A Princeton PhD Applied to 2,300 Jobs. He Still Can't Get One
wsj.com44 points by mid1110 3 hours ago
44 points by mid1110 3 hours ago
I find myself really disliking articles like this one, because it seems they don't present any information that can challenge people's perceptions. The image they want to paint is that this individual is extremely talented and still can't get a job, so what are the chances for those who are not? Yet this is one data point, and many of us have seen people with much less impressive resumes get jobs. There's no reason for this one data point to carry any more weight than your personal anecdotes, and we're not even seeing his resume. We only hear what he (and his parents) say. Not exactly independent observers.
So it seems to me that the article only serves to confirm your biases. After reading the article, you might feel that the job market is impossible, or you might feel that there's something important left out about the subject of the article. Or even both. Either way, I don't see anyone reading this article with their view of the world challenged.
I completely agree. Back in the early 2000s, I was graduating out of college and desperately wanted a job to pay off some financial obligations. I wasn't the top scorer in class and didn't even make the cut off for the good jobs. However, I was pretty confident in my skills almost to the point of arrogance and showed that unapologetically to the lady from HR in charge of hiring. She gave me a chance and I got the job (which I later found really boring but that's a different story).
It was a mix of opportunity, the willingness to seize it, how well you talked and finally, in a large amount, luck.
Why would the author not ask how many interviews they got and what stage to give some picture of the pipeline? Impressions on where they think they goofed in the process? It's frustratingly opaquely written
Perhaps for data points in similar extremes, but there are definitely a good many theorems that show there is reason to weight extreme outliers more heavily. And practical experience using them as a signal to test for measurement errors etc.
Run the experiment in different eras.
Did Ivy League phds boomers not get jobs after 2000 applications?
What has changed the opportunities in the job market?
Maybe people have wised up to the fact the prestigious degrees are not a 100% signal of competence? I dislike the framing of this article because the situation of one person like this only means something if you think such a degree implies you are utterly guaranteed a job.
That puts the cart before the horse, in the past these prestigious degrees signaled elite status, they are the people who decide where capital flows, if they couldn't get a job they'd just make one. More likely people haven't wised up, they just stopped making hiring decisions, leaving it to AI.
The point is precisely that with a sample size of one, this doesn't tell us anything about whether Ivy League PhDs in general don't get jobs.
Maybe this person's applications include things that are big red flags. Maybe when they get to the interview stage they give off the impression they are a fraud?
Maybe they're even lying about the 2000 applications.
Maybe they're applying to jobs completely outside their field.
Maybe their resume is just written really badly.
As you say, there's just nowhere near enough information.
This feeds off a misconception people have of the idea of a PhD. A PhD is not something you get by studying more, taking a few years more in advanced courses.
It is something you get by specializing on a topic so much that you are pretty much THE expert on that specific topic. (The inside joke is that at the end of your PhD you must know everything about nothing)
This fundamentally makes the usual job search strategy of casting a wide net completely useless. A PhD is typically a worse employee than a normal malleable undergrad you can train unless you really need an expert on the topic the person has a PhD on.
It’s not uncommon for top tier Phds to land good jobs regardless of, but that’s more because of willingness to do different things, give up on solving problems you have invested half a decade into, and the general availability of researchy jobs.
The last one is the least important.
This is a very simplistic view of a PhD and basically a prejudice.
During conducting a PhD, you learn a lot about organizing yourself, about how to work together with others in a professional context, about teaching and guiding others, about presenting you and your results orally and in a written way, about using certain tools (whatever applies in your field) and so on.
Some people like to view it the way that a PhD makes you a expert in one field and rendering yourself useless for any other task. But this is in general far from reality. As a PhD (at least where I live in Germany and in the field of engineering) you are indeed expected to have a broad view such that you are able to know where you are located with your PhD topic and such that you are indeed not a narrow expert.
I know that many American lectures are given by "TAs" that are PhD students, but do most American PhD students (or in Germany in your case) teach and guide others? That is certainly not the case for my European country: even if one wanted to teach as a PhD student for the experience on one's CV, the answer is usually that the department's budget wouldn't allow creating another teaching position for you.
There are a lot of PhDs in my company and basically none of them was hired because of the specific topic* of research they were pursuing during their thesis. Yet having the PhD was a huge plus during hiring and in most cases even an (informal) requirement.
I think it happens quite rarely that a company is looking for a PhD based on the specifc topic of their thesis. If that ever happens, you can consider yourself lucky though, because they will probably pay you a fortnue if they really think that they couldn't put any other PhDs on that topic.
*that is not to say field of research like "Machine Learning", but rather something like "loss functions for graph neural networks".
