Tell HN: Doing a PhD is good
The real good point of having a PhD is not in the title you get, it is in the network you can build and the problems you try to solve. By definition, most of the scientific PhD are to solve industrial problems. This means, you have a complex problem and customers, directly, right now, during your studies.
If you are smart, you can already have a portfolio of customers at the end of your PhD, you can have your product nearly ready and you will be able to charge your customers more in thousands of Dollars than in $9 per month.
Bonus point, the barrier to entry will be high for the competition and it is relatively easy to become an expert in your field.
So please, if you want to do a PhD, do it and do it wisely.
A short list to think about:
1. Get a supervisor known to give his students a lot of freedom. 2. Do your PhD in a country where you get a good pay (most of the EU countries pay well for a PhD). 3. Go in a university with a good budget for travel to conferences. 4. Find labs with intensive industrial collaboration.
63 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadPhD vs non-PhD does not determine whether you charge $1000/mo or $9/mo. It's what you actually build with your talent.
A PhD building a mobile service is still limited by the economics everybody else faces.
If you're build mobile services like mobile payment platforms, video games, ecommerce solutions etc., a PhD isn't going to get you more money from a customer.
(I clearly did things backwards, because the opposite is true of faculty pay.)
Do schools in Scandinavia and the Netherlands even care if your only language is English?
Some universities will top up a federal/provincial scholarship (Waterloo tops up by $10,000), and teaching assistantships are available as well. However, part-time work hours (TA or otherwise) are usually limited by the terms of the scholarship/assitantship, so there is a limit to how much a student can reasonably earn while doing a degree (NSERC limits to 10 hours worked/week, the expected hours for a TA).
Tuition is paid out of the student's stipend amount, though it's often quite a bit less than undergraduate tuition in CS and similar programs. My fee bill dropped in half when I finished my BASc and started an MASc.
¹ There are a few dedicated grad schools at some institutions. However, these are the exception, not the norm.
Try comparing programmers at ages 20 vs 30.
one source amongst many, note the # of achievements peaks around 40 not 20
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
". In some cases (e.g., bisection), performance differences between the older participants and students nearly 50 years younger used in other studies were negligible."
and so on and so forth, this is by no means a well solved problem that says, young people are smarter derp
See:http://www18.homepage.villanova.edu/diego.fernandezduque/Tea...
Seriously, if you need a kick in the ass to get moving every now and then (like me), then google Timothy Salthouse's research on cognitive aging. It's a depressing reminder that time waits for no one.
I would say that now, at 31, I may not be able to think as fast as when I was 20, but I also don't need to, because my thought processes converge on useful/correct solutions much faster.
I may not be able to quickly analytically evaluate five different solutions like I used to, but I don't need to, because I know from wisdom/experience what the best solution is.
You reach your peak in your 20s sometime but you don't really have any serious decline until much later.
There basically was no point.
Well, I'm just a BSc and only 28, but I can certainly say that I'm a better programmer now than I have been at 20. I would account the same to any programmer I have known over the years.
I'm not implying there are no good 20yo programmers. I'm saying if they keep studying, they will be better when they reach 30.
Plus, HN just recently featured an article stating the human brain does not deteriorate at all if you keep using it.
Most people, when given the choice between "fun" and "fun and money", will take the fun and money. After all, I know very few people who will turn down a chance at free money.
Look at it like professional athletes. Many guys just like to play basketball. But, I'm going to bet guys who were close to playing in the NBA and just didn't make it, are probably at least kinda depressed about it, whether or not they still like playing pickup games.
I'm sure occasionally some of them wondered about what it would've been like to found Intel or AMD or Apple, but for the most part they seem to have been happy to have a job where the business side was someone else's job, and they got paid to just work on interesting technical problems all day. I don't get the feeling that someone like Ken Thompson ever was particularly regretful that he spent his career at Bell Labs rather than founding a startup, because he was doing exactly what he wanted to do.
