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Man, seemingly every week on HN there’s an article attacking PhDs as monastic pyramid schemes for the foreign, financially gullible, and unemployable. As a 5th

by majos 7y ago

Man, seemingly every week on HN there’s an article attacking PhDs as monastic pyramid schemes for the foreign, financially gullible, and unemployable. As a 5th-year computer science PhD student (graduating next semester!) I think this characterization is unfair. With summer internships, I have made about 40k per year over my PhD, which was more than enough for anything I wanted. I only had to TA for one year. The jobs available to me now are much more interesting than the ones available to me 5 years ago. With the help of a great advisor, a few other hosts and mentors, and fellow grad students and postdocs, I’ve learned a lot about (and now, made some contributions I’m proud of) to a couple of areas of research. As someone who enjoys research, that has been a very rewarding process. This is not a universal truth. Things might be much worse if I had dependents, had a bad stipend, had a bad advisor, or did not like research. But in my case I had none of these complications, and I’m glad I did a PhD — not just to have the credential, but to have had the fun experience, grown, and now have a research future I’m pretty excited about.

cbames89 7y ago
This is pretty similar to my experience, but I also have two kids both born during graduate school. Their addition to our family will delay my graduation a bit, but they're worth it :)
barry-cotter 7y ago
Your experience is atypical for Ph.D. students though not out of the ordinary for CS Ph.D. students. There are other fields that are similarly well situated like Economics, with plentiful internship opportunities and great options after the Ph.D. that aren’t academia. Even for you in CS and the others in fields where the average position is ok a Ph.D. is a pretty bad bet monetarily but if the consumption value is high enough, great, it’s worth it even if you never even wanted to be an academic. But you gave up a lot in forgone earnings and in work experience and if you’re lucky you’ll make it up in a decade. The work experience might be a wash depending on the field you end up in. The forgone earnings will not be a wash. If you’d decided to do a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature there would have been no internships, a poor stipend, wild competition for academic jobs and no real demand for your skills and expertise outside academia. If a Ph.D. was worth it for the consumption value for you that’s great and it’s fantastic that there exist fields that have similar teaching demand, stipends and exit opportunities. But the Ph.D. hate is to tell people Are there any jobs in this field or demand for its graduates? If not it will be bad. Stay away.
- geebee 7y ago
  My impression is that a PhD in CS can be beneficial in industry, but the benefits generally derive more from the kind of work you get to do, not in the salary you earn. Some positions available "only" to PhD holders may allow you to bypass many of the unpleasantries in software engineering (technical whiteboard exams, SCRUM, limited autonomy, deadline pressures), but they don't necessarily pay more. And if you do go for the SWE position, a PhD won't keep you from having to go through the SWE hiring gauntlet. I say this based mainly on personal experience and some browsing of positions and salaries with limited data. I'm a onetime doctoral student who left with a MS and went over to Sun Labs for a bit. Salary-wise, the newly minted PhDs didn't really earn much more than the newly minted MS students[1] - and almost certainly less if you compared them with MS holders who had spent the last 5 years working. But I did get put in giant due diligence projects where I had to recreate and verify ever SQL query in a giant operational software system, while the PhD researchers pursued more interesting projects with greater autonomy. And if you're the sort who will burn out and decay to poor performance if you're bored, it could make a difference. We can compare MS to PhD generally across a population, but we can't really compare them for the same person. Fortunately for me, I actually like digging into long, complex, chaotic data pipelines, and if you find you enjoy something high impact and complicated that bores people, well then, that's not a bad way to get paid. But if you don't like it, that's a recipe for misery. I believe, strongly, that we greatly overproduce PhDs, even in employable categories like CS (mainly because I think many of these CS PhDs would have found equally if not more fulfilling work at a potentially higher salary without the long years in grad school). Some people just need to do the PhD style work if they're going to succeed in life, and for them, more time in grad school combined with no clear financial advantage may hide a number of benefits they get from these jobs. [1] one aside - salaries were notably lower for engineers and scientists in tech companies back then. This was back in the 1999/2000 - I was a grad student at Berkeley, and I was shocked by how much lower all engineering starting salaries were, at the MS and PhD level, than salaries out of the law and business schools, especially since the companies that were responsible for this pay disparity were lobbying congress fiercely to do something about this critical shortage of US citizens studying graduate engineering and science. My impression is that this gap has closed considerably since then.
alistairSH 7y ago
You're likely in one of a few fields where this is true. A PhD in classical history, not so much.
UncleMeat 7y ago
This is nowhere near the norm outside of CS. Many advisors don't allow students to intern. Many fields don't offer internships. Many fields don't have enough funding so people TA nearly every year during their PhD. Many fields don't have industry prospects like CS does. A CS PhD is pretty good. Pay is usually okay. Eventual job prospects are very strong. Leaving with a masters degree provides a great fallback. Other kinds of PhDs are nothing at all like this.

