9 ms·
Consider applying for grad school
- azhenley 8y agoIf anyone wants a PhD by studying how to make software engineers more productive, my website is in my profile.
- jarsin 8y agoTo increase productivity of engineers include the following in all employment contracts: "All engineers will become as rich as the founders and investors if this company succeeds." Instant productivity increase.
- azhenley 8y agoLet’s run an empirical study to measure how much it improves.
- analog31 8y agoThis is a tautology. The more you are paid, the more productive you are by definition.
- azhenley 8y agoThis morning I listened to the Freakonomics podcast from July 18th about “Why we choke”. About 22 minutes in, a researcher is discussing a study he did where they paid participants a months wage for a single task to see if they would perform better. They didn’t. They actually performed worse! A follow up study at MIT found this to be particularly true for cognitive tasks. Would this apply to a job over time instead of a single task? Probably not, but I’m also not convinced that salary will increase productivity after some relatively low amount.
- analog31 8y agoI think there's "productivity" from two standpoints. In the worker's eyes, she's more productive if she's paid more, by definition. In the employer's eyes, she's more productive if she produces more for the company, by definition. A classic "efficient" market should close any gaps between these two definition, but it doesn't work perfectly in practice.
- gravypod 8y agoWhat do you study and how does a citizen with practical experience in the field help? A lot of things I have read about software engineering isn't really well tested. How does your research stack up? Is that something people on HN could help improve on?
- shawn 8y agoI'd like to. Do graduate programs accept devs who have been working the last decade? There are areas I feel I could be helpful with, e.g. creating reproducible experiments or ensuring a codebase could be open sourced in relation to a paper. It's a lot of grunt work that nobody really has time to do. If that were possible, I'm not quite sure where to start with executing that plan. (Chicago area, FWIW.)
- hendzen 8y agoYup, there are a number of well regarded CS professors who recruit burnt out industry programmers as students. Check out Peter Alvaro at UCSC for one.
- minor3rd 8y ago6 years ago I was wondering how anyone gets burnt out from getting to program for a living. How naive I was :)
- hideo 8y agoI'm in the same boat - The PhD admissions proces over-indexes on Letters of Recommendation from other academics. I don't think I can get those because I have not actively stayed in touch with my professors. I went through the existing process once and promised myself I would never waste that much time again. But if there's a program that genuinely values industry experience, and is willing to look past recommendation letters from academics, I'd jump at it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Ar-Curunir 8y agoGet a Master's first; that way you can get a taste of whether you even like the field enough
- mxwsn 8y agoA significant number of PhDs drop out, and likely literally everyone undergoes some sort of huge realization of how doing a PhD is completely and surprisingly unlike what they expected (which is still true even with all the advice telling people that doing a PhD will be surprisingly unlike what you expect). Someone dropping out of a lab is a significant loss in time and resource investment which labs would prefer to avoid, and the biggest predictor for staying in a PhD is substantial experience doing research (to have some sense of what the lifestyle is like) and little experience with higher paying jobs (here at MIT, I see many PhD programs prefer people straight out of undergrad, even though older people are orders of magnitude more productive in the early phase of their PhD).
- BadassFractal 8y agoInteresting contrast to the recent wave of posts about how you should absolutely not go for academia in the current market of having 1 job spot for every 3 PhDs. What's one to make of this?
- currymj 8y ago80,000 Hours is a website made by members of a very particular subculture. The “prototypical” PhD they’re imagining is in computer science, probably with a focus on machine learning, probably at a highly-ranked school, by someone who went to a highly-ranked undergrad. Job prospects are relatively good. Pay is bad but industry internships during summer can compensate. Academic jobs are not quite as scarce, and R&D jobs in industry are plentiful. There is not an air of failure or taboo about moving on from academia after the degree. The calculation on a PhD is very different compared to most other fields, and certainly compared to humanities PhDs (which actually charge money to attend!)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gil_rutter 8y agoThis, also their audience is people trying to optimise for improving the world rather than making money.
