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

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

#51

Post by crucifiction » Sun, Apr 07, 2013, 6:14 AM UTC

tensor wrote: post #37

modarts wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, more power to them. They have the resources to train them up to a level where they'll be productive.

Or perhaps this thread is full of obscene generalizations that are untrue. Hell, it even started off on the wrong foot by invoking "real world". All that term means is that you think your work is somehow relevant while the work of others, in this case PhDs, is not relevant. Parts of this community have a real problem with ego and unsubstantiated generalizations.

No, real world = in production for potentially a long time, iterated with customer feedback. phd/ms work = functional hacks that maybe a professor or the student ever looks at/codes against and that are eventually thrown away.

except in very rare circumstances

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

#52

Post by jonemo » Sun, Apr 07, 2013, 7:18 AM UTC

crucifiction wrote: post #50

jonemo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the process of finishing up a PhD (Robotics, Cornell) and spent some time looking for jobs outside academia. What you write sounds very familiar because I heard it almost everywhere I looked. There seems to be a widespread misconception that graduate school consists of people focusing on one (usually obscure) topic without ever doing anything that "normal people" would do in a "normal job". Here's how grad sc…

you know what I didn't see in your reply? All of the large scale coding projects you implemented and put into production for a while. The big problem is that PhD/MS in CS is just an extension of BS, except you now have 4+ more years of bad coding practice under your belt. From my experience, coming out of school people need to relearn how to code in the real world. It is no more assignments you get functional, or in…

I was writing about grad school. Talking about my hobby projects that have been "in production for a while" would have been out of context. We can talk about those elsewhere if you want. Also note that this was about Mechanical Engineering. We Mechanical Engineers are indeed not very strong at writing "large scale" enterprise level software, even after years of industry experience. The only CS PhD graduate so far from our lab wrote [1] and this seems to have been not too bad in terms of quality because it had thousands of happy users and is now a successful commercial product.

The point of my comment was that you, and many others here and elsewhere, seem to assume that completing a PhD requires very specialized work only, which is wrong in my experience. I did not make any comment about whether PhD graduates have the skills that match the requirements of the positions that you are trying to fill.

Your focus is exclusively on coding habits and you do not seem to assign any value on other skills. It appears to me that you are seeking highly specialized people whose only expertise is the production of high quality code. In that context it seems rather amusing that you are suggesting that others are too specialized to be useful. Maybe PhD graduates are in fact too generalist to be a good match for your positions?

[1] http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/eureqa

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

#53

Post by Create » Sun, Apr 07, 2013, 9:35 AM UTC

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

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

#54

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sun, Apr 07, 2013, 10:43 AM UTC

marianne_navada wrote: post #49

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure you aren't just procrastinating? I'm joking, it sounds like you are doing the right thing.

Hehehehe, this is what my advisor thinks :) But honestly, right now, it just feels so good to reject the idea that a doctorate is everything. I've been in school for 12 years!

I was in school for 13 years (5+8). Procrastination is a common grad student problem.

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

#55

Post by ericd » Sun, Apr 07, 2013, 12:31 PM UTC

jonemo wrote: post #44

ericd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the motivation there at all - shouldn't the US be trying to hold on to the most educated foreigners as much as possible?

I used to ask that question and have been told that the US greatly benefits from having US-educated people in positions of power around the world. I don't know if this is true, but what is true that a surprising number of heads of states of countries that are considered political allies of the US have degrees from US universities. I first noticed this trend when reading about Pacific island nations.

I suppose, but the number of people leaving the country that that requires is fairly small, unless you're talking about spreading a cultural hegemony. I think it's likely just irrational.

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

#56

Post by larsberg » Sun, Apr 07, 2013, 12:37 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #39

larsberg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is also pretty achievable. For example, if you get a Ph.D. studying how to implement compilers and virtual machines, you basically have your choice of which place that implements compiler or VMs to work at (source: I am about to defend my Ph.D. in implementing compilers and VMs).

