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Great post. An interesting aphorism I used to spout was “to never listen to a first year PhD student sing praise of their PhD experience.” Though that was aimed

Great post. An interesting aphorism I used to spout was “to never listen to a first year PhD student sing praise of their PhD experience.” Though that was aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities not at people who can just choose to work at Google Brain if they feel like it. But ignoring that one persons warning about PhD still sounded like he had the typical arrogance contained by every person who ever did a PhD (including me). If someone says “don’t do it” and your reaction is to not even follow up with questions perhaps you should acknowledge you already know why they’re saying that! It’s still not clear to me a person of this cadre need a PhD in a technical field in this day and age; they might contribute just as much faster if they chose any other route.

akshayka 6y ago
I'm now in my third year of my PhD and enjoying it more than ever, so there's that at least! In all seriousness, I totally acknowledge that the variance in satisfaction with a PhD is very large. I'm lucky to have a great advisor and incredible labmates; my happiness with the program is largely due to them.
- MobileVet 6y ago
  > I'm lucky to have a great advisor and incredible labmates; my happiness with the program is largely due to them. This. So much this. As in just about every profession, people make or break places. Your advisor and lab mates are everything... choose wisely, and choose them vs a school for its name.
  - kkylin 6y ago
    As others have noted, it can be harder to move around academia than in industry. Your immediate community matters a lot more, whether you're a PhD student, a postdoc, or faculty. When things work it's great; when they don't, it's correspondingly worse.
Waterluvian 6y ago
>aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities Woof.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  It's an important reality to understand. I did my PhD in an in-demand field at a top uni. My partner did their PhD in a less in-demand field at a not so top uni. The difference in our experiences -- and how those experiences were directly impacted by the financial motivations of the department/university -- was beyond staggering. My partner was cheap teaching labor. I was a source of fellowship+grant money and potentially valuable patents/prestige. I could leave and 10x my salary with a single email (ultimately did). My partner would've been lucky to teach high school. In literally every interaction with the university, you could tell. Universities are just another org with budget and headcount and metrics to optimize. Academia is no longer sheltered from the shitty labor politics of finance capitalism. NEVER let anyone tell you otherwise.
  - akhilcacharya 6y ago
    What does one do if we've been deemed not good enough for top schools or institutions?
    - throwawaygh 6y ago
      Can you get a great advisor at a mid-tier place and a strong guarantee that you won't have to TA a ton? If not, opt out of academia. I had a half dozen tenure-track offers and decided on industry. Honestly, academia is not what it used to be. Lots of professors come close to killing their under-paid grad students so that they can spend 20% of their time on blue sky research ideas. I get that time and then some without throwing poor kids under the bus. Without even asking, really. And make 3x what I would've made as a slave driver to boot. Academia sucks, especially if you want to do good research. Seriously, outside of tippy-top elite institutions that can get the very best and brightest phd students, colleges and universities are some of the absolute worst places to do research these days. And if you want to teach CS, don't bother with a PhD. Just ad junct a bit on the side of an industry gig, do not-insanely-bad, and you'll be full time within a year or two. If you want. Which you very likely wont, because teaching one class on the side while engineering is a lot more fun than teaching full time. Teaching is exhausting, even for people who love teaching.
herodoturtle 6y ago
> It’s still not clear to me a person of this cadre need a PhD in a technical field in this day and age Hey there, thanks for sharing your experience. Would you mind telling us which technical field? And which country? I know several PhD students / recent grads that pursued this qualification primarily because of "academic inflation" - that in order to compete for top-paying jobs in the EU, the more qualified you are the better, and having "just a Masters degree" is no longer good enough. I should add, these are also ex-pats, who left their developing country in pursuit of greener pastures. But it seems to be the case that getting a PhD - as terrible as the experience might be - can also help with career prospects, purely because one has a PhD (irrespective of the details of their thesis topic). Whereas back home (in said developing country), it's the complete opposite. Qualifications hardly matter - or they certainly don't matter as much - only experience does. And given the thin supply of skilled labour, business owners have the mindset of "we'll take what we can get". So I do think the choice to pursue a PhD can be an indirectly strategic move depending on your job prospects - and less about the actual topic you plan to research. Just my 2 cents from a developing country that is experiencing excessive brain-drain! :)
- ramraj07 6y ago
  I also moved from India to the US to do a PhD in biomedical engineering! In the end I left the field and took up a tech job after my PhD because it became clear that this is the more sensible career choice. Given I put in 8 years of some of my most productive years into the PhD, I think I’d have been a much different place in tech if I had just made the jump earlier. The PhD helped but not nearly as much as the same number of years of actual experience in tech itself. Of course if you can’t or won’t program and want to be in a hard science a PhD might be necessary but it’s become generally annoyingly competitive and fruitlessly bureaucratic to be in the field and depend on it for long term guaranteed career growth. When I said tech I meant software-related: as long as you are interested or willing to be there it still seems the best place to make money without too much sweat and not need a PhD to do it. This also applies only if you’re good but not cream of the crop. If you’re doing a PhD under a superstar and have nature papers then you’re clearly set up well, but anything lower than that it’s not worth the competition and pain you need to put in to make a good career either in academia or industry.
superbcarrot 6y ago
> It’s still not clear to me a person of this cadre need a PhD in a technical field in this day and age; they might contribute just as much faster if they chose any other route. They might be able to contribute technically but they might not be given the opportunity to do so if they don't have a PhD.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  In hard sciences that might be true but I doubt it’s necessary in tech - see George Hotz.
  - superbcarrot 6y ago
    Hotz is kind of doing his own thing at comma.ai. If I founded my own company, I'm sure they would hire me for anything that I applied for.
sandgiant 6y ago
It sounds like you've had a very different PhD experience than I did. Perhaps a difference in fields? My PhD in physics was probably the most humbling experience I've had in my professional life. I went from thinking I knew everything to learning that I knew nothing. To me that's one of the most important parts of a research education, to become aware of what you don't know and be provided tools to try figuring it out. The most disconcerting part for me was coming back to society, realizing that no one actually knows what's going on most of the time, even when they think they do. I wish more people had the same humbling experience I did (not saying, by the way, that we need more PhD students, just the similar experience). It's curious why you'd think that the only reason for doing a PhD is to contribute faster. Contribute faster to what? The author says he's having a lot of fun with his PhD because he gets to work on topics that are not immediately tied in with Googles business model. This is exactly why we need PhD students doing fundamental research, because no one can see the immediate benefit. Because on the surface it has no value at all - so who else would look at it if not curious PhD students with little to no financial incentives. Constraining possible research breakthroughs to what someone thinks is valuable a-priori, seems very naive and counter productive to me.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  I had a ton of fun doing my PhD, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have had similar fun without it as well. The reason I suggested not doing a PhD is the forces at play in various angles (the whole pyramid scheme, academia politics, publish vs. perish, good luck going tenure track, insane hours, abusive practices, the whole luck based system of it all). If you went through your entire PhD without seriously questioning your life choices at all then we definitely did a different PhD for sure! I and my colleagues constantly discussed the pros and cons and why the system is the way it is. In general I can never present the problems as clearly as Hamming did so I’ll let him give my viewpoint since I agree with everything here - http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
tchalla 6y ago
> But ignoring that one persons warning about PhD still sounded like he had the typical arrogance contained by every person who ever did a PhD (including me). If someone says “don’t do it” and your reaction is to not even follow up with questions perhaps you should acknowledge you already know why they’re saying that! One my favourite quotes > “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” — Charlie Munger
throw14082020 6y ago
Lets put it in context: >In fact, most of my mentors at Brain encouraged me to enroll in the PhD program. Only one researcher strongly discouraged me from pursuing a PhD, comparing the experience to “psychological torture.” I was so shocked by his dark warning that I didn’t ask any follow-up questions, he didn’t elaborate, and our meeting ended shortly afterwards. What he did was discounted the unpopular and negative opinion because it was so polarising: “psychological torture”.

