what's plaguing phd programs is the lack of value for attaining a phd. the labor is cheap because it isn't valuable. the hours are endless because the output is low. victim mentality infects everything
Science is the quintessential example of high-value work with poor value-capture characteristics, and is often used in econ classes as an example of where the "captured value = value" approximation breaks down.
it's a huge waste of life time, family life and money; but it can be fun if you are a no-life, or a Billy no-mates
on the other side, you see the world, you travel payed by the taxpayers and you meet curious people. and, of course, it might be intellectually fulfilling.
The simple answer is they have low market value and aren’t a good investment for anyone - the student or the nation. Yes we need some researchers but not as many as we train.
They have a high market value outside of academia. Inside academia though they are all underpaid and overworked, and the modern version of “tenure” might carry prestige but it doesn’t carry the privilege it once did.
I think it is valuable to the nation, some subjects are arguably more or less valuable, but its about talent at a macro level. If a nation doesn't invest in talent through PhD funding, talented people can and do go elsewhere, work in a diferent economy, contribute to a different society.
Obviously, that's only one avenue for talent. Some talented people never do a PhD, they may create start-ups etc instead. But its about fostering an ecosystem to develop and retain talent.
I think there is some inherent value to PhDs in general. Even the ones commonly looked down upon as frivolous here, even the ones with little to no economic benefit.
The value is that obtaining a PhD involves deep research into something beyond what anyone else has done. Even if it's a topic that you don't think is important, even if it's a topic that no one thinks is important, I think there is still value to exploring that boundary of what we know and testing the limits of our understanding.
So many people spend their lives consuming rather than creating, doing the same things over and over again every day, maybe producing lots of economic value but not doing anything novel or interesting to anyone. A PhD forces you to do something different.
Of course you can do novel things and do deep research without doing a PhD, a PhD is just a certificate to prove you did it. I value the process equally regardless of the result of the research or the setting it's done in. And I don't discredit the value of work that isn't novel either - there's also a lot of value to the routines that make the world function day to day. I just think that in a world where most of us will never get a chance to spend years becoming a true expert on something obscure and novel, that encouraging more people to take that opportunity and explore that niche is worthwhile.
If you are high skill enough to do a PhD in anything meaningful, why enter into an open-ended low-paid work contract with a professor with no definite end-date on when the PhD is granted? An american has even less incentive, as the reward of a work permit is not on the other side.
Only reason should be that you want to be a professor, research can be done in private companies without this license. 95% of a PhD is worth as much as 0%.
There are very few of such roles. Of course PhD is often an advantage when it comes to job application and promotion, but outside very specific roles (think about OpenAI looking for a PhD in LLMs, or Intel looking for a PhD in certain engineering fields), it's more often a nice-to-have.
maybe in CS, but if you have a PhD in a STEM field, you're not going to be looking at a wasteland in private industry for jobs that demand a PhD. Good luck getting a job running a big firm's private research lab without a PhD, and tens of thousands of companies demand that PhD. Chemistry PhD? what company doesn't need one of them, if not dozens. Materials science? yeah, you are going to be finding lots of companies that want their product development team run by someone holding a PhD at least. BioTech and Pharma aren't being run by people who just have a bachelor's, and there are over 10,000 private pharmaceutical research labs. Even your Wonder Bread has more than one food science PhD behind the scenes working on it. Any random big agribusiness alone is going to expect you have a PhD in crop science to conduct trials for pesticide development, and they're going to want a chemistry PhD to help develop the formulation, and an entomology PhD to investigate the effect their product has on insect biology, a soil science PhD to study the effect on soil, biochem PhD, biotech PhD, all sorts of engineering PhDs, probably some statistics/math PhDs...
Now, if your PhD is in the humanities, you're not looking at the same situation. It's almost bizarre they call the degree the same name, since a PhD in the humanities takes you on a completely different path. I don't think many companies are demanding a History or English or German literature PhD. Sometimes this can make you a competitive candidate for a job in a completely unrelated field, but those jobs have no need for a PhD, it's just something that makes you stand out when 100 overqualified people are applying for the same job. So will a candidate working in the Peace Corps. Or volunteering hundreds of hours a year. Those getting a history PhD are competing for the...what, 60? 90? jobs in the entire nation that require a history PhD, which is being a professor that gives other people history PhDs. So of course, you will only get such a job if you go to a top 10 school, and the chances of this are basically less than becoming a professional athlete. So the vast disparity between a humanities PhD which has no sustainable aspirational track, vs. a STEM PhD where you become a qualified candidate for both academia/the government which hires many PhDs, and industry, which also has a demand for PhD-trained candidates. Probably 3/4 of STEM PhDs don't work for a school or the government.
> why enter into an open-ended low-paid work contract with a professor with no definite end-date on when the PhD is granted?
This is less of a problem than you might imagine. While no school will guarantee to give you a degree regardless of your performance, it's pretty close. They don't offer the limited funded spots to anyone they don't think can make it.
The real compromises are that people go into their PhD thinking they're going to cure cancer and become a professor at Harvard, and come out of it having made a 5% improvement to a model for predicting the risk of one particular complication following treatment for one particular type of cancer, knowing that becoming a professor at Podunk College would take another decade of work. Or the decide to quit once they discover the reality of it.
The under-paid indefinite purgatory period is called the postdoc.
In my rather limited experience, private research was way more productive and enjoyable and I was able to do it and get things working without a PhD. In fact, during my short stay a iRobot I was quite surprised to find that none of the PhD's there could help me with what I was doing or provide guidance.
Later I worked with PhDs and PhD candidates in a university setting. What shocked me the most was the narrowness of their knowledge and their lack of consideration for practical matters.
I'd rather let the market judge my work than an academic committee.
Maybe a correction is needed. Academia has become so gamified. It's supposed to be about ideas, truth, beauty. Too many are in it for the prestige, which has ironically made it less prestigious.
I can't speak for other fields, but this does seem true of computer science. I worked in a university lab for a couple years and knew many PhD students, and most of them were most interested in leveraging the PhD to make more money in industry.
I think the issue, should that be an issue, is in industry setting unrealistic requirements for education. There certainly are some jobs where the work is true research and a PhD can be a good indication of experience in that, but a great many PhD-locked careers are not really so research oriented. Requiring a PhD to demonstrate expertise in something that makes up 10% of a job is excessive and creates this system where people do 4-5 year PhD programs just to check off a box for the resume filter.
Fantastic thought. Though I think economic signaling theory shows the bottoms-up motivator.
Certainly in the US, the GI Bill lead to a decreased value for high school diplomas for the median graduate. This doesn't mean it wasn't the right idea for the time, just that it's caused a lot of crowding out. I feel like the Elite Overproduction is a good post hoc descriptive theory but missing the why.
> Academia is not about truth or beauty and never was.
I feel this idea is tired--like a 1978 Ford Pinto banged up and running on worn out re-treads. Will it go somewhere? Maybe, but not too far, not comfortably, and unlikely to end up where you want it.
Academia started as medicine, math, theology, and philosophy, if memory serves, and has given us so much of the basic research that leads to the applied technologies we have today.
The incentive structures get weird, certainly, like resources on the Serengeti.
Academia is about whatever the academics want it to be.
Personally, I think it’s a system for “experiments”: projects that mostly produce negligible real-world impact, but occasionally lead to major advances (“breakthroughs”). Whereas industry focuses on projects that are likely to succeed, and industry research focuses on projects that are less likely but not as risky as academia permits.
In that respect, I agree there’s an issue with prestige. I think it’s largely because of “publish or perish”: academics aren’t risky because they have to publish ‘quality’ papers, and papers on rejected hypothesis aren’t published and/or considered ‘quality’; and those who still take risks, don’t end up as powerful or get as many students, as those who “play the game”. Some people also say it's because academics naturally have high egos, but I disagree, because if anything, a high ego would make someone more likely to take risks (and focus on "ideas, truth, beauty" which 'only a genius can understand', vs boring practical results that anyone can produce).
Ironically, industry has somewhat recently created breakthroughs via venture capitalists (like YC), who fund many risky projects expecting only a couple to succeed (because they also expect the returns from the couple successful projects to recoup the losses from all the failed ones). But nowadays, it seems even VCs are avoiding experiments, focusing mainly on AI (which is arguably an experiment, but even if so, a single one; "couple successes recoup many failures" doesn't work if most of the projects will all succeed or fail together).
I think the problematic current software development industry is the result of too many safe and short-term projects and not enough risky and long-term experiments, which isn't an uncommon view. But, I guess a more uncommon view, I think that means we need more academics.
I don't disagree with you really, although the reasons for that are complicated.
