Well the other side of the equation also must be true. You should not be interviewing a PhD candidate unless you think you need one for that job. Else if you are interviewing a PhD even though a regular programmer would do, its not fair to the candidate. There in lies the main problem. The expectations are high for both parties involved. Also by definition they are already way too specialized and steering away from that specialization would be tough for a PhD as well.
"You should not be interviewing a PhD candidate unless you think you need one for that job."
Consider we produce twice as many PHDs as the business sector requires. This is probably accurate. From a humane perspective, what should we do with half the grads, soylent green seems a little harsh... The social perspective is they should just sit on an ice floe as it floats away in the ocean, which seems wrong.
We're moving toward a class based neo-feudalist system. The first time around with feudalism, the bottom of the barrel of knights and barons and such got wiped out in more or less continuous low-level warfare. In our new neofeudal era we don't have a solution for the bottom of the barrel of our various classes of titled nobility, leading to all kinds of angst.
To mix some metaphors it seems a waste of talent and economic costs to euthanize the bottom half of the modern Baronry after all that education and accomplishment.
Although it would screw around with modern feudalistic class based ideas, maybe we should be able to arbitrarily officially reject titles of nobility. Better to have a lower 50%-ile PHD writing CRUD apps as a code monkey than turn them into hamburger.