by majos 7y ago

cbames89 7y ago

This is pretty similar to my experience, but I also have two kids both born during graduate school. Their addition to our family will delay my graduation a bit, but they're worth it :)

barry-cotter 7y ago

Your experience is atypical for Ph.D. students though not out of the ordinary for CS Ph.D. students. There are other fields that are similarly well situated like Economics, with plentiful internship opportunities and great options after the Ph.D. that aren’t academia. Even for you in CS and the others in fields where the average position is ok a Ph.D. is a pretty bad bet monetarily but if the consumption value is high enough, great, it’s worth it even if you never even wanted to be an academic. But you gave up a lot in forgone earnings and in work experience and if you’re lucky you’ll make it up in a decade. The work experience might be a wash depending on the field you end up in. The forgone earnings will not be a wash. If you’d decided to do a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature there would have been no internships, a poor stipend, wild competition for academic jobs and no real demand for your skills and expertise outside academia. If a Ph.D. was worth it for the consumption value for you that’s great and it’s fantastic that there exist fields that have similar teaching demand, stipends and exit opportunities. But the Ph.D. hate is to tell people Are there any jobs in this field or demand for its graduates? If not it will be bad. Stay away.

geebee 7y ago
My impression is that a PhD in CS can be beneficial in industry, but the benefits generally derive more from the kind of work you get to do, not in the salary you earn. Some positions available "only" to PhD holders may allow you to bypass many of the unpleasantries in software engineering (technical whiteboard exams, SCRUM, limited autonomy, deadline pressures), but they don't necessarily pay more. And if you do go for the SWE position, a PhD won't keep you from having to go through the SWE hiring gauntlet. I say this based mainly on personal experience and some browsing of positions and salaries with limited data. I'm a onetime doctoral student who left with a MS and went over to Sun Labs for a bit. Salary-wise, the newly minted PhDs didn't really earn much more than the newly minted MS students[1] - and almost certainly less if you compared them with MS holders who had spent the last 5 years working. But I did get put in giant due diligence projects where I had to recreate and verify ever SQL query in a giant operational software system, while the PhD researchers pursued more interesting projects with greater autonomy. And if you're the sort who will burn out and decay to poor performance if you're bored, it could make a difference. We can compare MS to PhD generally across a population, but we can't really compare them for the same person. Fortunately for me, I actually like digging into long, complex, chaotic data pipelines, and if you find you enjoy something high impact and complicated that bores people, well then, that's not a bad way to get paid. But if you don't like it, that's a recipe for misery. I believe, strongly, that we greatly overproduce PhDs, even in employable categories like CS (mainly because I think many of these CS PhDs would have found equally if not more fulfilling work at a potentially higher salary without the long years in grad school). Some people just need to do the PhD style work if they're going to succeed in life, and for them, more time in grad school combined with no clear financial advantage may hide a number of benefits they get from these jobs. [1] one aside - salaries were notably lower for engineers and scientists in tech companies back then. This was back in the 1999/2000 - I was a grad student at Berkeley, and I was shocked by how much lower all engineering starting salaries were, at the MS and PhD level, than salaries out of the law and business schools, especially since the companies that were responsible for this pay disparity were lobbying congress fiercely to do something about this critical shortage of US citizens studying graduate engineering and science. My impression is that this gap has closed considerably since then.

alistairSH 7y ago

You're likely in one of a few fields where this is true. A PhD in classical history, not so much.

UncleMeat 7y ago

This is nowhere near the norm outside of CS. Many advisors don't allow students to intern. Many fields don't offer internships. Many fields don't have enough funding so people TA nearly every year during their PhD. Many fields don't have industry prospects like CS does. A CS PhD is pretty good. Pay is usually okay. Eventual job prospects are very strong. Leaving with a masters degree provides a great fallback. Other kinds of PhDs are nothing at all like this.