Job market after PhD in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Do people in the industry consider HCI a non-technical field? Do they expect an HCI researcher to have more design and social science skills than technical ones?
I am a little puzzled by your career goal and perhaps, this is rather early for you to decide.

Your immediate goals are:


Software Developer
Data Scientist


Your future goal is:

Entrepreneur

As far as I am aware, you don't need a phd to be a software developer and certainly not for an entrepreneur. So, discussion about a PhD in HCI is moot there.

There are also excellent data science jobs available with a bachelors or masters degree pre-requisite but a PhD can certainly help there.

A PhD candidate in HCI usually goes towards one of three ways - 

They can gravitate towards usability design/usability studies/usability analysis. This requires ~60% knowledge in social sciences (e.g. theory, experimental design) and ~40% knowledge in the computing sciences - basically in applications (e.g. applied ML, application development)

They can also gravitate towards data analysis i.e what industry calls data science (I am not a fan of that term). For that, ideally they should have ~70% data analysis knowledge (ML is not the only approach for analyzing data) and ~30% social science knowledge. (i.e. if you are in the Facebook data science team and studying rumor propagation then you better have a very good intuitive grasp of cascades, diffusions and homo/heterophily theory). Many data scientists have 0 knowledge of their domain - which is both a reflection of their demand as well as the inchoate state of what "data science" actually is.

Finally, there are those rare few who manage a zen-like balance between social and computing sciences. They are equally good in qualitative and quantitative methodologies and have appreciation for all spheres of knowledge. Generally, I find these folks in academia (which is not to say that you won't find such folks in industrial research - you will!)

Answers to your particular question:

1. Do people in the industry consider HCI a non-technical field?

No. This depends on what your specialization is and what you have done so far.

2. Do they expect me to have more design and social science skills than technical ones?

No. Not necessarily. Again, this depends on who you are and what you have done so far.

3. Finally, does having a PhD in HCI hinder my chances to achieving my career goal 

Yes, but its not a function of HCI but the fact of being enrolled in any PhD program. As I pointed out, you don't need a PhD to do software development or to be an entrepreneur. There is some advantage in having a PhD if you want to go specifically into data science but you can also see many counterexamples in industry - those who enter the data science domain with a MS and do extremely well.

Therefore, your current plan of action depends on what you want to do immediately. I urge you to ponder and self-reflect whether spending a sizable chunk of your adult life in a PhD is really worth it for you if all you want to do is to write code or start a business or analyze data.

Most PhD candidates from my departments and other similar ones in the US (CMU, UDub, GaTech etc.) either go into academia or into industrial research. I know of a few examples of folks who dropped out of their PhD with a MS because they realized that they don't want to do research but they want to contribute to industry in other ways.