Ask YC: How to survive grad school?

That is brilliant! It reminds me of two things.

One is Craig Larman's work on the history of the waterfall process. Larman posed the question: given how broken the waterfall process is, how was it possible for any project to succeed? (The failures of course are easy to explain.) So he went back and interviewed people who were on famous waterfall projects that succeeded. And they told him: "Of course we knew it would never work to do all the design up front. So we built the system and then went back and wrote the spec, handed it in and got it signed off, and later submitted the actual code."

The other thing it reminds me of is Andrew Wiles writing a stack of papers in advance so he would have ten years to work on Fermat's Last Theorem while still publishing regularly.

One old little statistic keeps screaming in the back of my head: in any given software development project, the average difference in productivity between the least and most productive programmers is 3600% -- so you're not in an unusual situation. The ones pretending to be scientists in your group end up on the bottom rungs of the hierarchy later.

As for sanity & graduation, I guess the question isn't what your group's doing, but what's _your_ research on? If you haven't decided your topic yet, you have some good scheming to do. If you have, then you have some more underhanded scheming to do. It's not cynical, it's being focused. The reason the project looks like a giant failure, assuming the ones planning it aren't complete idiots, is that it's essentially a cover story for specific research interests by the primary stakeholders.

The goal is to figure out how to pull as much good research you can on nonprimary topics out of the body of research your group is doing as a whole. The primary topic is rarely as interesting or as scientifically fruitful as the stuff you find on the way.

From your discussion, it sounds like you can't find a direct way to pull good research out of your mess of a research project. Perhaps it's time to talk about an interesting subsystem? Some way of coercing a small part of the project into useful research for you? Feel free to be as devious as you need to be, it sounds like you're one of the only few who care. The rest don't, and so it won't matter to them.

If not, look for viable exit strategies. You're there to do research. If you can't do it, then you're wasting your time.

And seriously, where's your adviser in all this?

As for research, I'm going to industry in a few months, but I never plan to stop researching. Only now I have to pay for my own hardware, which isn't terribly expensive giving what industry pays for a good computer scientist these days. Screw publication, I'm gonna be a crackpot independent scientist!

There are a few companies out there that make enclosed racks which take care of heat & noise for you. They look good underneath a TV.