akshayka 6y ago

I'm now in my third year of my PhD and enjoying it more than ever, so there's that at least! In all seriousness, I totally acknowledge that the variance in satisfaction with a PhD is very large. I'm lucky to have a great advisor and incredible labmates; my happiness with the program is largely due to them.

MobileVet 6y ago
> I'm lucky to have a great advisor and incredible labmates; my happiness with the program is largely due to them. This. So much this. As in just about every profession, people make or break places. Your advisor and lab mates are everything... choose wisely, and choose them vs a school for its name.
- kkylin 6y ago
  As others have noted, it can be harder to move around academia than in industry. Your immediate community matters a lot more, whether you're a PhD student, a postdoc, or faculty. When things work it's great; when they don't, it's correspondingly worse.

Waterluvian 6y ago

>aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities Woof.

throwawaygh 6y ago
It's an important reality to understand. I did my PhD in an in-demand field at a top uni. My partner did their PhD in a less in-demand field at a not so top uni. The difference in our experiences -- and how those experiences were directly impacted by the financial motivations of the department/university -- was beyond staggering. My partner was cheap teaching labor. I was a source of fellowship+grant money and potentially valuable patents/prestige. I could leave and 10x my salary with a single email (ultimately did). My partner would've been lucky to teach high school. In literally every interaction with the university, you could tell. Universities are just another org with budget and headcount and metrics to optimize. Academia is no longer sheltered from the shitty labor politics of finance capitalism. NEVER let anyone tell you otherwise.
- akhilcacharya 6y ago
  What does one do if we've been deemed not good enough for top schools or institutions?
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    Can you get a great advisor at a mid-tier place and a strong guarantee that you won't have to TA a ton? If not, opt out of academia. I had a half dozen tenure-track offers and decided on industry. Honestly, academia is not what it used to be. Lots of professors come close to killing their under-paid grad students so that they can spend 20% of their time on blue sky research ideas. I get that time and then some without throwing poor kids under the bus. Without even asking, really. And make 3x what I would've made as a slave driver to boot. Academia sucks, especially if you want to do good research. Seriously, outside of tippy-top elite institutions that can get the very best and brightest phd students, colleges and universities are some of the absolute worst places to do research these days. And if you want to teach CS, don't bother with a PhD. Just ad junct a bit on the side of an industry gig, do not-insanely-bad, and you'll be full time within a year or two. If you want. Which you very likely wont, because teaching one class on the side while engineering is a lot more fun than teaching full time. Teaching is exhausting, even for people who love teaching.