Everyone wants the benefits of research but no one wants to pay for it, and slowly over the last three or four decades administrations have pushed researchers into these Faustian bargains that have led to the system have today. A lot of what we have is a pyramid scheme, but that pyramid scheme exists in part because people somewhere along the legislator-funder-administrative chain decided that is what would be rewarded. Once it started and was encouraged it snowballed.
All of it is made worse by governments that don't seem to understand the problems or implications of their decisions. Anti-immigration laws (not talking about the US here actually necessarily) hurts enrollment, which has downstream effects even though that immigration is bringing in net income. Yes, indirect costs are gamified sometimes, and there should be some accountability system put in place with researcher protections (the original point of tenure), but no, that doesn't mean just cutting indirect costs down to some unsustainable level that doesn't reflect real costs.
Also to be fair there's a lot of this gamification and false prestige that happens all over the US and world economy, we just don't like to admit it. I think it's one of the defining problems of our time probably.
That Politics of Smell thesis is actually pretty great, I'm sorry you couldn't get past the title. Frankly, dragging Dr. Louks, who's already explained her thesis and how it was written after it blew up in certain online circles, tells me you didn't actually think that deeply on what she was trying to say. Probably means that the Architecture of Whiteness paper is worth a look, though, so thanks for the unintentional recommendation.
You're the one claiming no value - what about those theses makes you think they have no value?
What rebuttal to the works do you have?
Many seemingly useless theses turn out to be prescient and valuable decades or even centuries later. What evidence exists to suggest these won't have long term value?
The article cites a trend without providing any real facts or information for understanding the topic. I.E. which field are seeing growth and which are seeing contraction. It's a bunch of vague guesses at the cause like 'cost of living' without ever to find and present any facts that could validate whether such hypotheses are actually true.
Consider the most common phd is in education, we could easily see a decline in doctors of education and not realize that chemistry phds rose 4%. The effect of the change are very different in this scenario than 4% reduction in fundamental research.
Despite the typical tech-bro anti-intellectual comments on this thread. As the article states. It's the money. People need to be able to support themselves.
PhDs are important because they train specialists by giving them the time and space needed to develop that expertise (something not usually available at corporate gigs). The work you do during a PhD has value, much more value than the stipend is worth. Taxpayer dollars spent on these stipends have a huge ROI because they are investing in future expertise. These PhD students are trading their cheap labor for agency over their work. However, the deal has been stagnating and stipends are not keeping up with inflation. Stipends can be low, but they need to support the students living needs.
The job market is always a bit tougher on specialists, because of that focused expertise. However, an excess of PhDs is a net benefit for society. Most won't become professors, they will filter back into the workplace and bring cutting-edge knowledge either directly to their expertise in industrial settings, or laterally to new fields.
Is a glut of English and Comparative Literature PhDs really that big of a benefit? Those skills are not transferable to anything. I think it’s a crime the way liberal arts departments admit way more students than could ever hope to find a job in Academia. I say this as someone who loves literature and is sad to see these departments shrink. But it isn’t fair to the students to put them through so much pain when you know there is nothing for them at the end of the tunnel.
>According to data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), around 1,600 English and Literature PhDs are awarded annually in the United States. Total PhDs awarded annually in all categories : 57,862
It is a very small field that is being used as a straw-man for all PhDs. I don't know what benefit those 1,600 may produce, but I'd rather them have that expertise and use it for our country than have them leave the US for better opportunities elsewhere. Because they will leave.
The benefit is intangible and honestly if they didn't have the opportunity to pursue a PhD they wouldn't leave the country. They would do what the 99% of people like them who are unable to pursue a PhD in their chosen topic do, work another job and publish a smaller body of work in a less prestigious setting. The fact of the matter is that those are not the 1,600 people who have the ability to earn a PhD in English or Literature, it's the ones who's interests and personal profile afforded them the opportunity.
Now to be clear, I'm not saying that this work is unimportant. Intangible benefits are (despite the name) very real and do benefit the nation. It's just a much more complicated than engineering PhDs making stronger forms of concrete or whatever.
The glut is primarily a function of the fact that universities have decided that it's fine to have most of their courses taught by poorly-paid adjuncts. That is, actually, a bad thing. If we returned to having tenure-track faculty do a substantial majority of teaching, most people who get humanities degrees would get jobs in the end.
In the early 2000s those liberal arts departments went as far as Southeast Asia to recruit international students who paid a lot more than domestic students, especially at the time. One of their outreach programs in Myanmar is called the Pre-Collegiate Program, whose website claims to promote critical reasoning among young people.
Except I actually spoke to several of them who said that they were heavily groomed into joining the liberal arts departments. Not one of them went into engineering or the sciences. One student said during the program she was told she "must" choose the liberal arts. Another described how he was sweet talked by a philosophy professor into becoming a philosophy major, despite having followed a science-based curriculum in high school and little-to-no education in the arts (back then they had to specialize in either but not both in high school).
So when you said "crime" I thought "funny you should say that". It might not be criminal but there was definitely some creepy stuff going on.
Not quite sure what you're talking about. The majority of PhDs awarded in the US were science and engineering (S&E) degrees. The number of non S&E PhDs has held steady since about 1973 [1].
It's also never been a 1:1 ratio of PhD recipients ending up in academia. I will agree that many universities overinflate job prospects post-graduation, but students should also be doing their own market research before entering into such a long process.
Academia doesn't have a monopoly on intellectualism, and in fact "tech bros" tend to emphasize the reason and rationalism that typically defines intellectualism.
Credit Suisse here in Switzerland used to only hire PhDs for programming positions. It didn’t matter what the PhD was in - they’d train you how to program.
Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.
> Credit Suisse here in Switzerland used to only hire PhDs for programming positions. It didn’t matter what the PhD was in - they’d train you how to program.
> Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.
So you're saying that was a sound strategy on their part
> they just spent a period of about 10 years making sure they were involved in every major financial scandal due to poor judgment.
Hard to imagine any relationship between that outcome and a policy of exclusively hiring a demographic that's notorious for having high intellectual skills but low life experience. Wait, no, not hard. Easy.
From my experience, 40 years ago PhD used to be hard to do and meant that the person who had it was smart.
These days the only thing it indicates is that the person spent many years at university.
As is typical on HN, most comments are about how PhDs are of little value or how academia is not what it once was, whereas the article is about how the challenges of getting a degree (rising living costs, slumping stipends) are causing fewer enrollments.
> the article is about how the challenges of getting a degree (rising living costs, slumping stipends) are causing fewer enrollments.
Also, as far as I know, this dynamic was true at least 20 years ago, when I graduated. You either did a hard science PhD and hoped to get in at a top finance/pharmaceutical/tech firm, or you toiled away as an adjunct professor for low wages with the hope of achieving a unicorn tenured position.
Which is why most doctoral candidates were hopeful immigrants on student visas, and people who had work authorization mostly opted for joining the workforce.
Even if we define "value" strictly in monetary terms (which is a deeply bleak outlook, but nevertheless) PhDs can be at once of great value and also out of reach for those without the access to the debt instruments required to pay for it.
Of course, much like life has value outside of the monetary, PhDs are a great way to enrich your life if you don't have to financially bury yourself in debt. Notably, this is the case for people who have the good fortune of being born in places with low tuition, like much of Europe and Canada. I pay $4K in tuition and make, after tax, not much less than I was making as a junior machine learning dev.
I meant value as in not being able to achieve other life goals due to the pursuit of a PhD, of which many could be due to insufficient funds due to prospects of low pay and high volatility.
If the PhD had _increasing_ value it would offset its _increasing_ cost. Furthermore, not everything is linear over every range. There's only so much debt you can put yourself into and there's only so much ROI education can promise.
Almost nobody pays for a PhD. I didn't pay for mine. This isn't like student debt for undergraduate degrees, though I think the argument about the "opportunity cost" of getting a PhD has merit.
As a software engineer, a PhD doesn't seem worth it.
It's a lot of work and time, and most companies don't particularly need PhDs. Maybe a PhD gets a boost in pay starting out, but 5 years of experience cancels out most of the benefit. I suppose PhDs can get a shortcut into Prinicple or Senior roles, so there's some tangible benefit.
On the other hand, if a company is hiring PhDs and doing research, I feel those jobs are most likely to get cut if business is going poorly.
> I suppose PhDs can get a shortcut into Prinicple or Senior roles, so there's some tangible benefit.
I don't think that's a thing. Some government job will use a pay scale that varies based on your education level, but fast-tracking someone in software engineering because they got a PhD seems questionable seeing as the skillset does not really overlap.
