Academia is very different from the practical world. In academia, foundational skills are measured through exams and rudimentary coursework. While in practical world, organizations want people that can do the job under uncertainty, huge amounts of complexity, efficiently process noisy data, adaptability to change, and a requirement for following best practices. At some point in a person's career, work experience far surpasses academics both educationally and in problem solving. The below points highlight the typical patterns of behavior that Phd individuals display in the work place and academia:
- Will want to command authority simply because they hold a Phd which may not even be in a technical field and totally unrelated to the job
- Will measure someone's skills by the amount of degrees they hold and where they got them from
- Will expect others to help them with 80% of their job
- Will struggle to convert theory into practice
- Will take years to do something that could be done in months by an engineer
- Will reject perfectly good candidates simply because they don't hold a Phd like they do or went to a certain university like they did
- Will advertise for roles where job titles are miss-aligned to job descriptions to miss-lead candidates
- Will be enamored by the amount of papers they have published even though many of them are either plagiarized, summary synthesis of other papers, lack technical depth, incorrect in plausible theory, or are simply too unimportant to hold any real value to an organization
- Will ask really dumb questions to engineers and then expect them to sound deep like asking what is unit testing
- Will reject the very same people with experience in academic admissions to universities while lacking the same skills themselves
- Will try to take credit for other people's work
- Will have questionable basic foundational skills for the job, but will call themselves as experts anyway
- Will have multiple published papers that have different topical headings but basically the same content
- Will spend majority of their time hacking through things but will expect others to think they are following a scientific method or process
- Will usually have no clue themselves as to what they are doing
- Will introduce biases into their data just because they can and no one will question them for it, they will then produce such flawed and biased results and expect everyone to call them experts
- Will have no real accountability for their work output in organizations
- Will likely make terrible leaders or managers of people
- Will struggle to teach others the very same concepts that they call themselves experts in because they don't fully understand the concepts either
- Will make silly reasons as to why they need to hire more people on the team, even when it is really part of their own job to know how to do
- Will expect anyone that doesn't hold a Phd does not know what they are talking about
- Will likely patronize and discriminate on non-Phd people in the workplace
- Will reject people if they hold a difference of opinion to themselves
- Will likely be very insecure and take offense if their skills or work is criticized or is taken into question purely because they assume they are experts because they have a Phd, eventhough that Phd could be in cartoonism
- Will likely add more cost to organization for all the help they will need to be able to do their job, and the job that they do amounts to very little in quantifiable value
- Will likely leave a forgettable mark in organization especially as most of their work would already be done by others
- Will tend to hire people that will not be a threat to them or highlight their deficiencies in the workplace
- Will likely not know how to read a CV/resume
- Will reject approaches that are outside of their own discipline, knowledge, or comfort zone
- Will not be adaptable to change outside of what they already know
- Will likely hamper organizational productivity and efficiencies in work output and provide incorrect recommendations to management
- Will produce incorrect models which then influences flawed strategic decisions within organizations
- Will likely only have questionable academic skills with jupyter notebooks, matlab, or tools that will require huge amount of effort to refactor and productionize
- Will likely be expected to teach what they can't put into a practical implementation
- Will likely not have basic skills in data structures and software engineering or the background of things that they will look for in admissions applications to universities
- Will focus on theory all day long but be clueless about how to apply any of it in practice
- Will likely lack fundamental work experience to put them in a position of seniority to call them experts in organizations
- Will likely struggle to take such things as uncertainty, noisy data, biases, complexity, and context into account within their work output and likely expect someone else to sort out for them
- Will likely for all the things they call themselves an expert in, they will expect someone else to do for them
- Will likely be the weakest link in organizations expected to be an expert in an area, but a master of none when it comes to practical implementations
- Will likely be unprofessional when interacting with non-Phd individuals and not value their time
- Will get easy access to funding for their research projects but the work output will not be sufficient to justify the cost, and at times a lot of that funding may be deceptively used to fund other projects in other research teams or faculties
- Will require an awful lot of mentoring to be able to do even simple tasks, making you wonder how in the world they could be called experts or have achieved a Phd
- Will act like a grasshopper with the absence of legs in the workplace
- Will use overly complicated methods rather than approach it first with the simplest solution
- Will use academic approaches to solve non-academic problems in most cases the approach they use will be inefficient and unworkable for prime time production