herodoturtle 6y ago

> It’s still not clear to me a person of this cadre need a PhD in a technical field in this day and age Hey there, thanks for sharing your experience. Would you mind telling us which technical field? And which country? I know several PhD students / recent grads that pursued this qualification primarily because of "academic inflation" - that in order to compete for top-paying jobs in the EU, the more qualified you are the better, and having "just a Masters degree" is no longer good enough. I should add, these are also ex-pats, who left their developing country in pursuit of greener pastures. But it seems to be the case that getting a PhD - as terrible as the experience might be - can also help with career prospects, purely because one has a PhD (irrespective of the details of their thesis topic). Whereas back home (in said developing country), it's the complete opposite. Qualifications hardly matter - or they certainly don't matter as much - only experience does. And given the thin supply of skilled labour, business owners have the mindset of "we'll take what we can get". So I do think the choice to pursue a PhD can be an indirectly strategic move depending on your job prospects - and less about the actual topic you plan to research. Just my 2 cents from a developing country that is experiencing excessive brain-drain! :)

ramraj07 6y ago
I also moved from India to the US to do a PhD in biomedical engineering! In the end I left the field and took up a tech job after my PhD because it became clear that this is the more sensible career choice. Given I put in 8 years of some of my most productive years into the PhD, I think I’d have been a much different place in tech if I had just made the jump earlier. The PhD helped but not nearly as much as the same number of years of actual experience in tech itself. Of course if you can’t or won’t program and want to be in a hard science a PhD might be necessary but it’s become generally annoyingly competitive and fruitlessly bureaucratic to be in the field and depend on it for long term guaranteed career growth. When I said tech I meant software-related: as long as you are interested or willing to be there it still seems the best place to make money without too much sweat and not need a PhD to do it. This also applies only if you’re good but not cream of the crop. If you’re doing a PhD under a superstar and have nature papers then you’re clearly set up well, but anything lower than that it’s not worth the competition and pain you need to put in to make a good career either in academia or industry.

superbcarrot 6y ago

> It’s still not clear to me a person of this cadre need a PhD in a technical field in this day and age; they might contribute just as much faster if they chose any other route. They might be able to contribute technically but they might not be given the opportunity to do so if they don't have a PhD.

ramraj07 6y ago
In hard sciences that might be true but I doubt it’s necessary in tech - see George Hotz.
- superbcarrot 6y ago
  Hotz is kind of doing his own thing at comma.ai. If I founded my own company, I'm sure they would hire me for anything that I applied for.

sandgiant 6y ago

It sounds like you've had a very different PhD experience than I did. Perhaps a difference in fields? My PhD in physics was probably the most humbling experience I've had in my professional life. I went from thinking I knew everything to learning that I knew nothing. To me that's one of the most important parts of a research education, to become aware of what you don't know and be provided tools to try figuring it out. The most disconcerting part for me was coming back to society, realizing that no one actually knows what's going on most of the time, even when they think they do. I wish more people had the same humbling experience I did (not saying, by the way, that we need more PhD students, just the similar experience). It's curious why you'd think that the only reason for doing a PhD is to contribute faster. Contribute faster to what? The author says he's having a lot of fun with his PhD because he gets to work on topics that are not immediately tied in with Googles business model. This is exactly why we need PhD students doing fundamental research, because no one can see the immediate benefit. Because on the surface it has no value at all - so who else would look at it if not curious PhD students with little to no financial incentives. Constraining possible research breakthroughs to what someone thinks is valuable a-priori, seems very naive and counter productive to me.

ramraj07 6y ago
I had a ton of fun doing my PhD, but I’m pretty sure I’ll have had similar fun without it as well. The reason I suggested not doing a PhD is the forces at play in various angles (the whole pyramid scheme, academia politics, publish vs. perish, good luck going tenure track, insane hours, abusive practices, the whole luck based system of it all). If you went through your entire PhD without seriously questioning your life choices at all then we definitely did a different PhD for sure! I and my colleagues constantly discussed the pros and cons and why the system is the way it is. In general I can never present the problems as clearly as Hamming did so I’ll let him give my viewpoint since I agree with everything here - http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

tchalla 6y ago

> But ignoring that one persons warning about PhD still sounded like he had the typical arrogance contained by every person who ever did a PhD (including me). If someone says “don’t do it” and your reaction is to not even follow up with questions perhaps you should acknowledge you already know why they’re saying that! One my favourite quotes > “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” — Charlie Munger

throw14082020 6y ago

Lets put it in context: >In fact, most of my mentors at Brain encouraged me to enroll in the PhD program. Only one researcher strongly discouraged me from pursuing a PhD, comparing the experience to “psychological torture.” I was so shocked by his dark warning that I didn’t ask any follow-up questions, he didn’t elaborate, and our meeting ended shortly afterwards. What he did was discounted the unpopular and negative opinion because it was so polarising: “psychological torture”.