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A Survival Guide to a PhD

karpathy.github.io

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Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#71

Post by laxatives »

stared wrote: post #32

Well, I went from academia (after finishing my PhD) to industry, to get more Freedom, Ownership, Personal growth, Status and Expertise. Here is a blog post on my transition from theoretical physics to data science (and how it made my life much better): http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html I understand that Andriej Karpathy (my favourite author/lecturer in Deep Learning, by a large margin) had a wonderfu…

Karpathy has the benefit of being one of the best known bloggers/teachers in the most popular graduate-level course in possibly the most financially successful subfields ever while graduating at the peak of industry spending (so far). He's almost certainly the student described in http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/technology/the-race-is-on-... His experiences and successes are not generalizable.

But he's probably my favorite blogger too and its at the very least interesting to hear his take on his experiences.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#72

Post by eatbitseveryday »

morgante wrote: post #68
chronic102 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate. False. Do you even know how many people apply online to Uber, Slack, Facebook, and Google? More than the entire population of flagship state universities. > > you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or with a higher startin…

> False. Do you even know how many people apply online to Uber, Slack, Facebook, and Google? More than the entire population of flagship state universities. I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing. That's precisely my point: Google, for example, gets tens of thousands of applications. Their acceptance rate is incredibly low. > The results come from products you did not solely produce. Sure, but I don't see how…

>> False. Do you even know how many people apply online to Uber, Slack, Facebook, and Google? More than the entire population of flagship state universities.

> I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing. That's precisely my point: Google, for example, gets tens of thousands of applications. Their acceptance rate is incredibly low.

I spoke with an engineer (a PhD) and a recruiter at a recent USENIX conference; they stated Google gets much more than tens of thousands of applications (a factor of ten more than what you stated). I'm not sure if they meant applica_tions_ or unique applica_nts_.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#73

Post by eatbitseveryday »

morgante wrote: post #51

These reasons for getting a PhD seem extremely one-sided and, frankly, inaccurate. > Exclusivity. There are very few people who make it to the top PhD programs. Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate. > you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or with a higher start…

>> you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or with a higher starting salary

> This is 100% false. Many many people have found a PhD to be a handicap when it comes to getting a job, particularly in software engineering. A large number of employers have anti-PhD biases which will work against you.

I was wondering if you could comment on this? Personal experience? I may be naive for not believing this in the first place; why would there be disdain expressed towards PhD applicants at a company? Is it a business perspective ("PhDs are too expensive"), technical ("they are too specialized, cannot practically implement solutions we expect of a new hire"), social ("I don't understand academia and couldn't achieve that high"), or something else?

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#74

Post by jccalhoun »

I got my phd in the humanities. After following academic and grad school subreddits for the last years I could almost be convinced that grad school in the sciences is a pyramid scheme.

So much of the crap that I see people complaining about in the sciences simply doesn't occur in the humanities. Some of it I wish would (co-authorship would be a good way for those of us in the humanities to learn how to write an article for publication) but I am glad I didn't have to deal with a lot of the lab and advisor drama that I have seen (or arguing if someone should be fifth author or sixth...).

Of course I was making slightly more than half my peers in the sciences at the same university were making and they have a lot more career prospects than I do so maybe it is worth it....

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#75

Post by morgante »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #73
morgante wrote: post #51

These reasons for getting a PhD seem extremely one-sided and, frankly, inaccurate. > Exclusivity. There are very few people who make it to the top PhD programs. Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate. > you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or with a higher start…

>> you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or with a higher starting salary > This is 100% false. Many many people have found a PhD to be a handicap when it comes to getting a job, particularly in software engineering. A large number of employers have anti-PhD biases which will work against you. I was wonderi…

> I was wondering if you could comment on this? Personal experience?

I do not have a PhD. My experience is based on personal experience with hiring people, speaking to friends and other hiring managers, and anecdotes from HN.