- aaronwalsman 8y agoDon't get a PhD because you think it will be good for random job opportunities. Get a PhD because you really want to spend a lot of time researching X very deeply.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 3minus1 8y agoI was expecting reasons why now is a better climate to apply then in previous years. That would be interesting, but instead it's a list of generic reasons to apply for a phd. Yes, I know that phd's can open doors.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoI read the whole article, including the "why not to get a PhD part." I still thought it was way too kind to the "get a PhD" side of the equation. PhDs represent a tremendous opportunity cost, and I have not seen good evidence that they causally improve outcomes in the vast majority of cases.
- ianai 8y agoThey don’t make sense from a cost/benefit outside of the people actually able to find work in that one specific area and beat out all competition. There are simply more candidates than high paying phd jobs. A masters tends to have a more dependable ROI. But all things considered, I say modern academia is a shadow of what it claims to be.
- chrisseaton 8y agoHow are you measuring outcomes? Just salary? Because how would you empirically measure anything else?
- ianai 8y agoSalary, salary regressed on all factors of things (age,sex,years in industry, etc). Once the equation is properly balanced the marginal impact of a PhD is less than the marginal impact of just those added years in the field. And don’t forget to factor in the opportunity cost of accruing student loan debt (which can’t be defaulted!) against lost yearly income.
- chrisseaton 8y agoRight, but there are outcomes beside salary aren't there?
- teekno 8y agoI'm very interested in (applied) AI research positions but wasn't quite prepared to commit 5-8 years to a PhD program. In order to validate my interest in research, I've enrolled in a two year Computer Science Master's program at Tsinghua University. This program has a thesis component, allowing me to participate in research and potentially get a publication. Depending on how much I enjoy the content, I plan on applying to AI fellowships, a PhD program, or Machine Learning Engineering positions after graduation. Thought the program hasn't started yet, I hope that this is an alternative path for those interested in research but not quite ready for a full PhD.
- s0rce 8y agoHuge opportunity cost for 5-8 years, think carefully. Also, very very few jobs in academia so don't plan on those. Was interesting and learned a lot, not sure the most useful use of those years.
- shoo 8y agoindeed. a few folks in the FIRE (financial independence / retire early) space talk about being able to save enough money to be retired or semi-retired from 7-8 years of full-time work (this doesn't require FAANG scale salaries, just a combination of working somewhere that pays pretty well, not spending much money, building up investments, and luck to avoid getting clobbered with huge medical expenses. and the luck to start from a context where this might be an option for you at all) edit: adding a few links to reading material One of the main things is to focus on maximising your savings rate, i.e. your amount of savings divided by your revenue (for most people this would be their income from their job, minus income tax). You can increase this by making lifestyle changes that let you sustainably decrease your expenses, and by getting a job that pays you more, or other sources of income. William Bernstein has written a bit about investment and asset allocation. He has a free publication titled "If You Can" geared at young people to help them plan for retirement: http://efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/2books.htm http://efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/2books.htm One of his general pieces of advice is to invest 15% of income every year into low-fee investment funds, i.e. to achieve a savings rate of 15%. If you do this consistently for around 30 or 40 years, you can retire. Things get much more extreme for higher savings rates. For example, if you hit a savings rate of around 75% year after year (saving three quarters of what you earn after tax) and invest this, then with some assumptions about rates of return on investment, after about 8 years there should be enough income from investments to cover your expenses: https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si... You need to be a bit careful re: assumptions about stock market returns over the next few years or decades, some markets (e.g. the US stock market) are priced very highly compared to historical prices, so assumptions about rates of return from investment that seemed reasonable a decade ago are probably over-estimates now.
- Eridrus 8y agoI think the context that most commenters are missing here is that this is not an argument that you will make more money with a PhD. The focus of 80,000 hours is on "effective altruism" where the goal is to have the greatest positive impact on the world. And it's not super hard to believe that there are quite a few jobs that require a PhD, often due to plain credentialism, that have significantly more impact than your average software developer at a well paying company. I'm still not going to do a PhD, but I'm really not the target audience here, and it's sort of not surprising since 80,000 hours is an outgrowth of academia itself.
