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> I think you are missing the scale mentioned in the article: > The industry is paying five times what universities are paying. Not Fifty percent. Not double.

> I think you are missing the scale mentioned in the article: > The industry is paying five times what universities are paying. Not Fifty percent. Not double. Five times. Nope, not missing that. You don't think this happened in 1999-2000? I agree with you that grad students are ruthlessly exploited. I've seen that firsthand. I routinely discourage people from doing a Ph.D. for that reason. And if you're not too far along, taking a terminal master's and leaving for industry is a solid option, especially because this AI bubble won't last forever. But if, like the one student in TFA, you have just one year left, quitting grad school is not a great idea. Now you have, at best, an awkwardly long stretch of grad school on your CV with a master's degree on the end of it, and at worst, no degree at all to show for your pains. At that point, just suck it up and finish the degree.

notyourday 9y ago
> Nope, not missing that. You don't think this happened in 1999-2000? I do. I'm yet to see people who jumped away from academic CS tracks at the time being upset about their decisions. I do know of dozens degreed people in their late thirties reporting to C students while making quarter of the salary of the same C students.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  CS and AI are different subjects. As a CS dropout, your job is to write code. You can get quite competent at that without a higher education course. You can't do that with AI. The amount of material you need to get on top of is really something else, especially if you want to be able to understand the foundations of what you're doing- which stretch back several decades before statistical machine learning, popular as it is today.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    It is very naive to think that AI programs in most of universities is anything other than writing code and pretty lousy one. Do you know that it was possible to get a PhD in genetic sequencing not a very long time ago from very serious schools? That's right, what today can be done by a random student or a random outsourcing shop in a third world country used to be a PhD worthy specialty. In 5 years today's ML/AI PhDs would be in the same peculiar position as PhDs of genetic sequencing.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
      >> It is very naive to think that AI programs in most of universities is anything other than writing code and pretty lousy one. Are you speaking from experience? Because my own experience from my degree and Master's AI courses and lectures is completely different to what you describe. Particularly during my Master's, code was only incidental; the meat and potatoes of each and every lecture was theory. It depends of course on the quality of the teaching in a given institution, but, for instance, you can find here the lecture notes from Oxford's Deep NLP course: https://github.com/oxford-cs-deepnlp-2017/lectures https://github.com/oxford-cs-deepnlp-2017/lectures As you will see, it's anything but just code, or lousy such. Of course, that's Oxford, their teaching is world-class- but most AI courses I've found on the internet are similar in scope. Really, it's pointless trying to teach AI with "just code" - because in AI you can't really code much, unless you understand the theory. >> In 5 years today's ML/AI PhDs would be in the same peculiar position as PhDs of genetic sequencing. I think what you're saying is that in 5 years, people knowing Tensor Flow or Torch will be a dime a dozen. Perhaps- but someone will still need to figure out some way to acquire new knowledge. Also, it bears repeating that AI is not just statistical machine learning and statistical machine learning itself is not just deep learning. AI is a broad field with communities focused on many different subjects. Just as an example you can find information on, easily, try probabilistic programming.
  - bobdole1234 9y ago
    Back a decade or so ago, the only way to really reliably get access to current research was to work at a University or a large company with journal subscriptions. These days it's really easy to get all the information you need to teach yourself whatever you need to. If you have problems, ask the Internet for help. And these days, if you want to work on the actual leading edge, it's likely at Google, not at a University.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
      >> These days it's really easy to get all the information you need to teach yourself whatever you need to. If you have problems, ask the Internet for help. The information may be online but it's not organised in any way and if you're learning on your own, first you have to figure out what information is relevant to what you want to learn. University offers focus, support and guidance that you don't have when you're on your own. I think a lot of developers treat machine learning as just another technology they can get good at if they apply themselves to it, like blockchain, non-relational databases, VR etc. In truth, AI is nothing like that. You really need to grok some background knowledge before you can do anything useful with it. You can sure learn to use the free-access tools available today, like TensorFlow or Keras etc, but, for instance, you're not going to just figure out how to roll your own deep learning framework just by reading a few books you found online- like you could do for, say, a web framework. Nor does it mean that, just because you learned how to use a machine learnign framework, you can discover new knowledge and invent new machine learning algorithms, or optimise existing ones. Which means- someone else always has to be there to do the hard work for you. I'd say, that's the reason why it's AI PhD students who are being poached, and not just random devs who declare themselves "passionate about machine learning" on their facebook pages. Because the AI PhDs already have the background the big AI companies are looking for.
znpy 9y ago
A PhD lasts five years in the us. I would argue: what's the tangible difference between someone who has gone through all five years and someone who has gone through "just" four of them? Plus, i don't think applied research is less important than base research.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> I agree with you that grad students are ruthlessly exploited. More so than junior developers? In my experience, "junior programmer" means you'll do ten times the work for one tenth the salary - and everyone will treat you like an idiot on top of that (because, hey, if you were smart you wouldn't be a junior, amirite?). I do think the exploitation of grad students is a US phenomenon, btw. And the article is about universities in the UK, where I'm pretty sure the conditions are different.
- notyourday 9y ago
  > More so than junior developers? In my experience, "junior programmer" means you'll do ten times the work for one tenth the salary - and everyone will treat you like an idiot on top of that (because, hey, if you were smart you wouldn't be a junior, amirite?). Still pays more than a grad student.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    I thought the point was about exploitation, not absolute monetary values? Because if we're going for absolute money amounts, we might as well all give up on any sort of career in technology and shift our focus to getting some managerial position in a big corporation, somewhere- that's where the money's at.
    - notyourday 9y ago
      It is about being exploited for extremely small amount of money. This is a real world. In real world, people need money. Shit is expensive. Food is expensive. Shelter is expensive. Everything is expensive. Now it is possible that you are independently wealthy and it is irrelevant to you, but I can assure you anyone who is not independently wealthy would always trade shit job (A) which pays $K for a shit job (A) that pays $K + several thousand dollars, which is the complain of this article
      - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

