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The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010)

economist.com

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Re: The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010)

#11

Post by _delirium »

klochner wrote: post #5

A computer science Ph.D. is nothing like what is described in this article. For various reasons (other opportunities, generous industry grants, minimal financial overhead to run a lab), students in computer science are comparatively well paid and free to work at their own pace. YMMV based on advisor. It's been exhaustively shown that stopping after undergrad or masters degrees will be more financially lucrative, so s…

Unfortunately the "generous grants" often conflict with "free to work at their own pace". It's getting more common to find arrangements where PhD students essentially have a part-time job working for their RA funding. In the best case this overlaps with their own research, but sometimes doesn't, and may involve considerable additional work that doesn't really "count" as research. Particularly the case if you're funded on a DARPA grant, since those have very specific timelines and deliverables, plus days where you have to be ready for a "site visit" to demo things. Some industry grants are fairly hands-on as well, expecting the lab to basically lend out a PhD student to work part-time on a project the company wants completed. Though others are more hands-off and just donate a pile of money without demanding specific things in return.

Re: The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010)

#12

Post by jarek »

minimize_me wrote: post #2

I do sometimes wonder if this "PhD is a waste of time" is being pushed so heavily to get a glut of the best computer science grads, who would otherwise consider a PhD, onto the engineer job market. A cute little trick to drive down the salaries a bit, cut back on the perks... I mean, people posting links like this, on this board, don't really have English lit grads in mind, do they? Not that I disagree with the senti…

I don't think CS grads, however good, will make much of a dent in mech or chem eng salaries and perks...

Re: The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010)

#13

Post by pfedor »

The decision to enter a PhD program only makes sense for one of the two reasons: either you think you're going to win a Nobel Prize one day, or, you don't mind spending five years in a way which doesn't advance any goal (literal quote from a conversation I had, "so you had an offer from Google but you decided to do a PhD instead--why??", "Oh, I just want to do nothing for a while longer".)

The two kinds of PhD students may look the same but they're very different. If you belong to the first category, even if you realize you won't get that Nobel Prize, I doubt you're going to regret trying. If you're of the second kind, why yes, you have wasted five years of your life, which is exactly what you signed up for so why do you complain?

Re: The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010)

#14

Post by beala »

rayiner wrote: post #8

I think it depends on whose perspective you're talking about. I think for typical engineers, especially in EE/CS, the increase in earning power from the PhD doesn't make up for the six years of lost income and career progression. But I think from the point of view of society, it's absolutely worth it. The most brilliant engineers I know are PhDs. They have this incredible depth of theoretical understanding of a parti…

It's hard to know which way the causality goes here. It might just be that really exceptional undergrads happen to end up in grad school (because of pressure from professors or family, or simply because "it's just what smart people do"), even though they would have been exceptional engineers either way. I agree that PhDs are very knowledgable when it comes to their precise field of study, but this is often very narrow. How useful is this expert knowledge unless you're hired specifically for it (ie, as a researcher)?

Re: The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010)

#15

Post by rayiner »

beala wrote: post #14
rayiner wrote: post #8

I think it depends on whose perspective you're talking about. I think for typical engineers, especially in EE/CS, the increase in earning power from the PhD doesn't make up for the six years of lost income and career progression. But I think from the point of view of society, it's absolutely worth it. The most brilliant engineers I know are PhDs. They have this incredible depth of theoretical understanding of a parti…

It's hard to know which way the causality goes here. It might just be that really exceptional undergrads happen to end up in grad school (because of pressure from professors or family, or simply because "it's just what smart people do"), even though they would have been exceptional engineers either way. I agree that PhDs are very knowledgable when it comes to their precise field of study, but this is often very narro…

Socially, there is a big value in getting a very bright person to intensely study a single area for many years. PhDs do usually go on to work in their field, and a vastly disproportionate amount of innovation comes from them. That's why I don't really buy the correlation argument. I don't think even very bright people are going to be able to make contributions like new speech recognition algorithms or new algorithms for wireless networking, robotics, etc, without the kind of dedicated and focused study that comes from a PhD (or an equivalent level of theoretical study outside a PhD program).

Re: The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010)

#16

Post by [deleted] »

pfedor wrote: post #13

The decision to enter a PhD program only makes sense for one of the two reasons: either you think you're going to win a Nobel Prize one day, or, you don't mind spending five years in a way which doesn't advance any goal (literal quote from a conversation I had, "so you had an offer from Google but you decided to do a PhD instead--why??", "Oh, I just want to do nothing for a while longer".) The two kinds of PhD studen…

[deleted]

Re: The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010)

#17

Post by shawn-butler »

klochner wrote: post #5

A computer science Ph.D. is nothing like what is described in this article. For various reasons (other opportunities, generous industry grants, minimal financial overhead to run a lab), students in computer science are comparatively well paid and free to work at their own pace. YMMV based on advisor. It's been exhaustively shown that stopping after undergrad or masters degrees will be more financially lucrative, so s…

I would limit that to just #2 in your list. The other two carrots are so out of your reach or subject to factors so far beyond your control that a love for learning and a burning interest in your research is the only thing that you can count on sustaining you.

Re: The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010)

#19

Post by tensor »

pfedor wrote: post #13

The decision to enter a PhD program only makes sense for one of the two reasons: either you think you're going to win a Nobel Prize one day, or, you don't mind spending five years in a way which doesn't advance any goal (literal quote from a conversation I had, "so you had an offer from Google but you decided to do a PhD instead--why??", "Oh, I just want to do nothing for a while longer".) The two kinds of PhD studen…

I did a PhD to learn and to contribute some small bit to our collective knowledge. I didn't do it to be rich nor famous. As far as "waste of time" goes, there is nothing to me more important than contributing to the worlds knowledge. Pop stars come and go and the rich are forgotten and irrelevant just as fast. Knowledge is the only thing that accumulates and continually helps future generations.

Re: The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010)

#20

Post by tensor »

ideonexus wrote: post #10
crucifiction wrote: post #9

As a hiring manager of non-specialized software developers, I take people with 4-6 years of real world coding over a phd any day. We generally hire phd's at the same level/pay as a bachelors in cs with maybe only a nominal amount more in salary. the skills you learn as a phd are not really what the industry needs, unless you manage to find one of the small number of jobs that requires whatever specific thing you stud…

I concur. My experience with CS PhDs is that they lack the production-oriented mindset needed for the real world. We hired a CS PhD to write reports for us. In six months he did not write one single line of code, but produced a very impressive whitepaper about the code he intended to write. He went on to write more whitepapers for a company specializing in vaporware somewhere else. I've had similar experiences with P…

Meanwhile, the top tech firms aggressively recruit CS PhDs.
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