So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.

Of all the graduate students I met, you could more or less divide them into two classes. The first class wanted the PhD as a means to an end, such as doing research, or getting a professorship. The second class had more abstract and less well-defined goals. Sometimes that meant generally "doing good for the world", or "seemed like the right thing to do", or "the working world sucks, this is the lesser of two evils".

I fell into the second class.

I spent three years doing computer science grad school at UNC. I passed my dissertation proposal and then decided to leave.

I don't resent those three years and did learn a few things along the way.

Getting a PhD is ultimately about getting 5 other PhD's to sign off on your dissertation. At least that's the requirement in computer science at UNC. I wish that had been more clear to me at the beginning.

Graduate school as a means of stalling to find something you love to work on is not a horrible way to go. In the meantime you might solve a few problems. I also consider it noble that we (graduate students) as a whole are willing to do the nation's research for such little pay.

Had I thought long and hard about why I was doing the PhD to being with, I may not have started. But life always charges its own tuition.

From the article "As long as you have an answer that you believe in passionately, then that's enough." My three years in graduate school taught me that the most. Find something you love, or least have passion and do that. It may be a silly belief, but it's worth believing in.

I agree with this (despite being someone who is finishing soon, god willing), as long as you can have the mental toughness to not buy into the "man, failing out of grad school, what a shame" mentality that many people will direct your way. It's not that people are all jerks (though some are), but some people are just completionists (never start anything you won't finish), and other people are there because academia really is the best home for them, and they genuinely feel that it would be a waste for anyone smart and good at research not to finish and go into academia.

If you can get over that, though, a few years of grad school without finishing is not a bad deal. If you're in a PhD program (rather than masters) you generally get free tuition, plus a modest stipend that should cover at least rent+groceries, so you end up basically getting to study something for free for a few years. You could make a lot more doing something else, but if your goal is "learn some stuff about [subject]", it's just about the cheapest way you'll find to be able to do that full-time.

Got a job at the university, talked to professors about possible topics but ultimately decided to get a job in the industry.

While teaching classes was fun and the job gave me plenty of free time to read things.

What was really annoying me is the fact that for every little thing you want to do (e.g. buy another smartphone for the study, go to a conference, ...) you have to run through a horribly inefficient process of filling out a dozen forms and getting signatures from all sorts of people.

I also felt bad about not really "creating" something. In my master's thesis, I created an asynchronous web-crawler, evaluated lots of NoSQL backends, hacked for about 8 hours a day and had a nice project in the end.

At the university, I created slides, did lectures but never really did something "cool". There are already dozens of lectures on all sorts of topics and I pretty much only transformed text into pretty slides.

Starting next month, I'll be working at a small company (9 people) and really look forward to hack on something with likeminded people :)

Hope it was the right choice

Perhaps you could get the deep research engagement via an unusually research-focused master's, but there usually isn't scope for that. An M.S. is normally only two years, while 3-5 years is imo the amount of engagement you need with a field to really understand what's going on in research. You need to attend the major conferences in a field more than once, ideally present papers at several of them, present a few more papers after the initial time you do (your first presentation is never the greatest engagement with a research community), and so on. You can get to that as an ABD PhD student, but rarely as a master's student. An M.S. student publishes between 0 and 1 papers typically, and maybe attends 1 or 2 conferences, while a 5th-year PhD student, in CS at least, will more typically have published at least 3 papers in major venues (often 5+) and attended 5+ conferences.

That's all still writing-and-justifying independent research (getting a few conference publications and journal articles), but not quite the same as writing the equivalent of a book, which is a fairly different skill, and one you're not actually likely to use again after getting a Ph.D., since most research is done in conference and journal papers. I wouldn't say it's a complete waste of my time to be writing a thesis, but I wouldn't say it's the most important thing I've done in grad school either, by a long shot--- I value my peer-reviewed publications in the scientific literature much more than I value my institution's thesis/defense process.