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Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

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Re: Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

#91

Post by seanmcdirmid »

tagrun wrote: post #86
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4 years is generous. I know very few people in the states who have gotten their PhD in only 4 years.

That's because in the US, PhD is actually the combination of masters degree (typically 2 years) and PhD (typically 3-4 years) in other countries. At least in sciences, US universities don't typically even offer a MSc program; people can get MSc by enrolling into PhD, which is typically the only available graduate program, and quitting it after completing the coursework.

That isn’t really true either. We don’t receive masters degrees unless we do a gentleman’s withdraw, then it’s only an M Phil. If you come into a PhD program with an MSC, you can still take 8 years to finish, ya, you get to skip some course requirements, but that isn’t where the majority of the time in a PhD goes.

MSC’s aren’t offered as much anymore because they had the same problem as PhDs (it could take 4 years to finish one) without the prestige of a PhD at the end. They don’t even guarantee much of a jump start on a PhD. These programs have mostly been replaced by professional non-thesis or thesis-light options, along with “5th year” programs at universities that tack on a few courses and a straightforward thesis to an undergrad program (MIT is famous for these, many universities have copied that).

European universities often have the latter 5th year programs as well where they are considered even more crucial because many of them have only 3 year undergraduates.

Re: Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

#92

Post by AdrianB1 »

Not giving any advice, just data; you can draw your own conclusion.

As an IT manager doing recruiting, a PhD is irrelevant, both for hiring decisions and for salary & career. It will be your skills that matter, not your titles. If the PhD is helping you acquire some useful skills, that matters.

As someone who knows a number of people with PhD's: except for MDs and people working in universities, nobody is using in real life more than 1% of what they did for the PhD. But most of these people did the PhD after they got a job, in parallel with working full time, it took a while to complete but it was a passion/hobby and I appreciate that. One of these people is a lady that has a low level job, but interacting mostly with people in Germany: as Germans have a higher appreciation to titles, her PhD is impressive to them. Well, if they ever ask and find the PhD is in German literature (completely unrelated with her actual work), then it becomes less impressive.

For academia, I find PhD requirements to be more of a bureaucracy than real positive, but I confess my lack of expertise in that area and I am open to learn different.

Re: Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

#93

Post by abawany »

m52go wrote: post #73
benogorek wrote: post #65

In 2011 I was buying a Ford Mustang and I had to make the decision whether to upgrade to the V8 engine. It was $10K more (+ extra fuel) and the V6 already had 300+ horsepower. I just couldn't justify it. Eight years later, the car runs great, and it still even gets some complements. I never once needed any extra power! But when someone asks me, "Does it have the V8?" I have to tell them, "Naw, it's just the V6." At t…

For some people, the V8 means much more...the sound, the torque, and perhaps most importantly, a stronger platform for tuning and power that a V6 simply cannot offer. Perhaps people doing PhDs also have different motives and intentions for how to use them.

Also, for people into that sort of thing, a V8 has more value for a collector than a V6 just by virtue of rarity.

Re: Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

#94

Post by lonesword »

I am in a similar situation as you - I'm currently doing my Msc (Computer Science, in Germany) and cannot decide whether I would want to continue to a Phd or head back to the industry. However, I had worked 3 years in the industry _before_ I enrolled for the current masters program, and that gave me a lot of perspective. Since you mentioned this:

> I don't have industry experience and I don't really know how any of this stuff plays out. I'm worried that if I chose to forego the PhD, I'll really regret it in a number of years. I'm afraid I won't be able to find interesting work with just a MSc, and I'm really afraid of getting a boring software engineering gig.

The trick is to find an engineering job in a domain/problem that you are interested in. I would really recommend that you spend a few years in the industry, since my time as a professional really really helped me in the long run. I am able to prioritize things faster, and meta-learnings like "Validate your hypothesis before investing resources" are true in both academia and industry. It would also be a good opportunity to gain some software engineering skills (academia has a bad rep when it comes to code quality) and some people skills (eg: how to do code reviews without sounding like a jerk). Also, the money would really cushion the blow if you end up deciding to do a PhD later after all.

Re: Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

#95

Post by proc0 »

From my sporadic research on this the tl;dr is you don't get a PhD unless you want to profess the cutting edge of that field by teaching, researching and perhaps doing general public education. It seems it is not as profitable as it is intrinsically rewarding. Then my own perspective is that at the moment academia is a minefield depending on which institution you join and what field of study. Some fields end up looking like industry job anyways, except you write and review papers day to day.

Re: Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

#96

Post by p10_user »

fifnir wrote: post #72
falcor84 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that to be a funny statement. Would you actually argue that every single phd has "great value to history and humankind"?

I find it sad when people have no other metric of value other than $$$. "I can't sell this, what is this?"

Working in industry and making money also contributes to humankind. Whatever the company is doing must be of some value in order to make money. So someone who may not have the right motivations to getting a PhD is probably better suited to move into industry sooner rather than later and be the most productive contributor to humanity as possible.

Re: Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

#97

Post by soumyadeb »

mcv wrote: post #54

A PhD will probably make your life more "interesting" in the Chinese proverb sense[0]. At least that's the impression I get from a lot of PhDs. I don't have one myself, and I used to regret that, but not anymore. PhD work is hard, thankless, underpaid work that has little to no value in industry. Although it does open up opportunities to even more hard, thankless, underpaid work in academia. The one exception is Mach…

Who knows!! By the time you graduate, ML may be out of fashion OR there may be too many ML PhDs by then.

I got my PhD in 2008 and my room-mate was doing a PhD in object recognition. Fei-Fei Li (who now is a bigshot at Stanford now) was a professor at UIUC in the same group. In the pre deep-learning days, object recognition was tedious, boring and un-cool. Semantic web etc was hot then!! And look at things today.

Re: Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

#98

Post by enraged_camel »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #92

Not giving any advice, just data; you can draw your own conclusion. As an IT manager doing recruiting, a PhD is irrelevant, both for hiring decisions and for salary & career. It will be your skills that matter, not your titles. If the PhD is helping you acquire some useful skills, that matters. As someone who knows a number of people with PhD's: except for MDs and people working in universities, nobody is using in re…

>>As an IT manager doing recruiting, a PhD is irrelevant, both for hiring decisions and for salary & career.

I mean, that's because you're talking about IT, which is traditionally about practical sysadmin/network engineer skills and even a Master's degree is good only for management tracks.

If you were recruiting in a field where cutting edge research is performed, e.g. hardware engineers for microprocessor design, it would be a different story. Intel and AMD for example employ a ton of PhDs.

Re: Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

#99

Post by tylerl »

If we're talking about Computer Science, a PhD will generally not get you a job. The good jobs all look for skills rather than credentials, and formal education is mostly ignored, both during hiring and at work in general.

The case where a PhD will actually help is when your research topic is relevant to the business, where the work you did to get your PhD actually broke new ground in an way that makes you an expert on a problem the company wants to solve.

Re: Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

#100

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

RankingMember wrote: post #80
fifnir wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it sad when people have no other metric of value other than $$$. "I can't sell this, what is this?"

I agree with you on the point that money is overemphasized, but does a PhD really mean you're more likely to add great value to history and humankind?

Yes, that is basically the job description; the point of a PhD is to contribute new knowledge.
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