It's a different thing for corporate research labs, where usually you need a masters for entry-level and PhD for the level above.
A PhD isn't like a MBA which is meant mostly for the credential and associated pay bump. It's a research degree that you get if you want to work in academia or in a private research lab. If you're evaluating it purely by its economic value, of course it's not going to make sense, but that assessment misses why people pursue these degrees in the first place.
It also dismisses the effect it has on society entirely. In a sane world, we would enable anyone who wants to pursue a PhD in hopes in advancing things like medical science or our understanding of the world. The fact that people really can only care about the economic value education can bring, and the fact we all act like that's normal, is very radicalizing to me.
True, but like the VC model with companies, it's very difficult to consistently identify those people in advance. Invest in a load of qualified, promising individuals and hope more than a few "hit".
The desire to do something and understand something is the root of everything, and who are to preemptively decide who has that capability? What a pompous thing to say. On top of that you are operating on the assumption that it matters. If someone wants to learn, they should be able to learn. I guarantee you that we as a society have stifled people who would be this generations Einstein so to speak.
The money stifles. There's not enough money for everyone who wants a Very Large Array of their own. People don't have money to sit around thinking all day. There needs to be some system of deciding priority. The profit incentive is the only reason any science dependent on HPC and GPUs is possible. If you want more science, you need more economic growth.
My observation is PhDs make mostly great salesmen in normal tech companies that aren't doing anything crazy. It's a pretty good strategy to have a team of theoretically competent, titled, well spoken and well dressed employees to send/show to clients to get work and then outsource that work to cheap labour.
There are countless pragmatic reasons to avoid a PhD, and no doubt both the article and other commenters will bring them up. The most constructive thing I can do is share a personal perspective.
I am 30 years old. I am working through my last few months as a computer engineering PhD student. Eventually, it went good. Not great (the world gives zero f*cks about my work, nobody has offered me a job yet), but not hellish either (didn't quit, still mostly sane, learned a ton of stuff that I never had the guts or prudence to delve into as an undergraduate, and most importantly, I decided I like computers).
Now my background is anything but academic: none of my parents finished high school, people from my village consider me either batshit crazy or a genius. I mean, I was thrown into the PhD archipelago by life itself, rather unconsciously. I just knew that "corporate IT" wasn't my thing, and as for the cool computing jobs, I wasn't their thing. Again, I spent my years as an ECE undergraduate burying my insecurities instead of building my future. To understand the degree of mental fragmentation I was under, I had never made the connection between my digital design courses and my operating systems courses (all of this is the story of the computer, stupid, it's in the title of your degree for God's sake!).... Anyways.
It took me six years to get to today. I am another person now. The PhD (well, and the pandemic, and all that followed) crushed all of my assumptions about the world, myself, the meaning of life. There's no way to put it in the condensed form that an HN comment requires without sounding naive, but I'm telling you the truth. Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again. It made me.
At the end of the day, talking sh*t about hard stuff is sooo easy. You could replace any polemic against a PhD with one against starting a family, or a company, or in any way rejecting "safety" for the potential of leaving your own mark on the world. Being you. Like that poem by Robert Frost, these things make all the difference.
Another great thing about PhD programs is you generally don’t end them with 6 figures in college debt from the degree. As long as you get the PhD in something that gives you a marketable skill, it’s not going to hurt too much vs all the MBAs and Lawyers I know with a ton of debt and just marginally increased career choices.
But can you still get $125k directly after undergrad? How many employers are willing to pay 2x the median wage to someone with no experience and no demonstrated skills, simply because they went to a school? To someone who is likely to make a net negative contribution until they learn how things work and require less guidance? To someone who is at a high risk of taking another job after a couple of years?
It's more common that entry-level jobs in highly paid fields start at close to the median wage. Salaries can rise rapidly once you have demonstrated your worth. But unless there is a talent shortage in your field, it doesn't make sense to pay much for an unknown quantity.
FAANG or some company in a high-rent area where you could most definitely not save that kind of money, as far as I know.
And, I love how making $125K is some sort of great salary. I live in MN and while it’s above the median HHI for the state, it’s by no means a comfortable enough wage to save that kind of money unless your housing is covered by family or something.
Here in the MSP metro, you’re looking at $2500/mo for rent + utils or $3500/mo for mortgage + utils for what’s a pretty average living arrangement. Unless you’re making $200K+ you’re definitely not saving shit.
It's amazing how out of touch people are. It's one thing to say your lifestyle choices make it hard to save money at that income level, but it's certainly also true that many folks are perfectly able to save a lot at that income level. Out of college, rent in my area was $1500 for a one bedroom, but I was able to rent a house with a few friends for $800/month per person. Even with frequent eating out and outings I saved up over half my income per year, making under 100k the entire time. If you want a really nice car, travel a bunch, or similar, or live alone, I'm sure it gets much harder to save much, but those are lifestyle choices.
If you’re doing a PhD in anything other than the highly paid field of “computer stuff”, the opportunity costs look much, much different.
When I did my PhD, I was making roughly the same money as all of my friends (none of whom were in tech) except I had waaay more freedom and job satisfaction.
If your other opportunities are things like a school teacher or generic “office job”, a PhD program doesn’t really have an opportunity cost penalty
Unrealistic unless you’re talking about eating beans and rice, and sharing an apartment with a few other people for all six years. Remember taxes, etc.
Maybe, but if you compare paying 30-50k per year plus living expenses for an average masters program for 2-3 years and then paying student loans for a really long time because you couldn't afford it in the first place vs paying no tuition and getting a $30k-40k stipend for 4-5 years. The advantage of a year or two of additional work isn't as great as you think, when you subtract out tuition and the stipend they give you during the PhD and compare the pay differential and job prospects when you finish.
It depends on your career prospects. If you can expect to make $200k out of grad school then it’s definitely not better to spend your time in school, financially. But yeah it’s a math question at that point.
I don't think even smart folks here realize how much of a boost is some good income cash when you are starting your life from poor background. But one has to save it and not burn on 'better' lifestyle with trying to match peers or impress women (clue - if they don't like who you really are, no shiny expensive thing will ever make it work long term and you will just attract very wrong crowd).
I can attest it allowed me to do literal jumps way above what my peers and rest could do setting up much better life path. Pure numbers don't do this justice, not sure how to explain it properly.
Now it may not be your goal in life and thats fine, this comes from a guy who spent 6 months on unpaid backpacking all over India and Nepal well into his career work days, but be sure you are really fine with these decisions long, I mean LONG term. And we don't know who we will be in 2 decades.
Also a good quick start could easily mean retiring much earlier if one has a bit of luck and can control expenses growth (and they will grow regardless of your life path). One can focus on academia then.
It depends on what you want to do. I think 90% of the people here are computer science / programmers / IT people. There are people who don't even have a college degree and are self taught.
I'm in integrated circuit / semiconductor design. I only have a bachelors degree but that was 30 years ago. These days the vast majority of new graduates that we hire have a masters degree. IT's really hard to stand out with only a bachelors in my industry.
> Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again.
I can't agree more. My sister died at the hardest point of my PhD and I buried myself in my work for nearly every waking second for years, confident that at least I was doing it for myself. I couldn't have done that if I were working a normal job.
I would do a PhD if they paid me enough. I don't mind if I cannot find a job that pays well with a PhD (I actually don't need a PhD for that); I would do the PhD because I like doing research. What would bother me is to spent ~4-5 years without a decent income. The scholarships here in western europe are just too low, and I cannot justify not working for private companies in favor or pursuing a PhD during ~4-5 years
Prior to the new administration I would have pointed out that US CS and engineering Ph.D.s are generally paid with a stipend that's "just enough to live on".
I disagree a little with their cost of living calculations - they're off in both directions for areas I know reasonably well. Most Ph.D. students can live for something under the MIT living wage calculations if they choose -- transportation costs are overstated for most places (e.g., CMU students get a free regional bus pass; MIT students get subsidized transit passes, etc.). Often the medical costs are subsidized as well -- we cover the full cost of (individual) health insurance for Ph.D. students.
You're not going to be banking much, but in CS, it's OK at many institutions, particularly when you factor in summer internship income.
Grad school is a money loser in CS for people from the US. There's no argument. But I did end up having my net worth increase over the course of it, and it was a fantastic experience. In Boston, even - a pretty HCOL area. And in the end, being "rich but less rich than my FAANG friends" isn't the worst outcome. :)
The MIT "living wage" figures are, to put it lightly, utterly deranged; more a statement of the purveyors's ideal of a first-world standard of living than a reflection of reality. If they are to be believed, then evidently grad students—or really like, half the population??—must not be alive.
