41–50 of 57 posts
CMU has dropped significantly in my personal ranking of universities. None of that was related to faculty being hired away. All of it is related to activities like attacking the Tor network or accidentally admitting 800 students. Maybe they have a PR problem but my overal view of them is pretty meh even though they are one of the more elite CS schools (and I think Pittsburgh is a fairly nice city, never been there th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it really that easy to enter finance at that level (or at all), or even get a job at Google for $200k/year? I don't think it's that automatic unless your background is one that includes the "correct" college, an affluent background, and more. Many people end up pursuing an advanced degree in this field because they want to break into a new industry, make themselves more appealing to employers and make more money.…
> Is it really that easy to enter finance at that level (or at all), or even get a job at Google for $200k/year? I think it is when you condition on the fact that someone is a professor at Berkeley/CMU. Roughly 5% of applicants are accepted to top PhD programs, and less than 20% of people with PhDs at top universities (like Berkeley/CMU) get tenure track positions. Of those with tenure track positions, a minority ( S…
Even "lesser" schools without top tier academic stars are having trouble retaining and attracting enough talent to accommodate the current demand, and this is even with salaries starting in the six figures. Which implies the market for people with graduate level degrees possibly has a higher demand, and should translate into a higher salary.
Academia in general is screwing itself. The main reason for anyone to go into it is to work on interesting problems in a self-directed fashion with amazing job security. You probably wouldn't get rich, but you'll have a nice upper-middle class salary and almost no way of getting fired. Now the available tenure-track positions are declining every year in favor of adjunct quasi-slave labor. Even if you do win the lotte…
Honest question: where do you learn advanced stuff if not in a graduate school? Academia undoubtedly sucks if one mainly takes money or career prospects into account. But among people who do challenging and sexy stuff (including in the industry) phd seems to be the norm, not the exception. One might object that phd has become unnecessary because nowadays all the relevant information is online but learning without the…
Does anyone have any links to the emotion recognition work he talks about?
Academia in general is screwing itself. The main reason for anyone to go into it is to work on interesting problems in a self-directed fashion with amazing job security. You probably wouldn't get rich, but you'll have a nice upper-middle class salary and almost no way of getting fired. Now the available tenure-track positions are declining every year in favor of adjunct quasi-slave labor. Even if you do win the lotte…
Honest question: where do you learn advanced stuff if not in a graduate school? Academia undoubtedly sucks if one mainly takes money or career prospects into account. But among people who do challenging and sexy stuff (including in the industry) phd seems to be the norm, not the exception. One might object that phd has become unnecessary because nowadays all the relevant information is online but learning without the…
From a degree-less "researcher" whose published in neuroimage, i'd say, wherever you can and as you learn more you get better at knowing where to start when searching/who to talk to/who to work with.
>Academia undoubtedly sucks if one mainly takes money or career prospects into account.
Or tired of trying to get your lab to work on more on the cutting edge of the technology vs the grant hamster wheel and status games or sucking up to people who clearly don't have any understanding of modern technology/physics/mathematics/techniques on a intimate level and squandering resources because they can, and figure you can get what you want done faster with more resources you can more directly allocate.
>…learning without the help of a community and a mentor is hard.
It's going to be "hard" no matter what path you take imo, but that what makes the journey of knowledge fun, because of that small chance you might actually figure something out you never knew before is worth ones time?
As an aside, the use of the term "poaching" always bugged me. It implies that an employee is owned by a company like some deer in the King's forest.
Not really. It originated to describe high level employees who take a job and then exploit their personal network to hire away friends. This is super-common and expected, and is also the reason non-competes became popular. It wasn't until later, the tech boom, that "poaching" was repurposed to be more generalized luring of high potential employees from wherever using whatever ($, perks) means available.
Academia in general is screwing itself. The main reason for anyone to go into it is to work on interesting problems in a self-directed fashion with amazing job security. You probably wouldn't get rich, but you'll have a nice upper-middle class salary and almost no way of getting fired. Now the available tenure-track positions are declining every year in favor of adjunct quasi-slave labor. Even if you do win the lotte…
Honest question: where do you learn advanced stuff if not in a graduate school? Academia undoubtedly sucks if one mainly takes money or career prospects into account. But among people who do challenging and sexy stuff (including in the industry) phd seems to be the norm, not the exception. One might object that phd has become unnecessary because nowadays all the relevant information is online but learning without the…
For credibility, I was a Computer Science PhD candidate 4 years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question: where do you learn advanced stuff if not in a graduate school? Academia undoubtedly sucks if one mainly takes money or career prospects into account. But among people who do challenging and sexy stuff (including in the industry) phd seems to be the norm, not the exception. One might object that phd has become unnecessary because nowadays all the relevant information is online but learning without the…
> where do you learn advanced stuff if not in a graduate school? Hard to answer without knowing your background and exactly what you want to learn, but generally speaking... (1) Try to find some people who are good at something advanced you want to learn. Figure out a way to work with them. (2) Be active in online communities. Ask and answer questions, write something and open source it, or contribute to another proj…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question: where do you learn advanced stuff if not in a graduate school? Academia undoubtedly sucks if one mainly takes money or career prospects into account. But among people who do challenging and sexy stuff (including in the industry) phd seems to be the norm, not the exception. One might object that phd has become unnecessary because nowadays all the relevant information is online but learning without the…
You absolutely do not need a PhD for industry unless you want an R&D job in a handful of domains. A PhD is not simply learning more facts about a particular topic. It's an apprenticeship for conducting independently directed academic research. There are so many topics that you can not just learn from reading some online sources e.g. most experimental work. Most of the time spent in a typical PhD program is spent tryi…
I know Phd.s at {MSFT, Google, Uber, Deepmind, GE, P+G} research divisions. I don't know anyone who works at those who does not have a doctorate. So I would say this applies to more than 'a handful of domains' -- If you want to do research, you should plan on having a doctorate, even in industry. The majority of data scientists I know have doctorates, even if that strikes me as (generally) overkill.
Otherwise, I agree with the rest of your statements.
Academia in general is screwing itself. The main reason for anyone to go into it is to work on interesting problems in a self-directed fashion with amazing job security. You probably wouldn't get rich, but you'll have a nice upper-middle class salary and almost no way of getting fired. Now the available tenure-track positions are declining every year in favor of adjunct quasi-slave labor. Even if you do win the lotte…