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Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

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Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#41

Post by achileas »

jondubois wrote: post #13

I didn't go as far as PhD, but when I came out of uni, I knew nothing about life or work. I really wouldn't recommend anyone to try to launch their own startup right out of uni (especially not alone). When I think back to it; if I had succeeded with my first startup right out of uni, I would have had a seriously distorted view of life. My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. Staying up till 3am a few tim…

Going through a graduate program, especially in the sciences, can really prepare you with a lot of the soft skills (and even more of the 'hard' skills) necessary to do so.

>Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.

You already said you didn't get a PhD, you didn't need to say it twice.

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#42

Post by kyrre »

jondubois wrote: post #32
triplepoint217 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing the 100 page thesis is not the hard work part of a PhD. Doing the research to have the results to write that thesis is the hard work. Unless you are uncommonly lucky, you will fail at some avenues of research and have to slog through lots of painstaking work. I don't (yet) know how that compares to the challenges of a startup, but a PhD is an entirely different animal than an undergrad degree (for better or w…

I worked on some pretty big projects and did a lot of research. That was easy. Part of the reason why it was easy was because I knew that if I put in the effort, I would almost certainly pass the course. At uni, if you're smart, the odds are always stacked firmly in your favor. Failing a PhD thesis during the defence is apparently a 'rare occurrence' in most universities. By contrast, the odds of your startup not fai…

are you confusing the terms 'study' and 'research'?

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#43

Post by kayhi »

I completed a PhD in chemistry and went straight into the start up world in 2008. I focused on building tools that would have been helpful in my research lab[1].

My feeling was I can work a lot of hours for little pay and questionable benefits as a post doc or start my own thing. I use 'start my own thing' since I hadn't ever heard of doing a start-up being in the Midwest.

[1] https://labspend.com/

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#44

Post by Kenji »

jondubois wrote: post #13

I didn't go as far as PhD, but when I came out of uni, I knew nothing about life or work. I really wouldn't recommend anyone to try to launch their own startup right out of uni (especially not alone). When I think back to it; if I had succeeded with my first startup right out of uni, I would have had a seriously distorted view of life. My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. Staying up till 3am a few tim…

Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.

If you got through uni by doing this, you went to a bad uni. Same goes for your statement about a thesis. I feel like you don't really have an idea how tough academia can be. Your comments are smug and condescending.

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#45

Post by lumberjack »

Well sometimes you still need that Ph.D, though.

I recently enquired about a possible career at a small (BUT! They pretty much only hire Ph.Ds. Why? It's mostly a reputation thing. When they send you to help out a client they don't want to send somebody who "only" obtained a masters.

The firm was started by two Ph.Ds out of school and could essentially be considered a startup. Barely 10 years old I believe.

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#46

Post by jondubois »

mikebenfield wrote: post #30
jondubois wrote: post #13

I didn't go as far as PhD, but when I came out of uni, I knew nothing about life or work. I really wouldn't recommend anyone to try to launch their own startup right out of uni (especially not alone). When I think back to it; if I had succeeded with my first startup right out of uni, I would have had a seriously distorted view of life. My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. Staying up till 3am a few tim…

> Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either. Maybe don't belittle things you've never done? Doing a PhD is not just sitting down and writing a thesis, and it's also not just taking a few classes that occasionally require late nights. A PhD student is typically teaching one or more classes, learning as much as possible about his/her field, reading papers at the forefront of research in his/her field, conductin…

It's interesting how people are calibrated differently it comes to measuring 'hard work'. The difficult thing about startups is that the correlation between hard work and success isn't very strong.

It might be the case that a PhD is very hard. My idea of it is just based on third-party observation and discussions with people who have done it. I suppose some people have a harder time than others.

I worked on two open source projects for 6 years in total for about 20 to 30 hours every week in addition to my 40 hour per week day job. My first project had around 500 commits and was about 10K lines of code. My latest project has well over 1000 commits and probably 15K lines of code (I contributed about 80% to 90% of the code and it went through several rewrites). I also wrote the documentation for the project mostly on my own - There are almost 30 pages of technical documentation - About 15K wordcount. I did it for $0 - All I got out of it was experience, industry connections and some nice job offers.

I feel like I worked hard. Almost certainly harder than anyone I know. But I know for sure that some people on HN will read the paragraph above and think that I'm actually a lazy entitled millennial.

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#47

Post by jessaustin »

marmaduke wrote: post #28
jondubois wrote: post #13

I didn't go as far as PhD, but when I came out of uni, I knew nothing about life or work. I really wouldn't recommend anyone to try to launch their own startup right out of uni (especially not alone). When I think back to it; if I had succeeded with my first startup right out of uni, I would have had a seriously distorted view of life. My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. Staying up till 3am a few tim…

If you've not written a PhD thesis, you're not in a position to discount the work involved. Mine was a hundred pages, and I had about two weeks to write it from scratch. I'm not saying it was hard work, but it's not easy either.

This raises more questions than it answers. Why did you have such a compressed schedule?

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#48

Post by squeaky-clean »

mikebenfield wrote: post #30
jondubois wrote: post #13

I didn't go as far as PhD, but when I came out of uni, I knew nothing about life or work. I really wouldn't recommend anyone to try to launch their own startup right out of uni (especially not alone). When I think back to it; if I had succeeded with my first startup right out of uni, I would have had a seriously distorted view of life. My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. Staying up till 3am a few tim…

> Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either. Maybe don't belittle things you've never done? Doing a PhD is not just sitting down and writing a thesis, and it's also not just taking a few classes that occasionally require late nights. A PhD student is typically teaching one or more classes, learning as much as possible about his/her field, reading papers at the forefront of research in his/her field, conductin…

I think you're both making different points. Yes, a PhD is a lot of work (I'd assume, haven't got one). Maybe more work than a startup. But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest. You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it. Your advisor doesn't take on 10 graduate students and encourage practices that will cause 9 to fail but 1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams. Messing it up doesn't mean you don't have to tell 30 people that they need new jobs.

Maybe I'm interpreting the GP post wrong, but I take their use of "hard" to mean "unfair and stressful", and your use of "hard" to mean "high quantity and quality of work."

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#49

Post by jessaustin »

Kenji wrote: post #44
jondubois wrote: post #13

I didn't go as far as PhD, but when I came out of uni, I knew nothing about life or work. I really wouldn't recommend anyone to try to launch their own startup right out of uni (especially not alone). When I think back to it; if I had succeeded with my first startup right out of uni, I would have had a seriously distorted view of life. My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. Staying up till 3am a few tim…

Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either. If you got through uni by doing this, you went to a bad uni. Same goes for your statement about a thesis. I feel like you don't really have an idea how tough academia can be. Your comments are smug and condescending.

Different people's experiences can vary drastically, even at the same institutions. You may have had to study every day, but you had classmates who didn't. That doesn't mean you went to "a bad uni".

Re: Why building a startup is probably your most sensible career path

#50

Post by squidfood »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #48
mikebenfield wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either. Maybe don't belittle things you've never done? Doing a PhD is not just sitting down and writing a thesis, and it's also not just taking a few classes that occasionally require late nights. A PhD student is typically teaching one or more classes, learning as much as possible about his/her field, reading papers at the forefront of research in his/her field, conductin…

I think you're both making different points. Yes, a PhD is a lot of work (I'd assume, haven't got one). Maybe more work than a startup. But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest. You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it. Your advisor doesn't take…

> take on 10 graduate students and encourage practices that will cause 9 to fail but 1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams.

Sounds like a pretty good description of the academic job market to me.

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