[HN Gopher] The Illustrated Guide to a PhD
___________________________________________________________________
The Illustrated Guide to a PhD
Author : chii
Score : 360 points
Date : 2025-01-12 05:26 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (matt.might.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (matt.might.net)
| liontwist wrote:
| It's a nice idea that you're going to help the boundary of human
| knowledge expand but I don't think infinite progress is the right
| model.
|
| All the evidence shows that fields are completely ignorant of
| each other and reinvent the basic solutions. This coincides with
| the theory that cohorts of experts develop expertise which is not
| transferrable.
|
| Watch as ML rediscovers harmonic analysis while awarding plenty
| of Phds to those involved.
|
| Rediscovery is a great thing. You bring new meaning and context.
| I's just not "expanding circle of knowledge"
|
| More likely is you will dig further down the track of the fads
| your advisor is into. The trend will be forgotten in a few
| decades, with a small change of unforeseen utility later. And its
| contribution will be to your personal life.
|
| The model proposed is also lacking in ambition because
| historically PhDs were significant.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| For example
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10739
| asicsp wrote:
| See also this previous discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29138570 _(158 points | Nov
| 7, 2021 | 121 comments)_
| oezi wrote:
| PhDs' unfortunately have lost much of their value.
|
| - There aren't enough post-doc and tenure positions for the glut
| of PhDs.
|
| - Plagiarism scandals have reduced the public's perception of a
| PhD to become almost something unprestigous.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| Thankfully not everyone feels this way, and humanity continues
| to benefit from the work that PhD holders do.
| oezi wrote:
| That certainly would be nice, but the risk to the individual
| that they are just exploited on a meagre salary for 3-6 years
| to only benefit their advisor has become so large that I
| don't recommend doing a PhD to anyone (or at least think very
| hard and very diligently investigate the prospective advisor
| and the faculty). Even if this means we as a society are
| losing out on scientific discoveries.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Exploitation doesn't often end at certification. Academic
| world is very harsh for post-doc too. And permanent
| positions are rarer than degree holders.
| CaffeineLD50 wrote:
| As AI becomes better the quality of plagiarism should improve.
|
| So there's that.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Yes exactly. If you're not a plumber are you even really
| contributing to human progress.
| wanderingmind wrote:
| I can do better, the one line guide to PhD.
|
| ``` For safety and well being of you and your family, EVACUATE
| NOWWW. ```
| danieldk wrote:
| This is most likely a very American perspective. There are
| countries where you get paid like a normal employee (not much
| worse than an entry-level job) with unemployment benefits,
| building up pension, etc. and where you can focus on doing your
| research (only a lightweight teaching obligation).
|
| I really treasure my (non-US) PhD time. I had a great adviser,
| was decently paid, and had a lot of time/opportunity to explore
| things, which I think lead to interesting research. And when I
| retire, it provides part of my pension. Also when I look back I
| often realize how relaxed my PhD time was compared to the much
| more stressful life after doing a PhD.
|
| The field really changed after doing my PhD (I'm in NLP/CL and
| when I did my PhD, HPSG-like grammars and maxent models were
| still reigning), but I think I still benefit a lot from the
| methodologies I learned while doing my PhD.
| maxweylandt wrote:
| I just completed my PhD at an American university, and I had
| a great time. Granted, my institution's stipend was on the
| higher side for the social sciences and I lived in an
| affordable city, which helped a lot, as did the kind and
| supportive faculty. I often feel the negative voices dominate
| discourse on this topic --- which is maybe fair given the
| many structural issues --- but it is possible, sometimes, to
| enjoy it.
|
| (to clarify I'm not disagreeing with you, US academia does
| have lots of issues that lead to many having a bad time. But
| still, getting paid to learn is a dream)
| blharr wrote:
| Even in America I've seen similar opportunities. Engineering
| PhDs at state schools have offers where you get paid a small
| but livable amount and get your tuition paid for. I think the
| big difference is that in industry you can just get paid way
| more in America compared to engineering elsewhere.
| zipy124 wrote:
| Or the UK perspective where again it is becoming unaffordable
| to live on the striped, definitely so in London where I am
| doing my PhD.
| linkerdoo wrote:
| 250K in student loan debt?
| relyks wrote:
| You don't typically pay for a PhD. You're accepted into a
| program and the schools pays for you, sometimes even with a
| stipend to help with living costs
| gylterud wrote:
| And on the Nordic countries you are employed and given a
| living wage while doing a PhD.
| ks1723 wrote:
| This is the case not only in the Nordic countries, but also
| across Europe like Germany, Netherlands, Italy, UK and
| probably others.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| The UK has a highly competitive system for a limited pool
| of public funds, many students are self-funded in PhD
| programs. The UK has some great programs but unlike the
| US and continental Europe it is highly skewed towards the
| upper classes as the only requirements for entry are
| basic competence and money for the fees.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| It depends on the subject. Amongst mathematics PhD
| students, at least, it seems that almost no one is self
| funded. But you're doing history or literature or
| something, that's another matter.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I do not understand how this misconception is so pervasive
| especially on hacker news. Every time phds are discussed
| someone says this. If you don't know anything at all about a
| topic why say something?
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| Just as in real life, some people just enjoy hearing
| themselves speak (write).
| fastneutron wrote:
| Nobody pays tuition in a PhD program. Your work is funded by
| grants and fellowships and you get paid a stipend.
| nolamark wrote:
| I understand your intent, but "Nobody" is as just as much of
| a myth.
|
| I self funded my PhD. I prefered it that way.
| ulrischa wrote:
| A phd ist not a phd. A phd in medicine is like a Bachelor thesis.
| While a phd in engineering can become a 10 year nightmare
| chaosite wrote:
| That's not right. A PhD is a PhD.
|
| An MD (Medical Doctorate) is like a master's degree. It's not
| like a bachelor's because many MD programs start out with or
| require a BSc, biology is a popular choice but a lot of STEM
| majors are possible.
|
| But MD+PhD programs exist and those are definitely PhDs.
|
| You are right that an MD is not a PhD, though. Notice how they
| don't call it a PhD.
| reshlo wrote:
| > It's not like a bachelor's because many MD programs start
| out with or require a BSc
|
| In many countries, the degree you must obtain to qualify as
| an MD is indeed a bachelor's degree, the "Bachelor of
| Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery" (often abbreviated MB ChB or
| MBBS).
| chaosite wrote:
| It's still a 5-6 year degree, as opposed to a 3-4 year
| bachelor's.
|
| I agree it's not a research degree though... But some
| master programs don't include writing a research thesis
| either.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| MDs are also obsessed with calling each other "doctor". It
| always comes across as imposed authority from people who are
| essentially body mechanics.
| blitzar wrote:
| Doctor
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhkwh8u30mo
| anticensor wrote:
| No, a MD is a professional doctorate with novelty and
| research requirements, it's between a DA and a PhD in terms
| of difficulty.
| chaosite wrote:
| Sorry, I'm having trouble parsing your point.
|
| "Professional degree" is juxtaposed with "research degree".
| So if you say it's a professional degree, you're basically
| agreeing it's not a research degree...
|
| In my country at least MDs are not required to be
| researchers and the degree has no novelty requirements.
| They're required to be competent medical professionals.
|
| There are countries where the base medical degree is the
| MBBS and MD is a graduate research doctorate. That's not
| what I'm talking about here.
|
| I'm not talking about "difficulty", by the way. Just the
| differences between the degrees.
| ySteeK wrote:
| You don't need a PhD to push the boundaries. You need a PhD to
| make others believe you pushed the boundaries!
| mr_mitm wrote:
| You got it backwards. You need to push the boundaries to get a
| PhD.
| brulard wrote:
| Maybe at the worlds best universities. For sure not at an
| average one.
| bdangubic wrote:
| you should read some PhD dissertations outside of top schools
| /s :)
| amelius wrote:
| Push the boundaries but not actually move them.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| LOL. Hey!
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Yes, because so many contemporary breakthroughs have come from
| some guy in his garage.
| fl4tul4 wrote:
| Yes, I can attest that nowadays, in some fields, research has
| become a 'game', where:
|
| - people torture data until it yields unreproducible results;
|
| - people choose venues that maximise their chances of getting
| published (and pay for publication sometimes, I'm looking at you,
| APC);
|
| - little concern given to excellence, rigour, and impact;
|
| - the chase for a 'diploma' from a renowned institute without
| putting the effort;
|
| I could go on and on, but I'll stop now.
|
| Perhaps something changes, I am waiting for this to happen for
| some time now (10y and counting).
|
| It's a bad system but that's what we have (at the moment).
| antegamisou wrote:
| Yes it's horrifying indeed. It wouldn't be a stretch to say
| that there are many that fall into this rat race and treat it
| as another type of MSc credential.
| 3abiton wrote:
| > - people choose venues that maximises their chances of
| getting published (and pay for publication sometimes, I'm
| looking at you, APC); > > - little concern given to excellence,
| rigour, and impact;
|
| It's because the kpis of assessment are built like this.
| Goodhard's law. I know lots of good researchers who get
| frustrated with the system and end up giving up and faltering
| to those 2 points. If within a uni 2 research groups are
| putting out research at different rate at different quality,
| the one with higher quality, lower frequency, and higher
| standard and ambition gets heavily penalized. Seen it in
| action.
| graycat wrote:
| Yes, in the STEM fields, for published papers, it's easy just
| to count them; much harder to read them; to evaluate them,
| some people just count awards, etc. So, the hard work that
| makes the good material in the paper may never be noticed.
|
| There is, "You get what you pay for." So, want papers, you
| will get papers, and you can count them. It goes, did Haydn
| write 101 symphonies or 1 symphony 101 times?
|
| Early on, had a good career going in computing but where
| occasionally some math made a lot of difference. So, to help
| that career got a Ph.D. in applied math. Never had any
| intention of being a professor but for a while did to try to
| help my seriously, fatally, _stressed out_ wife
| (Valedictorian, PBK, Woodrow Wilson, NSF, _Summa Cum Laude_ ,
| Ph.D.) -- took a professor job near her family home and farm.
|
| In my little Ph.D department, saw the Chair and four
| professors get fired and one more leave, fired or not. The
| career I had before grad school was a lot better than the one
| those professors had.
|
| Had to conclude that, tenure or not, being a professor is, on
| average, a poor way to even reasonable financial security.
| Generally there is low pay, e.g., too little to buy a house,
| keep cars running, support a wife and family. There's a LOT
| of dirty politics, infighting, higher-ups who don't want you
| to be successful.
|
| Bluntly, a research university takes in money that a lot of
| people care about and puts out papers that only a few people
| care about: Net, there is no very strong reason to pay
| professors enough for even reasonable financial security. Key
| sources of the money are short term _grants_ from the usual
| suspects, NSF, DOE, DARPA, NIH ( "too many for them all to be
| turned off at once" -- JB Conant?), but that is essentially
| just _contract work_ and not steady employment, with little
| promise that when a Professor 's baby is ready for college
| there will be money enough for them to go. It's a house built
| on paper that can be blown away by any thunder storm.
|
| Now, for a career, e.g., financial security, to leave
| something for the kids in the family tree, regard _business_
| , e.g., now involving the Internet, as the best approach, and
| there regard computing and math as important tools but only
| tools. Research? Did some, and it is a key to the business.
