re: Smug PhD gets put in her place

Those are known as over educated idiots. We see those in engineering a lot. The engineers with the bachelors degrees and masters degrees actually know how to design a project. The over educated idiots have no clue how to manage a project. Their focus is so narrow and everything to them is an academic exercise with no understanding of cost or schedule. They don’t understand How to make assumptions based on prior experience or how actually build things. I’ve watched them spin their wheels. The generalists have a wider experience base.
My dad was a tool and die maker. The professors would bring him drawings of a reactor that They wanted him to build He would have to fix the sketch for them for to make the reactor actually work. He understood it better than they did. He had a high school diploma and four years in the US Army Air Force. He was very intelligent. The professors were educated. Not the same thing.