Me, consulting for a huge entertainment company:
Why do you guys have a 500 line method? And why is half of it so nested that it's indented half way across the screen?

Them: Oh, that was written by the best dev on our team. He holds a PhD.

🙃 so thats what kind of skill a PhD gets you these days?

Ha, I feel this too.
The “legendary devs” (they’re referred to that way, literally) at work write the ugliest, hardest-to-read shit ever. And the more “legendary” of the two writes so many security flaws it’s crazy, like storing and displaying partially redacted passwords! with their length! And then argued with me about how it isn’t a security concern. Ugh.

But I digress. Angrily.
It’s true these two baboons can get more work done than everyone else because they wrote and therefore understand the warehouse of rotting spaghetti that is the codebase. But they just keep churning out more of the same. And they’re praised for it.

@Root yes they undrstand their own feces better than anyone else. Thats their strength. They are shit for brains but know their own shit better than anyone else so they keep their million dollar salaries. Not like they would do well anywhere else but there

PhD stands for pretty huge d*ck?

@Root it's totally an arc for anime programming series. I wish I had time for storyboarding...

You don't build products or services in a PhD, you do research. Research is about asking and answering questions - you do the whatever to get the answer you need. You almost always end up with gnarly, shady code in PhD projects, because you're always short on time and getting something working somehow that proves your point is much more valuable than having a heap of beautiful code that doesn't work because you ran out of time. Following good software engineering practices (unless it's a large, multi-user project) isn't even a concern, and for good reason tbh. tl;dr: they are not developers.

Point is - PhD has nothing to do with their competency as a dev. That's a completely different skill. They're just bad at software engineering. It's more a reflection on the company's lack of good culture, competent training, and onboarding practices.