| Academic research? Did some, published, on my own dime, still
| waiting for the checks.
|
| History, how'd we get here? Used to be that some guy built a
| valuable business and had several sons. One of the sons
| inherited the business, and the rest went to the military as
| an officer, academics as a professor, or to politics. Then
| WWII showed that the STEM fields can be crucial for national
| security, and some related funding started, e.g., summer math
| programs for _selected_ high school students, research
| grants.
|
| "If you are so smart, why aren't you rich?"
|
| Ah, "The business of America is business."
| eloisant wrote:
| Yep. I also know researchers who refuse to play this game,
| but their career plateau'd and they have to work with little
| fundings.
| knolan wrote:
| I've seen this with a PhD student publishing several rapid fire
| papers in MDPI journals. They are repeating well understood
| physics work done 50 years ago using off the shelf commercial
| simulation software. They don't cite any papers older than a
| decade and claim without irony that the work is "significant"
| while none of their papers are cited. They will go to events
| where no one is an expert in the field and win prizes for
| showing lots of pretty pictures but nothing that isn't already
| well understood.
|
| When I, an expert in the field, tell them they need to produce
| something novel at their research panels I'm told I'm wrong.
| When I list all the work they are ripping off I'm told it's
| somehow different without explanation. When I question the
| obvious sloppiness in their work (the simulation data showing
| major artefacts) they blow up at me screaming and shouting.
|
| I've never experienced arrogance like this before. It's
| shocking. Their supervisors tell me that they are close to
| firing them but then also celebrate all the publications they
| are getting.
|
| The mind boggles.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| This isn't new, and academia has been rewarding behavior that
| wouldn't survive elsewhere for a long time.
|
| Maybe it's time we unshackled ourselves from these
| 'prestigious institutions'?
| knolan wrote:
| Your anti intellectual bias is showing. There are problems
| in all domains. I've seen plenty of arrogant fools in
| industry too.
|
| They're using an industry tool to do well trodden industry
| problems that were solved by academics decades ago.
|
| I'm not tolerating his behaviour and I've made my views
| clear to my colleagues. He's going to burn every bridge
| possible with this behaviour.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| I'm all in favor of intellectuals, it's academic
| bureaucracies I'm not fond of.
|
| I think Socrates was a hoot, and he taught in a cave or
| something like that.
|
| Priests teaching rural peasants to read in their
| monasteries, and collegial colleges for the public
| benefit are definitely meritorious.
|
| But,I mean, there is enormous corruption going on.
|
| How did Ren Youzai get into MIT? He was a body guard.
| Just because you've married into a billionaire's family
| MIT says "hey, send anyone you want in"?
|
| And I'm sure MIT isn't alone in mysteriously average
| students who not only get in but _graduate_ when linked
| to massively rich and powerful families. A recent US
| president comes to mind. Is that anti-intellectual?
| knolan wrote:
| You're arguing about highly specific cases while the vast
| majority of institutions get on with the job of educating
| large numbers of students and doing what research they
| can.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| The highly specific cases are glaring examples that the
| unbiased meritocracy they pretend to be is, possibly, not
| so.
|
| And the "large numbers of students" covers up the
| possible cronyism and/or corruption of the institution.
|
| I provide an example of a _totally unqualified_
| individual being allowed into a prestigious institution
| solely on the basis of his marriage family. Your response
| is that they mostly do a good job for most people?
|
| I've suggested that the research they do is not obviously
| beneficial to anyone except perhaps the person doing the
| research, possibly simply to advance their own careers
| (in or out of academia). Others have suggested the same.
|
| You haven't disagreed.
| knolan wrote:
| Ugh you're a tiresome culture war poster. I've no
| Interest in you or your hobby horse.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I think Socrates was a hoot, and he taught in a cave or
| something like that.
|
| I'm not sure whether you're joking or serious, but in any
| case, Socrates didn't teach in a cave, and you're
| probably referring to Plato's allegory of the cave.
|
| The interlocuters and followers of Socrates were mostly
| the wealthy elite of Athens.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| @lapcat yeah, he argued in the markets or where ever.
|
| I think I was mixing him up with Aristotle, e.g.
| https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-famous-
| people/caves-...
|
| who had some cave school or something.
|
| but there was some jokingness, yah. But I'm not anti-
| intellectual, which wasn't a joke.
|
| I wasn't making any point about his students or wealth.
| Education then, as now, is the plaything of the wealthy
| and wealthy nations.
| barbazoo wrote:
| In what way is education a plaything for the wealthy
| _now_?
| liontwist wrote:
| Criticism of university organizations is "anti
| intellectual bias"?
|
| Do you think criticism of religious organizations is
| "against god"?
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > When I, an expert in the field, tell them they need to
| produce something novel at their research panels I'm told I'm
| wrong. When I list all the work they are ripping off I'm told
| it's somehow different without explanation. When I question
| the obvious sloppiness in their work (the simulation data
| showing major artefacts) they blow up at me screaming and
| shouting.
|
| At risk of relying totally on assumptions, that wouldn't be a
| surprising reaction for someone facing first serious
| criticism after an entire life of probably being
| unconditionally lauded for their smarts (or the projection of
| it). When parents push children towards something
| relentlessly without providing any constructive feedback on
| account of living their dreams through their children and/or
| the fear of discouraging the child, any criticism can feel
| like someone is trying to destroy your life goals.
|
| > Their supervisors tell me that they are close to firing
| them but then also celebrate all the publications they are
| getting.
|
| Probably trying to protect themselves from being in the
| crosshairs of one of many things that can blow your career
| apart.
| knolan wrote:
| This individual is pretty unique in this regard. I've never
| seen anything like it. Most students will acknowledge that
| I know the literature and will accept guidance. This person
| seems to think they know everything but their work is the
| equivalent of a tutorial case in the commercial software.
| EagnaIonat wrote:
| I've seen it often as I have had to read peoples thesis
| when interviewing for job roles.
|
| Some from reputable universities. I have no idea how they
| defended them.
| throwoutway wrote:
| I've experienced this in the corporate world too, when
| someone is seeking a promotion. Entitlement is becoming a
| bane
| knolan wrote:
| Yes indeed. I've seen similar there too.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Ok to be fair the original is probably a badly scanned tech
| report from GE from the 70's with minimal implementation
| details. Whoever has tried to implement an obscure physics
| paper from that age knows how tough it can be.
|
| I think there is value revisiting some of this work with our
| modern toolsets and publishing the code in some public
| repository.
|
| But of course with a clear citation chain, and no pompous
| lies that a new discovery was made.
| knolan wrote:
| It's a really basic engineering problem that was studied
| extensively in many studies and we teach it at
| undergraduate.
|
| When I made the point that there is no scientific novelty
| here they insisted that their PhD was a 'generic' one and
| that means they can continue to run basic simulations
| according the to the recipe.
| enum wrote:
| Any evidence that this approach works? Are people who do this
| able to move from the PhD to a solid position afterward that
| they could not have had without the PhD?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Perhaps something changes, I am waiting for this to happen
| for some time now (10y and counting).
|
| What will change is that PhD will become an inherited title. If
| your parents were/are PhDs, you will ceremoniously be granted
| the title when coming of age. That title can then be rented out
| to people or organizations (such as companies) who are required
| to have a PhD by government regulation for the activity that
| they are in. You can of course also mortgage this title to a
| bank or other company that will take care of the process.
| y-curious wrote:
| Chiming in with my own experience. I was with a new PI that was
| a charlatan; I am grateful for the experience because I now
| know how to recognize these sorts of people and avoid them.
|
| "There is no journal of negative results." he would say at our
| weekly meetings. In order to secure his future, he set ablaze
| the dreams of 5 PhDs in my lab (all of which took their masters
| and went into industry; One developed severe OCD). Data was
| massaged, lies were told to his bosses.
|
| Guess what? He's still a professor there, his lab still
| publishes dubious, unreproducible research. No recourse was to
| be had at the university (all of the PhDs went to the head of
| the department and were told to f*ck off).
|
| Academia is on a death spiral at many schools, and I worry that
| it's up to the industry to carry the torch of research in the
| future.
| dataflow wrote:
| I just pray that everyone denigrating PhDs is making even greater
| contributions to humanity.
| CaffeineLD50 wrote:
| Since a PhD makes no intrinsic contribution, even greater than
| nothing is easily done.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Posting rude comments is worse than nothing, though.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| Why is getting a piece of paper after sitting in dozens of
| classes, and writing a essay considered automatically
| "beneficial to humanity"?
|
| Just pulling a random site (first hit on a search)
| https://www.findaphd.com/phds/browsebysubject.aspx
|
| It appears you can get a phd in dance, event management, or
| dozens of fields that aren't curing cancer, or AI.
|
| I'm reminded of the Olympic break dancer who did the
| "kangaroo" move. She has a PHD:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachael_Gunn
|
| thesis: "Her PhD thesis, titled Deterritorializing Gender
| in Sydney's Breakdancing Scene: A B-girl's Experience of
| B-boying" (from Wikipedia)
|
| Now I'm sure it was worthwhile, but I'm struggling to see
| it as a presumptive positive move to humanity for her work.
|
| And there's lots just like it.
|
| I'd even go so far as to assume that it's the extreme
| minority of phds that actually make a difference "for
| humanity" and not simply a good career move for the degree
| holder.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I'm unsure whether I should reply because I get the
| feeling that you think "beneficial to humanity" looks
| like someone working at OpenAI and not doing research on,
| say, anthropology.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| You tell me if for _any_ definition of "beneficial to
| humanity" that all or most Ph.Ds would fit that
| definition presumptively/intrinsically.
|
| I chose arbitrary fields that I suspected most readers of
| HN wouldn't be in, be familiar with, or necessarily
| esteem just to make the case more obvious. For example, a
| Ph.D in dance.
|
| There are lots and lots of PhDs in all kinds of things.
| You can get a Phd in videogames, food hygiene,
| librarianship, gender studies, ancient greek, theology.
|
| I am sure they are (mostly) worthwhile, and I'm not
| knocking any of them.
|
| I don't see how they would, by default, be seen to
| benefit humanity. Some small number might. A very small
| number. Possibly an _extremely_ small number.
|
| According to one random website there are over 70,000 new
| PhDs every year.
|
| That's a lot of assumed benefit to humanity. Or.. is it?
| saagarjha wrote:
| I consider the pursuit of knowledge to be beneficial to
| humanity. To that end most PhDs are doing something good.
| hulium wrote:
| Beneficial to humanity does not mean "increasing the
| GDP". Humans are not machines; there are things that are
| valuable that is not technology. Just from the title of
| the thesis I would not judge its value. Analyzing culture
| and writing about your own ideas can be a good thing.
|
| More important to me is whether it was written because
| someone really cared about the topic, or wrote 100s of
| pages of nothing to have a title.
|
| But I also want to comment on your idea that researching
| AI is superior to researching dancing because it is more
| beneficial for humanity. I am myself in AI adjacent
| research, but I still disagree. Dancing is a deeply human
| thing, and we should care about it. And I believe that
| many people (especially outside of this bubble) will
| think that many parts of currently hyped AI research has
| very questionable "benefit for humanity", such as AI
| image generators.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| I'm 100% with you on the nebulous value of AI, however
| given the "theme" of HN I think the bias is here towards
| such an assumption.