As maligned as the poverty lines are—and they do have plenty of shortcomings—they are still a far closer approximation of "the true cost of living in a modern economy" than this drivel.
You may not have understood the concept of a living wage. For a start, a living wage is expected to support saving for retirement and future expenses like a new car, or eventually buying a house. "People can live on $100/week for six weeks!!!" is not a relevant counter point to "$100/week is not a living wage."
I love doing research. I published a minor unimportant paper in undergrad and had a blast doing it.
Then at graduation I was offered a well paid job in the industry. Decided to pursue it as opposed to spending 5-6 more years in academia looking for grants.
Would love to go back and get a PhD, but the economics just don't make sense for me. For now, it's a retirement plan.
From my experience, there has been a noticeable decline in PhD positions available within academia, likely due to tenure and career longevity, and reduced retirement benefits. As a result, many PhDs are forced into the private sector. However, many organizations have removed middle management layers, making merit based advancement less likely, and instead time becomes the dominating factor.
So given the choice between longer tenure or further education, where education is only marginally effective and time is dominant, the clear choice is to start a career as soon as possible. Which is something i wish i would have understood during my studies.
As someone with a phd and is a professor at a community college, with the current governmental chaos there's no way I would recommend anyone starting a phd in the USA. In addition to the poor pay (and I was in the department of communication and I distinctly remember fellow grad students in stem complaining about their pay... which was literally double mine), there is also the fact that no one knows what is going to happen with funding. In my case, not only is there the federal government, but I live in a state with a republican supermajority so I have zero optimism about future prospects of higher education here. I'm just hoping I can hang on until retirement in a 15 years or so.
In the US, note that for many foreign students, PhD is a (in many cases, much faster) pathway to permanent residency compared to your standard PERM/H1B things
The smartest people I’ve ever worked with to date were from physics grad school. Still remember the time my coworker was doing code profiling, decided he was unhappy that the exponential function from the standard library was too slow, and decided to write a Taylor series approximation that gave him the precision he needed and cut the run time in half. He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry. And these were just every day occurrences that made it a thrill to go to work. Working with talented people is a drug.
Some tips for younger people considering it: get involved in undergraduate research, apply to fellowships, shop for an advisor with a good reputation, start anticipating and preparing for an industry transition early, travel, date, and enjoy life!
I don't want to take away from his brilliance, but generally Taylor approximations perform far worse than the standard library implementations. It's also the first tool of choice for physicists, so who knows ...?
My guess, though, is that if he improved the performance, he used some other wizardry (Chebyshev or something similar).
I think Carmack credits someone else as the origin - possibly some magazine entry.
These days I think the reciprocal square root intrinsic is the fastest where precision is not that important.
I think there was a bit twiddling hack for pop count which was consistently faster than the equivalent cpu intrinsic due to some weird pipelining effect, so sometimes it is possible to beat the compilers and intrinsics with clever hacks.
If he already knew how to code in other object oriented languages, and was really just learning C++ syntax over the weekend, it’s not as much of a stretch.
C++ is one of the most flexible and unopinionated languages you could ever encounter.
The idea that someone who knows a high-level object-oriented language could translate that to immediate success in low-level C++ syntax at a level higher than the experts that developed the libraries over a weekend is frankly fantastical.
> the experts that developed the libraries over a weekend is frankly fantastical.
this is not synonymous with "most [C++ programmers] in industry"
The claim was the person learned it better than most people in industry, not most people writing the libraries upon which the industry is based
EDIT: Also we don't technically know when this happened. If this story is from the 1990s, it's a lot more likely, because think of how many shitty C++ programmers there were back then since we didn't have all the language options we do now. It was still the language taught in schools, for example. Then it was Java and Python and JS etc. But back then, Jonny Mackintosh was writing bad C++ out of uni.
There's something to say here about getting the paid opportunity to spend several years thinking deeply about a problem without distraction. You'll make more money working at a startup or big tech churning out features each sprint, but usually you'd be very lucky to get a day or two to explore tangential ideas before the next project deadline in comparison.
Some people aren't optimizing for money so it's not best to compare on those terms.
The article mentions Australia, Japan, Brazil and the United Kingdom. Were there any counter-examples where the cost of living was supported and PhDs were doing well?
I did not register to continue the article.
Is nobody going to entertain this? Immigration opportunity is a major motivator for foreign students to get PhDs. And the university likes the cheap and captive labor.
What I really don’t like is that there are essentially rings of foreign professors within the US that only bring in foreign students, only write papers with them, review each others papers, etc. So you can end up with an American degree without doing any work with Americans, essentially having a parallel academic experience that mirrors culture of back home. And then use that experience to argue for US employment.
I considered a PhD in machine learning. It’s mostly downsides. Granted, most fields are not like this but:
1) The field moves too fast to focus on a single thing for 4 years. A lot of people were devastated when ChatGPT essentially solved their NLP tasks.
2) Cutting edge NLP/vision research is being done in industrial labs as much as universities. And industry will probably outgun you with equipment (GPUs) and high quality data.
3) Pay sucks. You can make 3-5x working in industry. The opportunity cost could be a half million dollars.
4) You can get a lot out of a Masters in half the time or less.
What sort of benefits come from getting a Masters? Everyone I talk to seems to say a Masters in CompSci is useless, and that you may as well do a PhD instead.
I believe a masters has helped me stand out as a candidate at least. Plus, I learned a great deal about computer engineering! The fundamentals have come in handy.
A lot of job requirements that I see ask for Masters or PhD, so you’re hitting the minimum requirement plus giving yourself a shot of having applicable work experience (read: doesn’t write spaghetti code). That said, there’s probably a huge selection bias due to my background.
Machine learning could be hardware as well. I'm in integrated circuit design and there are lots of custom hardware AI accelerators in development. Almost all of the new grads we hire have a masters degree in electrical or computer engineering (not computer science)
It helped me get a visa for Italy (I took part in a startup accelerator program).
Other than that not much else... I mean you learn things, but you could also learn things from watching YouTube, doing courses and reading books!
I've also seen people do PhD's and from the outside it seems like a lot of them did it just for the title - one of my friends though seems to love Academia and is now a professor.
Usually an inability to get shit done, too much of a scientist vs. engineer approach (not good in industry outside of very specific jobs), and a personality type that is not an aggressive go-getter.
Yellow flag not red because this is a general observation with plenty of exceptions, of course.
If I could go back to that age, I'd focus my PhD on actually understanding what's going on in ML models. Industry is always going to be incentivized to build things and not understand, so you can fill in the details. Plus it would be fascinating.
It’s not like interpretability research is immune. You could’ve been in year 4 of your degree when Anthropic released their sparse autoencoder research. It’s just less busy because as you correctly note, industry mostly cares about getting the black box to print money.
> Plus it would be fascinating
You can do research on the weekend even if you’re not in a PhD. I’ve done it. And no one was breathing down my neck to publish it.
I feel like the only places a doctorate is useful is in the research field or academics and generally neither actually pay that well for the doctorate to be worth it.
In STEM in particular the opportunity costs of a PhD are extremely high and with little payoff at the end. Even if you want to stay in academia, which is the only real reason to do a PhD now, there are far more PhDs graduating per year than open faculty positions. Many get stuck in Postdoc or adjunct hell for years and can never get a tenure track role.
True, but how competitive are those jobs to get? If one goes to a lesser-known university that has a PhD program and does related research are they getting an interview, or are these research jobs intended for specific university pipelines (Harvard, MIT, the usuals, etc.)?
The interview process for a place like Microsoft Research is essentially the same as for a faculty position - give a talk on your research, spend the day talking to researchers about your research, their research, convince them you have an interesting research agenda. Have dinner with more researchers, for a notionally more relaxed discussion :) [Tried, failed ;)]
As with university recruitment, this isn't a case of "you must come from specific pipelines", but of "you must have done interesting research, have an interesting plan". It's just that those two criteria are strongly correlated...
I have a CS PhD from a good (but not top 5) program and have published in top venues. I perceived my chances of getting a job at Microsoft Research (MSR) to be low (on par with getting a faculty position at a top place) and didn't feel like going through the unpleasant prospect of coming up with job talks and slides, sending off to universities while I'm at it, writing diversity statements, etc, for fairly low chances at getting something at MSR.
I could have gotten something at a 'lesser' place, but my guess is they'd be even more likely to be disrupted by budget cuts.
Even getting one of these roles though leaves you in a position where the next guy who wants to save money can just axe the whole division and then you're on your ass and due to a general paucity of research roles and high competition, this can be very, very bad.
I went bog-standard industry and the PhD probably didn't help much there. My industry job largely wastes my training and research experience. In retrospect, I was foolish to get a PhD and people choosing to not do so are generally making the right choice.