But how many places are there that do that? You have google, Microsoft, maybe intel, a few companies in the valley. PhDs are very specialized, and so they really can be at the mercy of their hot skill. And even google...might tell you to go work on ads with your hot VM/compiler skills. Disclosure: I'm a PL PhD who got out of the vm/compiler area to focus on PL design, which is even more esoteric.

I don't know about google - all the PL people I know who went to google no longer work on PL stuff, though I don't know if that's because of working at offices where PL work is not supported rather than a lack of company-wide freedom.

From conversations with hiring managers at each, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, NVidia, and Adobe all have far more positions than they can fill for people with PhD-level VM/compiler writing skills. Heck, we can't turn out experienced _undergrads_ fast enough for their tastes. I assume there would also be stuff in embedded systems, particularly FPGA compiler-related, though I don't personally know hiring managers at the big firms in that area.

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

#57

Post by minimize_me » Sun, Apr 07, 2013, 1:16 PM UTC

jarek wrote: post #12

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...

Well, I meant the software engineer job market...

I don't think mechanical engineers get any perks anyway.

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

#58

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sun, Apr 07, 2013, 2:28 PM UTC

larsberg wrote: post #56

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how many places are there that do that? You have google, Microsoft, maybe intel, a few companies in the valley. PhDs are very specialized, and so they really can be at the mercy of their hot skill. And even google...might tell you to go work on ads with your hot VM/compiler skills. Disclosure: I'm a PL PhD who got out of the vm/compiler area to focus on PL design, which is even more esoteric.

I don't know about google - all the PL people I know who went to google no longer work on PL stuff, though I don't know if that's because of working at offices where PL work is not supported rather than a lack of company-wide freedom. From conversations with hiring managers at each, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, NVidia, and Adobe all have far more positions than they can fill for people with PhD-level VM/compiler writing…

Google has found PL PhDs very versatile I guess. Many of their top people are in PL, so it could also just be a top down hiring bias.

I'd be weary taking just any job in VM/compilers, much of it is quite tedious and boring for a PhD. Intel used to have compiler groups filled with PhDs, Sun also. Them there are smaller companies like coverity.

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

#59

Post by jarek » Sun, Apr 07, 2013, 6:01 PM UTC

minimize_me wrote: post #57

jarek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, I meant the software engineer job market... I don't think mechanical engineers get any perks anyway.

> I don't think mechanical engineers get any perks anyway.

Not unless you consider going home at 5 pm a perk.

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

#60

Post by tensor » Tue, Apr 09, 2013, 8:24 AM UTC

crucifiction wrote: post #50

jonemo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the process of finishing up a PhD (Robotics, Cornell) and spent some time looking for jobs outside academia. What you write sounds very familiar because I heard it almost everywhere I looked. There seems to be a widespread misconception that graduate school consists of people focusing on one (usually obscure) topic without ever doing anything that "normal people" would do in a "normal job". Here's how grad sc…

you know what I didn't see in your reply? All of the large scale coding projects you implemented and put into production for a while. The big problem is that PhD/MS in CS is just an extension of BS, except you now have 4+ more years of bad coding practice under your belt. From my experience, coming out of school people need to relearn how to code in the real world. It is no more assignments you get functional, or in…

And you are in the vast minority in paying PhD/MS candidates the same as BS grads. I can say with confidence that you've hired the absolute worst most desperate PhD/MS candidates. This isn't something I'm making up, it's widely available salary statistics which as a "hiring manager" you should be intimately familiar with.

Academics work on real world problems, a great many solutions which you use daily. They care about accuracy, otherwise the science is bad. The only thing they don't design for, and this is because of the nature of research, not bad practice, is sustainable code that you can build on. Why try to build a great design when your requirements can change weekly? All you will do is slow down your research work and end up with a jumbled mess.

The right thing to do when exploring is write quick correct code with little thought to sustainable design. If you find an idea that works, rewrite it into something you can maintain.

All you've demonstrated here is your ignorance both of your own domain as well as that of others. You don't understand what PhD/MS grads are going for, are unable to hire good ones, and don't understand what it takes to research new ideas. That latter point probably means that your company is not at all innovative.