Perhaps the technical freedom some of those research labs offered is part of it? I can imagine there being more regret if you missed money-making opportunities and didn't have a great deal of freedom to choose your own technical problems.
Or, say, Ritchie & Thompson: famously young, but they didn't do anything of note younger than 25, and their big burst of output was around age 30 (when they wrote the first "real" version of Unix in C).
The bulk of the jobs out there are neither exciting nor challenging after the first hump and most people out there get disillusioned after they realize the Pareto principle seems universal when applied to themselves since they become so efficient now that they can generally do the most worthwile things at their jobs in 20% of the time.
The trick is to start applying that big brain of yours to other things rather than the problems that your pointy-haired boss tells you to. Like learning a new skill, or picking up a new hobby to keep your brain going.
However, there are many other advantages that come with years of experience and learning that I suggest would outweigh such deterioration.
Startup success may perhaps correlate inversely with age increase from 20 to 30 (although I doubt it), but I would be surprised if "brain deterioration" was the cause.
I often compare programmers. I haven't seen the evidence you see.
As a little tips if you're interested in taking a PhD in Norway: They discuss whether to halve the amount of PhD-positions and double the pay or not. If this happens, it will be very reasonable to take a PhD here. If this does not happen, I would not recommend taking a PhD "for the money", because prices here are skyhigh.
If you find being an undergrad painful and you're bored to tears, and you're only doing it is because your parents and peers tell you you'll end up as a janitor without that piece of paper, and you're literally itching to get into the 'real world', drop the fuck out and work on that startup.
If you're fascinated with Viking Poetry, and it's all you can think about, and people are telling you what a waste of money that Viking Poetry PhD is, tell them to fuck off and get that PhD anyway.
If you wanna be an actor, move to NY or LA, get a job as a waiter, and bust your fucking ass working on your craft. Don't stay at home and get that HR degree from University of Phoenix.
Both this post and the "X isn't worth it in the long run" articles it's responding to make the same mistakes. Assuming everyone has the same path in life. I think ultimately, deep down, all the posters want you to chase YOUR dream. But instead they take their dreams or their choices and find evidence prove to themselves that it's the right choice. And it probably is the right choice for them. It may or may not be the right choice for you.
As long as you're making the choices because that's what you really want, and not out of fear, they're the right choices. So yeah, if the only reason you didn't go to college was because your high-school sweetheart was a year younger, you made the wrong choice.
Why am I a software professional? Not because it pays well, but that sure helps. It's because I used to sit mesmerized in front of a computer typing in code from magazines, amazed that they followed my commands. It's because even before I had a computer to type the code into, I used to read the same code listings in the books, fascinated by them, even though I couldn't even run them. I didn't read the Economist's list of hot-fucking-jobs-for-the-next-ten-years and pick the top item on the list.
> typing in code from magazines and books, amazed that they followed my commands.
Amen.
P.S. Don't forget books.
Yes. But also make it a point to listen to people who've been there (which is exactly how I see these "Tell HN" and the "X isn't worth it in the long run" posts). Doing what makes you happy might make you happy in the short term. It might not necessarily be the best choice in the long run.
I'd hate to to think that someone considering a PhD program read yesterday's 'not worth it' article, but didn't get online over the weekend, missing the 'yes it is' article, and made his decision accordingly. I think we all agree that would be absurd, possibly even insane.
That's why I always feel like these articles and their upvotes are more about hn'ers trying to justify or rationalize their choices, than trying to help someone else out.
I just wanted people not to forget about the good sides of a longer education. Nothing more.
The Economist is (despite having offended lots of people here with its overview of the current start-up scene last week) much more about utility maximization than about money... Actually, why not pick up the winter special issue? - I'm guessing you'll find it much more thought-provoking than you currently imagine.
[ Trust me - I did a PhD for love, not money. But it's working out pretty well, AFAICT ]
I don't have any first-hand knowledge of this, maybe it is just the opinion of the successful and/or lucky people who had a good time and wrote about it, I would love for people to confirm or deny this perception. But the contrast with people I know who are/were doing their PhDs today is night and day.
