8 ms·

"I’ll assume that the second option you are considering is joining a medium-large company (which is likely most common). Ask yourself if you find the following

"I’ll assume that the second option you are considering is joining a medium-large company (which is likely most common). Ask yourself if you find the following properties appealing: ..." Why is every conversation about PHDs always cast in the light of as-opposed-to-working-for-the-man? I don't see discussions ever bring up the plethora of other life courses one can take. It is though the author sees a very clear binary: PHD or go work on fixing bugs in Gmail (or some other such cog-in-a-machine project). Where is the discussion of starting a business? Of making your own company? Breaking free of the political shackles of academia and blazing your own path to glory? I am all for PHDs, and all for people pursuing, and pushing, the boundaries of human knowledge. I would just like to see that discussion live on its own, without comparison, if that is possible.

throwawaymsft 10y ago
"Properties you find appealing..." * Freedom * Ownership * Personal freedom ... <Later...> * Getting into a PhD program: references, references, references * Student adviser relationship * Pre-vs-post tenure * Impressing an adviser * (Topic) Plays to your adviser’s interests and strengths Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to. Reading this, I'm so thankful I didn't enter academia. I still pursue my academic interests on my own. Edit: A few people insist on casting a float into a bool. Every job has politics, ranging from 0.01% (anonymous author of 1-man SaaS) to 99% (politician). It's not very informative to note that both are non-zero.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  From my super-limited experience in academia, I found politics is more important at top schools and much less important when you get to ~40-80 ranked US schools for PhD programs.
  - throwawaymsft 10y ago
    That's good to hear. I have the hankering to return to school at some point, and I really just want to learn and contribute.
  - pgbovine 10y ago
    Having spent time at schools of various "ranks" (whatever that means), "politics" (whatever that means ... that's super vague) is everywhere. It's what you make of it. Whenever you have people, money, and status mixing, there is politics. That's not exclusive to academia. Every company I've worked at also had those dynamics. Want to eliminate politics? Be independently wealthy and work alone :) Otherwise everyone needs to learn to work with and transcend the system in their own unique way.
    - stared 10y ago
      Well, with freelancing (in data science) I managed to avoid politics (and bureaucracy) completely (no, I am not independently wealthy).
  - phd_ 10y ago
    I went through a PhD at a non-top-tier school (borderline between second-tier and third-tier). I definitely dealt with politics extensively. A huge amount of people-pleasing, both with your advisor and with others in your chosen research area and the broader field it sits in. A fair bit of funding-related politics. And a fair bit of actual politics politics, if you want to fit in. There's a lot of in-group / out-group politics in academia; don't make life more difficult for yourself when you know a straightforward way to survive. Learn to deeply bury any opinions you might have that don't completely align with those of people who control your fate, especially in areas fundamental to their in-group identity, and if that fails, lie convincingly. (Remember that dodging a question where enthusiastic agreement was expected is a form of answer, and not the one you want to give.) You might get lucky and work with people accepting of differences of opinion, but I wouldn't recommend risking it when years of your life are on the line. I don't regret the experience, and quite frankly I learned a few other survival skills in the process that simply hadn't come up as an undergrad, but don't go into it thinking it's a purely technical experience, or that you won't have to deal with a pile of utterly ridiculous BS and unpleasantness.
- baby 10y ago
  Spoiler Alert: politic is everywhere.
  - throwawaymsft 10y ago
    Yes, but (importantly) degrees vary. The politics of working for an adviser chasing tenure are different from, say, running a SaaS, writing an ebook, or selling a plugin.
    - baby 10y ago
      You mean, politic is different if you're not working for anyone? I can't even agree with that. You will still have politic in place if you have people working for you, or if you have critics reviewing your ebook, or if you're trying to get your plugin accepted in a store, etc... cqfd
      - throwawaymsft 10y ago
        Correct. And are the politics of getting your plugin accepted in the Wordpress directory more or less than getting tenure? See the edit above. You are saying two things must be equal because they are both non-zero. It's a very strange argument.
        baby 10y ago
        Getting tenure is a life accomplishment. Getting a plugin accepted in a wordpress directory? Come on, we're comparing apples and oranges. If you look at some parts of getting a tenure, they are without politic as well. Example: studying a subject.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  > Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to. Yeah, internal corporate politics never gets people's entire project canceled with no notice in the corporate world. That would just be mean, so it doesn't happen /s. (Guess what I found out last Friday?)
  - throwawaymsft 10y ago
    That sucks, but politics in the workplace can be dialed from mega-corp to startup to consultancy to freelancer to anonymous author of a SaaS. How much politics did patio11 deal with when running Bingo Card Creator?
    - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
      Pretty sure that the same applies for academia. It depends on your department culture and lab environment.
      - user5994461 10y ago
        I found the academia to be way more vicious and politics than a company. In academia, teachers/referees/directors were commonly there for 10-20 years, some will probably never have to live their positions and they have full unlimited authority for many things. The worse that could happen in academia as a student is to have politics goes against your back. You will be blocked from graduating, you will loose X years of study unlikely to start over or graduate at another place, and be stuck with your debt and no diploma. In a company, the worst that could happen is simply to be fired. You look for another job and keep your money, you keep your diploma, keep your experiences. In fact, if you have a problem with your boss at work, you can always change job. If you have a problem with your PhD (or master's) teacher in academia, you can't leave without failing your studies and you're fucked.
- euske 10y ago
  > casting a float into a bool Haha, a geeky yet very apt expression.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  > Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics That's crazy. The way to get a great reference is to do outstanding work. If by 'playing politics' you mean not pissing people off by being an asshole or being unreliable, then, yeah, take care to be a good colleague. But almost entirely: do really good work.
  - hueving 10y ago