|
| I am not dismissing the value of dance or culture or
| social science or even event management (or farming or
| any of the dozens and dozens of things people can get
| Ph.D's in).
|
| And I note that in my post above.
|
| I am seriously not being sarcastic by saying it's
| worthwhile. Probably to her. Maybe her department. Maybe
| even to break dancing (well, maybe not break dancing).
|
| But the _presumption_ that someone getting a Ph.D has
| somehow "uplifted us all" as a default seems highly
| improbable to me.
|
| It no doubt uplifts a number of the degree holders, if
| statistics bear out.
|
| But that's like saying "If Elon Musk becomes rich, we all
| become rich" and I don't think that's true. Not even in
| some "trickle down" economics kinda way.
|
| If Elon gets a Ph.D we have all to assume some _intrinsic
| benefit to humanity_?
|
| Uhm, I don't think so.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| This comment is the equivalent of people doing their own
| research on vaccines.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| No one's denigrating those who choose to do a PhD, most of them
| I am sure are bright, ambitious and thoughtful individuals.
| Unfortunately the Academic Meat grinder system, successfully
| grinds them into working 80hr weeks on meaningless projects,
| meaningless papers that just serve to create jobs for other
| academics. They could be doing so much more with the faculty
| they possess, alas they would be more useful as a barista. (I
| am not picking on humanities PhD system, which is a bigger
| cesspool than normal, all my criticism is aimed at STEM PhD
| system. My actual advice would be do a PhD if you judge the lab
| you are joining as doing great work, lab is everything, don't
| join a PhD if it's not a lab that you've vetted or if you
| didn't get into that lab.)
| liontwist wrote:
| > making even greater contributions to humanity.
|
| than writing papers nobody will ever read? yes I am.
|
| A PhD can be a great contribution to your life, and the
| opportunities it can bring you and your family.
|
| The phony marketing that appeals to young people is that you
| are advancing the progressive human narrative.
| KnuthIsGod wrote:
| Not in here Australia.
|
| At many of our leading institutions in the hard sciences,
| rehashed work, data stolen from other teams, photoshopped images
| and a bit of plagiarism is enough to get you by.
|
| Once you get to the social "sciences", it is much worse.
|
| Karma cannot be denied and the result is that work outcomes with
| a PhD are derisible, since employers have worked out that
| something does not compute about the quality of freshly minted
| PhDs.
| paulpauper wrote:
| People complain about the US education system and higher-ed
| being bad or dumbed=-down. I'm like, compared to what? Much of
| the rest of the worst is worse in this regard. Cheating and
| plagiarism rampant. I've seen math papers in arxiv where the
| stuff is rehashed. Almost never US institutions.
| giacomoforte wrote:
| If you don't pick your lab/PI wisely you might end up stroking
| you PI's ego without accomplishing anything of value. Or you
| might end doing four years of work that ends up obsolete before
| you even graduate.
| kowlo wrote:
| For most (nowadays), the journey is about becoming a competent
| researcher.
| InkCanon wrote:
| I'm considering getting a masters or PhD (in PL) under a
| professor I work with now for my undergrad thesis. It has been my
| observation that the standard path of getting a standard
| corporate job tends to nullify all impact you could have (with a
| few rare exceptions). And after that I could get a job, become a
| professor, turn my research into a startup etc. The pros are
|
| 1) I know my professor and he's a solid guy
|
| 2) Pays decently well, money isn't too much of a concern
|
| 3) I get paid to do research, university provides generous grants
| if turned into a startup
|
| Cons
|
| 1) Hear a lot of bad things about the academic rat race, pressure
| to public even at masters/PhD level
|
| 2) I could probably hack out some paper into journals but whether
| I could have any real impact "on demand" (versus say
| spontaneously coming up with something) is a big question mark,
| especially within the deadlines given in the program
|
| Any thoughts on this? Especially heuristics, methods or ways to
| increase impact?
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| Ask yourself this, has there been any useful Programming
| Language that has come out of PL research/ Academia in the last
| 20 years? The only example I can think of is Julia, and it only
| seems to be used by other academics.
|
| If you're looking to be impactful, you are much better off
| joining a job and working in your free time, than doing a PhD.
| A PhD is a program to compete for academic prestige. Grad
| students want to publish papers that get them noticed at
| conferences, invited to talks at prestigious universities etc,
| those are the incentives, always has been in academia. The
| brightest minds join academia because they care more about
| prestige than money (as they should, anyone can earn money, few
| can win a Nobel prize). In a healthy academic system, prestige
| is linked to real world societal impact. That is still somewhat
| true in fields like Machine Learning, in some fields it seems
| to be completely dis-aligned from any real world impact
| whatsoever (which seems to be PL research). Our academic system
| unfortunately is a rotten carcass.
|
| You could still, advisor willing, do research that interests
| you and not care at all whether you get noticed by conferences/
| journals, your peers etc. But that takes a certain level of
| anti-social behavior that very few humans possess and so I say
| join a job. Plenty of companies are still building programming
| languages, like Google, Apple etc which are being used by
| engineers worldwide and if you finagle your way into a job at
| those teams, you will have a meaningful, impactful job, which
| is also well paying as a side bonus.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| > has there been any useful Programming Language that has
| come out of PL research/ Academia in the last 20 years?
|
| The goal of PL research is not, usually, to produce languages
| that see commercial adoption but to produce ideas that
| industry adopts. You cannot say a language like Rust is not
| influenced by PL research.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| No, I can very strongly claim that I doubt any of the
| modern languages like Rust, Go etc have been influenced by
| the trainwreck, that is programming language research.
|
| PL research today is actually the study of something called
| "type theory," whose relation to the act of building
| programming languages is the same relation a math PhD has
| to a carpenter. You will be a great mathematician if you do
| PL research but I would prefer if you do it in the maths
| department and not con us into believing it has something
| to do with programming languages. This is apparently what
| undergrads are taught in a compilers course:
| https://x.com/deedydas/status/1846366712616403366 I rest my
| case. (imagine the grad course syllabus)
|
| On the fringes, you might find research groups who are
| doing interesting useful stuff in programming languages,
| but that is an exception to the rule. Which is probably
| why, you never hear any of the new language developers ever
| cite programming language research.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| There is much more to PL research than "type theory".
| Look for instance at POPL 2024 program [1].
|
| Also Rust has been influenced by type theory. Rust first
| compiler was written in OCaml and the influence of
| OCaml/Haskell (and many other languages [2]) is pretty
| clear.
|
| Goal of PL research isn't to design programming languages
| but academic research has a lot of influence on
| programming languages.
|
| [1] https://popl24.sigplan.org/program/program-POPL-2024/
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34704772)
|
| Edit: regarding
| https://x.com/deedydas/status/1846366712616403366?mx=2
| these are just the formal specs of a type checker.
| Nothing magic or very complicated there, it's just a
| notation. Anyone who can understand and implement a type
| checker should be able to understand this notation as
| well.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| The creator of Rust in his own words:
|
| " Introducing: Rust Rust is a language that mostly cribs
| from past languages. Nothing new. Unapologetic interest
| in the static, structured, concurrent, large-systems
| language niche, Not for scripting, prototyping, or casual
| hacking, Not for research or exploring a new type system,
| Concentrates on known ways of achieving: More safety,
| More concurrency, Less mess, Nothing new? Hardly
| anything. Maybe a keyword or two, Many older languages
| better than newer ones: e.g., Mesa (1977), BETA (1975),
| CLU (1974) ... We keep forgetting already-learned
| lessons., Rust picks from 80s/early 90s languages: Nil
| (1981), Hermes (1990), Erlang (1987), Sather (1990),
| Newsqueak (1988), Alef (1995), Limbo (1996), Napier
| (1985, 1988)."
|
| If modern PL research is trying to take credit for the
| latest hot programming language (which I doubt they are,
| it's only internet commentators who have nothing to do
| with PL research who argue with me. Actual PL researchers
| don't care about Rust), they should be embarrassed.
|
| Thank you for linking latest PL research, it has been a
| while since I've gone through it, glad to see nothing has
| changed. Ask yourself, how many of those talks in day 1,
| have accompanying code? is it even 25%?
|
| For giggles I decided to peruse through "Normal
| bisimulations by Value". A 54 page dense paper with
| theorems, equations and lemmas. Lol, what are we even
| doing here? You can also notice that they don't bother
| justifying their research in the intro or the abstract,
| claiming relevance to any actual programming language.
| They themselves realize it's just math, and PL
| researchers has become a euphemism for math. Frankly,
| even one such paper being accepted to a PL conference
| tells me something is going awry in the field, but if a
| majority of papers are like this, then the field is a
| wasteland, that only serves to grind young talented minds
| into spending their lives chasing academic prestige with
| no value to society.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| > Ask yourself, how many of those talks in day 1, have
| accompanying code? is it even 25%?
|
| 57 out of 93 papers (61%) published at POPL 24 have an
| artifact available. Note that this may also be automated
| proofs etc, it's not necessarily "running code".
|
| But I also think focusing on POPL as a representation of
| the PL community isn't entirely fair. POPL is the primary
| conference focused on type systems within the PL
| community. It's a niche within a niche. Conferences like
| OOPSLA, ECOOP, or ICFP are much broader and much less
| likely to be so focused on mathematical proofs.
|
| [1] https://dl.acm.org/toc/pacmpl/2024/8/POPL
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| I asked Claude to go through all paper names and estimate
| how many have code vs how many are proofs:
|
| "Based on my analysis, I estimate: - ~35-40 papers
| (roughly 35%) likely have significant accompanying code -
| ~55-60 papers (roughly 65%) are primarily
| theoretical/mathematical proofs "
|
| I suspect even the remaining 35% doesn't have much to do
| with programming languages, and I don't think these stats
| change much for other conferences.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| > I don't think these stats change much for other
| conferences.
|
| I'd severely doubt that: there is a large difference in
| focus on theory vs practice between conferences. POPL
| really is one of the more theoretical conferences. At a
| conference like ECOOP, you're unlikely to see many proofs
| (I'd guess at most 20% of papers, based on personal
| experience).