My understanding from PhDs in the research business at major companies is that once you're in the club, it's a lot easier to get a position at another one.
I have anecdata that shows that plenty of intelligent, highly motivated, affable people with (hard science) PhDs still struggle to obtain employment of the "club" caliber, even after they're in the "club".
You'd want to keep your network alive. Publish, be on program committees doing reviews, etc. If the number of jobs is fairly static and you're doing this and your area doesn't collapse, (e.g., the AI winter), your network can probably land you okay. Networks in the academic world is a pretty big deal and it's a small world. Some people like doing this kind of 'service,' I wasn't one of them.
If there are general headwinds (i.e., research spending in general drops, which seems to have been an ongoing trend), there is almost definitionally more people getting cast off than there are actual researcher roles, not including new entrants to the market.
As with all things, the better off you do (very high quality lab, for instance), the more places you have to try to grab onto if you get cast off.
My peers from grad school have gone every which route, industrial labs, academia, more applied research-lite positions, finance, and fairly direct software engineering jobs. A decent chunk that started in academia or at labs have migrated into more standard software engineering roles. Personally, I really miss research, but it is what it is.
I want to vaguely highlight that they are not that competitive. Headcount is not that great; there is usually a citation/research impact floor; the ivory tower "oh our advisors are friends" thing likely also applies.
Research Scientist positions are also embedded in product teams in Google IIRC, certainly less "prestige" than DeepMind though, and probably easier to get into
(Also for the broader audience: Harvard here probably carries less weight than the likes of UT Austin)
Why pay an American worker 100k + benefits out of college when you can pay an H1B worker 60k for the same level of education and also have a massive amount of leverage over them?
Because this is ostensibly illegal, and it would be nice if someone enforced the fucking law (H1Bs must be paid the market rate, and it's supposed to be enforced by the Department of Labor). But the entirety of US government apparati are geared toward helping big corps make money. It's just a question of which big corps (modern Democratic party is soooo captured by Big Tech).
Of course, one of them also supports fascism; I'm not "both sides"ing.
I'm not surprised the richest man in the world will commit all manner of sin, because one more dollar might be the one to fill that gaping hole where his heart should be.
Sure it does, wealth hoarding is a significant factor in students enrolling in doctoral degrees. Be it because it is a step towards more wealth, or because it's not (and as such a group that might be a good fit, but prefer more wealth over deeper education will no longer enrol).
Combine that with very visible people actively promoting that, or representing that, you get yourself a discussion about knowledge, money, and capitalism. And if you dig deep enough you get current affairs and later on, philosophy involved as well.
If you were to remove all incentives on "get educated so you get paid more" and only focus on "get educated so you'll enjoy what you learn more" that might change the enrolment, but as a side-effect, it might also make it harder to find enough people for all manner of work.
Going down this thought a bit more, how much is enough? (money, knowledge) Is there such a thing as a goal or limit? Or better yet, is there a fixed quantity where it's all turned into a zero-sum game? Probably not.
So if someone will put effort in their hoard, would it then be good or bad for society at large? And either way, would such a person do it regardless of the side-effects on everyone else? Even if it has an outsized impact? Would we then not want to talk about someone with a big hoard trying to add a relatively small amount to that hoard at a cost that might be relatively big for everyone else?
If you read a biography of Musk, you'll find that he did not hoard wealth. At each step in his rise, he bet essentially all of his fortune on the next step.
After all, investing in Tesla was not a sane business decision. Nobody had ever started a successful car company in America since the 1920s or so. Bricklin, Tucker, Delorean, the path is littered with utter failure.
Neither was investing in rockets. At one point, he was down to bankruptcy if one more rocket exploded. What car executive would be crazy enough to bet it all on reusable rockets?
Reading a biography mostly informed me about the lack of general empathy, remorse, sympathy. Only regret came forward a little (and only once).
> be crazy enough to bet it all
Anyone who doesn't suffer any real consequences. Having parents with a lot of money makes it not matter all that much.
As for the other bad decisions; it doesn't really show much positive except maybe persistence, but persistence in a vacuum is not a good thing. In a way, it mostly read like "a skewed mind made a bunch of bets and got lucky". Perhaps mostly an example of survivorship bias in a business sense.
Now, if we go back to the hoarding; it's not about when someone didn't hoard, it's about the here and now. I'm pretty sure we can find a period of time where Gates or Kamprad didn't do any hoarding, or not the hoarding we'd expect. But concentration of anything doesn't really happen by accident, and wherever we see it now, we can assume it was intentional.
There are of course also examples of people on their death bed realising their hoard doesn't really matter anymore and they might give most or all of it away. But that doesn't mean the hoarding never happened. It doesn't turn someone into a genius or a saint. When such things happen, we might consider it commendable, but that doesn't mean history disappears.
In a way it works not like a balance or a sum but more like a ratchet; it's about the degree to which someone hoarded stuff and how they acted with their hoard (doesn't have to be money, can be property or secrets or power or knowledge etc).
> Anyone who doesn't suffer any real consequences. Having parents with a lot of money makes it not matter all that much.
You're not going to starve in America if you lose all your money.
Besides, Elon's dad at one point invested in Elon's company. Elon was already a success in business by then. From $20,000, he became the richest man in the world. All by luck! Pretty amazing!
Me, I could scrape up $20,000. Could I turn it into the richest man in the world? Nope. I would never have taken the risks Musk did. Nor do I have his work ethic. Nor am I as smart as he is. So I'm not envious of him.
> Now, if we go back to the hoarding; it's not about when someone didn't hoard, it's about the here and now. I'm pretty sure we can find a period of time where Gates or Kamprad didn't do any hoarding, or not the hoarding we'd expect. But concentration of anything doesn't really happen by accident, and wherever we see it now, we can assume it was intentional.
I’m no fan of Musk, but he clearly isn’t guilty of the hoarding aspect, as WalterBright pointed out.
I think we’re at the “so what are you going to do about it” phase where the courts and congress are going to tisk tisk at the most, because they don’t want the deep pockets of Elon and Co to primary-them-out
We are so cooked. I don't see a clear pathway out of this. I fear we've crossed the Rubicon and people will choose willful ignorance or the people who believe they stand to benefit will silently stand by. After decades of Neo-Liberal austerity measures, the rise of fascism is inevitable.
On H1B, its abuses, and big tech capture in general, it's a shame we can't generally admit that the democrats are terrible on this without others perceiving this as an endorsement of everything the other side wants to do.
Both major parties suck really bad here. I'm not partisan anymore, I'll vote split-ticket for whatever individual best represents my individual interests because if I'm going to exercise my apparently useless vote, I might as well use it to meekly voice my preferences in the extremely remote chance someone will decide pretending to give a shit would be helpful for them.
Our problems predate the current regime and they'll last past it. Pretty pessimistic if I'm honest.
My impression is that there are prized PhD jobs that people go back to school in anticipation of and there are essentially non-PhD jobs that are filled by people who don't go back or H1B workers who have a PhD.
These days it is like why even hire H1B's when they can simply outsource the talent? Even companies like American Airlines are opening big offices in India etc...
This is an incredibly small slice of roles available to CS PHDs and sometimes adjacent fields. Not really indicative of the larger STEM market and basically irrelevant to non STEM programs.
Most stem PhDs actually go into industry. In fact, in my department I would say 60% or more go directly to industry and we are a field with growing faculty opportunities.
The immediate post graduation employment of all PhDs is very high 74% in 2023 up from 68% in 2018 and the highest since 1993. Interestingly difference between stem and non stem is effectively moot.
I continue to be shocked in this thread at the factual statements being thrown around that there is easy data to push back on from the nationally managed survey of earned doctorates.
Whats the ROI vs a Masters for people going directly to Industry? Did they even intend to do that or realized the Academic Door was closed for them and had no other choice?
Not sure on this, but the type of job you can get in industry differs if you have a Master's or PhD... the difference between being a technician in a lab, and running a research lab, at least in my field. Also somewhat true for federal jobs. There are master's jobs, and PhD jobs.
The fields where you are bound to academia for a reasonable ROI are definitely the humanities, since there is essentially no demand for a history PhD in the private sector, or an English PhD. It can help for job hunting in an unrelated field, I guess. But, a chemistry PhD? or any other applied lab PhD, it's not like you're shooting yourself in the foot by getting an advanced degree in such a field.
A lot of people will point out the utility of a doctoral degree is low, but there's another angle.
Men, specifically, are becoming less likely to enroll in Medical or Law school also. Women pick up the slack here but not in STEM doctoral degrees.