notyourday 9y ago

> Nope, not missing that. You don't think this happened in 1999-2000? I do. I'm yet to see people who jumped away from academic CS tracks at the time being upset about their decisions. I do know of dozens degreed people in their late thirties reporting to C students while making quarter of the salary of the same C students.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
CS and AI are different subjects. As a CS dropout, your job is to write code. You can get quite competent at that without a higher education course. You can't do that with AI. The amount of material you need to get on top of is really something else, especially if you want to be able to understand the foundations of what you're doing- which stretch back several decades before statistical machine learning, popular as it is today.
- notyourday 9y ago
  It is very naive to think that AI programs in most of universities is anything other than writing code and pretty lousy one. Do you know that it was possible to get a PhD in genetic sequencing not a very long time ago from very serious schools? That's right, what today can be done by a random student or a random outsourcing shop in a third world country used to be a PhD worthy specialty. In 5 years today's ML/AI PhDs would be in the same peculiar position as PhDs of genetic sequencing.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    >> It is very naive to think that AI programs in most of universities is anything other than writing code and pretty lousy one. Are you speaking from experience? Because my own experience from my degree and Master's AI courses and lectures is completely different to what you describe. Particularly during my Master's, code was only incidental; the meat and potatoes of each and every lecture was theory. It depends of course on the quality of the teaching in a given institution, but, for instance, you can find here the lecture notes from Oxford's Deep NLP course: https://github.com/oxford-cs-deepnlp-2017/lectures https://github.com/oxford-cs-deepnlp-2017/lectures As you will see, it's anything but just code, or lousy such. Of course, that's Oxford, their teaching is world-class- but most AI courses I've found on the internet are similar in scope. Really, it's pointless trying to teach AI with "just code" - because in AI you can't really code much, unless you understand the theory. >> In 5 years today's ML/AI PhDs would be in the same peculiar position as PhDs of genetic sequencing. I think what you're saying is that in 5 years, people knowing Tensor Flow or Torch will be a dime a dozen. Perhaps- but someone will still need to figure out some way to acquire new knowledge. Also, it bears repeating that AI is not just statistical machine learning and statistical machine learning itself is not just deep learning. AI is a broad field with communities focused on many different subjects. Just as an example you can find information on, easily, try probabilistic programming.
- bobdole1234 9y ago
  Back a decade or so ago, the only way to really reliably get access to current research was to work at a University or a large company with journal subscriptions. These days it's really easy to get all the information you need to teach yourself whatever you need to. If you have problems, ask the Internet for help. And these days, if you want to work on the actual leading edge, it's likely at Google, not at a University.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    >> These days it's really easy to get all the information you need to teach yourself whatever you need to. If you have problems, ask the Internet for help. The information may be online but it's not organised in any way and if you're learning on your own, first you have to figure out what information is relevant to what you want to learn. University offers focus, support and guidance that you don't have when you're on your own. I think a lot of developers treat machine learning as just another technology they can get good at if they apply themselves to it, like blockchain, non-relational databases, VR etc. In truth, AI is nothing like that. You really need to grok some background knowledge before you can do anything useful with it. You can sure learn to use the free-access tools available today, like TensorFlow or Keras etc, but, for instance, you're not going to just figure out how to roll your own deep learning framework just by reading a few books you found online- like you could do for, say, a web framework. Nor does it mean that, just because you learned how to use a machine learnign framework, you can discover new knowledge and invent new machine learning algorithms, or optimise existing ones. Which means- someone else always has to be there to do the hard work for you. I'd say, that's the reason why it's AI PhD students who are being poached, and not just random devs who declare themselves "passionate about machine learning" on their facebook pages. Because the AI PhDs already have the background the big AI companies are looking for.

znpy 9y ago

A PhD lasts five years in the us. I would argue: what's the tangible difference between someone who has gone through all five years and someone who has gone through "just" four of them? Plus, i don't think applied research is less important than base research.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> I agree with you that grad students are ruthlessly exploited. More so than junior developers? In my experience, "junior programmer" means you'll do ten times the work for one tenth the salary - and everyone will treat you like an idiot on top of that (because, hey, if you were smart you wouldn't be a junior, amirite?). I do think the exploitation of grad students is a US phenomenon, btw. And the article is about universities in the UK, where I'm pretty sure the conditions are different.

notyourday 9y ago
> More so than junior developers? In my experience, "junior programmer" means you'll do ten times the work for one tenth the salary - and everyone will treat you like an idiot on top of that (because, hey, if you were smart you wouldn't be a junior, amirite?). Still pays more than a grad student.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  I thought the point was about exploitation, not absolute monetary values? Because if we're going for absolute money amounts, we might as well all give up on any sort of career in technology and shift our focus to getting some managerial position in a big corporation, somewhere- that's where the money's at.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    It is about being exploited for extremely small amount of money. This is a real world. In real world, people need money. Shit is expensive. Food is expensive. Shelter is expensive. Everything is expensive. Now it is possible that you are independently wealthy and it is irrelevant to you, but I can assure you anyone who is not independently wealthy would always trade shit job (A) which pays $K for a shit job (A) that pays $K + several thousand dollars, which is the complain of this article
    - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago