Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD. • Hacker News Board

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#121

Post by pnathan » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 5:28 PM UTC

cottonseed wrote: post #48

The author makes some good points, but what they don't realize is: For an intellectually and professionally ambitious person, the the options carry many of the same challenges, although the details might vary. I'm in a PhD program right now, but I did startups in my 20s. I worked crazy hours. I broke myself physically and mentally. Many relationships got destroyed along the way. The money was bad (ramen) and uncertai…

From a CS/software standpoint, I don't see a great deal of personal difference between an aggressive industry position and PhD research. Both involve heavy overtime, intense focus, and uncertain futures.

Financially, of course, there is a difference, which will bleed out into other areas... but this is less important after your needs & small wants are covered.

Put another way, working 6-7 days/wk for 16 hour days in industry was not meaningfully different from doing research; actually, research was more pleasant IMO. In both scenarios you come home and zonk, but in one you have the freedom to go wander around, stare at the clouds, and think, without getting in trouble.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#122

Post by pnathan » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 5:35 PM UTC

hedgie wrote: post #80

pnathan wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. You can have a family and do a PhD. Lots of people do. You just can't have a fulltime job and do a decent PhD. You should be able to wangle some kind of funding and get by OK if your spouse can work (& a few other conditions such as no financial catastrophe).

my father worked full time while receiving his phd in the professional field he was employed in. he has had a very successful academic career. his dissertation was no joke and he has advanced much further than others from more prestigious universities. i don't understand this mindset and the fact it exists is why i would never go back for a phd (pure math phd drop out). this is why so much research ends up being inap…

> i don't understand this mindset

maybe I can explain better?

Good research takes time and intense focus. I.e., you want to be able to have a total focus when your mind is fresh. That is not going to be doable after you've already worked your 8-9 day (maybe if you're in the 1% of humans who can do that, but I'm talking about the common case). This is going to get worse in the case of having a family.

I'm not going to comment on your father, since I don't know him, don't know his research, and don't know his field. :-) But I know that I've been... less impressed... with part-time PhD research than with full-time PhD research. There are ways to manipulate your situation into a less conflicting one, that is true, but that depends on the employer and the university.

> pushed the current boundaries of human knowledge further away from anything applicable, interesting, or worth spending 6 years of your life on.

That's just your opinion, ne? Why should academics do anything that is applicable? Isn't it industry's role to take this research and channel it into something practical (or ignore it if its not)? A surprising amount of effort has been expended over the years in software that have been avoided by some basic attention to the research literature.

But that leads us down an entirely different discussion, one I don't think is really resolvable here and now.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#123

Post by pnathan » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 8:43 PM UTC

geophile wrote: post #47

pnathan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My PhD adviser was a wonderful man, low-key, with some fun things he was investigating, but he wasn't building an empire, built on the backs of enslaved grad students. We were just looking at interesting problems together. That sounds like so much fun. Hey, what was your PhD on? Can you talk about the product you shipped?

My research was on spatial query processing -- z-order-based techniques. The idea is to map spatial objects to one dimension by noting how a space-filling curve (z-order) passes in and out of the object. Overlapping objects can then be found by simple operations on 1-d data structures supporting random and sequential access, (e.g. sorted array, btree). I believe that the same transformation is used in geohashes. The…

I've read your statement about five times now. I still only have the loosest idea of what your dissertation would be about. Which makes me kind of curious!