"Starving grad student" is an accurate stereotype. I really can't see myself spending 5 years earning barely $30k a year, busting my ass TAing undergrads, dealing with publishing deadlines and BS from the supervisor and university (you'd be surprised at the amount of people who end up with asshole supervisors!), practically begging for grants. I don't know any PhD candidates who regularly do consulting, or anyone who has a comfortable annual income. And the stress is crazy. I don't know why anyone would do this to themselves.
To add insult to injury, I know I'm making the same or more money than many people my age (or a year or two older, I'm 25) straight out of CS PhD programs.
If I want to hack on interesting R&D projects, I can do that as Free Software in my spare time (which I do). The contrast is I have actual users instead of papers to submit. If I had to write an interesting system for a dissertation, I'm practically guaranteed that no one will use it because everyone knows that software that comes out of academia is shit.
So, what's the point?
You started your post with a coherent argument, but the ending was completely WTF material.
I don't want to beg Sun for grant money to develop new ways to make Java less shitty (you would be amazed at the number of papers that have been written about this topic), since they don't want to invest the money in setting up a real R&D lab with real-world salaries.
I'm not interested in type theory, complexity, encryption, or formal verification. Are there any other areas of CS research where I can get away with not writing any software as a grad student?
The fact that "99.9999% of the time" is spent doing other things is the problem. If you're doing applied math like type theory and make an advancement, that's research. If you're doing anything else, that's the Development part of R&D.
Computer science doesn't exist in a vacuum. Unlike math, you can't come up with some new algorithm without first having a problem that that algorithm is intended to solve (again, this doesn't apply to complexity-related research because that is applied math).
So we can't claim CS arises a priori (unless it's just applied math like type theory), so then you have to claim that what your CS research is doing is empirical. Good luck with that. Because, you know, Java is a naturally occurring system.
Let's take two concrete examples of projects I hack on:
http://common-lisp.net/project/eager-future/
http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/
Both of these topics (using futures for parallelism, and language X to JavaScript compilation) have had and continue to have a lot of academic research devoted to them.
These two systems I contribute to happen to have interesting and original properties that I've arrived at in a process that can only be described as hacking.
I'm convinced that I never would have been able to have these hacking breakthroughs without the freedom and time to reflect that I have outside of grad school.
It doesn't matter how supportive your advisor is, there is still the question of grants and publishing deadlines. And I know a thing or two about working the university system to create a supportive environment for myself - as a math undergrad, I had my own cubicle in and run of the AI lab, had support from a number of CS professors, one of whom had a spot reserved in the CS MSc program for me (I obviously didn't go). I spent a lot of time around grad students at the AI and other CS labs, so I got to know what grad student life looked like.
But aside from all that, the best thing about working on these systems on my own has been the fact that people actually use them. The feedback has been invaluable for giving me new ideas and inspiring the innovative hacks.
It's not a problem, at all. Whether you're developing new algorithms, analyzing them, running simulations, studying and understanding the results, all that _is_ research. I think you're being too narrow in your definitions.
Doing a PhD is neither good nor bad. There is just no right choice for everybody. Some people will rather pursue one, some others will rather avoid higher education and go for other endeavors. It is just an individual decision which will turn out good for some and bad for others.
Personally, I didn't see the point for one and decided to graduate just with an MSc, but I have many friends with PhDs and in hindsight they are fully satisfied with their decisions.
1. I got a supervisor who gave her students a lot of freedom but it worked entirely the wrong way.
2. The UK doesn't pay well.
3. I didn't get any money for conference travel as my PhD stipend was a grant from my college.
4. Yeah, this is the fun one - you're doing a highly research focused degree and finding somewhere that actually has a foot in the real world, in the exact area you want to study and build a startup around, is difficult. But if you can pull it off, I'm sure it could work.
I got a lot of credit for starting a startup around my PhD topic - but I was forced to do so because I simply couldn't continue working on this stuff in academia any more, as it was too applied for my university.
Abshir