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I am a software developer by profession and was wondering what a professional doctorate (PdEng) would add to my career if I plan to work in the industry.
EDIT: I am not talking about a Phd rather a Professional Doctorate program (PDEng).It is a 2 year program and used for getting a job in a very specific sub discipline of a field.
TLDR: It trains you in both technical and soft skills (technical writing, meeting management, etc.), and lets you gain experience with small and large industry projects, using different technologies. It essentially compresses multiple years of industry experience into two.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what the program actually is. The Professional Doctorate in Engineering (PDEng) programs offered at Dutch universities have more in common with industry traineeships than with a traditional academic doctorate. As such, most of the negative effects of a PhD on job propspects (trouble actually writing code, far less job experience, etc.) simply do not apply.
For example, Eindhoven University of Technology describes their Software Technology PDEng program as follows.
The Software Technology program is designed to prepare you for an industrial career as a technological designer, and later on as a software or system architect. It starts with 15 months of advanced training and education, including 4 small, industry driven training projects, followed by a major design project of nine months in a company.
The program is specifically designed to teach MSc students with a good grasp of the theory how to efficiently apply that theory to practical applications. It is presented as a way to "fast-track" your career by gaining a lot of cross-disciplinary experience in only two years.
They write the following about their graduates:
The Software Technology program has been around for more than 25 years and to date trained more than 370 technological designers. Most designers have joined the companies where they carried out their design assignments and many now fulfill a management position.
Their alumni association XOOTIC released a detailed survey (pages 25-28), stating
Having a job as an XOOTIC is still easy: only 1% of the XOOTIC’s is unemployed. [...] By far the most XOOTIC’s have an indefinite contract (82.6%).
The OOTI program is known in the industry according to 80% of the answers and is rewarded according to 44% of the respondents. [...] XOOTIC’s, considering what they know now, would still do the OOTI program (96.7%).
You might get different answers for different countries. This answer is for the US.
Speaking as a person who has hired many programmers (both for my own company and for other companies) I feel quite confident that having a doctorate of any kind will not help you land a job as a programmer. The simple fact is, people care about what you can produce. What frameworks, models, patterns, languages, etc. are you effective in? This is what people generally care about from a technical perspective. They will care about other things like how committed you are, how many hours you can work, etc. but what you would gain from a doctorate will not be of value to people who hire in industry.
That said, it can be useful for career mobility. For example, I have see people chose one person over another for an IT management position because one had a doctorate. That turned out to be a terrible choice for the company, but I don't think the problems were connected to his doctorate (he simply had no experience managing people). Some people might see the value in the doctorate but only at a higher level (not entry level).
In general, for software engineering (in the UK), it will not help a lot in my experience - PhDs,PDEngs and EngDs will add to your initial salary over a masters. But probably no more than the extra experience that working in industry would get you.
The main exception is start-ups - if your tech guy(s) have post-graduate degrees then it can help with the early sales (proves you are smarter). Plus there is a valid argument that when you are limited in the number of heads you can get, it is worth getting the smartest ones you can.
The other exception is if it is for a very specific field and you want to go into that, it may help you beat out candidates with more experience in nearby fields (or satisfy a requirement of having experience in that field).
