I assume this is a PhD in CS or some computer related field. In the case of Chemistry, the PhD is the required degree to get above the technician grades (BS, MS). People with a BS and a good pair of hands in the lab can eventually reach the levels that a PhD walks into from university. Project leaders are drawn from PhD's with 5+ years of experience, as they have to learn medicinal chemistry in pharma. They learn synthetic or natural product (or computational) chemistry in uni and p-doc (cross training).

This has to be kept in mind when discussing STEM vs CS fields. The latter is placed in the former, but the training requirements can be rather different.