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> 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,

> 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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mattkrause 10y ago
  For what it's worth, I don't think you're a lazy entitled millennial. I do think that you may not understand what doing a PhD involves. People find academic careers hard for a lot of the same reasons that startups are difficult: there's no clear roadmap for moving forward, tons of hard work is necessary but definitely not sufficient for success, and although you have frustratingly little control over outcomes, it feels like all of your 'eggs' are trapped in one basket.
squeaky-clean 10y ago
I think you're both making different points. Yes, a PhD is a lot of work (I'd assume, haven't got one). Maybe more work than a startup. But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest. You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it. Your advisor doesn't take on 10 graduate students and encourage practices that will cause 9 to fail but 1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams. Messing it up doesn't mean you don't have to tell 30 people that they need new jobs. Maybe I'm interpreting the GP post wrong, but I take their use of "hard" to mean "unfair and stressful", and your use of "hard" to mean "high quantity and quality of work."
- squidfood 10y ago
  > take on 10 graduate students and encourage practices that will cause 9 to fail but 1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams. Sounds like a pretty good description of the academic job market to me.
  - ska 10y ago
    9:1 is too optimistic though
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  > But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest. Nor do you have a 90% chance of failing in your business venture despite you trying your hardest. Going from the statistic "90% of businesses fail" to "you have a 90% chance of failure when starting a business" is an incorrect deduction. The latter only follows from the former if business success is almost entirely random chance. It isn't. Some people are almost guaranteed to fail because they have no idea what they are doing or what they are getting into[1]. Some business ideas are just bad. On the flip side, some people are really good at running businesses, take the time to understand what is required, wait until they have a realistic idea, and through all that give themselves a very good chance of succeeding. I wish we, as a community, would stop parroting this abuse of statistics. [1] I'd wager that this explains the vast majority of restaurant failures.
stevenwiles 10y ago
Sorry, but a PhD does not require hard work or significant intellect at all. It just required following directions. Please don't make PhDs sound more difficult than they really are. That is disingenuous.
dfsegoat 10y ago
This. Only BA here. But I worked in a forensic genetics laboratory with 2 Ph.D candidates from start to finish and learned to mimic their work ethic and methods: They do not sleep. They teach, then they crank out publications, and in between maybe they can work on their thesis so that in 7 years it will be ready to defend. It is an obscenely grueling path that let me know it wasn't one I wanted to head down.

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.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mattkrause 10y ago
For what it's worth, I don't think you're a lazy entitled millennial. I do think that you may not understand what doing a PhD involves. People find academic careers hard for a lot of the same reasons that startups are difficult: there's no clear roadmap for moving forward, tons of hard work is necessary but definitely not sufficient for success, and although you have frustratingly little control over outcomes, it feels like all of your 'eggs' are trapped in one basket.

squeaky-clean 10y ago

I think you're both making different points. Yes, a PhD is a lot of work (I'd assume, haven't got one). Maybe more work than a startup. But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest. You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it. Your advisor doesn't take on 10 graduate students and encourage practices that will cause 9 to fail but 1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams. Messing it up doesn't mean you don't have to tell 30 people that they need new jobs. Maybe I'm interpreting the GP post wrong, but I take their use of "hard" to mean "unfair and stressful", and your use of "hard" to mean "high quantity and quality of work."

squidfood 10y ago
> take on 10 graduate students and encourage practices that will cause 9 to fail but 1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams. Sounds like a pretty good description of the academic job market to me.
- ska 10y ago
  9:1 is too optimistic though
vonmoltke 10y ago
> But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest. Nor do you have a 90% chance of failing in your business venture despite you trying your hardest. Going from the statistic "90% of businesses fail" to "you have a 90% chance of failure when starting a business" is an incorrect deduction. The latter only follows from the former if business success is almost entirely random chance. It isn't. Some people are almost guaranteed to fail because they have no idea what they are doing or what they are getting into[1]. Some business ideas are just bad. On the flip side, some people are really good at running businesses, take the time to understand what is required, wait until they have a realistic idea, and through all that give themselves a very good chance of succeeding. I wish we, as a community, would stop parroting this abuse of statistics. [1] I'd wager that this explains the vast majority of restaurant failures.

stevenwiles 10y ago

Sorry, but a PhD does not require hard work or significant intellect at all. It just required following directions. Please don't make PhDs sound more difficult than they really are. That is disingenuous.

dfsegoat 10y ago

This. Only BA here. But I worked in a forensic genetics laboratory with 2 Ph.D candidates from start to finish and learned to mimic their work ethic and methods: They do not sleep. They teach, then they crank out publications, and in between maybe they can work on their thesis so that in 7 years it will be ready to defend. It is an obscenely grueling path that let me know it wasn't one I wanted to head down.