I don't think men are less competitive. See how many are in tech and finance still. I think they just see academia as a place that isn't for them and are less likely to opt for more years in it than they need
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadCome on use the words that are actually plaguing PhD programs, exploitation of cheap labor and minimum pay for working endless hours
what's plaguing phd programs is the lack of value for attaining a phd. the labor is cheap because it isn't valuable. the hours are endless because the output is low. victim mentality infects everything
Science is the quintessential example of high-value work with poor value-capture characteristics, and is often used in econ classes as an example of where the "captured value = value" approximation breaks down.
on the other side, you see the world, you travel payed by the taxpayers and you meet curious people. and, of course, it might be intellectually fulfilling.
Obviously, that's only one avenue for talent. Some talented people never do a PhD, they may create start-ups etc instead. But its about fostering an ecosystem to develop and retain talent.
The value is that obtaining a PhD involves deep research into something beyond what anyone else has done. Even if it's a topic that you don't think is important, even if it's a topic that no one thinks is important, I think there is still value to exploring that boundary of what we know and testing the limits of our understanding.
So many people spend their lives consuming rather than creating, doing the same things over and over again every day, maybe producing lots of economic value but not doing anything novel or interesting to anyone. A PhD forces you to do something different.
Of course you can do novel things and do deep research without doing a PhD, a PhD is just a certificate to prove you did it. I value the process equally regardless of the result of the research or the setting it's done in. And I don't discredit the value of work that isn't novel either - there's also a lot of value to the routines that make the world function day to day. I just think that in a world where most of us will never get a chance to spend years becoming a true expert on something obscure and novel, that encouraging more people to take that opportunity and explore that niche is worthwhile.
Only reason should be that you want to be a professor, research can be done in private companies without this license. 95% of a PhD is worth as much as 0%.
Now, if your PhD is in the humanities, you're not looking at the same situation. It's almost bizarre they call the degree the same name, since a PhD in the humanities takes you on a completely different path. I don't think many companies are demanding a History or English or German literature PhD. Sometimes this can make you a competitive candidate for a job in a completely unrelated field, but those jobs have no need for a PhD, it's just something that makes you stand out when 100 overqualified people are applying for the same job. So will a candidate working in the Peace Corps. Or volunteering hundreds of hours a year. Those getting a history PhD are competing for the...what, 60? 90? jobs in the entire nation that require a history PhD, which is being a professor that gives other people history PhDs. So of course, you will only get such a job if you go to a top 10 school, and the chances of this are basically less than becoming a professional athlete. So the vast disparity between a humanities PhD which has no sustainable aspirational track, vs. a STEM PhD where you become a qualified candidate for both academia/the government which hires many PhDs, and industry, which also has a demand for PhD-trained candidates. Probably 3/4 of STEM PhDs don't work for a school or the government.
This is less of a problem than you might imagine. While no school will guarantee to give you a degree regardless of your performance, it's pretty close. They don't offer the limited funded spots to anyone they don't think can make it.
The real compromises are that people go into their PhD thinking they're going to cure cancer and become a professor at Harvard, and come out of it having made a 5% improvement to a model for predicting the risk of one particular complication following treatment for one particular type of cancer, knowing that becoming a professor at Podunk College would take another decade of work. Or the decide to quit once they discover the reality of it.
The under-paid indefinite purgatory period is called the postdoc.
Later I worked with PhDs and PhD candidates in a university setting. What shocked me the most was the narrowness of their knowledge and their lack of consideration for practical matters.
I'd rather let the market judge my work than an academic committee.
Very few true eccentrics left.
I think the issue, should that be an issue, is in industry setting unrealistic requirements for education. There certainly are some jobs where the work is true research and a PhD can be a good indication of experience in that, but a great many PhD-locked careers are not really so research oriented. Requiring a PhD to demonstrate expertise in something that makes up 10% of a job is excessive and creates this system where people do 4-5 year PhD programs just to check off a box for the resume filter.
This sounds like a market dynamic to me. If it were difficult to find qualified candidates, requirements would be lowered.
Just leaving this here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
Certainly in the US, the GI Bill lead to a decreased value for high school diplomas for the median graduate. This doesn't mean it wasn't the right idea for the time, just that it's caused a lot of crowding out. I feel like the Elite Overproduction is a good post hoc descriptive theory but missing the why.
To take an extreme rhetorical example: if slavery is allowed, human capitol becomes ridiculously cheap and you can say labor is overproduced.
I feel this idea is tired--like a 1978 Ford Pinto banged up and running on worn out re-treads. Will it go somewhere? Maybe, but not too far, not comfortably, and unlikely to end up where you want it.
Academia started as medicine, math, theology, and philosophy, if memory serves, and has given us so much of the basic research that leads to the applied technologies we have today.
The incentive structures get weird, certainly, like resources on the Serengeti.
Personally, I think it’s a system for “experiments”: projects that mostly produce negligible real-world impact, but occasionally lead to major advances (“breakthroughs”). Whereas industry focuses on projects that are likely to succeed, and industry research focuses on projects that are less likely but not as risky as academia permits.
In that respect, I agree there’s an issue with prestige. I think it’s largely because of “publish or perish”: academics aren’t risky because they have to publish ‘quality’ papers, and papers on rejected hypothesis aren’t published and/or considered ‘quality’; and those who still take risks, don’t end up as powerful or get as many students, as those who “play the game”. Some people also say it's because academics naturally have high egos, but I disagree, because if anything, a high ego would make someone more likely to take risks (and focus on "ideas, truth, beauty" which 'only a genius can understand', vs boring practical results that anyone can produce).
Ironically, industry has somewhat recently created breakthroughs via venture capitalists (like YC), who fund many risky projects expecting only a couple to succeed (because they also expect the returns from the couple successful projects to recoup the losses from all the failed ones). But nowadays, it seems even VCs are avoiding experiments, focusing mainly on AI (which is arguably an experiment, but even if so, a single one; "couple successes recoup many failures" doesn't work if most of the projects will all succeed or fail together).
I think the problematic current software development industry is the result of too many safe and short-term projects and not enough risky and long-term experiments, which isn't an uncommon view. But, I guess a more uncommon view, I think that means we need more academics.
Everyone wants the benefits of research but no one wants to pay for it, and slowly over the last three or four decades administrations have pushed researchers into these Faustian bargains that have led to the system have today. A lot of what we have is a pyramid scheme, but that pyramid scheme exists in part because people somewhere along the legislator-funder-administrative chain decided that is what would be rewarded. Once it started and was encouraged it snowballed.
All of it is made worse by governments that don't seem to understand the problems or implications of their decisions. Anti-immigration laws (not talking about the US here actually necessarily) hurts enrollment, which has downstream effects even though that immigration is bringing in net income. Yes, indirect costs are gamified sometimes, and there should be some accountability system put in place with researcher protections (the original point of tenure), but no, that doesn't mean just cutting indirect costs down to some unsustainable level that doesn't reflect real costs.
Also to be fair there's a lot of this gamification and false prestige that happens all over the US and world economy, we just don't like to admit it. I think it's one of the defining problems of our time probably.
And “The Politics of Smell” https://x.com/drallylouks/status/1868782615324770561
If the PhD is losing its lustre, it’s because the Universities took the shine off.
Also, circulating particularly weird dissertations for the express purpose of angering people has gotten a lot more rewarding
What rebuttal to the works do you have?
Many seemingly useless theses turn out to be prescient and valuable decades or even centuries later. What evidence exists to suggest these won't have long term value?
PhDs are important because they train specialists by giving them the time and space needed to develop that expertise (something not usually available at corporate gigs). The work you do during a PhD has value, much more value than the stipend is worth. Taxpayer dollars spent on these stipends have a huge ROI because they are investing in future expertise. These PhD students are trading their cheap labor for agency over their work. However, the deal has been stagnating and stipends are not keeping up with inflation. Stipends can be low, but they need to support the students living needs.
The job market is always a bit tougher on specialists, because of that focused expertise. However, an excess of PhDs is a net benefit for society. Most won't become professors, they will filter back into the workplace and bring cutting-edge knowledge either directly to their expertise in industrial settings, or laterally to new fields.
It is a very small field that is being used as a straw-man for all PhDs. I don't know what benefit those 1,600 may produce, but I'd rather them have that expertise and use it for our country than have them leave the US for better opportunities elsewhere. Because they will leave.
Now to be clear, I'm not saying that this work is unimportant. Intangible benefits are (despite the name) very real and do benefit the nation. It's just a much more complicated than engineering PhDs making stronger forms of concrete or whatever.
How do you think the US got so many international students?