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| I did the same thing for ECOOP 2024:
| https://2024.ecoop.org/track/ecoop-2024-papers#program
|
| Claude estimates 10 papers related programming languages
| and its features and 27 related to theory, verification
| etc.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| One sub-field of PL research is the ability to formally
| specify programs, and thus understand their meaning and
| prove their correctness. A great project that is based on
| lots of theoretical foundations and practical
| implications is compcert [1]. They wrote a C compiler and
| proved that it translates C code to equivalent assembly
| code. You couldn't even state the problem without all the
| maths, let alone prove it. I'd argue that having correct
| compilers is worth the effort.
|
| I assume "Normal bisimulations by Value" talks about
| equivalence relations between concurrent programs. If you
| want to prove correctness properties of concurrent
| programs or cryptographic protocols, this is one of the
| tools. It's not because there's no code and only maths
| that it's not relevant.
|
| > Actual PL researchers don't care about Rust
|
| Not true, I just watched this video a few days ago about
| Rust semantics [2]. How would you prove that a Rust
| program making use of unsafe construct is actually safe?
| what does safe even mean? how to describe rigorously the
| behavior of the rust type checker? AFIAU there's not even
| an informal spec, let alone a formal one. How are you
| supposed to write correct program or compiler if the
| language isn't specified?
|
| > Rust is a language that mostly cribs from past
| languages. Nothing new.
|
| Doesn't mean that Rust isn't influenced by academic
| languages and ideas. Anybody who knows Haskell or OCaml
| see the direct influence.
|
| Research isn't industry. A lot of what is produced may
| have no direct applications but may in the future. This
| is the point, it's _research_. Also it 's not because you
| don't see the connections between research and
| application that they don't exist. Lots of people working
| on these industrial tools have an academic background and
| bring their knowledge into the equation.
|
| > If modern PL research is trying to take credit for the
| latest hot programming language (which I doubt they are,
| it's only internet commentators who have nothing to do
| with PL research who argue with me. Actual PL researchers
| don't care about Rust), they should be embarrassed.
|
| You're the one explaining that Rust didn't benefit from
| academic research which is obviously not the case.
|
| [1] https://compcert.org [2]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y1dLDnS4uE
| saagarjha wrote:
| Have you ever talked to the people who design those
| languages? Because they will disagree with you about as
| strongly. And, of course, they are in a position to be
| correct.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| 1. TypeScript (and Dart, which influenced it) would not
| exist without the research on gradual and optional
| typing. Many other of the type system features in
| TypeScript - like type inferencing, intersection and
| union types, and type-level programming (e.g. conditional
| types) - find their origin in PL research, and were
| uncommon in mainstream but common in academic programming
| languages before TypeScript appeared.
|
| 2. Similarly, mypy was created by Jukka Lehtosalo as part
| of his PhD [1] and part of a wave of research in applying
| gradual typing to dynamically typed programming
| languages.
|
| 3. Rust's ownership types and borrowing are based on PL
| research, such as linear logic / linear types. Same for
| traits. Early Rust even had typestates.
|
| 4. Several of the core developers of Rust, Go,
| TypeScript, C#, Dart, Scala, have a PhD in PL or a
| background in research.
|
| 5. Generics are another feature that was heavily
| researched in academia (admittedly a longer time ago)
| before becoming part of mainstream programming languages.
|
| So I completely disagree with you: most modern languages
| have been heavily influenced by programming language
| research. In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to find a modern
| PL that hasn't been in some way influenced by PL
| research.
|
| (One thing I agree with in your comment, is that current
| PL research focuses too heavily on type systems and
| should look more at other interesting PL features. My
| recommendation to InkCanon would therefore be to look
| broader than type systems. The problem with research on
| type systems is that, because it looks math-y, it feels
| more like "science" and hence "cures impostor syndrome".
| But cool stuff can be real science too!)
|
| [1] https://mypy-lang.org/about.html
| peterkelly wrote:
| > A PhD is a program to compete for academic prestige
|
| That's true for some people but others have different
| motivations, such as learning useful skills so they can gain
| the ability to work on interesting problems in a given field.
|
| Doing a PhD in PL can also help you get the kind of jobs you
| mentioned, and achieve more once you're there. For me, the
| most valuable I thing I got out of the process was extensive
| exposure to the literature, which has been useful in a range
| of contexts.
| bdangubic wrote:
| _Ask yourself this, has there been any useful Programming
| Language that has come out of PL research / Academia in the
| last 20 years?_
|
| Scala
| InkCanon wrote:
| There are several assumptions here tangled together here
|
| 1) Use is sufficient, but not necessary for impact. Theory of
| relativity, a lot of QM, etc has had only uses in real world
| edge cases, but have enormous value. The value function for
| impact, so to speak, includes more than just use.
|
| 2) There is the structure of academia and it's incentives,
| the average behavior of people in it, and it's outcomes. I
| don't necessarily have to bow to it's incentives, nor behave
| like the average person in there. Academia is also
| sufficiently large and fractal that you can find people less
| interested in the incentives and more in some thing they
| obsesses about.
|
| PL has had some interesting, although sometimes unheard of,
| real world uses. CUDA for example. A significant chunk of PL
| now focuses on ML. Awhile back a company called Monoidics got
| acquired my Facebook for work on static bug finding with
| formal methods. Rust has been pretty influenced by PL
| concepts. New languages like WASM are formally verified from
| the ground up, and there are exciting opportunities for that.
|
| I have considered slinging my resume to more research
| oriented companies, but hearsay from people is that the
| golden age is over. Under FOMO and stock market pressure,
| these companies are eradicating the kind of freewheeling
| research they used to and dumping money into ML and ML
| hardware. Not to mention it's a bit of a dice roll and a
| circus to get a job at such companies nowadays as a fresh
| graduate.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| The only group under low pressure, free to do anything they
| want in Academia are tenured profs who have established
| themselves well or grad students who don't care at all
| about remaining in Academia (and presumably have NSF
| fellowship or similar so that they don't need to listen to
| their advisor either). Everyone else needs to grind, profs
| without tenure are arguably under the highest pressure,
| PhDs who want to stay in academia have high pressure etc.
| If your prof is tenured but not established and is
| struggling for grant money, even he is under high pressure
| to publish and win grants, something I learnt the hard way.
| The grant acceptance rate is what, like 20% these days.
|
| My 2 cents, you will be more likely to encounter creative
| coders who are passionate about a field in the right
| industry team than Academia. Unfortunately getting into the
| right industry team is also a grind, and you likely won't
| get there right out of undergrad, but within 10 years, if
| you put effort and grind, you can get there. I think it's
| better odds and more fun than going to academia, but your
| mileage may vary.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| >getting a standard corporate job tends to nullify all impact
| you could have
|
| It's very strange to me that you think other people would pay
| you millions or _tens_ of millions of dollars over an average
| 30- or 40-year career, without you generating at least that
| amount of value back to the external world as a whole, and
| probably generating some huge multiple more, and yet all that
| counts as "no impact" to you. Especially when your comparison
| point isn't oncology or something, but doing research in PL
| theory of all things.
|
| But I thank you for giving me the opportunity to get a little
| riled up on a lazy Sunday morning, it's one of my favorite
| hobbies. My recommendation to you for "increasing [overall]
| impact" is to read https://80000hours.org/ and follow their
| advice, and for "increasing impact [in this niche I really care
| about]" is simply to be more bounded with your claims.
| InkCanon wrote:
| >people would pay millions over a career without you
| generating at least that value back
|
| Some of it is empirical observation. I've seen many friends
| at big/elite tech firms get paid to do very little. Many
| claims online to that effect, although I weigh it lesser. And
| I think it's completely plausible. I think because of the
| exponential advancement of technology, huge accrual of
| capital and inability of human incentive structures to keep
| up, value does not universally equal money. IMO many
| examples. Many people are tech firms do things that are very
| loosely related to revenue generation - so you can almost
| double your headcount during COVID, fire tons of them and
| still function the same (a substantial amount of hiring and
| firing was tech companies FOMOing about each othe). Meta's VR
| division has burned through $50 billion, but it's people got
| paid incredible salaries. One in three Nvidia employees are
| now worth over 20 million. Many of them were working decent
| jobs making GPUs for video games and suddenly because of AI,
| their net worth went up 100x. Oncology is another possible
| example. By far the wealthy people today are all in
| computers, instead of curing cancer.
|
| I'm not saying these people are bad or anything like that.
| The other part of the equation, wealth as a signal, has
| become incredibly noisy. In some areas it is still a strong
| signal, typically smaller companies and startups where
| providing value is a lot more closely related to what you
| make. And conversely, I don't agree with money generated
| being a signal of impact in itself.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| >I've seen many friends at big/elite tech firms get paid to
| do very little.
|
| What matters is the outcome, not the amount of effort one
| puts in. If you're working at e.g. Google for $200,000 a
| year, your changes can affect millions to billions of
| people. At that scale even a small improvement like making
| Google Sheets load 1% faster can equate to millions of
| dollars of additional revenue downstream -- and likely
| _tens_ of millions of dollars of actual value, since the
| largest tech companies actually capture only a low
| percentage of the value they create for their consumers.
|
| You've just justified that $200k several times over for
| what might amount to two or three day's worth of effort for
| you, that's true. That's not a bug - that's a feature of
| working in a successful, scalable business. If you're
| inclined to do more than this "bare minimum" which you
| observe so many doing, just imagine how much value you
| could create for others if you actually worked close to
| your capacity in such a place.
|
| >[B]ecause of the exponential advancement of technology,
| huge accrual of capital and inability of human incentive
| structures to keep up, value does not universally equal
| money.
|
| I don't understand the thread of logic here. Claiming that
| human incentive structures are "unable to keep up" with
| value creation suggests to me that money is, if anything, a
| heavily lagging indicator of the real value one is
| generating, which is in line with the point above. But I
| don't think that is the point you are trying to make.
|
| >Meta's VR division has burned through $50 billion, but
| it's people got paid incredible salaries.
|
| Most company actions are bets that the company's leadership
| think are net positive. Sometimes those bets don't pan out
| the way we expect them to - that's normal. Your own
| research might take longer than you expect it to, but that
| in itself isn't a reason to look back and say you made a
| bad bet.
|
| As for the people, yes, you generally have to pay a lot to
| get top talent, and even that doesn't assure you of
| success. That's probably 2-4 years, out of a 30- or 40-year
| career, where their contributions may have been net
| negative to the bottom line. Maybe. If we include caveats
| like "Meta VR never becomes profitable in the future,
| either" and "none of the innovations from Meta VR turn out
| to be profit-generating via a different, unexpected
| mechanism". This probably equalizes out over the course of
| a career for the vast majority of these engineers. Not
| exactly a ship sinker.
|
| >One in three Nvidia employees are now worth over 20
| million. Many of them were working decent jobs making GPUs
| for video games and suddenly because of AI, their net worth
| went up 100x.
|
| AI is hugely, hugely useful for all kinds of people. I use
| it every day both professionally and personally. Almost
| everyone I know does the same. If you truly derive no value
| at all from it, you are decidedly in the minority.
|
| Is the claim here that they _shouldn 't_ have made money
| off of helping to manufacture the hardware that enables
| this invention which so many have found so enormously
| useful? Or maybe it's that since they never intended for
| their hardware to be useful for such a thing, their
| involvement should be worth less. That sounds way more like
| trying to invent a human incentive structure that can't
| keep up with the exponential advancement of technology than
| what we actually have. The current incentive structure,
| however, is wonderfully open to serendipity like this.
|
| >The other part of the equation, wealth as a signal, has
| become incredibly noisy.
|
| You've just given two examples where one company's wealth
| fell up to $50b because they made a bet on something that
| (for now) nobody wants, and another company's wealth went
| so high that a plurality of their employees are now
| millionaires because they made something everyone wants.
| That doesn't sound like a low signal-to-noise ratio to me.
| InkCanon wrote:
| >What matters is the outcome, not the effort
|
| >At certain companies the scale could be enormous
|
| The latter is true and I think the most legitimate reason
| for working at big companies. I should specify in the
| first they also accomplish little and affect very little.
| Things like internal tools that went nowhere, running
| basic ETL scripts, things like updating financial trade
| systems to comply with some new regulation. And this at a
| pretty slow pace.
|
| My meaning about Nvidia and Meta VR is how people who
| didn't create value got enormously wealthy anyway. In
| Nvidia's case, traditional GPU teams (which I suspect
| received most of the benefit because they've vested the
| longest and made up most of Nvidia's pre AI boom) got
| hugely rewarded by data center GPUs, which they played
| little role in. Conversely Meta's VR team still got paid
| really well (their stock is even up because of AI hype,
| despite VR losses) despite their failure. So you have
| these systems where even if you fail or don't play any
| role in success, you're still paid enormously well. This
| is because companies capture the value, then distribute
| in their very imperfect ways.
