How to Interview a Ph.D. for a Software Engineering Job

As someone who has helped build tech teams over the years and also happens to have a Ph.D. in Computer Science, I have a couple of observations about interviewing Ph.D. candidates for positions in software development and engineering. If you’re concerned about landing the right candidates and giving them a good interview experience, pay heed to the following.

DO ask them about their dissertation research.

Everyone with a Ph.D. has spent a significant portion of his or her life devoted to research in a specific area that (at least when they started out!) they were passionate about. Given that, I would suggest that in an interview setting it’s disrespectful not to spend some time asking about their research and dissertation experience. Additionally, if there’s anything a researcher is good at, it’s talking about and whiteboarding their work, and you can learn a tremendous amount about what it will be like to work with someone from this process.

Google had a wonderful approach to this at one time: For a Ph.D. job candidate in engineering, one Google interview was dedicated to a research deep-dive, usually (maybe always?) conducted by a fellow Ph.D.

DON’T assume that a Ph.D. is an Advanced Bachelors Degree

Ph.D. work is deep, not broad. Someone with a Ph.D. did not spend four more years taking more or more-advanced courses. Depending on the program, they may have scarcely spent any additional time in a classroom learning setting at all. So as an interviewer you cannot assume they know everything about any subject outside their immediate research area.

I once saw this dynamic in action where a “bar raiser” interviewer assumed that someone with a Ph.D. focused on “systems” knew some fact or another about the CAP Theorem. (This was long before the CAP Theorem was as relatively common knowledge among distributed-systems and cloud-computing types as it is today.) At any company with a bar raiser process, the bar raiser has tremendous power — and usually tremendously-held opinions — over how an interview debrief goes, so you can imagine the result.

Obtaining a Ph.D. requires the kind of persistence you probably want on your team. In an interview, follow a couple of simple tips to make sure you give these folks the best shot at showing you what they can do.