As a software engineer, PhD is worth it if you know what you are getting into. Especially now that job market is saturated, it definitely helps your career. It's a long journey but it's worth it if you know what you are doing.
Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
261–270 of 485 posts
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#262The smartest people I’ve ever worked with to date were from physics grad school. Still remember the time my coworker was doing code profiling, decided he was unhappy that the exponential function from the standard library was too slow, and decided to write a Taylor series approximation that gave him the precision he needed and cut the run time in half. He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by t…
I don't want to take away from his brilliance, but generally Taylor approximations perform far worse than the standard library implementations. It's also the first tool of choice for physicists, so who knows ...? My guess, though, is that if he improved the performance, he used some other wizardry (Chebyshev or something similar).
https://github.com/Duke-QCD/trento/blob/master/src/fast_exp....
Check it out for yourself! I’m not claiming this was some kind of prodigious programming move, just something memorable that stuck with me.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
The actual chances of getting a tenured position (or another permanent academic position with research opportunities) are more like 1 in 3, or even better. Most people who get a PhD and are in priciple interested in staying in the academia leave, because they are not willing to make the necessary choices. And the biggest reason why people leave is not the pay, the stress, the politics, the struggle for grants, the pu…
When I was in graduate school the chances of getting a tenured position weren't anywhere close to 1 in 3. Where are you getting that number?
Roughly speaking, there are 10-20 PhDs for every faculty position. But not every PhD wants a faculty position, even in principle.
Many want to do research in the industry, or in public research labs. Many do a PhD because it opens doors in other careers, such as medicine or education. Some PhDs are hobby projects people do in retirement. Some are side projects for people who want to study something relevant to their main job (those are quite common in social sciences).
Then there are those who actually want a career in the academia. But many of them are not trying seriously, because they restrict their job search to a single city / region / country. The 1 in 3 chance is for those who are flexible enough and committed enough and accept the realities of the academic job market.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also dismisses the effect it has on society entirely. In a sane world, we would enable anyone who wants to pursue a PhD in hopes in advancing things like medical science or our understanding of the world. The fact that people really can only care about the economic value education can bring, and the fact we all act like that's normal, is very radicalizing to me.
I disagree. More people have a desire to advance our understanding than have the ability to advance our understanding.
The desire to do something and understand something is the root of everything, and who are to preemptively decide who has that capability? What a pompous thing to say. On top of that you are operating on the assumption that it matters. If someone wants to learn, they should be able to learn. I guarantee you that we as a society have stifled people who would be this generations Einstein so to speak.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#265From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising. It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research . It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious…
> From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising. Not surprising at all. It's a forum run by a VC firm populated with a decent number of people who are wannabe founders, trying to jump on the latest fad, hoping to win the startup jackpot. And (way back when it was small), I think a big part of the appeal was you could rub shoulders with some VC people and fo…
>I thnk it does occur to people, but that's a choice for nepo babies and aspiring monks.
Maybe you've only spent time around PhD candidates at Ivy League schools where people are more likely to have access to wealth, but if you've spent any time at all around PhD candidates you'll find this is generally not the case. As a PhD candidate from a lower SE class, I've found that the majority of my peers are from a similar class. However, I am not connected to a private university though I am in medicine.
Studies on this show great variation across doctoral fields. Economics doctoral students tend to come from more affluent backgrounds, while the majority of Social Sciences doctoral students are from a lower SE class. Overall there seems to be a trend that doctoral students in fields with more lucrative career prospects tend to come from a higher SE class.
From what I have read, your claim only applies to the majority of faculty members, which tend to come from backgrounds with an income that is higher than the national median income.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#266From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising. It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research . It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious…
You don't need to pursue a PhD to do research, which I think underlies some of the pushback. If you don't care about the credentials or being an career academic, a doctoral program can add a lot of friction for little benefit if the only motivator is passion for the subject.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#267Maybe a correction is needed. Academia has become so gamified. It's supposed to be about ideas, truth, beauty. Too many are in it for the prestige, which has ironically made it less prestigious. Very few true eccentrics left.
Academia is not about truth or beauty and never was.
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Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#268From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising. It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research . It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious…
I love doing research on subjects that excite me, but I found that joining a PhD program would mean I would only get to work on what my advisor found exciting.
If you get lucky and find a PI that is interested in exactly the same thing, you're good. You might get lucky enough to find someone who is interested in something near what you want. Most likely, you will be assigned the thing you do for your PhD.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#269Good. Academia is done growing. We're in a steady state, which means if you're in grad school, look at your advisor. Look at the other grad students who have him. Look at the work of the grad students who came before you, with this advisor. Think about the ones that will come after. Only ONE of you will take your advisor's place, statistically speaking. If you an afford to pursue a PHD for the sake of doing the work…
If your advisor is one of the stars of their field, then probably more than one of their grad students will be professors. If not, then probably none of them will.
Otherwise this point is indeed correct.
Re: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you read a biography of Musk, you'll find that he did not hoard wealth. At each step in his rise, he bet essentially all of his fortune on the next step. After all, investing in Tesla was not a sane business decision. Nobody had ever started a successful car company in America since the 1920s or so. Bricklin, Tucker, Delorean, the path is littered with utter failure. Neither was investing in rockets. At one point,…
Reading a biography mostly informed me about the lack of general empathy, remorse, sympathy. Only regret came forward a little (and only once). > be crazy enough to bet it all Anyone who doesn't suffer any real consequences. Having parents with a lot of money makes it not matter all that much. As for the other bad decisions; it doesn't really show much positive except maybe persistence, but persistence in a vacuum is…
Musk used his "hoard" to revolutionize the car industry, then the rocket industry, then the communications industry, etc.
Did you know he gave away free Starlink to victims of hurricane Helena and the LA fires? When FEMA did nothing?
He's also going to rescue the astronauts abandoned in space.
My gawd, Elon is pure eeevil!!