“PhDs are the hardest people to motivate to ship commercially viable products—with rare exception.”
PhDs and Shipping
From Marc Andreessen, “How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with” (Pmarchive, June 6, 2007). The line is part of a critique of Google’s 2007 hiring practice of putting PhDs at the front of the queue.
Andreessen’s preferred hiring signals, laid out in the same post, are drive, curiosity, and ethics, evidenced by concrete shipping work like starting businesses or major open-source contributions. The PhD line follows from those criteria: a PhD is evidence of academic accomplishment, and academic accomplishment doesn’t predict shipping. The “with rare exception” hedge isn’t an afterthought; it’s consistent with the positive criteria. A PhD who has shipped gets evaluated on the shipping; a PhD who hasn’t, gets passed.
(Disclosure: the owner of this site holds a PhD himself, and left academia because the work felt too detached from solving practical problems.)