Huge opportunity cost for 5-8 years, think carefully. Also, very very few jobs in academia so don't plan on those. Was interesting and learned a lot, not sure the most useful use of those years.
Consider applying for grad school
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Re: Consider applying for grad school
#12I'd like to. Do graduate programs accept devs who have been working the last decade? There are areas I feel I could be helpful with, e.g. creating reproducible experiments or ensuring a codebase could be open sourced in relation to a paper. It's a lot of grunt work that nobody really has time to do. If that were possible, I'm not quite sure where to start with executing that plan. (Chicago area, FWIW.)
Yes. I did this a few years ago after working for ~9 years. The trick is getting good letters of recommendation that far out. In my case, I got letters from supervisors/colleagues and applied to Masters programs, then used my Masters as a springboard to a PhD. It's been great, I would highly recommend it.
Re: Consider applying for grad school
#13I'd like to. Do graduate programs accept devs who have been working the last decade? There are areas I feel I could be helpful with, e.g. creating reproducible experiments or ensuring a codebase could be open sourced in relation to a paper. It's a lot of grunt work that nobody really has time to do. If that were possible, I'm not quite sure where to start with executing that plan. (Chicago area, FWIW.)
I left another career (military, rather than tech though) to go back and do a PhD. I didn't really find any barriers to it - I just applied like anyone else. I basically cold-emailed some professors doing things I was interested in and went from there.
> There are areas I feel I could be helpful with, e.g. creating reproducible experiments or ensuring a codebase could be open sourced in relation to a paper. It's a lot of grunt work that nobody really has time to do.
Whoah caution there. Don't go into a PhD with the idea that you can be helpful with someone else's work, or doing grunt work. Doing a PhD is very personal - you need your own big idea to work on. You may be part of a lab, your work may even be one part on a larger project, but you must carve out your own very distinct part of that and generate your own research. You can't really do a PhD by helping along with something else. Open sourcing a code base is not a research contribution.
You could make a PhD about how to make science more reproducible, though. You'd need some big idea about how to do that.
It sounds like you might be interested in looking at being a research engineer as well. Prestigious places like Microsoft Research hire quite a few of these I believe.
Re: Consider applying for grad school
#14I'd like to. Do graduate programs accept devs who have been working the last decade? There are areas I feel I could be helpful with, e.g. creating reproducible experiments or ensuring a codebase could be open sourced in relation to a paper. It's a lot of grunt work that nobody really has time to do. If that were possible, I'm not quite sure where to start with executing that plan. (Chicago area, FWIW.)
I'm in the same boat - The PhD admissions proces over-indexes on Letters of Recommendation from other academics. I don't think I can get those because I have not actively stayed in touch with my professors. I went through the existing process once and promised myself I would never waste that much time again. But if there's a program that genuinely values industry experience, and is willing to look past recommendation…
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Re: Consider applying for grad school
#15Huge opportunity cost for 5-8 years, think carefully. Also, very very few jobs in academia so don't plan on those. Was interesting and learned a lot, not sure the most useful use of those years.
indeed. a few folks in the FIRE (financial independence / retire early) space talk about being able to save enough money to be retired or semi-retired from 7-8 years of full-time work (this doesn't require FAANG scale salaries, just a combination of working somewhere that pays pretty well, not spending much money, building up investments, and luck to avoid getting clobbered with huge medical expenses. and the luck to start from a context where this might be an option for you at all)
edit: adding a few links to reading material
One of the main things is to focus on maximising your savings rate, i.e. your amount of savings divided by your revenue (for most people this would be their income from their job, minus income tax). You can increase this by making lifestyle changes that let you sustainably decrease your expenses, and by getting a job that pays you more, or other sources of income.
William Bernstein has written a bit about investment and asset allocation. He has a free publication titled "If You Can" geared at young people to help them plan for retirement: http://efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/2books.htm One of his general pieces of advice is to invest 15% of income every year into low-fee investment funds, i.e. to achieve a savings rate of 15%. If you do this consistently for around 30 or 40 years, you can retire.
Things get much more extreme for higher savings rates. For example, if you hit a savings rate of around 75% year after year (saving three quarters of what you earn after tax) and invest this, then with some assumptions about rates of return on investment, after about 8 years there should be enough income from investments to cover your expenses:
https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
You need to be a bit careful re: assumptions about stock market returns over the next few years or decades, some markets (e.g. the US stock market) are priced very highly compared to historical prices, so assumptions about rates of return from investment that seemed reasonable a decade ago are probably over-estimates now.
Re: Consider applying for grad school
#16Interesting contrast to the recent wave of posts about how you should absolutely not go for academia in the current market of having 1 job spot for every 3 PhDs. What's one to make of this?
Don't get a PhD because you think it will be good for random job opportunities. Get a PhD because you really want to spend a lot of time researching X very deeply.
Re: Consider applying for grad school
#17I was expecting reasons why now is a better climate to apply then in previous years. That would be interesting, but instead it's a list of generic reasons to apply for a phd. Yes, I know that phd's can open doors.
Same, but I read more like "if you've been considering grad school, you should just go ahead and apply!"
I was hoping for some reason I hadn't considered, to consider grad school.
As it stands I have no idea why I should go to grad school lol, I'm already happily employed. I guess it's not for me!
Re: Consider applying for grad school
#18I'd like to. Do graduate programs accept devs who have been working the last decade? There are areas I feel I could be helpful with, e.g. creating reproducible experiments or ensuring a codebase could be open sourced in relation to a paper. It's a lot of grunt work that nobody really has time to do. If that were possible, I'm not quite sure where to start with executing that plan. (Chicago area, FWIW.)
Yup, there are a number of well regarded CS professors who recruit burnt out industry programmers as students. Check out Peter Alvaro at UCSC for one.
6 years ago I was wondering how anyone gets burnt out from getting to program for a living. How naive I was :)
Re: Consider applying for grad school
#19I was expecting reasons why now is a better climate to apply then in previous years. That would be interesting, but instead it's a list of generic reasons to apply for a phd. Yes, I know that phd's can open doors.
I read the whole article, including the "why not to get a PhD part." I still thought it was way too kind to the "get a PhD" side of the equation. PhDs represent a tremendous opportunity cost, and I have not seen good evidence that they causally improve outcomes in the vast majority of cases.
They don’t make sense from a cost/benefit outside of the people actually able to find work in that one specific area and beat out all competition. There are simply more candidates than high paying phd jobs. A masters tends to have a more dependable ROI. But all things considered, I say modern academia is a shadow of what it claims to be.
Re: Consider applying for grad school
#20I was expecting reasons why now is a better climate to apply then in previous years. That would be interesting, but instead it's a list of generic reasons to apply for a phd. Yes, I know that phd's can open doors.
I read the whole article, including the "why not to get a PhD part." I still thought it was way too kind to the "get a PhD" side of the equation. PhDs represent a tremendous opportunity cost, and I have not seen good evidence that they causally improve outcomes in the vast majority of cases.
How are you measuring outcomes? Just salary? Because how would you empirically measure anything else?