- pazimzadeh 8y agoI can't wait until you can make new strains of E. coli on your desktop/iPad. Time in grad school is often spent cloning. It would be really great if there were more community-accessible Core facilities available on a subscription service.
- rubatuga 8y agoI remember specifically looking at cloud labs because of your sentiment above. Unfortunately, they aren’t that advanced yet.
- syntaxing 8y agoI'm a MechE so this is probably different compared to software. A masters is far better in terms of ROI compared to PhD. I seriously contemplated to complete my PhD after my masters but an additional ~4 years of school was not worth it financially. Your wage is not much different (though the type of work and responsibility might be different) and sometimes masters + 4-5 years actually make more than a PhD grad. Also, you make a full wage 4-5 year earlier. That meant a lot for me in terms of starting my own family and such.
- ransom1538 8y agoI know this isn't popular. But I will say it - since I know it goes unspoken in the industry. When I see a CS MS degree I assume the person is terrible. I am always proved correct. I can count on one hand resumes of people that gets a CS BS degree THEN a MS degree in CS [15 years of looking at resumes]. In the US, if you get a BS in CS you usually take off doing cool stuff. CS Master degrees are full of people not majoring in CS for the right reason [eg, never played with computers as a kid]. If computers were your passion you would have got a BS in it.
- azhenley 8y agoNot everyone finds their passion before or during undergrad.
- BugsJustFindMe 8y agoMy experience is the opposite of yours. Oh look, we cancel out. Hurray for anecdotes and biases!
- monocasa 8y agoI mean, if they're coming from a different major, it's the equivalent of hiring people after sophomore year. If they haven't been programming outside that, that frankly isn't enough time to be a good programmer.
- BugsJustFindMe 8y agoWhat a weirdly specific statement that has little connection to the parent or reality. Remember that we're responding to: > I can count on one hand resumes of people that gets a CS BS degree THEN a MS degree in CS [15 years of looking at resumes]. In fact most people who get an MS in CS got a BS in CS first. And all MS programs have prerequisites.
- nickthemagicman 8y agoMost M.S. requires a year or two of prerequisites.
- dwaltrip 8y agoOne point jumped out at me, which I haven't seen anyone respond to: > We are concerned about untrained amateurs going directly into trying to solve very difficult global problems. They can then cause harm overall, by lowering the average quality of analysis or launching ill-considered projects due to a lack of experience or understanding. A PhD reduces the risk you’ll accidentally do this. This point is operating off of a different fundamental paradigm than the comments here that are talking about opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is looking at personal benefit, while the above is looking at the effectiveness at solving hard, large-scale problems. Obviously, money is important, but for many (often those who are fortunate enough to have reached a certain income level), it isn't the only thing or even the primary thing. I don't have much insight into how true the point actually is, but I found it to be interesting.
- late2part 8y agoQuite often, these untrained amateurs create great solutions!
- stouset 8y agoYes, but the argument is that these untrained amateurs more often make grave errors from ignorance that make existing situations worse, or at best divert resources from more well-considered approaches. Which produces net better global outcomes I couldn’t say, though I have my own intuitions.
- vokep 8y agoNot really. As an untrained amateur myself hoping to create great solutions. Thing is its the exception, not the rule. Also with highly complex things (large scale - global problems) often it is possible for an untrained amateur to create a solution that is easy to communicate why it should be good, and it works in the short term. However awhile later, it is found that long term failure occurs
- Fomite 8y agoAnd quite often, they create toe-curlingly bad ones.
- dm8 8y agoLooks like author is focusing on grad school as in PhD only. PhD highly depends on the field. For example in hardcore sciences, to accelerate career PhD is often helpful. However, in applied fields it depends on industry to industry. I was doing my masters with focus on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I was considering PhD but after talking with academic advisor, I realized having PhD will limit my options to either research labs or academia, for which jobs are few and far between. For industry jobs, I felt I didn't need PhD. Yes, you might be few steps below in the ladder but you can quickly catch-up as you climb. So everyone should seriously consider where they want to end up. If research is something they fancy and their field has ample research opportunities or can be leg up in the industry with PhD then PhD is a great option given the opportunity costs.
