"It was like being a chameleon and trying to get jobs where you had to be red, blue, or black. Yes, you’re capable of becoming any of those colors, but companies would rather hire animals that already were those specific colors."
"I eventually realized that, like many Ph.D.’s in many other fields, I had fallen into the Ph.D.-industry gap—i.e., the gap between highly specialized Ph.D. training and corporate-world expectations..."
There seems to be a dissonance in these two statements. If the former is true (based on description of his experiences) then companies would rather have specialized people to fit into slots (red/blue/black) than have a generalist (chameleon) who could grow to match nuanced needs. It seems like the problem was that he was not specialized enough in the very narrow skill they were looking for. If that's the case, then it goes against the commonly held opinion expressed in the 2nd excerpt.
You could interpret it as saying he is highly specialized in a color industry isn't interested in, so his remaining marketable skill is his chameleon nature, which is not valued as much as he thought it would be.
Irrespective of whether or not he was highly specialized in some aspect, he had demonstrated a much broader potential to learn and adapt; more than the specialized people they would otherwise be hiring.
So it seems like the real reason he wasn't hired was:
1. They might have to pay him more, for his potential (as illustrated by his degree) than they needed to pay some other fellow they could hire.
2. The HR management doesn't really know what to do with smart broadly skilled people. They have well-defined slots for cogs, but generalists are tougher to manage... you can't just shove them into a predefined slot.
To me, al it proves is that the industry is not ready/willing to hire a possible generalists (who also happened to have proven that they can learn something and be good at it). The cognitive dissonance making them think that he was "highly specialized" might also have been a possible contributor.
I would bet generalists are going to be selected against. It's good to have a few generalists to handle the unexpected and such, but at least to me it seems you'd wind up paying the generalist more for the same work, so you would seek to use specialists wherever possible.
"I eventually realized that, like many Ph.D.’s in many other fields, I had fallen into the Ph.D.-industry gap—i.e., the gap between highly specialized Ph.D. training and corporate-world expectations..."
There seems to be a dissonance in these two statements. If the former is true (based on description of his experiences) then companies would rather have specialized people to fit into slots (red/blue/black) than have a generalist (chameleon) who could grow to match nuanced needs. It seems like the problem was that he was not specialized enough in the very narrow skill they were looking for. If that's the case, then it goes against the commonly held opinion expressed in the 2nd excerpt.