9 ms·

I didn't go as far as PhD, but when I came out of uni, I knew nothing about life or work. I really wouldn't recommend anyone to try to launch their own startup

I didn't go as far as PhD, but when I came out of uni, I knew nothing about life or work. I really wouldn't recommend anyone to try to launch their own startup right out of uni (especially not alone). When I think back to it; if I had succeeded with my first startup right out of uni, I would have had a seriously distorted view of life. My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.

amelius 10y ago
> Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either Except if you stubbornly decide to fully understand LaTeX in the process.
- pyromine 10y ago
  Dear lord, I've started writing all of my mathematics homework in LaTeX, it's not even remotely reasonable. Though interestingly, having to be more deliberate in my operations do make me have a much more rigorous understanding of what I'm doing.
  - arcanus 10y ago
    > it's not even remotely reasonable. What is more scary: I exclusively write LaTeX equations in emails, raw to my colleagues. We have all been working with it for so long it is a native language. Math does funny stuff to your brain.
    - tjl 10y ago
      Most of my colleagues did this too. I know I've done it with my supervisor. It's just easier when you're trying to write out something complex and everyone who you're writing to knows how to read it without difficulty.
    - 50CNT 10y ago
      This is your brain \this{is your brain on Math} As a less poetic example, playing Dwarf Fortress for prolonged periods of time reportedly has similar effects. The ASCII fades, and mental images take its place. It's freaky when decoding slips into the hardware layer.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    I once (only once) live-typed notes from my Quantum Field Theory 2 class in LaTeX. It was on non-Abelian gauge theory IIRC. We had a German professor who was really fast too, and there's so many co(ntra)variant indices it's not even funny. It took quite some preparation and a shitload of custom \newcommand's, but it was doable, although painful.
    - elcritch 10y ago
      Impressive feat. And I'd buy you a shot of whiskey if I ever met you in person for attempting said feat.
  - mablap 10y ago
    Now try to go back to MS Word and typeset equations. You will miss LaTeX.
santiagobasulto 10y ago
This is odd. I was checking socketcluster.io a few hours ago for a side project I'm planning on building. Now I see your comment and Googled you ("because you said 'my first startup', no stalker) and found out you're the main contributor of it. Crazy.
lukeqsee 10y ago
> My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. This. I was just considering this last night, since I was back on my university campus again. While I subconsciously knew the work I was doing in school wasn't real, I still attributed value to it. Looking back, while it had value, it was fundamentally different value than real work. Its value was most temporal, i.e., if I got it done on time, it was valuable. This has little to no direction correlation to real life. Hard work is valuable when applied to intrinsically valuable work, which will be valuable if you finish it today or tomorrow. And in general, a missed deadline is bad, but doesn't reflect on the intrinsic value of the work (there are exceptions, of course). Hard work is worthless when applied to intrinsically worthless work, regardless of when or how it is completed.
marmaduke 10y ago
If you've not written a PhD thesis, you're not in a position to discount the work involved. Mine was a hundred pages, and I had about two weeks to write it from scratch. I'm not saying it was hard work, but it's not easy either.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  This raises more questions than it answers. Why did you have such a compressed schedule?
  - marmaduke 10y ago
    Doctoral school refused theses which were simply concatenation of publications and I was also obliged to start postdoc on deadline.. not great but whatever.
triplepoint217 10y ago
Writing the 100 page thesis is not the hard work part of a PhD. Doing the research to have the results to write that thesis is the hard work. Unless you are uncommonly lucky, you will fail at some avenues of research and have to slog through lots of painstaking work. I don't (yet) know how that compares to the challenges of a startup, but a PhD is an entirely different animal than an undergrad degree (for better or worse)
- jondubois 10y ago
  I worked on some pretty big projects and did a lot of research. That was easy. Part of the reason why it was easy was because I knew that if I put in the effort, I would almost certainly pass the course. At uni, if you're smart, the odds are always stacked firmly in your favor. Failing a PhD thesis during the defence is apparently a 'rare occurrence' in most universities. By contrast, the odds of your startup not failing are like 10%. Now if we're talking about actual 'success' then that's like 1% or less (it certainly feels like that from where I'm standing). With these sorts of odds, you don't have this feeling of 'meritocracy' that you might get if you came right out of uni.
  - gbrown 10y ago
    You do not have the experience or expertise to justify your claims; a PhD thesis is in no way like doing a regular research project, or passing a course in university. The reason why failing a PhD thesis defense is rare is because your adviser should prevent you from defending until the product is sufficiently strong. Many, many, many more people fail by dropping out of a PhD program during their dissertation than fail by doing a poor defense. Comparing successful thesis defense rates to startup success rates is not valid.
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      > The reason why failing a PhD thesis defense is rare is because your adviser should prevent you from defending until the product is sufficiently strong. This. Failing a public defense is not like a startup failing, it's more like an IPO failing (as in, stock goes to zero within a short time). You don't do it if you aren't 99.9999% sure it won't fail.
mikebenfield 10y ago
> Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either. Maybe don't belittle things you've never done? Doing a PhD is not just sitting down and writing a thesis, and it's also not just taking a few classes that occasionally require late nights. A PhD student is typically teaching one or more classes, learning as much as possible about his/her field, reading papers at the forefront of research in his/her field, conducting original research, writing papers on one's research, preparing and giving talks at conferences and seminars, along with writing the thesis and (at least in the first year or two) taking classes. My thesis was in fact just over 100 pages. It also required a lot intense studying (on top of my basic undergrad and graduate education) before I understood the topic well enough to begin to do research on the topic, and quite a lot more work before I started to find worthwhile original results to write about. Here "a lot of work" doesn't mean a few late nights, it means years of working as much time as possible every week. As someone who was in the working world for almost 10 years before returning to school, I assure you my thesis represents a lot more hard work than anything I ever did in "the real world." All that said, this article is nuts. Very few PhDs are in a good position to launch a startup. But not because PhDs "know nothing about life or work," and not because they are unfamiliar with hard work.
- wuschel 10y ago
  Seconded. 1) A PhD is a very personal experience, but hard work is the common denominator. 2) The article is off - very much because there is a multitude of outcomes when it comes to personal development during a PhD.
- jondubois 10y ago
  It's interesting how people are calibrated differently it comes to measuring 'hard work'. The difficult thing about startups is that the correlation between hard work and success isn't very strong. It might be the case that a PhD is very hard. My idea of it is just based on third-party observation and discussions with people who have done it. I suppose some people have a harder time than others. I worked on two open source projects for 6 years in total for about 20 to 30 hours every week in addition to my 40 hour per week day job. My first project had around 500 commits and was about 10K lines of code. My latest project has well over 1000 commits and probably 15K lines of code (I contributed about 80% to 90% of the code and it went through several rewrites). I also wrote the documentation for the project mostly on my own - There are almost 30 pages of technical documentation - About 15K wordcount. I did it for $0 - All I got out of it was experience, industry connections and some nice job offers. I feel like I worked hard. Almost certainly harder than anyone I know. But I know for sure that some people on HN will read the paragraph above and think that I'm actually a lazy entitled millennial.
kaeluka 10y ago
> My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. I'm a phd student and my idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since I started, too. The master's was child's play. Now it's about determination and finding avenues forward when facing problems that are so large that even finding a good question to ask is a major success. Staying up late and putting in the hours is the easy part. This is not as simple as you imagine it to be.
achileas 10y ago
Going through a graduate program, especially in the sciences, can really prepare you with a lot of the soft skills (and even more of the 'hard' skills) necessary to do so. >Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either. You already said you didn't get a PhD, you didn't need to say it twice.
- kyzyl 10y ago
  I opened this thread in the morning, got to that '100 page' remark and belly laughed. Then my day took over, and I just refreshed and saw your comment, and belly laughed again. I'd say it's been a successful day. Thanks ;-)
Kenji 10y ago
Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either. If you got through uni by doing this, you went to a bad uni. Same goes for your statement about a thesis. I feel like you don't really have an idea how tough academia can be. Your comments are smug and condescending.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Different people's experiences can vary drastically, even at the same institutions. You may have had to study every day, but you had classmates who didn't. That doesn't mean you went to "a bad uni".
- nsp 10y ago
  I got through uni by doing this at a top 5 research university (Columbia), it may depend on degree but it's definitely doable at 'hard uni's. That said, definitely keep my gpa off my resume.
_RPM 10y ago
I agree with you, even though I haven't graduated until December. I did 3 internships throughout college, and it really taught me a lot about life. Before that, I too, had a distorted view of life. Working in the real world really opened up my views on life in generally. Your example about hard work is excellent. I used to think staying up 24+ hours working on something was what hard work meant. Today, for me, hard work means getting adequate sleep, making sure that I have great energy so I can function for 10 hours a day on my personal projects, school, work, and wellness.
noobermin 10y ago
>Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Finishing assignments is to what a PhD student actually does is as `printf("hello world\n");` is to what a developer does.
dnautics 10y ago
writing a 100 page thesis for a contemporary PhD is easy, if you're not an idiot. Do everything in TeX and digitally staple the papers you've written together, and whip up a 10-page introductory statement. What is hard is the work that you have to go to to get to the 100 page thesis. Try working a 100 hour workweek, including sleeping the lab only to find out that the experiments that you've set up completely go to hell because of a minor detail that you missed at the beginning. Five or six times. (with 75 hour workweeks in between) Over the course of a year. Not taking any vacations. Five years over.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

amelius 10y ago

> Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either Except if you stubbornly decide to fully understand LaTeX in the process.

