5 ms·

I like this framing. In graduate school, I worked for 2+ years before my first paper was published. In that time, I passed my PhD qualifying exam, took classes

I like this framing. In graduate school, I worked for 2+ years before my first paper was published. In that time, I passed my PhD qualifying exam, took classes, wrote code, read papers, learned math, and so forth. Yet when I applied for internships, I received no interest from employers. I suspect this was because I had no concrete signal that I knew anything in my field. While working on my second paper, I started blogging. In the language of this article, I started generating public intellectual capital for myself. I have definitely experienced the effects of this capital on subsequent job hunts. Now I can point people to my blog to demonstrate knowledge, technical skills, and communication skills beyond the scope of my peer-reviewed work. Furthermore, there is no question about who contributed to my blog, and when I learn something new, I can externalize that quickly.

nnmg 6y ago
I totally agree and had a very similar experience in graduate school. Writing about my experiences and things I had learned (technical and project management) had a huge impact on my ability to demonstrate my knowledge and is without a doubt why I quickly received two job offers before defending my phd (biology/neuroscience). I think papers are a really poor way to demonstrate the huge amounts of work you've done unless you stay in academia (and probably not even then).
- _huayra_ 6y ago
  This is one thing I messed up during my grad school studies. Now that I have a "real job", getting the ball rolling on blogging about what I'm looking into / learning about is harder (although that is still a convenient excuse). Thank goodness I have been meticulously keeping track of what I've learned in Org mode for years. I've just gotta dredge that old database for some blog posts (starting with why folks who are similar to me should really consider not going to grad school...).
  - zikzak 6y ago
    I work on a well established, closed source, trade secrets style e-commerce site. I can never seem to think about anything I could write up that would not involve me reworking everything to be more general. I also think it would largely boil down to a Stack Overflow link. I am doing more management now, so that might make this problem a little easier to solve for me.
    - Consultant32452 6y ago
      I had one of these blogs years ago and I found the questions I had to look up were great subjects for blog posts. Many of them wound up being pretty basic: thread safe singleton in java, sort a list, etc. This isn't a PhD thesis, it doesn't have to be profound, you're just trying to demonstrate you can write some code and communicate.
      - zikzak 6y ago
        I don't think I did a good job of articulating my point. By the time I wash out all the domain specific stuff, I believe I am left with a post that is even less valuable than a link to a Stack Overflow discussion about the same issue. Does that make sense? What value am I adding to the world if I spend an hour typing up my thoughts on this and I could have just linked to SO? Also, my blog traffic is effectively 0 people. I don't think it is wrong for others to do so, it just isn't the right thing for me. EDIT - sorry, I missed the fact that we are talking about producing a blog as a proof that I understand and think about programming in a certain way (e.g. as useful to people evaluating me)... You are absolutely right, then, and I withdraw my objection. I am not currently looking for work but if I were, I think a blog focused on dev would be more valuable than my collection of half-baked github repos. Food for thought.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - loosetypes 6y ago
    I’d be interested in hearing those considerations.
    - _huayra_ 6y ago
      The pithy way I tell people is that they should only do a PhD if they can't NOT do a PhD, i.e. they feel so compelled to work on a specific thing and have found an advisor who will advise them but ultimately let them do their own thing to a great degree. The only other viable option is to find a tenure-track junior professor who really has their stuff together (including their work ethic and emotional intelligence; often the latter can be lacking). One also has to consider the time cost of doing a PhD, and whether spending the equivalent time working would have gotten them further not only in career, but also salary. Between a) people who go from undergrad to a job and don't really keep pushing themselves, b) people who go to grad school to hopefully skip to a more interesting job post-PhD, and c) people who go from undergrad to a job but really push hard to learn new skills (e.g. presenting at conferences, blogging about it, etc), option C is generally leaps and bounds ahead of the other two. A PhD is worth considering if the thing you're interested in most is not really used widely in industry (perhaps some PL stuff?). Also, prospective PhD students need to consider that there is a very asymmetric relationship between advisor / advisee compared to a normal job. If my job starts treating me like dirt, I can tell them to shove it and quit ASAP because I know that my skills can get me another job in short order. With a PhD, it is almost impossible to quit a PhD and then pick it up again if you and your advisor have some sort of falling out; every future PhD position will look at the prior "failure" with suspicion, losing the nuance of issues besides the actual work that triggered the separation. Basically you need to really understand why you want a PhD (and whether you could do better towards your ultimate career goal without it), and if that's a "yes" you need to really make sure you can get along with your advisor for years. A strong advisor can "compensate" for a weak student (i.e. get them through the program), and a strong student can compensate for a weak advisor (e.g. students who basically do their own thing from the get go, and have high-ranking perpetually absentee advisors who do more research bureaucracy than research and advise by way of ominous single-word emails), but if both are weak it's a recipe for disaster, and only the student gets hurt. Getting a visa into a country via graduate studies is definitely a good reason (especially in the US it seems), but often an MS is sufficient (except if one tries to get in on the green-card fast-track via the O1 visa, which requires an exceptional PhD track record).
dzolob 6y ago
This happened to me when I left academia. No “real credentials”. Math expert with strong computer background (phd, published papers, years of experience in research/teaching) didn’t said more than “one year data science ‘masters’ abroad”. It took me quite some time to translate my expertise into marketable skills. Before that, I got passed on even for entry level positions.
- sjg007 6y ago
  While a PhD can do the work, you really want the PhD to direct the work and explore new related things. A lot of this will depend on where you apply. That being said the market for data scientists has exploded in the past 2 years. 3-5 years ago things were different. Part of this is due to maturation of the tooling and the development of data platforms with organizations building out their data pipelines etc...
  - endymi0n 6y ago
    Thing is, while PhDs are usually by far the biggest domain experts you'll get, the absolute majority of them comes absolutely ill-equipped to lead anything, as university rarely teaches any skills in project, people or resource management skills, business sense, opportunity cost and presentation. I've had disastrous outcomes going by credentials for leadership positions and these days only hire for demonstrated results on a real-world project. Just my personal anecdotal evidence points me towards stellar academic success having a slight negative correlation with on-the-job performance. People who prefer building things with impact over citation rubber points usually don't survive in academia long enough for enduring a PhD.
    - sjg007 6y ago
      Like I said depends on the company.
- laichzeit0 6y ago
  Well I had a “math expert” join my team recently and the problems were: they couldn’t work in a team, verbally expressed their intellectual superiority to everyone else, didn’t have the technical ability to get anything into production, could not follow instructions from superiors, thought most of the work they were given was “boring” and invented their own projects to work on, etc. I don’t know if that type of attitude is acceptable in academia, but it won’t work in industry. So now I’m extremely cautious about on boarding anyone without a proven track record at working outside academia. I simply don’t have the time to “manage” someone like that, shit had to get done.
currymj 6y ago
your blog is very high quality and i've enjoyed it in the past (Metropolis-Hastings post especially). however there's a problem if everybody is going to do this, if it becomes standard that you want to have a blog in order to promote yourself during a job hunt. i think this is why search results are cluttered with a proliferation of largely useless "awesome X" GitHub repositories, repetitive bad Medium articles on basic ML topics, and so on. I hope we don't end up in the world where everyone has to do this... there's certainly a diminishing social utility.
- drorco 6y ago
  Then Google will need to build a better search engine, otherwise people will just move to a search engine that can get them the better results.
- graeme 6y ago
  Not necessarily. OP wrote a blog about their research paper. That is by definition a nov or rare topic. If people use any kind of horse sense when choosing blogging topics they will either choose something: 1. Unique, or 2. Where what they have to contribute beats what already exists To be sure, anything poorly done is clutter. But this applies to the work product itself too. If someone writes garbage, superfluous blog posts, why would you expect good research from them? Despite the massive amount of information that exists the world certainly does not have enough good, specific information yet.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    I don't think this is entirely true. Getting in the habit of writing, even if a lot of it is things other people have said better, means that when you do have something novel to say you will be much more practiced. My experience is that when people try to only write the good posts they don't end up publishing things, but if they write hundreds of posts dozens will be good.
    - graeme 6y ago
      I agree, and you’re actually supporting my argument with additional reasons against OP haha. But in the case of a research blog about a new research paper I think my point above trends closer to true, as the novelty of the subject guarantees novelty of the blog.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
Your blog is pretty cool! How did you "[generate] public intellectual capital" though? Posting your blog places, or just by virtue of being able to refer to the blog in your resume it helped your job hunts?

