4 ms·

Probably not too dissimilar to the delusional early employees who sign up for a startup hoping to make millions from their shares...

twblalock 10y ago
That depends. Are the grad students making six-figure incomes while they suffer through the experience, as the startup employees do?
- flowereaterz 10y ago
  They are not. But are startup employees doing something meaningful, or building their own reputations and expertise? And since you're talking about software startup employees, probably the closest comparison is CS phd students, who are nowhere near suffering. The vast majority of graduate students are at least as satisfied as a developer, otherwise whole programs would have disappeared decades ago from inability to recruit. New admits always ask current graduate students what it's like. There seems to be this dissonance between people here on Hacker News believing that everything is like the horror stories of grad students being abused by psychopathic advisors and at best will get poorly paid adjunct positions before burning out, and what's really happening.
  - kernelbandwidth 10y ago
    There's a lot of variation, both due to school and due to department. When I did my PhD, I found the Biosciences department to be rather brutal. Drinking and misery poker (and Magic the Gathering) were the standard pastimes, and long, tedious hours were the norm. On the other hand, the CS department was much more laid back, with much more time put into 'cerebral' work. It's not that the CS students were smarter, I knew a number of brilliant biologists, but the nature of subject matter and the culture. Biology experiments are inherently physical, and can fail or die if not attended to properly, putting a pretty tight time constraint on the experimenter. CS work is much more forgiving, and much more of it (proportionally) happens in the mind. Biology is also a much more grind-centered culture, perhaps in part because it lacks a strong history of internal tool building, while tedious work in CS tends to inspire attempts to build automation and higher level methods. I think some of this is the difficulty (tools in Biology are just harder to make), and some of this is purely culture. I would argue that the somewhat bizarre field of Biophysics is, historically speaking, the tooling culture of Biology that was severed off when Molecular Biology became a field in it's own right and the tools were commoditized, and it's partially this split that's responsible for the culture there. All of which is to say, grad school is horrible. Sometimes. Sometimes it's awesome, and YMMV.

twblalock 10y ago

That depends. Are the grad students making six-figure incomes while they suffer through the experience, as the startup employees do?

flowereaterz 10y ago
They are not. But are startup employees doing something meaningful, or building their own reputations and expertise? And since you're talking about software startup employees, probably the closest comparison is CS phd students, who are nowhere near suffering. The vast majority of graduate students are at least as satisfied as a developer, otherwise whole programs would have disappeared decades ago from inability to recruit. New admits always ask current graduate students what it's like. There seems to be this dissonance between people here on Hacker News believing that everything is like the horror stories of grad students being abused by psychopathic advisors and at best will get poorly paid adjunct positions before burning out, and what's really happening.
- kernelbandwidth 10y ago
  There's a lot of variation, both due to school and due to department. When I did my PhD, I found the Biosciences department to be rather brutal. Drinking and misery poker (and Magic the Gathering) were the standard pastimes, and long, tedious hours were the norm. On the other hand, the CS department was much more laid back, with much more time put into 'cerebral' work. It's not that the CS students were smarter, I knew a number of brilliant biologists, but the nature of subject matter and the culture. Biology experiments are inherently physical, and can fail or die if not attended to properly, putting a pretty tight time constraint on the experimenter. CS work is much more forgiving, and much more of it (proportionally) happens in the mind. Biology is also a much more grind-centered culture, perhaps in part because it lacks a strong history of internal tool building, while tedious work in CS tends to inspire attempts to build automation and higher level methods. I think some of this is the difficulty (tools in Biology are just harder to make), and some of this is purely culture. I would argue that the somewhat bizarre field of Biophysics is, historically speaking, the tooling culture of Biology that was severed off when Molecular Biology became a field in it's own right and the tools were commoditized, and it's partially this split that's responsible for the culture there. All of which is to say, grad school is horrible. Sometimes. Sometimes it's awesome, and YMMV.