pyromine 10y ago
Dear lord, I've started writing all of my mathematics homework in LaTeX, it's not even remotely reasonable. Though interestingly, having to be more deliberate in my operations do make me have a much more rigorous understanding of what I'm doing.
- arcanus 10y ago
  > it's not even remotely reasonable. What is more scary: I exclusively write LaTeX equations in emails, raw to my colleagues. We have all been working with it for so long it is a native language. Math does funny stuff to your brain.
  - tjl 10y ago
    Most of my colleagues did this too. I know I've done it with my supervisor. It's just easier when you're trying to write out something complex and everyone who you're writing to knows how to read it without difficulty.
  - 50CNT 10y ago
    This is your brain \this{is your brain on Math} As a less poetic example, playing Dwarf Fortress for prolonged periods of time reportedly has similar effects. The ASCII fades, and mental images take its place. It's freaky when decoding slips into the hardware layer.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  I once (only once) live-typed notes from my Quantum Field Theory 2 class in LaTeX. It was on non-Abelian gauge theory IIRC. We had a German professor who was really fast too, and there's so many co(ntra)variant indices it's not even funny. It took quite some preparation and a shitload of custom \newcommand's, but it was doable, although painful.
  - elcritch 10y ago
    Impressive feat. And I'd buy you a shot of whiskey if I ever met you in person for attempting said feat.
- mablap 10y ago
  Now try to go back to MS Word and typeset equations. You will miss LaTeX.

santiagobasulto 10y ago

This is odd. I was checking socketcluster.io a few hours ago for a side project I'm planning on building. Now I see your comment and Googled you ("because you said 'my first startup', no stalker) and found out you're the main contributor of it. Crazy.

lukeqsee 10y ago

> My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. This. I was just considering this last night, since I was back on my university campus again. While I subconsciously knew the work I was doing in school wasn't real, I still attributed value to it. Looking back, while it had value, it was fundamentally different value than real work. Its value was most temporal, i.e., if I got it done on time, it was valuable. This has little to no direction correlation to real life. Hard work is valuable when applied to intrinsically valuable work, which will be valuable if you finish it today or tomorrow. And in general, a missed deadline is bad, but doesn't reflect on the intrinsic value of the work (there are exceptions, of course). Hard work is worthless when applied to intrinsically worthless work, regardless of when or how it is completed.

marmaduke 10y ago

If you've not written a PhD thesis, you're not in a position to discount the work involved. Mine was a hundred pages, and I had about two weeks to write it from scratch. I'm not saying it was hard work, but it's not easy either.

jessaustin 10y ago
This raises more questions than it answers. Why did you have such a compressed schedule?
- marmaduke 10y ago
  Doctoral school refused theses which were simply concatenation of publications and I was also obliged to start postdoc on deadline.. not great but whatever.

triplepoint217 10y ago

Writing the 100 page thesis is not the hard work part of a PhD. Doing the research to have the results to write that thesis is the hard work. Unless you are uncommonly lucky, you will fail at some avenues of research and have to slog through lots of painstaking work. I don't (yet) know how that compares to the challenges of a startup, but a PhD is an entirely different animal than an undergrad degree (for better or worse)

jondubois 10y ago
I worked on some pretty big projects and did a lot of research. That was easy. Part of the reason why it was easy was because I knew that if I put in the effort, I would almost certainly pass the course. At uni, if you're smart, the odds are always stacked firmly in your favor. Failing a PhD thesis during the defence is apparently a 'rare occurrence' in most universities. By contrast, the odds of your startup not failing are like 10%. Now if we're talking about actual 'success' then that's like 1% or less (it certainly feels like that from where I'm standing). With these sorts of odds, you don't have this feeling of 'meritocracy' that you might get if you came right out of uni.
- gbrown 10y ago
  You do not have the experience or expertise to justify your claims; a PhD thesis is in no way like doing a regular research project, or passing a course in university. The reason why failing a PhD thesis defense is rare is because your adviser should prevent you from defending until the product is sufficiently strong. Many, many, many more people fail by dropping out of a PhD program during their dissertation than fail by doing a poor defense. Comparing successful thesis defense rates to startup success rates is not valid.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    > The reason why failing a PhD thesis defense is rare is because your adviser should prevent you from defending until the product is sufficiently strong. This. Failing a public defense is not like a startup failing, it's more like an IPO failing (as in, stock goes to zero within a short time). You don't do it if you aren't 99.9999% sure it won't fail.

