4 ms·

A Ph.D. is professional training for being a professor, or at a push, a researcher. If you don’t get yours from a top programme your chances of getting a profes

A Ph.D. is professional training for being a professor, or at a push, a researcher. If you don’t get yours from a top programme your chances of getting a professor job are quite low in the US, though other countries vary. A Ph.D. will at absolute minimum take three years on top of a Bachelor’s in the UK. In the US it’s common for it to take six years including a two year Master’s portion. Many fields have large numbers of people taking nine years, like literature or anthropology. Even three years is a huge cost in forgone income never mind six or nine. Then in many fields there’s a post doc before you can get a shot at a professor job and then you spend six years trying for tenure, which you often won’t get. That’s fine if you’re willing to live like a monk because you love what you do for most of your twenties and if you could be guaranteed a job at the end of ten years plenty of people would take that offer but many very talented people spend close to a decade, or more, in training for a job they never get. A Ph.D. for fun, for consumption purposes is fine if you come from money or are supported by a working spouse with a real job but for a great many people they end up with nothing after enormous effort.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> A Ph.D. is professional training for being a professor, or at a push, a researcher. It's professional training for being a researcher. You can do that in industry or academia. It doesn't make a huge difference, really. Becoming a professor is something that only a tiny minority of people are ever going to do, perhaps after another decade or more after their PhD.
- analog31 7y ago
  Unfortunately, there are also not a huge plethora of jobs for researchers in industry either. At least, it's hard to find posted job openings. It may be that a lot of the people in industry who are doing researchy work started out as clerks and worked their way into their positions over time.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  And yet the system is set up for a time when every Ph.D. who wanted a job as a professor would get one. That ended in the 70s. Now you have people doing three post docs before giving up to go into industry as they could have straight after the Ph.D. which many would never have done if they’d known where they’d end up. And you have humanities Ph.D.s doing jobs that in no way require the training and social science Ph.D.s doing jobs they could have ended up in if they’d never gone to graduate school though it’s not quite as bad because at least they often end up getting jobs that require the six or so years of experience they spent in grad school, earning a lot less money.
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  Industrial research positions are collapsing. Even in CS, what is left outside of ML? MSR is declining. Fujistu labs and IBM research aren't doing much.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    I wouldn't agree with that - I think industrial research is flourishing it's just moved from separate labs into the mainstream parts of companies. For just one example the V8 team at Google at a product group but they're doing research - they have PhDs, they publish top-tier papers, they have students. They happen to ship their research, that's all. Seems like a good thing, really? I'm a researcher at Shopify. I don't work in a formal lab, but I'm doing research, writing papers, reviewing papers.

chrisseaton 7y ago

> A Ph.D. is professional training for being a professor, or at a push, a researcher. It's professional training for being a researcher. You can do that in industry or academia. It doesn't make a huge difference, really. Becoming a professor is something that only a tiny minority of people are ever going to do, perhaps after another decade or more after their PhD.

analog31 7y ago
Unfortunately, there are also not a huge plethora of jobs for researchers in industry either. At least, it's hard to find posted job openings. It may be that a lot of the people in industry who are doing researchy work started out as clerks and worked their way into their positions over time.
barry-cotter 7y ago
And yet the system is set up for a time when every Ph.D. who wanted a job as a professor would get one. That ended in the 70s. Now you have people doing three post docs before giving up to go into industry as they could have straight after the Ph.D. which many would never have done if they’d known where they’d end up. And you have humanities Ph.D.s doing jobs that in no way require the training and social science Ph.D.s doing jobs they could have ended up in if they’d never gone to graduate school though it’s not quite as bad because at least they often end up getting jobs that require the six or so years of experience they spent in grad school, earning a lot less money.
UncleMeat 7y ago
Industrial research positions are collapsing. Even in CS, what is left outside of ML? MSR is declining. Fujistu labs and IBM research aren't doing much.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  I wouldn't agree with that - I think industrial research is flourishing it's just moved from separate labs into the mainstream parts of companies. For just one example the V8 team at Google at a product group but they're doing research - they have PhDs, they publish top-tier papers, they have students. They happen to ship their research, that's all. Seems like a good thing, really? I'm a researcher at Shopify. I don't work in a formal lab, but I'm doing research, writing papers, reviewing papers.