251–260 of 382 posts
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If you don't want people to read your post, perhaps write a private diary instead.
Having it on the Archive is fine; choosing to disregard how scary landing on the top of HN can be seems callous.
call it callous, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for what is the direct result of their own actions. You make a post on HN, people have a right to be curious about it
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I interact very heavily with academics (though am thankfully no longer one myself) and one thing I can't stand is that all of them will complain endlessly about the horribly abusive and broken system that academia has become, then without hesitation turn around and flog the next person in line when it's their turn to continue the process from the abusing side. As someone who once held the title of assistant professor…
I'd be interested in hearing your perspective on what's broken, why, and what avenues are available to fix it. (Genuinely curious, I know the tone of that sentence may come across as dismissive. It wasn't intended to.)
A lot of researchers are very mediocre and they treat research as a simple career where they superficially advise a bunch of PhD students. A lot of those researchers neither think nor raise questions nor make meaningful contributions.
Exacerbated by research grants which favours researcher with lots of publications regardless of the quality of the research (usually real honest high quality research takes time and produces much fewer papers). Those researchers thus end up chasing low hanging fruit just to increase their paper count, making everything they do shallow and full of bullshit.
I will hand in my notice tomorrow, after circa 1 year as a PhD student. In fact, I'm switching fields: from a PhD in Mechanical Engineering (energy systems) to a software developer role in a non-engineering sector. Very little of my 7 years (MSc) and subsequent circa 1 year as a PhD will carry over. Certainly an exciting step, although the program here was pretty excellent. Good supervision, full funding for the enti…
However, you will still be dealing with some project management and other similar workplace-related tasks that contribute nothing to the overall work product.
I made a similar decision as a former engineer in the physical realm. I would say normal engineering is about 90% 'fluff' work related to corporate traditions. In tech, it is more like 75%.
The only workers who truly focus only on their work are blue-collar workers. If that is what drives you, there are plenty of interesting trade jobs and fabrication jobs where people just solve problems day-in day-out and don't have to worry about dressing up or being diplomatic.
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You can still quit. And, at least I would recommend you doing it. I have yet to do the jump to industry, but from what I'm hearing so far: There is little to no value assigned to the _paper_. And, at least in my view, this is exactly as it should be. There are two and only two situations [0]: 1) The company requires your specific expertise and won't care about the title as you are the one with the knowledge 2) The co…
There are some programs where you can earn a Doctorate without a Master's degree. Sometimes the program will combine both into one curriculum. In these cases, it's not possible to just quit and still have a Master's. You will have a Bachelor's and a bunch of debt. Perhaps they could work with an academic advisor to apply those credits taken to a Master's, maybe fill in the gaps and be done with it.
https://github.com/derhagen/derhagen.github.io/commit/71c934... I don't understand what's so controversial about this post that the author had to take it down. Seems like a level-headed criticism of modern-day academia to me. Sturgeon's rule applies to everything, including academia.
If any of that does not add up, you are in going to have to do something. In a way, a PhD. degree is the reward for your ability to overcome such obstacles. It's a lonely job and with few exceptions, the only readership for your hard work is the handful of people who will actually read more than a few pages of your thesis and only because they have to. And yet you have to take it seriously and get it done. You might feel like you are wasting years of your life. But think of the person indulging you for all those years and trying to do their best to nudge you in the right direction.
My advice would be to only do a PhD for the right reasons (i.e. the knowledge and the learning instead of the degree) and only if you can find the right mentor to coach you through it. Your first failing might be rooted in getting either of that wrong.
> Because this article received somewhat more attention than I expected/feel comfortable with, I’ll take it down for a moment. Sorry. I’ll leave the disclaimer: Here's the original: Just a bit over half a year ago, I started my PhD in Quantum Computing. Even though I basically didn’t have any previous knowledge about it, I thought Quantum Computing was an interesting challenge to get into. What should I say? Quantum…
Why couldn't you simply respect the author's wish to leave the text private?
I've been in a similar position, saying something incendiary on a large corporation's public intranet comment section. What I said was more objective and pointing to a specific instance that was very fair to criticize and ultimately damaging to the company, but the next day I was well aware the cat was out of the bag I needed to defend my position with logic and reason and not try and hide it. In fact I emailed my manager immediately the next morning, saying that I was worried about the blowback and linking to the comment. I feel for the author, because the anxiety was definitely a ohh shit moment. Looking back, I probably shouldn't have made the public comment in the first place because it was emotionally driven and it did hurt my advancement.
Congrats on making a decision sooner rather than later. I also dropped out of graduate school and remembered having some similar thoughts as you. I remembered feeling a bit lonely, too. There's no one to talk to about your work since no one understands it. It's a bit obvious in hindsight. Research topics are at the fuzzy fringe of human knowledge. They exist just outside of others' research topics. Your job is to fin…
> But most likely, when you come home and a loved one asks what you did today, you won't be able to have an answer My PhD - and subsequent research - is in security. I will happily explain my research to anyone who will listen. In case I'm not sure, I just start explaining just in case. How privacy in voting is important. How most scraping studies have a fundamental flaw. How to catch scientific fraud. Current WiP is…