While this is somewhat true, people also overstate how narrow a Phd student’s general understanding of the field really become as they specialize. For pretty much any serious field, specialization is inescapable without spending decades minimally studying the field via many branches, but a Phd isn’t just preparing you to have a specialized understanding of a specific branch within the field, because very often contributing something mostly new and worthy to that branch requires a mix of depth and breadth, the proportions of which depend on the exact field, branch and specialized topic. Most Phd curriculums I’ve seen still require students to take several advanced courses outside of their main topic area and take exams in multiple areas within the field. Somebody working in only one area would need to have at least graduate level understanding of multiple branches to get through these. I have also seen Phd students who are not broadly interested or comfortable in certain core branches of their field so there are all types and different requirements for different programs.
The graduate level understanding of multiple branches can be pretty hollowed out.
In practice you read the relevant papers, and have mentors and collaborators explain the insights useful for a particular purpose until you get the zeitgeist but not an in depth understanding of a neighboring field.
The article does not talk about numbers. It is hard to understand competition in the field he is applying to. Then having the opinions of his parents does not help, it’s odd I need his mom telling me the CV looks good. It would have been better to question Princeton here as it is in their interest to make sure alumni get the jobs. It would be useful to ask some recruiters about the possible red flags for this guy, just to be sure. In any case sure I understand and sympathise, anyone would be mentally broken after that many job applications.
Given the range of jobs he seems to have applied to, numbers don't mean a thing. I mean, it ranges from high profile research labs to fast food prep.
> It would be useful to ask some recruiters about the possible red flags for this guy, just to be sure.
Unfortunately, it seems much of the hiring process is automated, and they are not going to tell you how to navigate that.
Your credential is only one factor that determines your employability. Others include things like: competence, experience, personality, culture fit, and qualifications. Having a 10/10 credential is nice, but having a 0/10 in any other area is often still disqualifying.
This just confirms what I've suspected all my life... I should have been a plumber.
Meanwhile big firms are fighting for AI/ML phds for hundreds of thousands dollars.
He can still go for gig jobs like 320 million Chinese do.
Could anyone copy the text for us paywalled peasants?
I have a gift for you https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/labor-market-freeze-ph...
In the future, just know that typing archive.is/{paste article link} in your URL bar almost always removes paywalls. There’s also an extension that does this automatically for most news sites https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294166
archive.is blocks the whole of Finland, which is annoying.
> [site] blocks [Country]
Are you sure it is not the opposite? Why would they...
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I've seen people like this before. The problem is not the job market, which merely happens to be fucked as well right now. But with a summa cum laude degree from Rice and a PhD from Princeton you usually knock at any big firm remotely interested in STEM and you will at least land an interview with someone important. There is only one reason you can fail from that point: You're a complete social inept. A double PhD from Oxford will not save you if you can't hold a conversation. This stuff doesn't matter that much in school, but it is absolute paramount in the real world. To quote the late Professor Winston from MIT: Your success in life will be determined by three things,
1. Your ability to speak.
2. Your ability to write.
3. Your ability to think.
- in that order! If you suck at social communication, you basically have to be an era-defining genius like Newton in the thinking department if you want to make it. And even he almost didn't get his most famous work published if Halley (yes, the guy from the comet) hadn't seen beyond his social quirks and realized his genius.
> There is only one reason you can fail from that point: You're a complete social inept. A double PhD from Oxford will not save you if you can't hold a conversation.
I imagine for a lot of positions this is true, but surely not every position is like this? Like say, at an HFT firm/hedge fund/etc. -- if you can make people ridiculous amounts of money, they'd be insane to turn you away just because you're socially inept. They would just give you a room to do your thing solo and make everyone rich, no?
This kind of job is one in a million. In all other jobs you are expected to work in a team and if the interviewer thinks that you're lacking the basic interface for that - i.e. being able to articulate your thoughts in a concise way and not being annoying to work with - they just cannot hire you.
Very few jobs work like that, though. I've worked with brilliant engineers who are bad at collaboration and communication: this can be bad enough their contribution becomes negative.
I read this as basically an expanded form of "just know someone who's hiring" or "know someone who knows someone who's hiring". That's all you really need.
It is a valid assumption but I would have expected the article to provide such details. And why would you not want to hire a socially awkward person, if I do that for my business I just want results and awkwardness doesn’t matter much in technical positions.
Have you ever tried to hire such a person? I can guarantee you it is not as easy as you might think to get something useful out of them. Normal smart people simply can't deal with others who have severe Asperger's (or any Autism spectrum disorder for that matter). The only place I could see for those people is in a back room in some university where they get to research whatever they want with no teaching duty. But these positions are ultra-rare and you basically have to be super accomplished before you are even considered.
There are other cases, and it can be very valuable to be able to get something out of someone with a lot of technical ability but poor collaboration, but I do agree it's something that will reduce their value to most employers substantially.
HR ladies are basically undefeated against socially awkward chuds. He would have to be at least 6'4" to stand a chance of still getting hired and avoiding a sexual harrassment saga.
> Your ability to write
Be careful also of the environment you plan to enter, because there exist ones in which people (or some people) cannot read past the "John eats an apple" level of complexity. You need to be able to calibrate.
