41–46 of 46 posts
As it happens, I'm defending my dissertation tomorrow (neuroscience, U.S.) and this post pretty well sums up my sentiment. I particularly agree with the ending: Oh you’re saying I’m a dreamer, and that simply never happens? Well what about those thousands of internet start-up companies? They waste their time as well, trying to become another Facebook or another Google. Yet they still do it, because it’s their dream t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dad has worked at a grocery store for almost 33 years, and he's 50 years old. He always made good money (especially for not having a degree), and did a good job, but I never felt like he actually liked his job, especially with all the crap he has to go through from both employees and bosses. He's been salary for a long time, and has worked probably an average of 60+ hours a week for the past 12 years. This always…
"I don't know anyone who has gone to school for a PhD just to get a better paying job when they get out." Now you know of one.
PhDs open up a lot of jobs that you wouldn't be able to get in with only a Masters, but they don't typically pay that much more (most my background is with Physicists)
I do know lots of people who go for a Masters in order to make more money.
The comparison between startups and PhDs is not esp. appropriate. The entrepreneur often is willing to assume greater risk for greater pecuniary reward, whereas the PhD often is not assuming any greater risk but willing to accept likely lesser pay to do what he loves. Which isn't to say that there is a class of entrepreneurs that start companies simply because they love starting companies, but that this isn't unique…
I agree that it's not a perfect comparison, but there are undoubtably similarities. In both cases, you're working mostly on your own, on a project that you have to define and that is entirely dependent on your personal level of self-motivation. One of the biggest challenges to running a startup seems to be correctly defining the problem on which to work, and the single biggest hurdle to finishing a PhD is coming up w…
I'm happy I'm currently in the middle of my PhD, but this article makes a bunch of errors. It generally strikes me as the naive impression that undergrad have of grad school until they spend some time talking to post-doc and professors. I'll just identify a couple of obvious ones. 1. "We all read the PhD Comics and we all hear about how many hours of coursework or admin-duties a typical US grad student has. I don’t k…
I don't know where you're getting 2 from. To throw one anecdote out there, my advisor, who has experience with hiring committees, has told me that for academic positions, they're looking for a wide range of things - including demonstrated teaching ability. And for professors (even at a research facility), poor student reviews of classes you've taught can get in the way of being awarded tenure.
I'm in my 4th year of grad school, and I tend to pick the brains of professors and post-docs a lot. I have never once heard them (a) recommend that I get more TA experience than is strictly required ("get on a fellowship or a grant as fast as you can so you can completely absorb yourself in research"), or (b) mention that a professor was granted/denied tenure for anything besides research.
Don't get me wrong, departments pay a lot of lip service to this stuff. And yes, at many places the professors have to write a (brief) essay explaining how incredible they are at inspiring young students. But as a determining factor in advancement at research universities, my strong impression is that it's practically insignificant.
You'll probably think that Sean Carroll speaks with more authority than me, though. Here is how he puts it:
"When was the last time Harvard made a senior tenure offer to someone because they were a world-class educator, rather than a world-class researcher? Not only is the answer 'never,' the question itself is somewhat laughable."
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/...
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"I don't know anyone who has gone to school for a PhD just to get a better paying job when they get out." Now you know of one.
What are you going to school for? PhDs open up a lot of jobs that you wouldn't be able to get in with only a Masters, but they don't typically pay that much more (most my background is with Physicists) I do know lots of people who go for a Masters in order to make more money.
I got a Ph.D. in engineering; the program was in essentially the mathematics of operations research. So, the emphasis was on optimization and stochastic processes. The work was fully careful mathematically, especially in measure theory. My dissertation research was on stochastic optimal control (yup, with careful attention even to 'measurable selection').
"PhDs open up a lot of jobs that you wouldn't be able to get in with only a Masters, but they don't typically pay that much more (most my background is with Physicists)"
Eventually I concluded that for a 'job', a Ph.D. was from nearly useless down to less good than a serious felony conviction. The main reason is that for a "job", the people hiring are still almost entirely stuck in the 'job hierarchy' model of 120 years ago on the factory floor where the supervisor was supposed to be older and know more than the subordinate, and the subordinate was supposed to be there mostly to apply labor to the ideas of the supervisor. So, since there are nearly no supervisors with Ph.D. degrees, the situation is as I described.
I was misled: My early career was around DC on mostly military problems. There a technical Ph.D. would have helped a lot. During that work, at times I wanted to know more about optimization and stochastic processes, so I selected such a Ph.D. program.
But then I drifted away from such DC-DoD work. Dumb move.
I never had even for a milli, micro, nano second any desire for an academic job.
But in the US now, technical "jobs" are essentially a joke. So, major US employers have often been nailed due to lack of ability to change. So, 'globalization' nailed GE and Detroit, both of which at one time tried to do highly technical work. IBM and AT&T were nailed by changes in microelectronics. Of these four, in my career at times I interviewed at all of them and worked for two of them -- NOT a good situation.
Broadly, the chances that a person can, in their 20s, get a technical 'job' in a company and then hold that job until retirement are next to zilch.