|
| You're right that the valid reason for this is that tech
| companies act as risk absorbing entities by paying people
| to take high risk bets. But the necessary condition for
| these are
|
| 1) Hiring really good people (not just intelligent, but
| really motivated, curious, visionary etc)
|
| 2) A culture which promotes that
|
| The on the ground reality of 1) is that it's a huge mess.
| The system has turned into a giant game. There are entire
| paid courses advertised to get a job in MAANG. The
| average entrant to MAANG spends six to eight months
| somersaulting through leetcode questions, making
| LinkedIn/Twitter/YouTube clones, doing interview prep,
| etc etc. Many causes for this, including the
| bureaucratization of tech companies, massive supply of
| fresh grads, global economic disparities, etc. It's no
| longer the days when nerds, hackers and other thinkers
| drifted together.
|
| 2) Because of FOMO, AI hype and frankly general lack of
| vision from many tech CEOs, it's just a mess. Anything AI
| is thrown piles of money at (hence the slew of ridiculous
| AI products). Everything else is under heavy pressure to
| AI-ify. I've heard from people inside Google has really
| ended that kind of research culture that produced all the
| great inventions. There are still great people and teams
| but increasingly isolated.
| Eduard wrote:
| > The main reason being getting a standard corporate job tends
| to nullify all impact you could have (with a few rare
| exceptions).
|
| "Impact" is an ambiguous term, so it's quite vague what you
| mean. I assume "positive impact on the world and knowledge".
|
| While this mantra is indeed motivational, it can set you up for
| disappointment, both in corporate as well as research/PhD
| settings, at the moment you realize how many hurdles there can
| be (toxic colleagues, bureaucracy, ignorance, etc.).
|
| Also, for this interpretation of "impact", a corporate job can
| be very impactful as well.
| InkCanon wrote:
| >impact is ambiguous
|
| This is the core of the issue (most replies usually involve
| some slightly different definitions). I take many definitions
| of impact, including societal use, contributing to knowledge,
| etc. But it's much clearer there are many things people do
| that are low impact, especially in places with a lot of
| bureaucracy, politics etc.
|
| A corporate job can, but it seems to me as a result of
| various incentives corporate jobs tend to be
| compartmentalized, low impact and repetitive. We're also at a
| down cycle where tech, the historical haven for impact in a
| job, is scaling back a ton of things to focus on stock
| prices. If you know of any corporate jobs that do have impact
| by some definition of it, I'd love to hear it. In my
| experience these have been mostly startups.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| Understand that a PhD is an apprenticeship to become a
| researcher. You are not expected to do career defining work as
| a PhD student, and indeed that is unlikely.
|
| Your relationship with your advisor is very important. It seems
| like you already have that sorted out.
|
| Most successful PhDs (in CS) involve tackling a relatlively
| small and easy project, usually suggested by your advisor,
| early on, and then expanding and iterating on this. Once you
| make some progress on a topic you'll easily find more
| directions to take it.
|
| Working with other people is one of the easiest ways to
| increase your productivity. All the great groups I saw had a
| lot of collaboration. Don't fall into the "lone scholar locked
| in the library" stereotype.
|
| Avoid bad people. Avoid getting stuck in your own head. Realize
| a PhD is a project like many others. It doesn't define you. You
| start it, you work consistently on it, you finish it.
|
| Doing a research Masters is usually a waste of time. Doing a
| taught Masters is a lot of fun, but something quite different
| to a PhD.
| InkCanon wrote:
| Thanks for the reply!
|
| >A PhD is an apprenticeship to become a researcher That's a
| good way to look at it. I suspect one of the biggest possible
| benefits of a PhD is that you're put in an environment
| structured to and pressuring you to develop something new,
| which is the opposite of most other human work.
|
| >Start a relatively small and easy project and collaborate
| Sound advice, it's the general approach I've taken for my
| undergrad thesis.
|
| >A research masters is a waste of time, a coursework masters
| isn't Really? It looks the opposite to me. A research masters
| let's you collaborate with different people and work on new
| things. A coursework masters is taking advanced classes.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| At least in the UK, a PhD takes one year more than a MRes
| and it lets you become a university lecturer. It also
| should be funded, whilst you might have to pay your own way
| for an MRes. Hence I don't see the point of doing an MRes
| when you can stay an extra year and have more opportunities
| afterwards. MRes are usually a consolation prize for people
| who drop out of their PhD, IME.
| InkCanon wrote:
| In my side of the world I think it's more similar to the
| USA where a masters is two years and a PhD is four. And
| it's fifty fifty whether a PhD has a masters or comes
| straight from undergrad. I'm leaning towards masters
| because I don't particularly care about the prestige and
| I don't want to over commit. I don't think the title is
| important to the impact I have
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| > Hear a lot of bad things about the academic rat race,
| pressure to public even at masters/PhD level
|
| Strongly depends on the advisor and your goals. If you want to
| stay in academia, some amount of publications is required. Your
| advisor, especially if he pays your salary, may also push you
| to publish. If both are not an issue, I guess you can even
| finish without publications.
|
| > I could probably hack out some paper into journals but
| whether I could have any real impact "on demand" (versus say
| spontaneously coming up with something) is a big question mark,
| especially within the deadlines given in the program
|
| Nobody comes up with good ideas on demand. As you progress in
| your academic career the rate of ideas (theoretically) grows.
| That's why you need the advisor: he can come up with ideas at
| rate sufficient for his students
| InkCanon wrote:
| >advisor might push to publish
|
| That's fair. I'm just cautiously eyeing the likelihood of
| coming up with something publishable that's not a going
| through the motions kind of thing.
| sega_sai wrote:
| As a professor many years after the PhD my advice is to do the
| PhD only if you are genuinely excited / cannot stop yourself
| from doing research. Only then it will outweigh the negatives
| of difficulties of getting the jobs, somewhat low pay etc. At
| least from my point of view I always tried to work on what was
| interesting to me and what I was good at/or it was interesting
| to learn vs optimising what is more high profile/sexy. I don't
| think it is a universal advice but at least I always enjoyed
| what I did
| InkCanon wrote:
| What do you mean by cannot stop doing research? I certainly
| haven't discovered anything new, but I love learning new
| things, reading about ideas, coming up with them.
| enum wrote:
| You'll do great. This will eventually turn into new
| discoveries if you keep at it.
| InkCanon wrote:
| That is the hope!
| lordnacho wrote:
| Why not just study a bunch of different things to Master's
| level then? Learning something genuinely new seems like it
| has a much lower return to effort.
| InkCanon wrote:
| Good question. IMO
|
| 1) There's a kind of "hard" learning you're learning a
| fixed, structured way from a textbook.
|
| 2) There's a kind of "soft" learning which is
| transmission of knowledge, which happens a lot more face
| to face when you're working together.
|
| 3) Then there's a kind of research learning, where you're
| doing something new, usually with collaborators.
|
| The second and third are really best done in certain
| environments like research or good companies
| sega_sai wrote:
| I meant that you tend to spend free time on that as opposed
| to treating it like 9 to 5 job. and again it is important
| that if you do that, it is because you just want to see
| what comes out of your experiment/learn a new thing etc
| rather than because you have to publish or is forced by
| your advisor.
| InkCanon wrote:
| I see. I think I definitely lean towards that.
| skalarproduktr wrote:
| I can only second this after having advised a few students
| from bachelor to PhD level. The ones who do well are
| (usually) the ones who are genuinely excited. Not only about
| the thing they're doing, but in general. It really helps
| getting over the lows.
|
| Furthermore, do not underestimate the importance of sheer
| luck. Exaggerating a bit, deep learning was just another
| subfield of ML, until GPU-powered DL really took off and made
| the researches behind the most fundamental ideas superstars.
| This is not a given, and it might take years or decades until
| it's really clear whether you're making an impact or not.
|
| I wish you the best of luck, InkCanon, and stay excited!
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| > And after that I could get a job, become a professor, turn my
| research into a startup etc.
|
| chances of getting professor-ship, tenure, or even a post-doc
| is close to nil, due to extreme competition and limited seats.
| academia is the most slowly moving enterprise, some folks in
| their 80s still around, when young grads kicked out.
|
| getting a job after PhD may also be very hard. you would be
| very over-qualified, likely huge ego, and very narrow skillset
| in your domain, that is likely lagging behind industry.
| managerial (or even just "work at corporate") skills will be
| lacking. unemployment of PhDs is wildly high, even higher than
| if you did not do PhD.
|
| turning research into startup may be much harder than you would
| expect. milking government funding for years (and surviving
| jungle of academic politics to get its cut) is very different
| from market outside of it (i.e. venture capital, startups,
| tech, etc.), at the time you would want to make startup you
| would have to learn all from scratch, or even un-learn, as many
| would be detrimental.
|
| then there is toxic academic culture (funding, publishing,
| power dynamics). and in recent years academia become pit of
| wild woke left agenda, even more oil on fire.
|
| tbh, if you want to do something special, academia as we have
| it today is not the best place.
|
| if you still want to do it, guess best strategy is to "do it
| quick and get out". some smart people I know doing exactly
| that. doing accelerated PhD asap and getting the hell out of
| academia. (but then, it depends all on your professor power
| dynamics. in some places they would not let you graduate unless
| they wish so.)
| andrepd wrote:
| > changes of getting professor-ship, tenure, or even a post-
| doc is close to nil
|
| What an extreme exaggeration. Yes academia is competitive,
| yes tenure is hard to get (obviously). But the chance is not
| "close to nil" for that at all, and it's certainly not "close
| to nil" for a postdoc lol.
|
| > getting a job after PhD may also be very hard. you would be
| very over-qualified, likely huge ego, and very narrow
| skillset in your domain, that is likely lagging behind
| industry. managerial (or even just "work at corporate")
| skills will be lacking. unemployment of PhDs is wildly high,
| even higher than if you did not do PhD.
|
| This is just not true x) There are no numbers where PhDs have
| worse unemployment than grads.
|
| Conversely, it does open a lot of doors for industry jobs
| (think ML, quant finance, to name a few)
| InkCanon wrote:
| >getting a job in academia is really hard
|
| In my side of the world its a little bit better, the CS
| department has plans to double headcount in the next few
| years. They've got whole new faculty apartment buildings set
| up and everything, and the funding situation is quite
| generous (I'm told). Although I have also read in the USA the
| bar for even stipend paying masters/PhDs has gotten
| incredibly high.
|
| >Milking government funding for years
|
| There are special programs for startup oriented funds, so
| it's more like VC pitching to academics with equity free
| grants (although naturally there's the whole university
| research IP issue). But I'm quite willing to put up with it
| to do something meaningful (at a decent number of jobs you
| put up with it just to keep your job). I do keep an ear on
| startup-y things, I don't think I'll have it any easier than
| an undergrad but I think I won't be too disadvantaged.
|
| >Do it and get out
|
| I don't place too much emphasis on the PhD per se but the
| real value of it.