You could say being good at 1 and 2 with people who are worse than you at 3 is basically a guarantee to success in almost any field. That's the kind of person who diffuses to the top, even if they are just slightly above average at 3.
I am afraid we need to mention the dark side, as a warning:
convincing people will "climb".
That, in bad environments of people of little judgement, includes the worst: high convincing skills but low or rotten substance. Some people are just pure climbers: it takes an environment of clean eyed people to prevent their damage.
I only have a second-hand experience with PhDs looking for jobs. It seems very similar to programming jobs market: it's saturated with worthless applications and the filtering on the receiving end is completely broken. I don't have numbers and wouldn't know how to measure it, but it feels like most applications never get assessed by relevant experts at all. Basically, no matter what you put in your resume it goes straight into the garbage bin.
So, your professor's rules are no longer relevant. There's nobody to speak to, no matter what you write it's not going to change anything. Thinking isn't a priority either.
You need to know people. That is all.
Anecdotally, I had this happen to me. For the context, I'm moving back from the Netherlands to Israel. I've been looking for a job in the Netherlands before giving up and leaving. Despite maybe a hundred or so applications that I've sent, I've never heard from anyone. I think, Dutch law requires a timely response to the application and so I would get template rejections most of the time. Sometimes seconds after applying.
Back in Israel, I also applied through LinkedIn and Indeed. But I also happen to be on the file in some HR agencies which supply candidates to the programming jobs. I've received an invitation from such an agency to interview for a job with a company I've already applied to through LinkedIn (and was promptly rejected). I've landed an interview, and when asked about my job hunting efforts in the Netherlands, I jokingly described the application through LinkedIn and the likes as futile, as nobody reads those applications.
The interviewer start beating his chest assuring me that they would never... I decided to withhold from them the fact that they actually would. I'm still at the... third interview with them now. So, we'll see how it goes.
Anyways. My larger point is: the automation brought to job hunting is very disadvantageous to the junior workforce. Connections always played a role, but now their role is exaggerated. The article describes it as decreased job mobility (nobody quits, so there are fewer jobs to hire people into). And while it keeps the appearance of low unemployment, the problem with it is that it's the same people who are unemployed all the time. Our unemployment model isn't prepared for this. The idea behind social security unemployment compensation is that you find a job relatively quickly and only need a few months to get by before you do. This doesn't work anymore, as unemployment lasts years.
This is bad on many levels: it lowers the number of professionals entering the field, it leads to the loss of expertise as older workers retire w/o having trained a replacement, the effort spent on acquiring expertise is wasted by the young workforce as they are forced to change direction.
It's not only about juniors and not only about Netherlands. There are no jobs and there is(are) war(s). If you lose your current job there will be no next one. All money in the economy is funneled through military, "AI", and healthcare directly to oligarchs/elites and it doesn't translate into military, healthcare, or AI milestones or achievements, except death. We are slowly transitioning into a war economy.
That's pretty stereotypical. In order to be successful, you need to find yourself in places where you can convince others that it's worth giving opportunities to you. Social skills help. Being extroverted helps. Being neurotypical helps. But many other things help as well, and the world is a really weird place.
A PhD always involves a huge random element. You commit to working long term under the close supervision of a person you don't know, often in an unfamiliar place far away from home, in a project that may not lead anywhere. And you may not even know if research is actually something you want to do and your personality is suited for. Most of the time things ultimately work out, but for many people they don't. Most of the latter manage to find something else, but there are always some unlucky people who don't. (And who may be scarred by the experience.)
> There is only one reason you can fail from that point
Really? You make a rather harsh, specific point. Where's the evidence? I'd wager competition and suitability for the job would also weigh in, especially after such a superficial introduction.
> To quote the late Professor Winston from MIT: Your success in life will be determined by three things,
Yeah, that's meritocratic wishful thinking. Criteria obviously missing are: good looks, and a good network, which includes rich or otherwise influential parents.
> There is only one reason you can fail from that point: You're a complete social inept.
Harsh words for someone you've had no social interactions with. To me this statement says more about you than Jack Weis.
He entered the STEM job market in the US at the worst possible time, between BigTech layoffs and the current US exec branch attacks on domestic STEM employment in general. And having a PhD can be a turnoff to many potential employers and hiring managers.
Every single job requires many YoE at this point. Every. Single. One. And the worst part is that they really mean "years of employment" and not experience. Pursuing a PhD full time effectively _is_ employment, yet most companies and HR departments don't see it this way. Likewise for independent research, open source work, self-employment etc. My guess is he has dedicated his life to his PhD studies, meaning he has little "ReAl ExPerIeNcE" so no one wants to hire him because... reasons? Who knows, hiring is broken.
A PhD is not the same thing as professional experience. The contexts, goals, and nature of the work are very different, and employers are right to not count them as the same. It's more meaningful than undergrad, sure, but a 4 year PhD is not 4 years of professional experience (it might be worth more in some cases, but it is on average going to be worth less).
> A PhD is not the same thing as professional experience.
You're correct, academic experience and credentials should be worth _more_.