If you have a link to the dissertation or would like to chat about it, my email is in my profile, and I'm interested in learning more.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#124

Post by mcknight0219 » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 9:45 PM UTC

denzil_correa wrote: post #41

pnathan wrote: post #23

I just finished up a Master's in Computer Science. It took 5 years; my initial advisor died and I had to find another one to step in. I went deep into debt (no funding) and finally switched over to a part-time study while I worked full time. Unfortunately, it was just that point when the real research was ramping up. I remember nights where I would be falling asleep as I crammed my code in to see it work. Then more n…

> I'm not particularly special; just tenacious. It's a myth that you require to be "smart" to do a Ph.D. You just require few basic skills, a good supervisor and persistence. You are good to go! Here's a quote which is another version of what you said and you will realize it's exactly the same. If this person could do it(with wide spread fame) why not you? It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with proble…

You can't be serious when Dr.Einstein said he was not smart. He is pure genius. Absolutely no doubt. He was saying that just to make ordinary people feel good.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#125

Post by geophile » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 9:58 PM UTC

gench wrote: post #116

geophile wrote: post #17

My experience was quite different from that of OP, and I suspect most people who walk that path. I'm 56 in a few days, and got my PhD in computer science in 1983. I was lucky enough to go to a high school that had a real computer, a PDP-8M, and I was hooked five minutes after I sat down at the DecWriter. At college, I was theoretically pre-med. A month into my freshman year (1974), I went to a party at the house of a…

I don’t think saying PhD is good or bad in general makes sense. It depends on what alternatives you have on your hands. If you are from a third world country and PhD is the only chance to take you a batter place, it makes sense. For the ones who already live in a decent country, it only makes sense if you are very very passionate about being an academician and you should carefully question the arguments making you pa…

I have the sense that a PhD in computer science is harder to obtain now because the field is more mature, there are many more people working in it, and it just takes more time and effort to get to the point that you're doing original work.

Also, my impression is that, in the USA at least, the economy is fundamentally much more fragile, with the disappearance of the middle class. Someone starting out now does not really have the luxury of doing something purely out of passion. The penalty for needing to change course is much higher now. I think.

I disagree with you on the role of industry in computer science research. In the 80s, there were many companies in which research was happening: Xerox PARC, IBM, Digital, and to a lesser extent at other computer companies. I worked at Computer Corporation of America, a mid-sized software company, in the mid 80s (after UMass, before startups), and they did some amazing, DARPA-funded research in databases. Now it's Microsoft and IBM. Oracle, Apple and others are obviously doing leading-edge work, but I think those efforts are more closely aligned with products. I think there was far more pure research done by software/compute companies 30 years ago.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#126

Post by sjg007 » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 11:39 PM UTC

enjo wrote: post #66

geophile wrote: post #17

My experience was quite different from that of OP, and I suspect most people who walk that path. I'm 56 in a few days, and got my PhD in computer science in 1983. I was lucky enough to go to a high school that had a real computer, a PDP-8M, and I was hooked five minutes after I sat down at the DecWriter. At college, I was theoretically pre-med. A month into my freshman year (1974), I went to a party at the house of a…

Another data point: My wife is a relatively recent PhD (6 years out). Her experience has been nothing but amazing. When it comes to academia your field of study matters. Alot. My wife is a behavioral accounting researcher, which is a high-demand field with incredibly low supply. Her experience, compared to other disciplines, just couldn't be any more different. She's highly paid and does exactly what she loves. It he…

Umm, so what is behavioral accounting? I did google it, and it suggests that Steve Jobs (when he was alive) was a major asset of Apple and should be priced into the company's stock value.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#127

Post by ChuckMcM » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 12:50 AM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #84

ChuckMcM wrote: post #50

One of the interesting thing I find about PhDs (as in people who have one) is that a non-trivial number of them seem to equate not having a PhD with not being able to get one. I've always wondered if that was a cognitive dissonance issue (unable to relate to having a capability and not using it) or a self evaluation issue (unable to accept that having a PhD doesn't increase the specialness of your snowflake status).…

I don't see that as much in computer science, though I could be oblivious. Conferences often have a mix of people with and without PhDs, and a lot of good work comes from people in the 2nd category (especially if your sub-area has many participants from industry), so I don't think many people are under the impression that those people are less intelligent. I do find it jarring that in some fields they put the degree…

It is entirely possible that this impression comes from survivor bias as its jarring when you run into it, and you don't notice when you don't.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#128