In general, the reasons are (for better or worse):

1. PhDs aren't very good programmers or don't follow software engineering best practices.

2. PhDs want to do "research" and will get bored with the basic software production required for 90% of industry jobs.

3. PhDs expect to be paid/respected at a higher level of seniority, even though skill-wise they'e often barely above a recent BA graduate.

I don't know how valid all of these are, but in general I would personally always choose someone with 5 years of industry work experience over someone with a PhD for a software job.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#76

Post by Kephael »

morgante wrote: post #68
chronic102 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate. False. Do you even know how many people apply online to Uber, Slack, Facebook, and Google? More than the entire population of flagship state universities. > > you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or with a higher startin…

> False. Do you even know how many people apply online to Uber, Slack, Facebook, and Google? More than the entire population of flagship state universities. I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing. That's precisely my point: Google, for example, gets tens of thousands of applications. Their acceptance rate is incredibly low. > The results come from products you did not solely produce. Sure, but I don't see how…

I'm pretty sure the acceptance rate for those applying for jobs at retailers such as Best Buy are lower than the admission rates of many top graduate programs so the acceptance rate only tells part of the story. The barrier to even apply for these graduate programs is significantly higher and very self selecting.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#77

Post by iamtrask »

many people seem to discount this thread because "Karpathy is one of the most successful PhD students in his field"

perhaps instead of discounting his experience... it would be better to take his advice

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#78

Post by argonaut »

hiq wrote: post #39

> You’ll sit exhausted and alone in the lab on a beautiful, sunny Saturday scrolling through Facebook pictures of your friends having fun on exotic trips, paid for by their 5-10x larger salaries. You get around USD 70k per year in Switzerland for a Computer Science PhD in Switzerland (at ETHZ or EPFL). You could get up to five times this amount working in the industry, but usually not much more than that, especially…

I think the larger point is that you won't have time to take those vacations. That being said, a fresh grad that can make it into a top PhD can probably pull 200k+ in Silicon Valley.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#79

Post by aab0 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #58
aab0 wrote: post #25

All valid advice, but god is some of it depressing. Papers can be evaluated by flipping through and looking for pretty graphs and equations. Incremental, replication, or comparison work is discouraged. Never include the dead ends or what didn't work. Get into only the elite colleges and betwork at conferences as much as possible - it's not what you know but who you know. Hype up and make your paper as sexy and short…

> Good teaching, blogging, and sharing software probably hurts you. Karpathy is pretty famous for his blogging and open software. His code and blog post about recurrent neural networks practically got him a language model named after him. He also recommend you to release code in this article, so I'm not really sure what you are getting at.

> Karpathy is pretty famous for his blogging and open software.

Yes, he's famous for that, but that didn't earn him his PhD nor would it have gotten him tenure. As he remarks about his teaching of his course, him doing a good job actively worked against him because... it's not writing a sexy new paper or networking.

> He also recommend you to release code in this article, so I'm not really sure what you are getting at.

Releasing code isn't the same thing as creating polished end-user applicable stuff on the level of char-rnn. In ML, you're increasingly expected to at least chuck over the wall a barebones implementation to demonstrate it works at all, but there is no expectation that it will be generalized, well-written, or polished, or maintained, and typically they are not. (Most ML releases I've looked at are kind of horrifying from a software engineering perspective. Just thinking about improved-gan makes me shudder.)

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#80

Post by euske »

throwawaymsft wrote: post #3
michaelvoz wrote: post #2

"I’ll assume that the second option you are considering is joining a medium-large company (which is likely most common). Ask yourself if you find the following properties appealing: ..." Why is every conversation about PHDs always cast in the light of as-opposed-to-working-for-the-man? I don't see discussions ever bring up the plethora of other life courses one can take. It is though the author sees a very clear bina…

"Properties you find appealing..." * Freedom * Ownership * Personal freedom ... * Getting into a PhD program: references, references, references * Student adviser relationship * Pre-vs-post tenure * Impressing an adviser * (Topic) Plays to your adviser’s interests and strengths Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to. Reading this, I'm so thankful I didn…

> casting a float into a bool

Haha, a geeky yet very apt expression.

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