|
| >If you want to do something special academia is not the
| place
|
| Ten years ago tech would've been a good place. But now
| especially for a new graduate its a bloodbath, not to mention
| there's been huge layoffs. Academia seems like the better
| option nowadays.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Getting a postdoc position is usually easier than getting
| into a PhD program in the same university, especially in top
| universities. And the chances of getting a tenure-track
| faculty position or similar are probably something like 1/3.
|
| The biggest obstacles to getting an academic job are
| personal. The jobs are wherever they are, and your (or your
| partner's) preferences cannot change that. If you are willing
| to relocate, your chances of getting a good academic job are
| much higher than if you restrict your search to a single city
| / region / country / continent.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| And now imagine this as a hypersphere in 10 dimensions. The
| choice of two dimensions in the post is arbitrary, isn't it?
| jokoon wrote:
| I also like what Dyson had to say about the PhD
|
| Can't find it now
| Sid950 wrote:
| Can't deny tbh
| ioblomov wrote:
| Dyson is the (super) rare exception of a full professor without
| a PhD. But then again he did unify quantum electrodynamics.
|
| https://www.ias.edu/sns/dyson
| kowlo wrote:
| I would show this to all prospective PhD students, and then again
| on their first day if they were selected.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I was expecting
| https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=2031
| lihua919 wrote:
| agree
| fastneutron wrote:
| Most discussions I see online about whether or not someone should
| do a PhD tend to assume:
|
| - The student becomes hyper focused and pigeonholed into some
| esoteric and unemployable domain, destined to run on the
| postdoctoral treadmill for decades.
|
| - The PI is a control freak who only cares about publications,
| and considers students who leave for industry jobs after
| graduation to be failures.
|
| These stereotypes can have an element of truth, but there are
| more enlightened PhD programs and PIs that understand the value
| of cross-cutting and commercializable research than you'd expect
| from the discourse. Not everyone is stuck working on a pinprick
| of knowledge, and if you choose your program and PI wisely, you
| can go much further and do many more things than you would never
| have access to with just an undergraduate background.
| hikingsimulator wrote:
| One big issue is that industry jobs in some areas increasingly
| expect academic excellence in the shape of "publishing in top 3
| conferences" for example.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| An obviously totally arbitrary barrier. Why not 4 or even 5?
|
| Someone who only published in 2 top conferences is obviously
| not worth anyone's time. But 3, now we're talking.
| halgir wrote:
| Most quantitative recruitment criteria are arbitrary to
| some degree. Unless you rigorously examine every single
| applicant, you need some heuristics for initial filtering.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| So you need some arbitrary filtering to give you
| breathing room for your objective heuristics?
|
| For some reason that seems slightly non-optimal.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Because that's the number conferences that are generally
| considered to be better than the rest. Just like the "top
| 4" computer science schools in the US are unambiguously
| Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. You can
| ask, why not 5? Because then you start getting into
| questions about whether you want to include UCLA or UIUC or
| Caltech and it's significantly more complicated.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| And... it's totally arbitrary.
|
| Top people come from non-top schools, and lots of non-top
| people from from "top" schools. And some top people come
| from no school at all.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Of course, but there are still four schools which are
| clearly the "top" ones. The same is true for academic
| conferences, or big tech, or intelligence agencies.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| Top is just marketing. In Big Tech it's market cap or
| something, but it's not proof of anything and may be just
| marketing. Google is a search advertising monopoly
| pretending to be a "tech" company (per Thiel), but is a
| "top" company to work for. Ok.
|
| And intelligence agencies are government mandated, not
| marketing made. Or at least I haven't heard any marketing
| from the NSA saying how selective they are in admissions
| (as if that means anything).
| Over2Chars wrote:
| I'm not saying you're wrong but...
|
| Elon Musk skipped his PhD program and did many more things than
| spending time in school would have allowed him to do. Of
| course, most people aren't Elon (probably a good thing).
|
| Other than preparing you for a career in academia or some
| highly regulated environment where education is erected as a
| barrier to entry, it's hard for me to think of "many more
| things" that are open to a phd holder than to someone who is
| not.
| fastneutron wrote:
| Celebrity exceptions are exactly that; exceptions. Those
| people knew an opportunity when they had one, and were able
| to generalize their early successes into other domains by
| leveraging the financial, social, and intellectual capital
| they accumulated. People who fit this description aren't the
| ones reading this thread.
|
| In some fields all you need is a computer and an idea to be
| impactful, but in plenty of other fields you'd be hard
| pressed to make any credible, let alone meaningful impact
| without significant intellectual preparation and tacit
| knowledge. These things only come through experience, and for
| many people, the PhD program is that experience.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| I agree that the exception is rare, but it suggests that
| the non-exception isn't exclusively necessary. It might
| suggest that the dominant paradigm of diplomas is quite
| non-optimal or at least optional.
|
| Carlos Ghosn started out as a factory manager (although
| well educated), and in his Stanford interview the presenter
| noted that Stanford produced no factory managers, although
| it produces lots of would be global CEOs.
|
| Perhaps it should produce more factory managers.
|
| Musk has shown an ability to make an impact in multiple
| fields for which he seems quite under qualified for, for
| which he did not have "significant intellectual preparation
| and tacit knowledge". He read alot.
|
| I think there are more non-celebrity exceptions that are
| simply not well known.
|
| And there are lots of people in PhD programs who, despite
| their education, do not make credible or meaningful
| impacts, quite possibly not at all due to their competence
| or training quality, but due to wholly accidental or
| uncontrollable factors: industry shifts, business culture,
| changes in government research funding, or their entire
| paradigm being based on faulty assumptions that were simply
| not known and discovered later, or superseded by some
| innovation, etc.
|
| Academics are rarely comfortable discussing the
| shortcomings of academia.
| fastneutron wrote:
| No, the non-exception is not absolutely necessary, and
| there are plenty of people on my staff who fit the
| description. There are also plenty more who Dunning-
| Krueger their way into thinking they do, but break down
| when challenged to do anything novel. Understand your
| options and choose your program carefully. > Musk has
| shown an ability to make an impact in multiple fields for
| which he seems quite under qualified for, for which he
| did not have "significant intellectual preparation and
| tacit knowledge". He read alot. He also had a giant pile
| of money from his PayPal windfall to hire the right
| people with the tacit knowledge to act on his ideas. The
| difference between a crank and eccentric businessman is
| the size of the budget they can wield when nobody else
| will. > Academics are rarely comfortable discussing the
| shortcomings of academia. Correct, which is why I'm not
| in academia.
| InkCanon wrote:
| I never understood point 1. Your PhD thesis will almost
| definitely be on a very specific topic, you don't have the time
| or knowledge to cover multiple distinct fields.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| I'm starting a PhD -- essentially from tomorrow. It's a shame to
| see so much discouragement here, but at this point I'm no longer
| surprised. I also don't care because if left to my own devices I
| would do research anyway.
|
| In the kindest possible way: screw all of you!
| Over2Chars wrote:
| @xanderlewis I don't think anyone's comments are meant for you
| specifically, nor to discourage you or anyone particularly.
|
| If anything, take it all with a "grain of salt" and reflect on
| whether or not anyone you meet might resemble these comments.
| Hopefully, not your future self.
|
| Good luck in your career.
| megaloblasto wrote:
| Most of these people have never been in a PhD program, so take
| their words with a grain of salt.
|
| If you have a good advisor, your passionate about your project,
| and you got some good funding, you'll have a wonderful time of
| exploring interesting ideas and becoming a competent
| researcher. Good luck!
| xanderlewis wrote:
| So far, I seem to have all three. Let's see how it goes!
| Thanks.
| liontwist wrote:
| All that's true, and that is completely different than what's
| advertised in this article.
| j_maffe wrote:
| I also started my PhD last week and honestly from my talks with
| the people there thus far I'm much more optimistic than the
| general HN view of PhDs. You still have to be realistic
| however. Best of luck!
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Great! The view of almost _anything_ hard is gloomy online,
| probably because the conversation is dominated by those who
| either wish they 'd tried and now have a chip on their
| shoulder or who made the wrong choice for them and are self-
| therapising by writing about it. Those who _thrived_ in a PhD
| programme likely don 't have a reason to bang on about their
| experience in quite so many words.
|
| > You still have to be realistic
|
| I'm expecting it to be very challenging. But that's the point
| -- isn't it?
|
| Good luck to you too.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I just left academia (after one three-year postdoc). Good
| riddance. For myself at least. I do think one can thrive in it,
| if you are a good salesman, don't mind sucking up to those with
| money with lies and exaggerations, and don't mind isolation
| xanderlewis wrote:
| What kind of area were you in?
|
| It's hard to believe this 'sucking up to those with money'
| thing applies everywhere, though it's easier to imagine it
| applies in certain domains.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Quantum physics
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Could you be more specific about the pressure you felt to
| 'suck up' and 'lie'? I read this kind of thing often, but
| it's usually left quite vague. What exactly are people
| lying about?
|
| Physics (since it's supposed to be rigorous) seems like a
| less likely area than some to be driven by politics and
| trends, but I suppose I can imagine that competing
| research programmes and ideas benefit from a certain
| amount of marketing and smooth-talking of people with
| funding rather than relying purely on empirical evidence
| for their claims.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Physics absolutely is dominated by politics and trends. I
| was constantly expected to over exaggerate the impacts of
| my work and its possible applications, on both science in
| general and wider technology. For example, we used to
| always say that it had some impact in quantum computing
| even if it was a total lie, because that makes it way
| easier to get funding
|
| Physics may be in some sense more falsifiable, but it is
| absolutely subject to politics and social norms, both in
| how it lies about itself for money, and literally in
| which theories are chosen (since we can rarely
| empirically distinguish between them)
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Right. That's a shame, but it seems like that's just
| life. The idea that it helps to constantly emphasise (or,
| as you say, exaggerate) the importance of your work if
| you want to have a career is certainly not restricted to
| academia. It seems to apply to most industry engineering
| jobs too -- from what I've heard. I guess in that context
| funding isn't the issue, but being promoted (and,
| conversely, not being sacked) certainly is.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Well in most engineering there is a market and going out
| into the market and selling is not the job of the
| engineers
|
| Academia is rare for having the engineer also be the
| salesman
|
| My wife is the lead mechanical engineer at a small
| company and she definitely doesn't have to go around
| convincing customers they need her products
| owlbite wrote:
| I did a PhD and about a decade in postdoc/early-career
| researcher posts before moving into tech. That was in
| Computational Mathematics, it was clear that the most
| successful people in the field were the ones who had found
| areas where they could publish "Technique X applied to
| field Y" type papers, so for each new X they could get 10
| publications (by way of 10 different PhD students). These
| people generally could steer the core funding in the
| discipline their way.
|
| Everyone else basically had to reformulate their research
| to pretend it was applicable to the government's funding
| subject de jure. This led to some quite large stretches in
| definition to achieve "<Main area of research>, and some
| applications in <funding stream>". This very much felt like
| it was sucking up to money.
|
| I got out of the academia in the end because it felt like
| the more senior I got the more time I spent applying for
| funding and managing the spending and the less time I spent
| doing research/development. (Also given I was in a UK
| public sector institute, the pay was shit due to 40 years
| of below inflation pay rises crippling the institution).
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yeah that's the thing. Not only do you have to beg for
| money but actually you make fake papers to do so. My
| supervisor taught me this early on, every single tiny
| discovery or synthesis can be made into a paper even if
| it really doesn't warrant it
|
| I left because the only path forward here in Germany is
| to become a professor, aka a life full of admin and sales
| liontwist wrote:
| Why would a field be immune to political patterns found in
| every organization?