Post by bwood » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 3:14 AM UTC

guylhem wrote: post #54

I could not disagree more with the author - in fact at the moment I feel sorry for her. TLDR: PhD is not for whimps Yes it has the potential to break you, yes you will have very or little feedback loop and almost no money, and yes more people look forward being in academia for the freedom to pursue whatever research they fancy. But this whole interpretation is very very wrong. A PhD is a life changing experience - yo…

> I believe this is wrong, because anyone who wants to do that believes that its own interests are for some reason better than what the market values. It's good and all, do whatever you fancy, but not on my dime - not on public money. Get a real job.

How would the market gauge the value of research with no obviously profitable applications? While markets are excellent automatic control systems for efficient resource allocation, I am unconvinced that they are ideal for long-term outcomes in which it is difficult to put hard values on all the variables. Our current system, though inefficient, covers an enormously broad range of research, often with little regard to applications other than the pursuit of truth...and I think this probably leads to much more creative work and more groundbreaking discoveries in the long-term. But I don't have any data on this either way. Perhaps you do?

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#129

Post by tripzilch » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 11:05 AM UTC

guylhem wrote: post #106

tripzilch wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe this is wrong, because anyone who wants to do that believes that its own interests are for some reason better than what the market values. It's good and all, do whatever you fancy, but not on my dime - not on public money. Get a real job. If that's your chosen frame of reference, then that's not your dime. Or the public 's dime. At that point it's the market 's dime. And the market doesn't particularly ca…

True, the market doesn't care. However, I do. I just believe any given individual is less likely to be right that the market, as an emanation of the will of many many people (at least on a statistical basis) Traditionally, academia wants to work on the problems it deems worth its time. I don't like that - it's working on a fancy, on the public dime. My dime. Working on the market dime on something the market fancies…

Yeah. I can probably see that point of view, but I do disagree with quite a lot of the details--I believe a market works great in certain specific and relatively small scale circumstances, especially since it's a relatively effort-free system to set up, outside of those domains, the modus of "the market" seems to starts diverging more and more wildly from what I consider "good", or "to the benefit of those whose lives it affects"--but that becomes a philosophical discussion that might be a bit OT here.

We can totally agree that academia's approach is similarly imperfect.

> They will even be rewarded again if they did something the market needed but didn't know it wanted.

Here you are conflating again "what the market needs/wants" with "good"

> In any case, you are not spending the public money, and you are redeemable (you can be fired or run out of your own money) which discourages waste.

That's not entirely fair reasoning. Just because what you describe here is the way a market discourages waste, doesn't mean that a different system like academia doesn't have its own ways in place to discourage waste. Which it does. And both systems have their fair share of examples where these methods fail spectacularly.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#130

Post by stared » Thu, Jan 24, 2013, 5:57 PM UTC

To start with, I recommend text: The Ph.D. Grind, A Ph.D. Student Memoir http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm. The good thing about it is that it contains rather report, than merely a conclusion. Plus, it is written in a neutral way, leaving judgement to the reader. When it comes to anecdotical evidence (both the linked article + most of stories in this thread are one data point) also http://www.phdcomics.com/ (in short, equating PhD with stress, procrastination and frustration) is popular for a reason.

Among my friends, ones doing their PhD are lot more depressive than programers.

The "funny" thing is that (according to my observation) burnout and crisis hits the most the most creative and ambitious ones (and often - talented). If one starts with a world changer approach but then discovers that "you are free as long as it contains keywords from the grant + will result in a popular publication on a fashionable topic" is devastating. My friends who had approach "OK, I don't have ambition to do anything beyond what my advisor says" do much better, at least - psychologically.

One thing is that "the world is changed" - and no longer academia is the place for the smartest and the most creative. There are other possibilities. And I wish I had known that before.

Caveat: I'm in the middle of my PhD. Then going to data science or software engineering, after finishing PhD... or instead of it.