Getting a Ph.D. is "often a waste of time".
Sometimes it's much worse: I've seen too many lives
seriously hurt or even destroyed, as in they died,
e.g., from suicide from clinical depression, from
the stresses of a Ph.D. program. Some of the
students hurt or killed were brilliant, some of the
best undergraduate students in the world, PBK,
'summa cum laude', Woodrow Wilson, NSF, etc.
Still the fact that a Ph.D. is "often a waste of
time" should not be regarded as very important.
Why? Because that statement is essentially a
probability. So, if W is the 'event' of a waste of
time and P is a probability measure, then the claim
is that the probability of W, P(W), is too large.
I'd agree P(W) is too large.
But a given student usually doesn't have to 'face'
only P(W) and, instead, has information about some
more 'events', say, A, B, and C, that are relevant,
and then gets to observe an estimate of the
'conditional probability of W given A, B, and C',
that is, P(W|A, B, C). Then, even if P(W) is too
high, P(W|A, B, C) can be quite low in which case
that student might go ahead.
We know that a Ph.D. is the 'union card' for
professors in college and universities. While there
can be a lot to discuss about a career as a
professor, I set that aside as, at least for HN
readers, not very interesting.
But, what about a Ph.D. for careers other than being
a professor? Okay:
I limit my discussion to Ph.D. degrees in
'technical' fields. I omit biomedical fields due to
my limited knowledge of those fields.
There are pros and cons:
Cons. In nearly every line of work other than being
a professor, having a Ph.D. is 'unusual'. So, in
particular, if a Ph.D. takes a a job, say, job J, at
company UGE, then somewhere in the path in the tree
of the organization chart of company UGE from job J
to the CEO likely there will be a person S without a
Ph.D. where person S has a Ph.D. reporting to them.
This is an uncomfortable situation; lawyers know
this, and supposedly their profession tries to
arrange that any working lawyer reports only to a
lawyer. This unfortunate situation is a special
case of the larger situation that Ph.D. holders in
technical fields do not have a strong 'profession'
to protect them.
A Ph.D. in electronic engineering can at times want
to swap their degree for an electrician's license --
good union card, key to a sole proprietorship that
commonly pays well enough to buy a house and support
a family, a rock solidly stable industry, a great
geographical barrier to entry.
Why "awkward"? Because person S will be afraid of
two cases: (1) The Ph.D. training is irrelevant so
that the Ph.D. holder will have their degree
influencing their job performance in ways irrelevant
to the job. (2) The Ph.D. training is relevant in
which case the subordinate may conclude that their
supervisor S is low on competence and, thus, be
insubordinate and, with their extra competence, may
be a threat to the career of person S.
So, if get a technical Ph.D. and pursue a
non-academic job, then likely will be in an awkward
position without help of a recognized, respected
profession.
Pro. One aid in making 'the big bucks' is to do
some work that meets three criteria: -- powerful,
valuable, and new. If everyone over at UGE is
determined to hire people only like themselves, keep
down any additional competence, and, net, just keep
doing things they way they long have been doing
them, then a person with work meeting the three
criteria might have a golden opportunity. Call it
'innovation', 'creative destruction', 'survival of
the fittest', or just blowing the doors off those
other guys, getting the big house, winter vacation
house, summer vacation house, sports cars, good, old
Stradivarius violin for a talented daughter, help
getting into Princeton for another child, yacht, for
wine for dinner parties, shopping, for a few dozen
cases, between Beaune and Dijon, seat at the Round
Table of the university president, for a child help
getting through graduate school and seed funding for
a startup, etc. Or just quite a lot of additional
financial security.
Of course, in this case will be 'different'; maybe
in a good way different but definitely not the same.
Often will not 'fit in'. E.g., would not be hired
at UGE.
But being different is commonly what goes with
success, which in itself is 'different'.
So, what does a Ph.D. have to do with doing some
work that has the three criteria of powerful,
valuable, and new? Answer, a lot: Those three
criteria are essentially those of some successful
original research -- the usual statement is "new,
correct, and significant" but for non-academic work
we can substitute the three criteria I gave. So,
the crucial work is necessarily about 'research'.
So, how to do 'research'? Well, history shows that
commonly it's not easy, but there's education for
that, called Ph.D. programs at the best 20 or so US
research universities -- many of the names are well
known, Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Brown, Yale, Columbia,
NYU (and Courant), Princeton, Johns Hopkins, UNC,
Georgia Tech, CMU (see, Jerry, I didn't leave you
out!), University of Chicago, University of
Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, Cal Tech.
Nearly always the main difficulty in a Ph.D. program
is the research part. For a good, succinct
description of much of the challenge, buried in at
least the machine readable copy of D. Knuth's 'The
TeXBook' is
"The traditional way is to
put off all creative
aspects until the last part
of graduate school. For
seventeen or more years, a
student is taught
examsmanship, then suddenly
after passing enough exams
in graduate school he's
told to do something
original."
And there can be other challenges.
But as difficult as the original work is via a Ph.D.
program, commonly such work is more difficult
otherwise. So, for someone in business trying to do
work with the three criteria I listed, a Ph.D.
program should be a big help.
In my Web 2.0 startup, the computing is often a pain
in the back side due to poorly written
documentation, system management headaches, security
holes, ..., bugs but is all just routine. The key
to my startup, if it is successful, will be some
work that meets the three criteria, and for that
work I have to admit that my Ph.D. program helped.
So, right, glad you noticed: If get a technical
Ph.D. and want to use it outside of academics, then
are heavily betting on doing some work that meets
the three criteria and being a founder of a
successful startup.
Maybe there are too few examples successful Web 2.0
companies founded by a Ph.D. who did some research
crucial to the success of the company. Then can
take this situation as evidence that (1) a Ph.D. and
some research are not powerful or (2) there is a
wide open field full of opportunities. My guess is
(2).
I know; I know: But why can't there be just a nice,
easy, secure, 20-30 hour a week job that will
provide good financial security for life? Well,
Obama already has that job (that's intended to be a
joke!).