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I don't think there's any reason to be discouraged. There's a
| lot of bias against PhDs for various reasons (good and bad).
|
| I have a PhD, got an academic position and then worked in
| various companies (startups, big tech company). These paths
| aren't exclusive.
|
| I'm glad I did the PhD.
|
| - it gave me time to work on a variety of interesting topics.
| In my company, I always feel rushed and don't have time to
| learn as much as I'd like to.
|
| - I had more than one career. Working only in industry after
| graduation would have been pretty sad I think. Not that it's
| bad but it's great to see something different
|
| - I developed some skills (for instance talking in front of
| audience, write scientific papers) and got to meet a lot of
| interesting people, and worked in different countries.
|
| I also learned that research wasn't for me but it was worth
| doing the PhD anyway. If I had to do it again, I would pick my
| topic more carefully, and go straight to industry rather than
| pursuing an academic position (which I actually didn't like).
| Also money wise, even though I'm not materialistic, the pay was
| too low. Certainly enough to live, but not enough to secure my
| future and retirement.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| This is the best possible answer to Internet-based negativity!
| I wish you luck in your PhD :)
| austinjp wrote:
| Care to share any details? What country are you studying in,
| and what's the subject area?
| xanderlewis wrote:
| UK; more specifically Scotland. And mathematics; more
| specifically (algebraic) topology and (differential)
| geometry.
| vaylian wrote:
| The nice thing about mathematics is that there probably
| won't be any failed or non-reproducible experiments in the
| lab. That doesn't mean that a math PhD is going to be easy,
| but you should be aware that a lot of people will have a
| different idea of what you are doing if you don't tell them
| that your PhD is in math.
|
| Best of luck for your PhD! You might want to check out this
| ted talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/uri_alon_why_science_de
| mands_a_lea...
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Thanks! I hope so. Experiments (to the extent that there
| _are_ experiments in mathematics, which arguably there
| very much are) often fail, but once they succeed they 're
| usually fairly bulletproof, and reproducibility is barely
| even a concept.
| leviliebvin wrote:
| There is literally an ocean of difference between
| mathematics and ML (which seems to be what a lot of
| comments are talking about).
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Yes. Which is why I'm trying to push back a bit and say
| 'hang on... none of this is intrinsic to the PhD system'.
| Of course it's true that _some_ PhDs -- hell, some
| disciplines -- are built to an embarrassing degree on BS
| and academic schmoozery, but there 's no need to tar
| everyone with the same brush. It seems as though some
| commenters have difficulty conceiving of intellectual
| pursuits that don't involve 'data' and 'graphs'.
|
| I'm only very junior, though, so I don't have _total_
| confidence that I 'm right. But I'm pretty certain I am.
| richrichie wrote:
| I hope you have decent source of secondary income or your
| family is reasonably well off.
|
| A math PhD might take 6-7 years to complete and I hope
| that, at the end of it all, you won't have to come to
| London to look for C++ or Ocaml jobs at hedge funds or
| banks.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| I'm in the UK. It takes nominally three years here;
| usually three and a half. I also have full funding.
|
| ...this is the discouraging negativity I'm talking about.
| I do, respectfully, wonder what your agenda is.
| richrichie wrote:
| Because i have worked with many math phds who lost their
| youth to something that they could not make a living on
| (research positions at universities are few and the
| competition is intense) and were writing C++
| implementations of derivatives pricing models for a
| (comfortable) living.
|
| I am not trying to discourage you, just a different
| perspective.
| atlintots wrote:
| If time and money weren't concerns, I would love to do
| mathematics research!
|
| I hope you achieve good things, and have fun while at it!
| analog31 wrote:
| From what I've read, graduate study on your side of the
| pond is a lot better than in the US. I really can't say
| why. The people I know who got their PhDs in Scotland were,
| for one thing, really sharp. That helps. For another, it
| seems there's more of an expectation of a difficult but
| manageable workload and risk level. Maybe more focus on
| research and less on politics. Of course, a better safety
| net, meaning less pressure to drop out if something happens
| like your spouse or child needs medical care.
|
| Every country is different.
| monadINtop wrote:
| Good luck
| samantha-wiki wrote:
| > if left to my own devices I would do research anyway.
|
| Then you're going to have a great time during your PhD, good
| luck and have fun!
|
| > screw all of you!
|
| "Disregard!"
| https://stepsandleaps.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/feynmans-brea...
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| I've worked with PhDs all my life in various industries and it
| has always been a fun and enjoyable partnership. Have fun.
| skalarproduktr wrote:
| Please consider that not everyone has the luxury of having
| (had) a PhD advisor who really cares. There's a wide spectrum,
| ranging from micromanagers, to people you see once during your
| PhD, to advisors that are genuinely great (intellectually and
| as a person) and caring.
|
| I wish you the best of luck for your PhD, a caring and
| supportive advisor, and great results!
| fastneutron wrote:
| Disregard them. A lot of people fixate on the 1 in a billion
| celebrity exceptions like Musk, Thiel, Gates, Dyson, et al and
| go "look look you don't need a PhD!"
|
| Yes, a highly motivated college dropout with a computer, a
| strong financial safety net, and the right social connections
| can be in the right place at the right time to seize big
| opportunities. Most people are not in that position. Many high-
| impact technologies need more than what just a computer can do.
|
| The main thing is to be self aware enough to know the path
| you're on, what paths are available to you, and how to make the
| most of the connections and resources you have available to
| you. The second you start to get pigeonholed, wrap things up
| and move on.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| > The second you start to get pigeonholed...
|
| That seems like good advice.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Yes! Be very aware of your time and opportunity costs. It
| can be an amazing journey, struggles and all, but make sure
| to not get stuck long-hauling on something you're not
| passionate about.
| mattmight wrote:
| Good for you!
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I did my PhD (mapping and studying the physics of caves in the
| ice on an antarctic volcano) purely for fun, and it was
| awesome.
|
| I hope you have a similarly rewarding experience. You will
| encounter unfair systems and unscrupulous people, and it will
| be frustrating. The data will be confusing as hell. My only
| advice is stay true to yourself. Maybe look into some of the
| new trends that could fix academia -- pre-registration, open
| access with public comment periods, reproducible code, etc. For
| inspiration, I cheer for crusaders like Data Colada who are
| trying to save the academic system.
| richrichie wrote:
| That is the way. Not long ago, most of Science was done by
| rich people as a hobby. We need to get back to that system.
| eloisant wrote:
| Can't wait to read Elon Musk's Ph.D. on pointy rockets!
| richrichie wrote:
| Mendel did not have a PhD.
| analog31 wrote:
| "PhD Envy" is a real part of office politics outside of
| academia. Remember that the naysayers are just jockeying for
| their own status. On the one hand, you can ignore it. On the
| other, learning to manage it is a good starting point to
| navigating the social and political side of any career.
|
| Also, this is HN, which revolves around an occupation --
| computer programming -- that is unique in terms of having high
| demand while remaining flexible about how and where people
| learn their skills. Not all fields are that way.
|
| I got a PhD in physics, in 1993, and have worked in industry
| since then. There are a couple of "negatives" that I still
| think are wroth pointing out:
|
| 1. PhD programs have very high attrition, and you bear most of
| the risk on your own shoulders. It's worth going in with eyes
| open, and knowing the risks. Getting out with your PhD may
| require some compromises along the way. I won't necessarily
| call them ethical compromises, but perhaps compromises to the
| (typically) idealistic views that many students start out with.
|
| 2. The little nub of specialized knowledge shown in TFA is your
| research, not your brain. You can do specialized _research_
| without becoming a specialized _person_ if you want. This is a
| personal choice (academic freedom and all that). My dad, who
| also had a PhD and a good industry career, always told me to
| avoid hyper-specialization.
|
| Don't forget to learn how to code, just in case. ;-)
| liontwist wrote:
| > PhD programs have very high attrition, and you bear most of
| the risk on your own shoulders.
|
| How many people do you know who "failed to meet the
| standard"? Zero. If you do the time and work for your
| professors you will get the reward. There is no risk.
|
| > PhD Envy" is a real part of office politics
|
| The most vocal critics are not bachelor degree holders, but
| those who did it and had a bad experience.
| eloisant wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's about "failing to meet the standard".
| Sure, there is no exit exam you can fail, but there are
| still people dropping out of a PhD.
|
| It could be because you realize you don't really like
| research - that involves reading and writing a lot of
| papers, going to conferences not just tinkering. It could
| be because you had the wrong professor who failed to lead
| you and left you by yourself. It could be because you gave
| up at a low point, where most PhD student go through. It
| could be because after 4 or 5 years your professor keep
| saying "you're not ready yet" (I've seen that in
| humanities).
|
| So it's not really a problem of "not being good enough",
| but it definitely happens.
| liontwist wrote:
| Definitely true. Attrition is real, but "risk" is
| probably the wrong term. It's one of the lowest risk
| options available for young people.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> If you do the time and work for your professors you
| will get the reward. There is no risk.
|
| 1. Your experiment fails to produce a result after a few
| years of effort (my project, we don't know to this day what
| went wrong, and I was lucky to find a new project).
|
| 2. Loss of funding or institutional support. (A large
| program at my state's university pulled its support for a
| process that required regulatory approval, and an entire
| group of faculty and students all had to leave.)
|
| 3. Your advisor quits, changes jobs, gets fired, goes to
| prison, dies. (Many cases).
|
| 4. Your advisor holds your thesis hostage until you publish
| a certain number of articles (a friend of mine, she sued
| and won).
|
| 5. Mental health issues (high incidence of clinical
| depression).
|
| 6. Personal animosity between members of your committee
| (another friend).
|
| How these risks instantiate themselves is that you have to
| start from scratch, often with a completely new research
| project, and finding one isn't guaranteed by your
| department. You are almost completely at the mercy of one
| person -- your advisor. There is virtually no oversight.
| liontwist wrote:
| I agree, those are all real, especially the advisor and
| committee.
|
| Most of these are factors in any employment, and I would
| argue things like chance of losing funding at your job is
| worse than academic funding threats.
| richrichie wrote:
| PhD now is an expensive way to signal that you can persevere
| longer than the average human.
|
| Unfortunately, that is not always a positive as many real life
| situations require you to make decisions under extreme paucity
| of information and reverse or change course at short notice.
| For such professions and roles it is a liability.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| I can see why you might think that; in some cases I'd agree.
| But there are parts of science -- indeed of human knowledge
| in general -- that are _very_ difficult to break into if you
| don 't have the opportunity a PhD affords. These disciplines
| also require perseverance longer than the average human.
| Without this system, we're not going to make fundamental
| progress.
|
| I'm pretty sure that without the research done by people with
| PhDs and people who don't give up at the first hurdle, we
| wouldn't be able to be sitting at our keyboards now having
| this conversation. Of course, it's not for everyone. Maybe
| it's not for most. But I don't think you should write all of
| it off as 'signalling'. Some research simply cannot be done
| without several years of focus, outside of industry or 'the
| real world'.
| j_bum wrote:
| Good luck with your PhD. Stay focused and enjoy this time, you
| will have a freedom to explore and study that's almost
| unparalleled in post-grad life!