Except I actually spoke to several of them who said that they were heavily groomed into joining the liberal arts departments. Not one of them went into engineering or the sciences. One student said during the program she was told she "must" choose the liberal arts. Another described how he was sweet talked by a philosophy professor into becoming a philosophy major, despite having followed a science-based curriculum in high school and little-to-no education in the arts (back then they had to specialize in either but not both in high school).
So when you said "crime" I thought "funny you should say that". It might not be criminal but there was definitely some creepy stuff going on.
It's also never been a 1:1 ratio of PhD recipients ending up in academia. I will agree that many universities overinflate job prospects post-graduation, but students should also be doing their own market research before entering into such a long process.
[1] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25300/report/u-s-doctorate-awa...
Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.
> Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.
So you're saying that was a sound strategy on their part
They also employ <100 PhDs. The entire company is small. Might not be worth mentioning as an employed because the chance of getting in is miniscule.
they just spent a period of about 10 years making sure they were involved in every major financial scandal due to poor judgment.
Hard to imagine any relationship between that outcome and a policy of exclusively hiring a demographic that's notorious for having high intellectual skills but low life experience. Wait, no, not hard. Easy.
I see this as being the same as
> the article is about how the challenges of getting a degree (rising living costs, slumping stipends) are causing fewer enrollments.
Also, as far as I know, this dynamic was true at least 20 years ago, when I graduated. You either did a hard science PhD and hoped to get in at a top finance/pharmaceutical/tech firm, or you toiled away as an adjunct professor for low wages with the hope of achieving a unicorn tenured position.
Which is why most doctoral candidates were hopeful immigrants on student visas, and people who had work authorization mostly opted for joining the workforce.
Of course, much like life has value outside of the monetary, PhDs are a great way to enrich your life if you don't have to financially bury yourself in debt. Notably, this is the case for people who have the good fortune of being born in places with low tuition, like much of Europe and Canada. I pay $4K in tuition and make, after tax, not much less than I was making as a junior machine learning dev.
It's a lot of work and time, and most companies don't particularly need PhDs. Maybe a PhD gets a boost in pay starting out, but 5 years of experience cancels out most of the benefit. I suppose PhDs can get a shortcut into Prinicple or Senior roles, so there's some tangible benefit.
On the other hand, if a company is hiring PhDs and doing research, I feel those jobs are most likely to get cut if business is going poorly.
I don't think that's a thing. Some government job will use a pay scale that varies based on your education level, but fast-tracking someone in software engineering because they got a PhD seems questionable seeing as the skillset does not really overlap.
It's a different thing for corporate research labs, where usually you need a masters for entry-level and PhD for the level above.
My sense is you might get paid when you start what an undergraduate makes after one year and a pay raise.
Your career will probably develop faster than the person who started working after undergrad. Your ceiling is likely hire.
I don't have a PhD, but this is what I've observed.
The money stifles. There's not enough money for everyone who wants a Very Large Array of their own. People don't have money to sit around thinking all day. There needs to be some system of deciding priority. The profit incentive is the only reason any science dependent on HPC and GPUs is possible. If you want more science, you need more economic growth.
I am 30 years old. I am working through my last few months as a computer engineering PhD student. Eventually, it went good. Not great (the world gives zero f*cks about my work, nobody has offered me a job yet), but not hellish either (didn't quit, still mostly sane, learned a ton of stuff that I never had the guts or prudence to delve into as an undergraduate, and most importantly, I decided I like computers).
Now my background is anything but academic: none of my parents finished high school, people from my village consider me either batshit crazy or a genius. I mean, I was thrown into the PhD archipelago by life itself, rather unconsciously. I just knew that "corporate IT" wasn't my thing, and as for the cool computing jobs, I wasn't their thing. Again, I spent my years as an ECE undergraduate burying my insecurities instead of building my future. To understand the degree of mental fragmentation I was under, I had never made the connection between my digital design courses and my operating systems courses (all of this is the story of the computer, stupid, it's in the title of your degree for God's sake!).... Anyways.
It took me six years to get to today. I am another person now. The PhD (well, and the pandemic, and all that followed) crushed all of my assumptions about the world, myself, the meaning of life. There's no way to put it in the condensed form that an HN comment requires without sounding naive, but I'm telling you the truth. Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again. It made me.
At the end of the day, talking sh*t about hard stuff is sooo easy. You could replace any polemic against a PhD with one against starting a family, or a company, or in any way rejecting "safety" for the potential of leaving your own mark on the world. Being you. Like that poem by Robert Frost, these things make all the difference.
It's more common that entry-level jobs in highly paid fields start at close to the median wage. Salaries can rise rapidly once you have demonstrated your worth. But unless there is a talent shortage in your field, it doesn't make sense to pay much for an unknown quantity.
And, I love how making $125K is some sort of great salary. I live in MN and while it’s above the median HHI for the state, it’s by no means a comfortable enough wage to save that kind of money unless your housing is covered by family or something.
Here in the MSP metro, you’re looking at $2500/mo for rent + utils or $3500/mo for mortgage + utils for what’s a pretty average living arrangement. Unless you’re making $200K+ you’re definitely not saving shit.
The median household income in Minneapolis is around $77K and they are somehow surviving.
When I did my PhD, I was making roughly the same money as all of my friends (none of whom were in tech) except I had waaay more freedom and job satisfaction.
If your other opportunities are things like a school teacher or generic “office job”, a PhD program doesn’t really have an opportunity cost penalty
I can attest it allowed me to do literal jumps way above what my peers and rest could do setting up much better life path. Pure numbers don't do this justice, not sure how to explain it properly.
Now it may not be your goal in life and thats fine, this comes from a guy who spent 6 months on unpaid backpacking all over India and Nepal well into his career work days, but be sure you are really fine with these decisions long, I mean LONG term. And we don't know who we will be in 2 decades.
Also a good quick start could easily mean retiring much earlier if one has a bit of luck and can control expenses growth (and they will grow regardless of your life path). One can focus on academia then.
No debt, no opportunity cost.
Wish one would let me do the same with a PhD.
I'm in integrated circuit / semiconductor design. I only have a bachelors degree but that was 30 years ago. These days the vast majority of new graduates that we hire have a masters degree. IT's really hard to stand out with only a bachelors in my industry.
I can't agree more. My sister died at the hardest point of my PhD and I buried myself in my work for nearly every waking second for years, confident that at least I was doing it for myself. I couldn't have done that if I were working a normal job.
There's even a website: https://csstipendrankings.org/
I disagree a little with their cost of living calculations - they're off in both directions for areas I know reasonably well. Most Ph.D. students can live for something under the MIT living wage calculations if they choose -- transportation costs are overstated for most places (e.g., CMU students get a free regional bus pass; MIT students get subsidized transit passes, etc.). Often the medical costs are subsidized as well -- we cover the full cost of (individual) health insurance for Ph.D. students.
You're not going to be banking much, but in CS, it's OK at many institutions, particularly when you factor in summer internship income.
As maligned as the poverty lines are—and they do have plenty of shortcomings—they are still a far closer approximation of "the true cost of living in a modern economy" than this drivel.
†No, really, go compare the "living wage" figures (https://livingwage.mit.edu/) with AMI stats (https://ami-lookup-tool.fanniemae.com/).
Which is generally above poverty levels right
Then at graduation I was offered a well paid job in the industry. Decided to pursue it as opposed to spending 5-6 more years in academia looking for grants.
Would love to go back and get a PhD, but the economics just don't make sense for me. For now, it's a retirement plan.
So given the choice between longer tenure or further education, where education is only marginally effective and time is dominant, the clear choice is to start a career as soon as possible. Which is something i wish i would have understood during my studies.
Some tips for younger people considering it: get involved in undergraduate research, apply to fellowships, shop for an advisor with a good reputation, start anticipating and preparing for an industry transition early, travel, date, and enjoy life!
My guess, though, is that if he improved the performance, he used some other wizardry (Chebyshev or something similar).
If anything it's a lesson that the definition of brilliance is being in the wrong place at the wrong time... ;-)
These days I think the reciprocal square root intrinsic is the fastest where precision is not that important.
I think there was a bit twiddling hack for pop count which was consistently faster than the equivalent cpu intrinsic due to some weird pipelining effect, so sometimes it is possible to beat the compilers and intrinsics with clever hacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
> He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry
I doubt this. Really, really doubt this. Sure, geniuses exist, but I don't buy it.