So, somewhere between the 20s and retirement, the technical person will be out of work. Then they can send a few thousand resume copies, get help from all their friends, etc. and still be out of work.
They will discover the crucial importance of geographical barrier to entry and conclude that an electrician's license is a MUCH better foundation for a good career than a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. The Ph.D. of 35 who gets fired from a technical job in some big company can conclude that, literally, in his neighborhood, while he still had his house, the guy cutting grass who started 15 years earlier and now with, maybe 10 employees actually has a much better career. E.g., the grass guy has customers from the broad economy of people who have grass; the grass will keep growing; grass mowing just cannot be 'outsourced' and has a terrific geographic barrier to entry; do well in a radius of 50 miles and can do well. Just mowing grass. Shrubbery, etc.? Maybe still better. Landscape architecture? Maybe still better. Also own a nursery and be 'vertically integrated'? Maybe still better.
I mowed grass, etc. as a teenager and had more happy customers than I could serve. I actually had an opportunity, basically better than a Ph.D., but didn't know enough about the economy to see it. I was also good at repairing cars, e.g., clutches, radiators. That was another good opportunity I didn't appreciate.
Net, in the US, a technical 'job' is a fool's errand, and anyone needs something MUCH better.
Broadly there are good examples of what to do on Main Street in each village, town, and city all across the US.
So, net, one of the main, good career directions is just to be a sole proprietor. So, can be an electrician, plumber, landscape architect or run a driveway paving company, a roofing company, a dry cleaning service, a few pizza carryout places, etc. Just look on Main Street.
Basically trying to have a career from a 'job' just sucks and is usually less good than just being a Main Street sole proprietor. Being a successful Main Street sole proprietor is not always easy, it's just that the odds are that it's a much better direction than being a technical 'employee'.
Note: The employee just can essentially never have a better job than the one provided by their supervisor. Unless the supervisor is doing fantastically well, the employee is on a long walk on a short pier. E.g., look at a TV biography (go to Clicker and follow biographies) of Carnegie: Early on he was an assistant to a big shot in the Pennsylvania Railroad when rails were likely having better growth than the Internet now. So, he had a good start. He accumulated some cash, made an investment in a competitor of the Pullman railroad sleeping car company, did well enough to buy a long yacht, and then just kept making investments, especially in steel. He finally sold the steel to Morgan who took it public and cleaned up big time. The key was for a while he had a really GOOD 'job', but these are rare.
Assuming want to be a sole proprietor, besides a geographical barrier to entry, so common on Main Street, with a Ph.D. and some targeted research can also get an advantage and a technological (intellectual property, 'secret sauce') barrier to entry. So, do that. So, such applied math research "Isn't just for peer-reviewed journals anymore.".
So, start a Web 2.0 company, derive some applied math, use it as the crucial, core, intellectual property 'secret sauce' to give results a few hundred million people will like a lot and can't get elsewhere, use info on the users to do ad targeting, and get revenue.
Notice the Canadian romantic matchmaking Web 2.0 company Plenty of Fish: One guy, two old Dell servers, ads just via Google, and $10 million a year in revenue. Nice sole proprietorship, maybe worth $1 billion. Nice pay for writing a little routine software.
An advantage is, while some pizza guy is tossing these flexible disks in the air one at a time, a Web 2.0 guy can have some $500 servers sitting there pumping out dozens of Web pages and ads per second.
Uh,
3600 * 24 * 365 = 31,536,000
A few dozen ads per second from each of a dozen or so servers, with a little targeting, and multiply it out.
If the Web site is really popular, then get a nice house, car, yacht, and IRA brokerage account in a big hurry. Else, use the same Web site and software 'skills' to do another Web 2.0 site.
Here the Ph.D. can be crucial, a huge advantage.
But, net, in the US now, a technical 'job' is a really dumb career direction. Instead, it is just CRUCIAL to OWN the enterprise that are going to count on to keep paying the bills for several decades.
Employers: You're screwed; no one with any good sense will work for you without one heck of a salary, golden parachute, or founder's stock.
Technical guy: Learn programming, data base, system and network management and administration, Web site development, etc. and go for it.
From all I can see, for likely all the rest of this century, the opportunity is from (1) processors with many cores for less than $200 per processor, (2) optical fibers for 1 Gbps or so to/from each IP address, (3) from (1) and (2), wide, deep, rapidly flowing oceans of data, (4) software to process that data and deliver valuable results, and (5) some original math to make the processing more powerful. So, it's 'automation', third millennium style.
Automate what? As much as possible of all the work there is to be done. Why? Because we already know what people want in the famous one word answer, "More". So, use (1)-(5) to deliver more for less cost -- that's called 'productivity' and the key to economic progress.
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My experience is almost exactly the opposite. Most programmers care little to nothing about any sort of CS or theory. I've met successful programmers with years of experience who'd never even heard of even the simplest CS concepts like linked lists. How their language of choice actually works below the surface is a complete black box to them, and they're quite happy to keep it that way. If you meet a programmer who c…
I think what you're saying can easily be extrapolated to any vocation... There are people who are passionate about what they do, and then there vastly more people who are doing it simply because it's a job.