- miguelrochefort 8y agoI always wanted to get a PhD, but I don't have a BS. Is there any way I can skip the BS?
- BadassFractal 8y agoBill Gates did it, so I guess it's possible?
- chrisseaton 8y agoBill Gates didn't do it - he doesn't have a PhD at all. He has honorary doctorates, but that's not really what we're talking about here.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoI think that's the entire point: Gates has honorary doctorates without ever getting a bachelor's. So, yeah, some people have gotten a doctorate while skipping the BS (if we assume BS means Bachelor of Science).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- barry-cotter 8y agohttps://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-software-engineering?wssl=1 https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-softwar... University of Oxford Master’s in Software Engineering ... However, more extensive experience may compensate for a lack of formal qualifications, and a strong, immediately-relevant qualification may compensate for a lack of professional experience.
- nolemurs 8y ago> PhDs are intellectually demanding, and not everyone will be able to finish. In the US between 41 and 78% of people who start PhDs have finished them after ten years, depending on their sub field. Computer and Information Science has the lowest graduation rates (41%) Right... I've met a good number of PhD dropouts - I am one myself. None of them dropped out because it was too "intellectually demanding." They all dropped out because the work was unrewarding, the odds of employment in academia were poor, and the work in academia was unappealing. Looking at Computer and Information Science in particular, I might suggest that high availability of high paying jobs in the private sector is worth looking at rather than the "intellectually demanding" academic program.
- refurb 8y agoA lot of it depends on the field. I went to grad school for chemistry. A PhD in my experience is more an exercise in perseverance than anything. You don’t need to be a genius, just work hard and have some luck as well.
- retsibsi 8y agoWhile I suspect you're right, anecdotal evidence must be fairly weak here. Not many people would admit to themselves that they weren't up to the intellectual challenge -- let alone admit it to other people.
- alimw 8y agoI guess I'll admit I wasn't up to the intellectual challenge in that, all else being equal, being smarter might have got me through.
- nolemurs 8y agoMy own experience was that part of the problem was that there was no intellectual challenge. I actually suspect that if PhD programs were a little more intellectually challenging drop-out rates would go down.
- fangsout 8y agoI also dropped out of a PhD program in CS after I realized that my advisor had incentives to keep me in the program and no incentives to help me complete my dissertation in a timely fashion. Imagine having a highly-educated, native english speaking computer scientist that you paid $30K / year. Compared to the 150K+ / year that person would make in the private sector.
- mchahn 8y agoI assume this refers to a PHD. The masters degree I got is also post-grad. I'm not sure if anyone else covered it but you have to have a certain amount of money to get a PHD. I was approved to enter a doctorate program at Stanford. I couldn't afford it so I went to HP to earn some money. After the five-year approval expired I was disappointed that I could never afford it. (We're talking astronomical numbers here).
- analog31 8y agoWhen I was a student 30 years ago, the rule of thumb was: Don't get a graduate degree unless someone else is paying for it. In my field (physics), a first or second tier school would provide free tuition plus a stipend if they expected to get any students. Don't know how things are now, or how they are in other fields. Now, of course free wasn't exactly free, because studying in grad school was potentially at the expense of working a regular job. That's another topic.
- Fomite 8y agoYep. If they're not funding you, it's both a bad idea and a soft reject. Hell, last I looked, Standford won't even let you self-fund all the way through, at least in my field.
- yontherubicon 8y agoWhat? Doctoral programs pay you through stipends. You shouldn't have to pay for any doctoral program, ever.
- mchahn 8y agoHmm. When I told the professor trying to "hire" me that I couldn't afford it there was no mention of a stipend. Could it have been different in the 1970s? Pricing on Stanford website (https://registrar.stanford.edu/students/tuition-and-fees https://registrar.stanford.edu/students/tuition-and-fees): Each graduate Engineering unit above 18 is $1200.