    Bash other people's novel work while peer reviewing it anonymously, then steal it and submit for publication at another conference before the rejection notification goes to the original author. Once someone makes it into the review pools for top conferences, they receive a constant feed of good ideas to harvest in the form of submissions.
    - robotresearcher 10y ago
      That's the pathological case, yes. People can also go steal cars and rob houses. But they usually don't. Good luck getting a reference from someone after stealing their idea.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
Agreed completely. I did a PhD knowing that I had zero interest in going into academia, and it provided a major boost to my professional career. I find it surprising when people talk about doing a PhD as exclusively useful for academics.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  Same! I was super-interested in research and that's why I pursued a PhD. I never thought of running a lab or teaching classes.
  - tostitos1979 10y ago
    A friend and I (both PhDs) were just discussing how difficult having a PhD has made getting engineering positions.In the course of interviewing at top-5 companies, we both have experienced a$$hats/interviewers with complexes who seem bent on showing off how they are smarter than the PhD interviewee .. curious if you have run into this as well, and any strategies to guard against this? I've also seen people who think PhDs can't code to save their life (I've seen such people but those are very obvious ... people who couldn't do fizbuzz) or think PhDs would get bored and leave easily. How does a competent PhD job seeker deal with this crap?
    - JoshTriplett 10y ago
      I didn't run into any of that in any of the companies I interviewed with; if anything, I found that coming in with a PhD resulted in correspondingly higher expectations. I'd treat any of the items you mentioned as warning signs and look for a better opportunity. To specifically counteract the "can't code" item, have plenty of practical items on your resume; include your published papers and conference presentations, but also include projects you've contributed to and similar. (For people doing a PhD who plan to work in industry, make sure you present at some industry conferences, not just academic conferences, and publish your code as/into Open Source projects.) A CV for an academic position doesn't work unmodified as a professional resume (with possible exceptions if you want to work in an industry research lab). In the specific context of CS, if you look at medium to large companies, you should already ask questions about the technical job ladder (such as making sure that one exists, rather than the only promotion path leading into management). Ask specific questions about how a PhD affects your starting position on that ladder. If it doesn't at all, then seriously consider looking for somewhere that it does. A company that values PhDs seems less likely to hold the misconceptions you mentioned.
p4bl0 10y ago
Your comment reminded me of a 5 years old blogpost of mine: https://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html https://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html. Eventually I decided that I wanted to do research and I couldn't be more happy about it. My experience as a PhD student was awesome, I did a postdoc on a topic that interested me very much but quite different than what I did during my PhD, and I've just landed a permanent position in academia as an associate professor!
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Where is the discussion of starting a business? Of making your own company? Breaking free of the political shackles of academia and blazing your own path to glory? The discussion of what now? Not everyone wants to start a business. Not everyone has the domain and market knowledge to start a successful business. "Blazing your own path to glory" fails 90% of the time, usually repeatedly. If you're gonna be that damned persistent, you might as well have the freedom of academia.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
"Where is the discussion of starting a business? Of making your own company? Breaking free of the political shackles of academia and blazing your own path to glory?" Good point. Several, nice examples from my field of study are AbsInt, Kesterel, Galois, and AdaCore. https://www.absint.com/products.htm https://www.absint.com/products.htm http://www.kestrel.edu/home/about.html http://www.kestrel.edu/home/about.html https://galois.com/blog/ https://galois.com/blog/ http://www.adacore.com/academia/projects http://www.adacore.com/academia/projects AbsInt turns elite work of Ph.D.'s into commercial products and enhances them. Doubt it's boring. Kesterel has people doing academic-style research on hard problems and applying it to real-world. Galois does that too. AdaCore does a combo of tooling for grunt work, advanced tooling (esp compiler), and cutting-edge work (eg SPARK provers) involving academics remote or in-sourced. A good PhD in relevant subjects might get a job at any of these companies with similarly interesting work. Or, if tool is good enough, make a company out of it by partnering with people good at the business/sales side. So, definitely opportunities here beyond black and white of academic-only or grunt work.
Retra 10y ago
Break free of the political shackles of academia and go on trying to convince people to invest in your business, become employees, and convince customers to use your services? At least the political shackles of academia are intellectually stimulating and not pure dreary salesmanship like the political shackles of business ownership.
Chinjut 10y ago
Hm... are there any options other than hoping against all odds to successfully navigate the tenure-track rat-race, working for The Man as an anonymous cog at BigCorp, or starting a business and pouring myself into businessy businessperson busywork? I'm afraid... I'm afraid I may be a defective individual in that none of these sound terribly appealing as a way to spend the bulk of my life.
- michaelvoz 10y ago
  Sure! I merely presented a few of the more common case paths! For instance, a good friend of mine (who shall remain nameless for anonymities sake) is currently exploring the world, working as a cook in cafes, restaurants, etc, never staying anywhere for long, living out of a backpack. Very romantic, I could never do it myself, but his life is his own. I dont think man has ever been as truly free as we are today, you can really do anything you set your mind to, not confined to the short, somewhat stuffy list you and I have walked over together.
- tgarma1234 10y ago
  Please, don't do a PhD. The tenure track treadmill is brutal and on the wane. You would be much happier just getting a job. A normal job. With ordinary people. And I say that after a masters degree, many years in a PhD program and the having a normal job. A PhD is sort of useless at this point in history.
  - Chinjut 10y ago
    Good advice, but bad news: Too late. (Well, I quit ABD (with a consolation Master's) and got a BigCorp job, but wasn't too thrilled with that, and since now I've got this monkey on my back, I keep trying to finish writing my dissertation again, pointless though I know it to be... Actually, sounds like our experiences are quite similar except for the last bit!) [No one's ever going to put in the effort to de-anonymize me off Hacker News, right? Just in case: Dear future potential employers reading this, A) Please don't, and B) Hey, I was totally kidding about not being thrilled with the BigCorp job. I love working for The Man! Go you! You The Man!]