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| It's more or less that except the scale - the inner circles are
| far too big and the "ray" of the particular branch too wide. What
| actually happens is a small dot in the middle with very tiny
| branches going in various directions, some just a bit wider and
| longer than others.
| worldmerge wrote:
| Is it possible to be a professor without a PhD? I would like to
| teach at a college level but the PhD path seems so risky to me to
| take a pay cut for years and you might not get the degree, and
| not a get a job.
| enum wrote:
| In the U.S., in most fields, it is virtually impossible.
| ioblomov wrote:
| The only exception would be community colleges, which still
| require at least a masters.
|
| At my university, my favorite professor's title was "senior
| lecturer" because he only had a bachelors. This was despite
| being a Times bestselling author. (He taught literature and
| writing.)
| gtmitchell wrote:
| In the US at least, it is entirely possible to teach at a
| university without a PhD. Community colleges are full of
| instructors with masters's degrees, and tons of classes offered
| by major universities are taught by graduate students or
| adjunct faculty without doctorates.
|
| Your job title probably won't be 'professor', but you'll be
| doing basically the same work as one.
| lapcat wrote:
| Graduate students teach classes at their own universities as
| part of their departmental funding. This is only a temporary
| situation and exists only while they're enrolled. It's not a
| career path.
|
| As a former graduate student myself, I'm actually not aware
| of any non-PhDs who are adjuct faculty or community college
| instructors. I'm not claiming that they don't exist anywhere,
| but given the number of PhDs and the number of available
| academic jobs, the competition is fierce, and non-PhD
| candidates are likely to lose out to PhD candidates.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Fwiw my dad had a masters in biology and a PhD in botany,
| but was an instructor for biology in the local community
| college ("Mount San Jacinto Community College"). I guess
| technically he had a PhD, but not in the way most people
| would think
| paulpauper wrote:
| Just make a youtube channel and start lecturing or substack.
| Obviously not the same thing, but the barriers to entry to
| content creation have been eroded, and if if you have the chops
| not having a doctorate won't be an impediment.
| stared wrote:
| The illustrated guide (which I had known during my PhD) focuses
| on progress--however, niche progress. Yet, PhD students' life
| experiences are usually not centered around progress but
| frustration, disillusionment, and depression. If you want to
| compare it with anything else, it may be like creating pieces of
| novel art with great effort, with one's identity tied to it. Yet,
| even in the case of success, it is unlikely to be appreciated by
| contemporary people.
|
| So, I prefer a narrative guide to PhD - "The Lord of the Rings:
| an allegory of the PhD?" by Dave Pritchard,
| http://danny.oz.au/danny/humour/phd_lotr.html
| skalarproduktr wrote:
| Matt has also written a great follow-up, "How to get tenure", see
| https://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/
|
| Highly relevant for the aspiring researcher, and it describes
| really well the nonlinearities of (academic) life.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| I'm a bit confused about why the Master's degree is set before
| "reading papers". I had to do a whole lot of reading (and be at
| least involved in the writing of) papers in the research of my
| Master's.
| mattmight wrote:
| Original author of the guide here. Wonderful to see these little
| illustrations still making the rounds. I first published them in
| 2010!
|
| To those in the comments who mentioned you are just starting your
| own PhD: Good luck to you! And, I hope you, like I once did, find
| a problem that you can fall in love with for a few years.
|
| To those just finished: Congratulations! Don't forget to keep
| pushing!
|
| To those many years out: You have to keep pushing too, but there
| can be tremendous value in starting all over again by pushing in
| a different direction. You have no idea what you may find between
| the tips of two fields.
| skalarproduktr wrote:
| Thank you, Matt! Loved your guide when I started my own PhD in
| ye olden days, and I've shown it to a lot of people since then.
| mattmight wrote:
| Happy to hear that! Thank you for sharing it with others. :)
| azhenley wrote:
| Your blog _really_ helped me during the early years of my PhD.
| Thank you!!!
| mattmight wrote:
| So happy it helped! Thank you for the kind words!
| gtmitchell wrote:
| Any advice for PhD dropouts? I spent years and years pushing
| against that boundary in an obscure corner of my field and it
| never moved. What little funding I had dried up and I left grad
| school with a half finished dissertation, no PhD, and giant
| pile of broken dreams.
|
| I'm sure over the years you've known students who have started
| a PhD and not finished. What (if anything) have you said to
| them? Do you feel their efforts had any value?
| lapcat wrote:
| I'm a PhD dropout myself. Serious question: what kind of
| advice are you looking for exactly? This is not intended as
| an insult, but it sounds like what you're looking for is not
| advice but rather consolation, which is natural and
| understandable given the circumstances.
| m348e912 wrote:
| I'll give you advice. Success in pursuing a PhD isn't just
| about the discipline or the degree--it's about finding the
| right environment to support you. If earning your PhD is
| still a dream, focus on identifying a program that aligns
| with your needs and strengths. Look for a school with the
| right resources, a program that's well-structured, and, most
| importantly, a supportive advisor who believes in your
| potential. Combined with your dedication and passion, these
| factors can make all the difference in achieving your goal.
| Don't lose heart--sometimes, the right opportunity can change
| everything.
|
| Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. I've never
| participated in a graduate program.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Reading the original post led me to this article on your site:
| https://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/#full
|
| This is just to say I found it incredibly compelling and
| moving; I hope mentioning it doesn't make you feel bad.
| mattmight wrote:
| Nothing to feel bad about. Thank you for sharing that too.
|
| My son's life changed my own in profound ways, and even
| though he died four years ago, he is _still_ changing my life
| in profound ways. I am always grateful for the reminder and
| to reconnect with the purpose that his life gave to mine.
|
| That post also reminds me that while he was alive, I did the
| best I could for him under my abilities, and that's all any
| parent can do in the end.
|
| If you want to know more about his life, I wrote on it here:
| https://bertrand.might.net/
| drdude wrote:
| Matt thanks for the encouraging words... enjoyed your compiler
| class and sad that you didn't end up in my PhD committee...
| done 3 years now but stuck lol.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| >>> but there can be tremendous value in starting all over
| again by pushing in a different direction.
|
| This rings true for me at this time. Done about 10 years now,
| never went into academia but direct into industry. Things seem
| a bit stale, maybe its time to pick and research something new.
| I've been hesitating on the "going back to school" thing. But
| quantum does show promise, for curiosity and potential rather
| than immediate impact.
| croissants wrote:
| My fairly generic PhD advice, as somebody who did one, graduated
| a bit early, and is happy about the process and where it's taken
| me:
|
| * Choose your advisor with care. This is not very easy as an
| applicant looking at professors' websites, but if you are
| admitted, any good school will probably have an in-person or
| virtual admitted students day where you can talk to current
| students out of faculty earshot. Take advantage of these times to
| ask about your potential advisor. A truly bad advisor will
| probably produce at least one person who will warn you about
| them. If you can't do this in person, try to get a quick
| phone/video chat -- something off-record where they can be
| honest. I was always happy to do these for my advisor, because I
| liked him and wanted him to get more good students. Conversely, I
| know people who were warned off specific advisors during these
| events, for good reasons. A bit of subjectivity: a good advisor
| at a decent school is usually better than a bad advisor at a good
| school.
|
| * The financial niceness of doing a PhD in field X seems to
| correlate pretty well with the current job market value of a
| masters in field X, at least partially for reasons of leverage --
| if you can leave and transition into a cushier job, advisors have
| to provide a bit more value. Computer science scores highly on
| this metric.
|
| * There is a _ton_ of negativity about PhDs in places like HN.
| This isn 't unjustified: doing a PhD with a bad advisor can be a
| very bad experience. At the same time, I think "person who had a
| bad PhD experience" is also "person who writes comments on the
| internet" with higher probability than "person who had a good PhD
| experience".
| resiros wrote:
| That's a way of looking at it. Another way is looking at it
| inwardly, as a journey of self. Personally, a PhD for me was
| being punched in the face every morning (i.e., experiment failed)
| for years, yet getting up to try again.
|
| It's the archetypal hero's journey where you dive into the
| deepest darkness, discover yourself, and emerge triumphant.
|
| At the end, you get a hat.
| scaradim wrote:
| Nice! but... are these graph steps roughly at scale e.g. area of
| initial blue circle compared to all of human knowledge circle? or
| the small PhD pimple compared to the blue circle?
|
| If not then can someone (original author or someone else) try to
| review the steps with roughly realistic average scales assuming
| surface represent knowledge volume and color complexity spectrum
| from advanced (indigo) to advanced (red)?
|
| Any candidate to make another pimple on the outer circle?
| jofer wrote:
| My wife rather derisively calls this the "penis pimple model of
| science". It's a great article and a great set figures, but folks
| sometimes push it a bit too much, especially in grad school.
|
| It has a lot of truth to it and it's been making the rounds for
| well over a decade. Unfortunately, sometimes it can set folks up
| to feel bad about themselves if what they do doesn't line up well
| with whatever is in vogue as the boundary of knowledge that's
| currently being pushed.
|
| There's a _ton_ of value in more pragmatic parts of fields that
| focus on applications or combining relatively well-know parts of
| different sub-fields. Those parts of science often don't feel
| like you're pushing some "boundary". It's more layering on top
| of, filling in holes, and building up than building "out".
| Sometimes what you do is to use multiple things that lots of
| folks already knew, but the people who knew X and the people who
| knew Y didn't talk to each other, so no one thought about how to
| combine them. It can also be hard to get papers published because
| reviewers will consider one part obvious/well-known and the other
| part irrelevant because they come from one sub-field and not
| both.
|
| It will often feel like you don't belong because your work
| doesn't look like these figures. Applied and interdisciplinary
| fields "feel" different. However, this type of integrative work
| can be among the most valuable parts of modern research.
|
| Don't feel like what you do has to fit into the "penis pimple
| model" of science. There's also nothing wrong with pushing some
| known boundary of a field, either! Both are valid.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| But this _isn 't_ a model is science, it's a model of what
| different kinds of _academic credentials_ mean.
|
| Sure there's plenty of ways to contribute to society without
| publishing academic research, but that's not what a PhD is.
| jofer wrote:
| Not all PhDs push boundaries of knowledge in quite that way.
| Often what you do was already known, but no one really
| figured out how to correctly apply it. Alternatively, it's
| often combining different things that were already well
| known, but no one had combined.
|
| It's novel work that makes a PhD. Novel work is distinct from
| pushing the boundary of knowledge. Often what you do doesn't
| change what "humanity knows" in any way.
|
| Both my wife and I have PhDs. Neither of us did things that
| look like the figures there. It's not a good mental model for
| what all PhDs mean, though it is a good model for some.
|
| I combined fields and reinterpreted a ton of things that had
| already been done to draw very different fundamental
| conclusions about what was going on in a particular location.
| I put out alternative hypotheses for observations that had
| already been collected. It's not new knowledge at all and I
| didn't add to what we "know". I just added an additional
| hypothesis to the set of multiple working hypotheses that
| will hopefully be tested decades from now.
|
| My wife worked on how to actually apply well-known methods in
| other fields to our field. Her work was half engineering,
| half field experiments. Lots of folks had been working with
| fiber optic strain gauges for decades. However, no one was
| using them to measure in-situ strain in rock masses yet
| (which has since become common). The application was broadly
| "known", but actually doing it and demonstrating that is
| novel.
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