mikebenfield 10y ago

> Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either. Maybe don't belittle things you've never done? Doing a PhD is not just sitting down and writing a thesis, and it's also not just taking a few classes that occasionally require late nights. A PhD student is typically teaching one or more classes, learning as much as possible about his/her field, reading papers at the forefront of research in his/her field, conducting original research, writing papers on one's research, preparing and giving talks at conferences and seminars, along with writing the thesis and (at least in the first year or two) taking classes. My thesis was in fact just over 100 pages. It also required a lot intense studying (on top of my basic undergrad and graduate education) before I understood the topic well enough to begin to do research on the topic, and quite a lot more work before I started to find worthwhile original results to write about. Here "a lot of work" doesn't mean a few late nights, it means years of working as much time as possible every week. As someone who was in the working world for almost 10 years before returning to school, I assure you my thesis represents a lot more hard work than anything I ever did in "the real world." All that said, this article is nuts. Very few PhDs are in a good position to launch a startup. But not because PhDs "know nothing about life or work," and not because they are unfamiliar with hard work.

wuschel 10y ago
Seconded. 1) A PhD is a very personal experience, but hard work is the common denominator. 2) The article is off - very much because there is a multitude of outcomes when it comes to personal development during a PhD.
jondubois 10y ago
It's interesting how people are calibrated differently it comes to measuring 'hard work'. The difficult thing about startups is that the correlation between hard work and success isn't very strong. It might be the case that a PhD is very hard. My idea of it is just based on third-party observation and discussions with people who have done it. I suppose some people have a harder time than others. I worked on two open source projects for 6 years in total for about 20 to 30 hours every week in addition to my 40 hour per week day job. My first project had around 500 commits and was about 10K lines of code. My latest project has well over 1000 commits and probably 15K lines of code (I contributed about 80% to 90% of the code and it went through several rewrites). I also wrote the documentation for the project mostly on my own - There are almost 30 pages of technical documentation - About 15K wordcount. I did it for $0 - All I got out of it was experience, industry connections and some nice job offers. I feel like I worked hard. Almost certainly harder than anyone I know. But I know for sure that some people on HN will read the paragraph above and think that I'm actually a lazy entitled millennial.

kaeluka 10y ago

> My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. I'm a phd student and my idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since I started, too. The master's was child's play. Now it's about determination and finding avenues forward when facing problems that are so large that even finding a good question to ask is a major success. Staying up late and putting in the hours is the easy part. This is not as simple as you imagine it to be.

achileas 10y ago

Going through a graduate program, especially in the sciences, can really prepare you with a lot of the soft skills (and even more of the 'hard' skills) necessary to do so. >Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either. You already said you didn't get a PhD, you didn't need to say it twice.

kyzyl 10y ago
I opened this thread in the morning, got to that '100 page' remark and belly laughed. Then my day took over, and I just refreshed and saw your comment, and belly laughed again. I'd say it's been a successful day. Thanks ;-)

Kenji 10y ago

Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either. If you got through uni by doing this, you went to a bad uni. Same goes for your statement about a thesis. I feel like you don't really have an idea how tough academia can be. Your comments are smug and condescending.

jessaustin 10y ago
Different people's experiences can vary drastically, even at the same institutions. You may have had to study every day, but you had classmates who didn't. That doesn't mean you went to "a bad uni".
nsp 10y ago
I got through uni by doing this at a top 5 research university (Columbia), it may depend on degree but it's definitely doable at 'hard uni's. That said, definitely keep my gpa off my resume.

_RPM 10y ago

I agree with you, even though I haven't graduated until December. I did 3 internships throughout college, and it really taught me a lot about life. Before that, I too, had a distorted view of life. Working in the real world really opened up my views on life in generally. Your example about hard work is excellent. I used to think staying up 24+ hours working on something was what hard work meant. Today, for me, hard work means getting adequate sleep, making sure that I have great energy so I can function for 10 hours a day on my personal projects, school, work, and wellness.

noobermin 10y ago

>Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Finishing assignments is to what a PhD student actually does is as `printf("hello world\n");` is to what a developer does.

dnautics 10y ago

writing a 100 page thesis for a contemporary PhD is easy, if you're not an idiot. Do everything in TeX and digitally staple the papers you've written together, and whip up a 10-page introductory statement. What is hard is the work that you have to go to to get to the 100 page thesis. Try working a 100 hour workweek, including sleeping the lab only to find out that the experiments that you've set up completely go to hell because of a minor detail that you missed at the beginning. Five or six times. (with 75 hour workweeks in between) Over the course of a year. Not taking any vacations. Five years over.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]