throwawaymsft 10y ago

"Properties you find appealing..." * Freedom * Ownership * Personal freedom ... <Later...> * Getting into a PhD program: references, references, references * Student adviser relationship * Pre-vs-post tenure * Impressing an adviser * (Topic) Plays to your adviser’s interests and strengths Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to. Reading this, I'm so thankful I didn't enter academia. I still pursue my academic interests on my own. Edit: A few people insist on casting a float into a bool. Every job has politics, ranging from 0.01% (anonymous author of 1-man SaaS) to 99% (politician). It's not very informative to note that both are non-zero.

eanzenberg 10y ago
From my super-limited experience in academia, I found politics is more important at top schools and much less important when you get to ~40-80 ranked US schools for PhD programs.
- throwawaymsft 10y ago
  That's good to hear. I have the hankering to return to school at some point, and I really just want to learn and contribute.
- pgbovine 10y ago
  Having spent time at schools of various "ranks" (whatever that means), "politics" (whatever that means ... that's super vague) is everywhere. It's what you make of it. Whenever you have people, money, and status mixing, there is politics. That's not exclusive to academia. Every company I've worked at also had those dynamics. Want to eliminate politics? Be independently wealthy and work alone :) Otherwise everyone needs to learn to work with and transcend the system in their own unique way.
  - stared 10y ago
    Well, with freelancing (in data science) I managed to avoid politics (and bureaucracy) completely (no, I am not independently wealthy).
- phd_ 10y ago
  I went through a PhD at a non-top-tier school (borderline between second-tier and third-tier). I definitely dealt with politics extensively. A huge amount of people-pleasing, both with your advisor and with others in your chosen research area and the broader field it sits in. A fair bit of funding-related politics. And a fair bit of actual politics politics, if you want to fit in. There's a lot of in-group / out-group politics in academia; don't make life more difficult for yourself when you know a straightforward way to survive. Learn to deeply bury any opinions you might have that don't completely align with those of people who control your fate, especially in areas fundamental to their in-group identity, and if that fails, lie convincingly. (Remember that dodging a question where enthusiastic agreement was expected is a form of answer, and not the one you want to give.) You might get lucky and work with people accepting of differences of opinion, but I wouldn't recommend risking it when years of your life are on the line. I don't regret the experience, and quite frankly I learned a few other survival skills in the process that simply hadn't come up as an undergrad, but don't go into it thinking it's a purely technical experience, or that you won't have to deal with a pile of utterly ridiculous BS and unpleasantness.
baby 10y ago
Spoiler Alert: politic is everywhere.
- throwawaymsft 10y ago
  Yes, but (importantly) degrees vary. The politics of working for an adviser chasing tenure are different from, say, running a SaaS, writing an ebook, or selling a plugin.
  - baby 10y ago
    You mean, politic is different if you're not working for anyone? I can't even agree with that. You will still have politic in place if you have people working for you, or if you have critics reviewing your ebook, or if you're trying to get your plugin accepted in a store, etc... cqfd
    - throwawaymsft 10y ago
      Correct. And are the politics of getting your plugin accepted in the Wordpress directory more or less than getting tenure? See the edit above. You are saying two things must be equal because they are both non-zero. It's a very strange argument.
      - baby 10y ago
        Getting tenure is a life accomplishment. Getting a plugin accepted in a wordpress directory? Come on, we're comparing apples and oranges. If you look at some parts of getting a tenure, they are without politic as well. Example: studying a subject.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
> Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to. Yeah, internal corporate politics never gets people's entire project canceled with no notice in the corporate world. That would just be mean, so it doesn't happen /s. (Guess what I found out last Friday?)
- throwawaymsft 10y ago
  That sucks, but politics in the workplace can be dialed from mega-corp to startup to consultancy to freelancer to anonymous author of a SaaS. How much politics did patio11 deal with when running Bingo Card Creator?
  - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    Pretty sure that the same applies for academia. It depends on your department culture and lab environment.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      I found the academia to be way more vicious and politics than a company. In academia, teachers/referees/directors were commonly there for 10-20 years, some will probably never have to live their positions and they have full unlimited authority for many things. The worse that could happen in academia as a student is to have politics goes against your back. You will be blocked from graduating, you will loose X years of study unlikely to start over or graduate at another place, and be stuck with your debt and no diploma. In a company, the worst that could happen is simply to be fired. You look for another job and keep your money, you keep your diploma, keep your experiences. In fact, if you have a problem with your boss at work, you can always change job. If you have a problem with your PhD (or master's) teacher in academia, you can't leave without failing your studies and you're fucked.
euske 10y ago
> casting a float into a bool Haha, a geeky yet very apt expression.
robotresearcher 10y ago
> Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics That's crazy. The way to get a great reference is to do outstanding work. If by 'playing politics' you mean not pissing people off by being an asshole or being unreliable, then, yeah, take care to be a good colleague. But almost entirely: do really good work.
- hueving 10y ago
  Bash other people's novel work while peer reviewing it anonymously, then steal it and submit for publication at another conference before the rejection notification goes to the original author. Once someone makes it into the review pools for top conferences, they receive a constant feed of good ideas to harvest in the form of submissions.
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    That's the pathological case, yes. People can also go steal cars and rob houses. But they usually don't. Good luck getting a reference from someone after stealing their idea.

JoshTriplett 10y ago

Agreed completely. I did a PhD knowing that I had zero interest in going into academia, and it provided a major boost to my professional career. I find it surprising when people talk about doing a PhD as exclusively useful for academics.

eanzenberg 10y ago
Same! I was super-interested in research and that's why I pursued a PhD. I never thought of running a lab or teaching classes.
- tostitos1979 10y ago
  A friend and I (both PhDs) were just discussing how difficult having a PhD has made getting engineering positions.In the course of interviewing at top-5 companies, we both have experienced a$$hats/interviewers with complexes who seem bent on showing off how they are smarter than the PhD interviewee .. curious if you have run into this as well, and any strategies to guard against this? I've also seen people who think PhDs can't code to save their life (I've seen such people but those are very obvious ... people who couldn't do fizbuzz) or think PhDs would get bored and leave easily. How does a competent PhD job seeker deal with this crap?
  - JoshTriplett 10y ago
    I didn't run into any of that in any of the companies I interviewed with; if anything, I found that coming in with a PhD resulted in correspondingly higher expectations. I'd treat any of the items you mentioned as warning signs and look for a better opportunity. To specifically counteract the "can't code" item, have plenty of practical items on your resume; include your published papers and conference presentations, but also include projects you've contributed to and similar. (For people doing a PhD who plan to work in industry, make sure you present at some industry conferences, not just academic conferences, and publish your code as/into Open Source projects.) A CV for an academic position doesn't work unmodified as a professional resume (with possible exceptions if you want to work in an industry research lab). In the specific context of CS, if you look at medium to large companies, you should already ask questions about the technical job ladder (such as making sure that one exists, rather than the only promotion path leading into management). Ask specific questions about how a PhD affects your starting position on that ladder. If it doesn't at all, then seriously consider looking for somewhere that it does. A company that values PhDs seems less likely to hold the misconceptions you mentioned.

p4bl0 10y ago

Your comment reminded me of a 5 years old blogpost of mine: https://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html https://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html. Eventually I decided that I wanted to do research and I couldn't be more happy about it. My experience as a PhD student was awesome, I did a postdoc on a topic that interested me very much but quite different than what I did during my PhD, and I've just landed a permanent position in academia as an associate professor!

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>Where is the discussion of starting a business? Of making your own company? Breaking free of the political shackles of academia and blazing your own path to glory? The discussion of what now? Not everyone wants to start a business. Not everyone has the domain and market knowledge to start a successful business. "Blazing your own path to glory" fails 90% of the time, usually repeatedly. If you're gonna be that damned persistent, you might as well have the freedom of academia.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

"Where is the discussion of starting a business? Of making your own company? Breaking free of the political shackles of academia and blazing your own path to glory?" Good point. Several, nice examples from my field of study are AbsInt, Kesterel, Galois, and AdaCore. https://www.absint.com/products.htm https://www.absint.com/products.htm http://www.kestrel.edu/home/about.html http://www.kestrel.edu/home/about.html https://galois.com/blog/ https://galois.com/blog/ http://www.adacore.com/academia/projects http://www.adacore.com/academia/projects AbsInt turns elite work of Ph.D.'s into commercial products and enhances them. Doubt it's boring. Kesterel has people doing academic-style research on hard problems and applying it to real-world. Galois does that too. AdaCore does a combo of tooling for grunt work, advanced tooling (esp compiler), and cutting-edge work (eg SPARK provers) involving academics remote or in-sourced. A good PhD in relevant subjects might get a job at any of these companies with similarly interesting work. Or, if tool is good enough, make a company out of it by partnering with people good at the business/sales side. So, definitely opportunities here beyond black and white of academic-only or grunt work.

Retra 10y ago

Break free of the political shackles of academia and go on trying to convince people to invest in your business, become employees, and convince customers to use your services? At least the political shackles of academia are intellectually stimulating and not pure dreary salesmanship like the political shackles of business ownership.

Chinjut 10y ago

Hm... are there any options other than hoping against all odds to successfully navigate the tenure-track rat-race, working for The Man as an anonymous cog at BigCorp, or starting a business and pouring myself into businessy businessperson busywork? I'm afraid... I'm afraid I may be a defective individual in that none of these sound terribly appealing as a way to spend the bulk of my life.

michaelvoz 10y ago
Sure! I merely presented a few of the more common case paths! For instance, a good friend of mine (who shall remain nameless for anonymities sake) is currently exploring the world, working as a cook in cafes, restaurants, etc, never staying anywhere for long, living out of a backpack. Very romantic, I could never do it myself, but his life is his own. I dont think man has ever been as truly free as we are today, you can really do anything you set your mind to, not confined to the short, somewhat stuffy list you and I have walked over together.
tgarma1234 10y ago
Please, don't do a PhD. The tenure track treadmill is brutal and on the wane. You would be much happier just getting a job. A normal job. With ordinary people. And I say that after a masters degree, many years in a PhD program and the having a normal job. A PhD is sort of useless at this point in history.
- Chinjut 10y ago
  Good advice, but bad news: Too late. (Well, I quit ABD (with a consolation Master's) and got a BigCorp job, but wasn't too thrilled with that, and since now I've got this monkey on my back, I keep trying to finish writing my dissertation again, pointless though I know it to be... Actually, sounds like our experiences are quite similar except for the last bit!) [No one's ever going to put in the effort to de-anonymize me off Hacker News, right? Just in case: Dear future potential employers reading this, A) Please don't, and B) Hey, I was totally kidding about not being thrilled with the BigCorp job. I love working for The Man! Go you! You The Man!]