41–50 of 100 posts
Reading this article makes me realize I certainly picked the road not taken. Last year I quit my job as the Director of IT at a small pharma, dropped out of a company-paid MBA program, drastically reduced my expenses, and started doing independent research. A lot of people around me thought I was crazy especially since I wasn't going the PhD or startup route either. In my mind though, it seems pretty logical - I want…
Reading this article makes me realize I certainly picked the road not taken. Last year I quit my job as the Director of IT at a small pharma, dropped out of a company-paid MBA program, drastically reduced my expenses, and started doing independent research. A lot of people around me thought I was crazy especially since I wasn't going the PhD or startup route either. In my mind though, it seems pretty logical - I want…
Reading this article makes me realize I certainly picked the road not taken. Last year I quit my job as the Director of IT at a small pharma, dropped out of a company-paid MBA program, drastically reduced my expenses, and started doing independent research. A lot of people around me thought I was crazy especially since I wasn't going the PhD or startup route either. In my mind though, it seems pretty logical - I want…
I did the same thing about ten years ago: I quit a high-paying job in Zurich, moved to Prague on-the-cheap, and hired two Czech PhD students part-time. We spent five years doing CS research and it was always two-steps forward, one back. Every three or four months we would throw everything out and start again; and we had the freedom to do so. There was no installed base, no one tapping their fingers expectantly. Looki…
You're only getting one side of this, and before you find yourself in complete agreement ask yourself this: Are you agreeing because it confirms your bias and opinion of the academic system? I got a PhD from Cambridge. Everyone I worked with was helpful to a fault. Everyone shared credit when it was due, and declined offers of credit when they felt they hadn't contributed enough. I got my PhD, got a 3 year post-doc,…
The other thing that occurred to me when I read this, was that he's constructed a false dichotomy for himself: work in a world-class place, which is probably indeed much like being an olympic athlete, or work in an absolutely rubbish place, which can't really support your research. Anything missing in the middle??
You're only getting one side of this, and before you find yourself in complete agreement ask yourself this: Are you agreeing because it confirms your bias and opinion of the academic system? I got a PhD from Cambridge. Everyone I worked with was helpful to a fault. Everyone shared credit when it was due, and declined offers of credit when they felt they hadn't contributed enough. I got my PhD, got a 3 year post-doc,…
You're only getting one side of this, and before you find yourself in complete agreement ask yourself this: Are you agreeing because it confirms your bias and opinion of the academic system? I got a PhD from Cambridge. Everyone I worked with was helpful to a fault. Everyone shared credit when it was due, and declined offers of credit when they felt they hadn't contributed enough. I got my PhD, got a 3 year post-doc,…
You're only getting one side of this, and before you find yourself in complete agreement ask yourself this: Are you agreeing because it confirms your bias and opinion of the academic system? I got a PhD from Cambridge. Everyone I worked with was helpful to a fault. Everyone shared credit when it was due, and declined offers of credit when they felt they hadn't contributed enough. I got my PhD, got a 3 year post-doc,…
That's the hard part about things like this. It's almost completely subjective, so doing a study would be difficult. We're left with dueling anecdotes from credible people.
I can believe that the 'hard' sciences are roughly like he says, at least at many places. It's common for there to be a sort of "lab" mentality, with a lot of grad-student cogs in a famous-professor-lab machine, and credit tends to go to the head of the lab (especially if the paper has 50 authors or something, as is common in some areas). Partly that's because it takes a lot of money to set up a physics/chem/bio lab, and there is a lot of grunt-work to be done.
That's less common in CS, I think. Not inexistent, but you can find a research group that isn't like that. It's even less common in the humanities, but then you have a whole different set of problems (less money, fewer jobs).
Isn't the real problem here that we rely on "academia" to be the "experts"? I know a number of very accomplished and intelligent folks that did not pursue PhD and have done phenomenally well in their own research. But sadly many, for credibility's sake, had to advertise themselves as think tanks. Why can't we just put the damn degrees down and listen to the person to judge their competency??