- sevensor 8y agoNothing in the article about what one really learns in a Ph.D. program. Here are the things you only learn in a Ph.D. program, more or less in chronological order: 1. What kind of information you will find in each section of a research paper in your field. 2. What are the major research programs in your field and where they disagree. 3. How to identify where a paper's author stands with respect to the major disagreements in your field. 4. How to decide that a paper isn't worth your time without reading all of it. 5. How do you write a research paper? 6. How do you decide what research to do? (This decision will often be made for you for the first couple of years.) 7. Where you stand with respect to the major disagreements in your field. 8. How to synthesize half a decade's work into a realtively brief document. Notably, these skills don't help you do any of the following: 1. Manage a research group in an academic setting. 2. Teach undergraduates. 3. Manage people in industry. You might pick up applicable skills along the way, but these are incidental. Any specific skill, any particular knowledge, can be obtained without getting a Ph.D. The Ph.D. teaches what you need to know to advance the field. I'd like to return for a second to talk about teaching undergraduates. It's a very important thing to do. Ph.D. training ought to include pedagogy. Standards for university instruction are shockingly low, and professors are rarely held to account for failing to teach the material well, especially at R1 institutions. However this comment is not about what you should learn, but about what you'll actually learn in a Ph.D. program if you decide to enroll tomorrow.
- adminprof 8y agoI agree with your main point here, but I think you're trying to paint and overly broad claim about PhD programs, which are extremely different between institutions. It's like saying "working at a company is like this... you learn this but not that." Specifically, 1. Senior PhD students in many research groups can become de facto managers of the group, especially when the professor is on sabbatical. PhD students are often involved in the funding, presentations, recruitment, and represent the group. Some PIs/professors empower their PhD students to run a mini research group within their group. 2. I've seen some PhD programs have a strong emphasis on teaching undergraduates, both as in teaching undergraduate courses directly (which many PhD students in the humanities and social science already do), serving as teaching assistants with a substantive educational role (not just grading), and mentoring them in research or more general advising. For example, Brown University and Princeton are known to have a good research-teaching balance for PhD students. Brown has a large number of programs that help PhD students get more involved in undergraduate teaching [https://www.brown.edu/sheridan/programs-services/certificates https://www.brown.edu/sheridan/programs-services/certificate...]
- j7ake 8y agoOf course here is a counterpoint from Jonathan Katz , a professor of physics, about doing graduate school. http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html TL;DR. Don't do it!
- pdfernhout 8y agoFrom that article: "Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you from following a career path which was successful for me? Because times have changed (I received my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American science no longer offers a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school in science it is in the expectation of spending your working life doing scientific research, using your ingenuity and curiosity to solve important and interesting problems. You will almost certainly be disappointed, probably when it is too late to choose another career." People saying related things: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130115173649/http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/1/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130115173649/http://www.villag... A previous comment I made with quotes from those links four months ago with various replies (then the topics was "Time to talk about why so many postgrads have poor mental health"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16725676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16725676 For all that, there are many good STEM-related jobs which seem to require a PhD these days, so obviously there are nuances to the topic and whether a PhD is worth it. If you are getting a PhD and someone else is paying for it (current job or a fellowship) and you already know and like the professor who you will be working for, and you already know of a good industry job prospect (in five to seven years, so hard to predict), and you like academic work, then it may not be quite as financially risky as otherwise (although it still may be emotionally draining). Also, if you are independently wealthy and do a PhD for fun, then again a PhD can make sense. For people in the USA thinking about getting a PhD, consider schools in Western Europe as they tend to be more research-oriented with less-to-no classroom busywork. It's sad things have come to this in a country with as much wealth as the USA -- especially given how much advanced research can (in theory) potentially improve people's lives if you are allowed to research such things. Bottom line: as people have said here, a PhD represents a tremendous opportunity cost with a significant risk of having nothing to show for it.
- scottlocklin 8y agoGetting a Ph.D. for career reasons is like taking up drug addiction for creative writing reasons. Source: I have a Ph.D.