Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Consider applying for grad school

80000hours.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 165 posts

Re: Consider applying for grad school

#101

Post by Fomite »

late2part wrote: post #43
dwaltrip wrote: post #34

One point jumped out at me, which I haven't seen anyone respond to: > We are concerned about untrained amateurs going directly into trying to solve very difficult global problems. They can then cause harm overall, by lowering the average quality of analysis or launching ill-considered projects due to a lack of experience or understanding. A PhD reduces the risk you’ll accidentally do this. This point is operating off…

Quite often, these untrained amateurs create great solutions!

And quite often, they create toe-curlingly bad ones.

Re: Consider applying for grad school

#102

Post by throwawaymath »

TTPrograms wrote: post #96
Nimitz14 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may shock you, but some people prefer doing research to working a normal job and earning lots of money. Those are the types of people that should and will do PhDs (there are unfortunately a lot who think like you and still try and do a PhD for god knows what reason).

You don't need a PhD to do research. All information is free now. It's fully possible for individuals to self teach in a working environment and be capable of performing effective research with 2-4 years of good experience after undergrad. To assume that the only way to accomplish this is via PhD is silly. This is especially the case when talking about computer science fields, where the barrier to entry is basically…

Hypothetically speaking you're right. You can teach yourself everything you need to know even if that means sitting down and going through MIT OCW with all the textbooks in the syllabi.

But practically speaking, in the real world we reside in, approximately no one authors peer reviewed research without at least being in graduate school. You frequently see "talks" at conferences given by non-PhDs, but it's exceptionally rare to find math or computer science research published in reputable journals or conferences by non-PhDs.

The dirty secret is that the formal barrier to entry was never really the problem. It's extraordinarily difficult to learn how to conduct meaningful research. The structure of a PhD is imperfect, but it places you in direct collaboration with an experienced researcher who can mentor you. Half of the entire work of a PhD program is precisely learning how to learn on your own so you can find interesting research questions.

I don't think it's productive to talk about what's merely possible. A more realistic barometer is what's plausible. Anyone who can bootstrap themselves up to original research in math or computer science through independent study is extremely gifted. You don't want to set a goal that requires you to be extremely gifted right from the start.

Re: Consider applying for grad school

#103

Post by mikekchar »

jrumbut wrote: post #72
dwaltrip wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered if working for 10 or so years and then getting a PhD could be a good strategy.

I'm trying it out now, I guess meet you back at this thread in another 10 years? FYI for others wondering about the same, I wouldn't wait the full 10 years unless you are going to study something very industry adjacent like software engineering methodology. I've had to spend a lot of time relearning anything theoretical. I bet the sweet spot is 2-5 years.

Not to be argumentative, but there is very little research that I've found on software engineering methodology that is in any way convincing. If you've got a good source, I would be incredibly grateful if you shared it! This is one of those areas where I wonder if a PhD is in any way useful. One the one hand in industry you have a complete lack of rigorous controls to measure your effectiveness and on the other hand in academia there is no way to fund the kind of project that would give you decent data (if you could somehow even figure out a way to introduce rigorous controls). I've thought about this quite a bit, and I think you're better off on the industry side if you are really interested in pursuing that kind of thing. Would love to be proven wrong, though.

Re: Consider applying for grad school

#104

Post by Fomite »

shawn wrote: post #2

I'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.)

You're in very much the wrong part of the country, but I'd absolutely hire a dev who had been working for the past decade. And find them hugely valuable.

Hell, one of the rising stars of my field started as a dev.

Re: Consider applying for grad school

#105

Post by newen »

TTPrograms wrote: post #96
Nimitz14 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may shock you, but some people prefer doing research to working a normal job and earning lots of money. Those are the types of people that should and will do PhDs (there are unfortunately a lot who think like you and still try and do a PhD for god knows what reason).

You don't need a PhD to do research. All information is free now. It's fully possible for individuals to self teach in a working environment and be capable of performing effective research with 2-4 years of good experience after undergrad. To assume that the only way to accomplish this is via PhD is silly. This is especially the case when talking about computer science fields, where the barrier to entry is basically…

Not everyone is a certified genius like Grigori Perelman who can do great research while living in a vacuum. You need great advisors who will guide you, and fellow grad students who you can ask for help and bounce ideas off. The academic enviroment is invaluable for someone doing their PhD, and it's pretty much impossible for someone with somewhat above average intelligence (and let's face it, most PhD's are not geniuses) to do good research with just a computer.

