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What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

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Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#41

Post by azhenley »

jccalhoun wrote: post #19

I have a phd in a Communication-realted field. I like my job at a community college but I am over-educated for it. However, I burned out on trying to get published. My advice is if you have doubt about going to grad school then don't. There are tons of people competing for every job. There is no guarantee you will get a job and there are fewer and fewer tenure track jobs. I was lucky to get out of adjuncting hell and…

If you don't have doubts about ANY major life choice, then you are the exception.

My experience has been great. Straight out of grad school I got several tenure-track offers from R1 universities. I'm not a super star and graduated from an unranked department.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#42

Post by azhenley »

dannykwells wrote: post #3

A little disappointed with the one-sided point of view here - the author states "...I deeply admire everyone I’ve listed, and I am not arguing that a PhD is never useful or never works out well" but never really gives examples of skills that PhDs do provide. And there are absolutely career paths where a PhD is not required, but since many of the practitioners have one, can often be selected for (data science, biotech…

Sadly, there is a weekly post on HN that hates on PhDs and grad school. I have tried my best to comment on each one and try to give a different perspective:

In CS you can earn over 50k a year with your stipend plus summer internship, you have a lot of unstructured time to explore your interests, and there are a lot of tenure-track positions without doing a postdoc.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#43

Post by azhenley »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #28
sktrdie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s so sad to be in it just for the money. If a phd will allow you to eventually do the things that you love, that should be the priority. Of course you can do what you love also without a PhD, but I’d argue that a PhD will eventually allow you to explore fields and things that are not economically viable. In fact I would say that it’s just plain sad that we have to choose something based on how economically via…

If you want to do something purely for its interesting properties, you don't need a PhD to do it.

But someone pays me to pursue my interests, so a PhD was a fantastic choice!

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#44

Post by jingleheimer »

tha12 wrote: post #32
nicodjimenez wrote: post #30

A PhD is a license to do deep research. Deep research careers are very rare, but for the right kind of person, they're great. However, deep research by definition means it probably won't work, and there's just a lot more money in doing things that will probably work vs things that probably won't. So it helps to be extremely talented at deep research if you want to pursue the PhD. Also, most engineering PhD's are bogu…

What do you consider to be deep research? I agree that engineering research is not actually deep, but once you eliminate that almost all of the current (applied, and maybe theoretical too) Machine Learning work for instance is also dismissed.

That's why it's called Machine Learning and not Artificial Intelligence. It was an intentional differentiation to avoid the pure research academics who start every presentation with 'assuming infinite compute resources'.

ML is an Applied Research discipline and all the better for it.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#45

Post by variational123 »

This is a rather narrow perspective focused on (and giving examples from) one subfield (deep learning) at one point of time (year 2018). Have factors like (i) commoditization of software + hardware, (ii) the limited mathematics required, (iii) many open problems, and (iv) a lot of industry funding made a PhD unnecessary for doing research in deep learning in year 2018?: Yes. But does this mean that a PhD (with several advanced courses and a few years of struggle solving hard research problems) won't be useful for doing Computer Science research for the next 30 years? The answer is probably "No". If you want a long-term, intellectually satisfying research career, whether in academia or industry, a PhD is extremely useful.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#46

Post by seanmcdirmid »

jedberg wrote: post #21

This is total anecdata, but out of my closest college friends, five of them went to get a PhD, while I went to industry. When they graduated, I was already making more than of all of them, with five years of industry experience. And I made more them them for the next thirteen years too. I never hit any magical ceiling where a PhD was necessary. In other words, don't do a PhD if you're in it for the money. It may open…

I don’t think significantly many PhDs are deluded enough to think they did it for the money.

You do a PhD to scratch that itch, hopefully once you graduate you can keep scratching those itches, even if often that doesn’t work out.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#47

Post by seanmcdirmid »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #28
sktrdie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s so sad to be in it just for the money. If a phd will allow you to eventually do the things that you love, that should be the priority. Of course you can do what you love also without a PhD, but I’d argue that a PhD will eventually allow you to explore fields and things that are not economically viable. In fact I would say that it’s just plain sad that we have to choose something based on how economically via…

If you want to do something purely for its interesting properties, you don't need a PhD to do it.

You can, but you won’t necessarily get the support that you can from a stipend, adviser, upper division courses, student colleagues, conference travel, and so on.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#48

Post by seanmcdirmid »

david-gpu wrote: post #9
account2 wrote: post #2

I have several questions regarding this: 1) Do FAANG companies hire non-PhDs for machine learning positions? Most seem to require a MS or PhD 2) What are the interview questions like at FAANG companies for machine learning positions? Is the interview different if you don't have a PhD? 3) For non-PhDs applying, what are the math requirements for the job? 4) For people that have a PhD working in ML at a FAANG, do you f…

I work at NVidia as a GPU architect doing ML applied research. I'm not a hiring manager, but I have interviewed a bunch of people. 1) Having a PhD will make it easier to get an interview, but it is not necessary. Relevant experience counts just as much. I only have an MSc. 2) That will vary a ton from one team to another and from one position to another. The interviewers are not going to change their questions depend…

The best machine learning researcher I know has a MsC in EE. This is at a research lab that begins with an M.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#49

Post by currymj »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #46
jedberg wrote: post #21

This is total anecdata, but out of my closest college friends, five of them went to get a PhD, while I went to industry. When they graduated, I was already making more than of all of them, with five years of industry experience. And I made more them them for the next thirteen years too. I never hit any magical ceiling where a PhD was necessary. In other words, don't do a PhD if you're in it for the money. It may open…

I don’t think significantly many PhDs are deluded enough to think they did it for the money. You do a PhD to scratch that itch, hopefully once you graduate you can keep scratching those itches, even if often that doesn’t work out.

there is definitely a naive perception in some circles right now that a doctorate studying deep learning is a path to riches and fame. Due to misleading reports of million dollar salaries for new PhDs and so on.

It's a degree with a high opportunity cost that won't pay off financially in the long run, even with no tuition or debt. In the past I think everybody understood this but now I'm slightly more worried.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#50

Post by nl »

tha12 wrote: post #32
nicodjimenez wrote: post #30

A PhD is a license to do deep research. Deep research careers are very rare, but for the right kind of person, they're great. However, deep research by definition means it probably won't work, and there's just a lot more money in doing things that will probably work vs things that probably won't. So it helps to be extremely talented at deep research if you want to pursue the PhD. Also, most engineering PhD's are bogu…

What do you consider to be deep research? I agree that engineering research is not actually deep, but once you eliminate that almost all of the current (applied, and maybe theoretical too) Machine Learning work for instance is also dismissed.

I don't have a PhD, but I have run research programs.

The deeper into a field you get the more you realize that the parts which seem deep research aren't, and the parts which seem incremental improvements are actually very deep.

I can think of a number of things in machine learning which appear hard which are easy, and vice versa.

Theoretical justification for GAN improvements (eg, the WGAN paper): elegant but obvious, even though I'm not a mathematician.

Generative models for text including entities that remain coherent for longer than a sentence? We barely know how to even start thinking about this problem.

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