The idea that someone who knows a high-level object-oriented language could translate that to immediate success in low-level C++ syntax at a level higher than the experts that developed the libraries over a weekend is frankly fantastical.
this is not synonymous with "most [C++ programmers] in industry"
The claim was the person learned it better than most people in industry, not most people writing the libraries upon which the industry is based
EDIT: Also we don't technically know when this happened. If this story is from the 1990s, it's a lot more likely, because think of how many shitty C++ programmers there were back then since we didn't have all the language options we do now. It was still the language taught in schools, for example. Then it was Java and Python and JS etc. But back then, Jonny Mackintosh was writing bad C++ out of uni.
C++ --
Check it out for yourself! I’m not claiming this was some kind of prodigious programming move, just something memorable that stuck with me.
Some people aren't optimizing for money so it's not best to compare on those terms.
What I really don’t like is that there are essentially rings of foreign professors within the US that only bring in foreign students, only write papers with them, review each others papers, etc. So you can end up with an American degree without doing any work with Americans, essentially having a parallel academic experience that mirrors culture of back home. And then use that experience to argue for US employment.
1) The field moves too fast to focus on a single thing for 4 years. A lot of people were devastated when ChatGPT essentially solved their NLP tasks.
2) Cutting edge NLP/vision research is being done in industrial labs as much as universities. And industry will probably outgun you with equipment (GPUs) and high quality data.
3) Pay sucks. You can make 3-5x working in industry. The opportunity cost could be a half million dollars.
4) You can get a lot out of a Masters in half the time or less.
Google will hire you to work on moving protobufs around as an L4, instead of an L3.
Other than that not much else... I mean you learn things, but you could also learn things from watching YouTube, doing courses and reading books!
I've also seen people do PhD's and from the outside it seems like a lot of them did it just for the title - one of my friends though seems to love Academia and is now a professor.
Why?
Yellow flag not red because this is a general observation with plenty of exceptions, of course.
> Plus it would be fascinating
You can do research on the weekend even if you’re not in a PhD. I’ve done it. And no one was breathing down my neck to publish it.
As with university recruitment, this isn't a case of "you must come from specific pipelines", but of "you must have done interesting research, have an interesting plan". It's just that those two criteria are strongly correlated...
I could have gotten something at a 'lesser' place, but my guess is they'd be even more likely to be disrupted by budget cuts.
Even getting one of these roles though leaves you in a position where the next guy who wants to save money can just axe the whole division and then you're on your ass and due to a general paucity of research roles and high competition, this can be very, very bad.
I went bog-standard industry and the PhD probably didn't help much there. My industry job largely wastes my training and research experience. In retrospect, I was foolish to get a PhD and people choosing to not do so are generally making the right choice.
My understanding from PhDs in the research business at major companies is that once you're in the club, it's a lot easier to get a position at another one.
(No, not me, I don't have a PhD.)
If there are general headwinds (i.e., research spending in general drops, which seems to have been an ongoing trend), there is almost definitionally more people getting cast off than there are actual researcher roles, not including new entrants to the market.
As with all things, the better off you do (very high quality lab, for instance), the more places you have to try to grab onto if you get cast off.
My peers from grad school have gone every which route, industrial labs, academia, more applied research-lite positions, finance, and fairly direct software engineering jobs. A decent chunk that started in academia or at labs have migrated into more standard software engineering roles. Personally, I really miss research, but it is what it is.
Personally knowing a couple PhDs who did the rounds, it is highly competitive.
Research Scientist positions are also embedded in product teams in Google IIRC, certainly less "prestige" than DeepMind though, and probably easier to get into
(Also for the broader audience: Harvard here probably carries less weight than the likes of UT Austin)
Of course, one of them also supports fascism; I'm not "both sides"ing.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/musk-vivek-ramaswamy-h1b-vi...
Combine that with very visible people actively promoting that, or representing that, you get yourself a discussion about knowledge, money, and capitalism. And if you dig deep enough you get current affairs and later on, philosophy involved as well.
If you were to remove all incentives on "get educated so you get paid more" and only focus on "get educated so you'll enjoy what you learn more" that might change the enrolment, but as a side-effect, it might also make it harder to find enough people for all manner of work.
Going down this thought a bit more, how much is enough? (money, knowledge) Is there such a thing as a goal or limit? Or better yet, is there a fixed quantity where it's all turned into a zero-sum game? Probably not.
So if someone will put effort in their hoard, would it then be good or bad for society at large? And either way, would such a person do it regardless of the side-effects on everyone else? Even if it has an outsized impact? Would we then not want to talk about someone with a big hoard trying to add a relatively small amount to that hoard at a cost that might be relatively big for everyone else?
After all, investing in Tesla was not a sane business decision. Nobody had ever started a successful car company in America since the 1920s or so. Bricklin, Tucker, Delorean, the path is littered with utter failure.
Neither was investing in rockets. At one point, he was down to bankruptcy if one more rocket exploded. What car executive would be crazy enough to bet it all on reusable rockets?
> be crazy enough to bet it all
Anyone who doesn't suffer any real consequences. Having parents with a lot of money makes it not matter all that much.
As for the other bad decisions; it doesn't really show much positive except maybe persistence, but persistence in a vacuum is not a good thing. In a way, it mostly read like "a skewed mind made a bunch of bets and got lucky". Perhaps mostly an example of survivorship bias in a business sense.
Now, if we go back to the hoarding; it's not about when someone didn't hoard, it's about the here and now. I'm pretty sure we can find a period of time where Gates or Kamprad didn't do any hoarding, or not the hoarding we'd expect. But concentration of anything doesn't really happen by accident, and wherever we see it now, we can assume it was intentional.
There are of course also examples of people on their death bed realising their hoard doesn't really matter anymore and they might give most or all of it away. But that doesn't mean the hoarding never happened. It doesn't turn someone into a genius or a saint. When such things happen, we might consider it commendable, but that doesn't mean history disappears.
In a way it works not like a balance or a sum but more like a ratchet; it's about the degree to which someone hoarded stuff and how they acted with their hoard (doesn't have to be money, can be property or secrets or power or knowledge etc).
Did you know he gave away free Starlink to victims of hurricane Helena and the LA fires? When FEMA did nothing?
He's also going to rescue the astronauts abandoned in space.
My gawd, Elon is pure eeevil!!
You're not going to starve in America if you lose all your money.
Besides, Elon's dad at one point invested in Elon's company. Elon was already a success in business by then. From $20,000, he became the richest man in the world. All by luck! Pretty amazing!
Me, I could scrape up $20,000. Could I turn it into the richest man in the world? Nope. I would never have taken the risks Musk did. Nor do I have his work ethic. Nor am I as smart as he is. So I'm not envious of him.
Walk down my street with me and I’ll show you.
> Nor am I as smart as he is.
Are you kidding?
Lots of people seem to think that Musk has blundered his way from success to success. Nobody blunders $20,000 into richest man in the world.
There are plenty of “smart” people who aren’t rich.
> There are plenty of “smart” people who aren’t rich.
Of course. And the biggest barriers to success are:
1. not getting educated in what you want to do
2. being risk averse
3. not willing to commit to the work needed
4. doing drugs and alcohol
5. believe your friends and acquaintances telling you you can't make it
This forum is part of ycombinator, an outfit looking for startups to fund. You're already in the right place at the right time.
claim, meet data: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10990269/#:~:text=%...
I’m no fan of Musk, but he clearly isn’t guilty of the hoarding aspect, as WalterBright pointed out.
I think we’re at the “so what are you going to do about it” phase where the courts and congress are going to tisk tisk at the most, because they don’t want the deep pockets of Elon and Co to primary-them-out
Both major parties suck really bad here. I'm not partisan anymore, I'll vote split-ticket for whatever individual best represents my individual interests because if I'm going to exercise my apparently useless vote, I might as well use it to meekly voice my preferences in the extremely remote chance someone will decide pretending to give a shit would be helpful for them.
Our problems predate the current regime and they'll last past it. Pretty pessimistic if I'm honest.
The immediate post graduation employment of all PhDs is very high 74% in 2023 up from 68% in 2018 and the highest since 1993. Interestingly difference between stem and non stem is effectively moot.
I continue to be shocked in this thread at the factual statements being thrown around that there is easy data to push back on from the nationally managed survey of earned doctorates.
The fields where you are bound to academia for a reasonable ROI are definitely the humanities, since there is essentially no demand for a history PhD in the private sector, or an English PhD. It can help for job hunting in an unrelated field, I guess. But, a chemistry PhD? or any other applied lab PhD, it's not like you're shooting yourself in the foot by getting an advanced degree in such a field.
Men, specifically, are becoming less likely to enroll in Medical or Law school also. Women pick up the slack here but not in STEM doctoral degrees.
I don't think men are less competitive. See how many are in tech and finance still. I think they just see academia as a place that isn't for them and are less likely to opt for more years in it than they need