The "all information is free and you can study anything using just a computer" is a stupid meme that doesn't work for the vast majority of people.

Re: Consider applying for grad school

#106

Post by zhdc1 »

deviationblue wrote: post #86
tommymachine wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corollary being: can a PhD make up for lack of real world experience?

Not, if your PhD is in something mindless, like political science.

Which is funny, because the lack of government academic information transfer is so small that any PoliSci PhD has an immediate competitive advantage in almost any bureaucratic setting (this is true at the federal and local levels).

A PhD in government pretty much guarantees that you'll be retiring after a thirty year career as a GS-15 or SES. A 150k salary plus benefits may not be high for some STEM fields, but it's definitely not something to look down on.

Re: Consider applying for grad school

#107

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

mehrdadn wrote: post #97
solomatov wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We are concerned about untrained amateurs going directly into trying to solve very difficult global problems. It's a black and white thinking. Why people who don't have PhD are amateurs? Why person having MBA, MD, JD, MA or BS degree isn't professional?

How is this black and white thinking? The sentence was "A PhD reduces the risk you’ll accidentally do this", not "a PhD will prevent this" or "you're an amateur if you only have a BS". It's taking about risks and likelihoods. That's not black and white thinking, that's pretty much the exact opposite.

Heaven forbid anyone without a PhD engineer something like a spacecraft. We shouldn't let NASA get away with so many amateurs on the payroll.

Re: Consider applying for grad school

#108

Post by TTPrograms »

throwawaymath wrote: post #102
TTPrograms wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a PhD to do research. All information is free now. It's fully possible for individuals to self teach in a working environment and be capable of performing effective research with 2-4 years of good experience after undergrad. To assume that the only way to accomplish this is via PhD is silly. This is especially the case when talking about computer science fields, where the barrier to entry is basically…

Hypothetically speaking you're right. You can teach yourself everything you need to know even if that means sitting down and going through MIT OCW with all the textbooks in the syllabi. But practically speaking , in the real world we reside in, approximately no one authors peer reviewed research without at least being in graduate school. You frequently see "talks" at conferences given by non-PhDs, but it's exceptiona…

Effective research is not always published. There are volumes of private research in technical disciplines you will never hear about. There is not enough data available for you to declare confidently that the PhD is a strong requirement for real research. Furthermore, especially in the field of computer science, you should really run the numbers on how many of ex. the 10 authors on each of the 100 Google papers put out each year had a PhD.

Additionally, nothing has been done to separate the issue of correlation and causation. If research capable individuals pursue a PhD because it interests them, who's to say that their research capability came from the PhD versus it being intrinsic.

One can learn a lot from a PhD. But saying that it's a practical requirement for research in this modern era of information access is without definitive evidence.

Re: Consider applying for grad school

#109

Post by TTPrograms »

newen wrote: post #105
TTPrograms wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a PhD to do research. All information is free now. It's fully possible for individuals to self teach in a working environment and be capable of performing effective research with 2-4 years of good experience after undergrad. To assume that the only way to accomplish this is via PhD is silly. This is especially the case when talking about computer science fields, where the barrier to entry is basically…

Not everyone is a certified genius like Grigori Perelman who can do great research while living in a vacuum. You need great advisors who will guide you, and fellow grad students who you can ask for help and bounce ideas off. The academic enviroment is invaluable for someone doing their PhD, and it's pretty much impossible for someone with somewhat above average intelligence (and let's face it, most PhD's are not geni…

My statement is not that people can't benefit from a PhD, but that it is not a strict requirement. You are presenting a strawman.

Re: Consider applying for grad school

#110

Post by mxwsn »

hideo wrote: post #6
shawn wrote: post #2

I'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…

A significant number of PhDs drop out, and likely literally everyone undergoes some sort of huge realization of how doing a PhD is completely and surprisingly unlike what they expected (which is still true even with all the advice telling people that doing a PhD will be surprisingly unlike what you expect). Someone dropping out of a lab is a significant loss in time and resource investment which labs would prefer to avoid, and the biggest predictor for staying in a PhD is substantial experience doing research (to have some sense of what the lifestyle is like) and little experience with higher paying jobs (here at MIT, I see many PhD programs prefer people straight out of undergrad, even though older people are orders of magnitude more productive in the early phase of their PhD).
Post reply on HN