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In the field of engineering and software development of computational physics, I am wondering whether hiring managers/recruiters would still look carefully if you got a PhD vs having MSc after having a number of years of experience?

Is there a point in the career when having a PhD or Master is no longer the focus point, but it is rather your experience

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A PhD is just vocational training for researchers, so if a company is not looking for a researcher then the PhD should be a disadvantage; you are not going to hire a carpenter if you want a plumber.

In practice, it is a bit more complicated because the PhD has the undeserved stigma as "highest" level of education. So a PhD could still get an advantage even in situations where (s)he shouldn't. How fast this undeserved advantage decreases depends on many factors, e.g. country, industry. So there can be no single answer to your question.

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    I rather disagree on statements like "should be a disadvantage", although the specifics will depend on location and subject. From a German CS perspective, a fresh PhD graduate will often bring some 3 to 5 years of experience of applying their technical skills to actual projects that need to produce a certain output, of guiding small teams and coordinating efforts with external entities, of conveying information to international audiences, etc. A fresh Master graduate has typically done only few of these, and rarely outside of "simulated model settings". Furthermore, there's a large grey ...
    – O. R. Mapper
    Jan 19, 2020 at 13:55
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    ... area of experience that seems more specific to academia at first, but that may also be valuable to people who are not researchers (as in, actively publish research) themselves, such as finding and extracting information from research papers, or supervising students (think theses done partly in a company, or new hires who are freshly out of university). Thus, I'd argue the "stigma" of a PhD having progressed further in their professional training and experience than a Master at the respective time of receiving the degree is actually quite deserved.
    – O. R. Mapper
    Jan 19, 2020 at 14:00
  • Doing a PhD over three years vs having a job in those three years - In the latter case you got quite of an experience in industry, and I am wondering if some would apply for senior jobs which requires a number of years of experience , whether the importance becomes less on your background degree but rather on your actual experience, specifically on the area of computational physics, and development of scientific code
    – user118548
    Jan 19, 2020 at 17:44
  • A more fair comparison would be to compare a PhD student with a Masters graduate with 3 to 5 years work experience. Of course you learn during a PhD some skills that are also useful outside research, but that is not the aim of the program and it is not a particular efficient way of attaining those skills. So comparing a Master's student with "real" work experience and a fresh PhD student should work in favor of the Master student. In countries with a serious case of title fetishism, like Germany (or worse: Austria) you may still get an advantage as a PhD, but that does not mean it is deserved.
    – Maarten Buis
    Jan 20, 2020 at 8:32

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