Back in the 1990s, I worked in a vault area with a number of Air Force contractors. One had a small stack of business cards on the side of the desk.....which I picked up to review one day.
The card had the name, and then under it.....'PhD, Scientist, and Engineer'.
I quizzed one of the other contractors that I worked with, and he quickly noted that this person was the last person on Earth that you wanted to ask a question to.
Naturally, I asked why.
He noted that any question to the person....meant a 12-minute explanation, and the end wouldn't really resolve the question you asked.
The next day, I asked the PhD gal a question. Yeah, the response was roughly 10 to 12 minutes, and the answer really didn't fit the question posed.
I went back to the original guy who'd warned me, and asked....why did they have this PhD person hired? Well....the contract said something to the effect that you needed to have one PhD person out of the dozen folks hired for this support function. It's not that they really filled some critical requirement....just that you might need their expertise in a critical decision process.
Part of me wonders if the whole PhD thing is over-sold, or just wasted lectures by colleges in selling more 'degrees'.
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