nnmg 6y ago

I totally agree and had a very similar experience in graduate school. Writing about my experiences and things I had learned (technical and project management) had a huge impact on my ability to demonstrate my knowledge and is without a doubt why I quickly received two job offers before defending my phd (biology/neuroscience). I think papers are a really poor way to demonstrate the huge amounts of work you've done unless you stay in academia (and probably not even then).

_huayra_ 6y ago
This is one thing I messed up during my grad school studies. Now that I have a "real job", getting the ball rolling on blogging about what I'm looking into / learning about is harder (although that is still a convenient excuse). Thank goodness I have been meticulously keeping track of what I've learned in Org mode for years. I've just gotta dredge that old database for some blog posts (starting with why folks who are similar to me should really consider not going to grad school...).
- zikzak 6y ago
  I work on a well established, closed source, trade secrets style e-commerce site. I can never seem to think about anything I could write up that would not involve me reworking everything to be more general. I also think it would largely boil down to a Stack Overflow link. I am doing more management now, so that might make this problem a little easier to solve for me.
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    I had one of these blogs years ago and I found the questions I had to look up were great subjects for blog posts. Many of them wound up being pretty basic: thread safe singleton in java, sort a list, etc. This isn't a PhD thesis, it doesn't have to be profound, you're just trying to demonstrate you can write some code and communicate.
    - zikzak 6y ago
      I don't think I did a good job of articulating my point. By the time I wash out all the domain specific stuff, I believe I am left with a post that is even less valuable than a link to a Stack Overflow discussion about the same issue. Does that make sense? What value am I adding to the world if I spend an hour typing up my thoughts on this and I could have just linked to SO? Also, my blog traffic is effectively 0 people. I don't think it is wrong for others to do so, it just isn't the right thing for me. EDIT - sorry, I missed the fact that we are talking about producing a blog as a proof that I understand and think about programming in a certain way (e.g. as useful to people evaluating me)... You are absolutely right, then, and I withdraw my objection. I am not currently looking for work but if I were, I think a blog focused on dev would be more valuable than my collection of half-baked github repos. Food for thought.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- loosetypes 6y ago
  I’d be interested in hearing those considerations.
  - _huayra_ 6y ago
    The pithy way I tell people is that they should only do a PhD if they can't NOT do a PhD, i.e. they feel so compelled to work on a specific thing and have found an advisor who will advise them but ultimately let them do their own thing to a great degree. The only other viable option is to find a tenure-track junior professor who really has their stuff together (including their work ethic and emotional intelligence; often the latter can be lacking). One also has to consider the time cost of doing a PhD, and whether spending the equivalent time working would have gotten them further not only in career, but also salary. Between a) people who go from undergrad to a job and don't really keep pushing themselves, b) people who go to grad school to hopefully skip to a more interesting job post-PhD, and c) people who go from undergrad to a job but really push hard to learn new skills (e.g. presenting at conferences, blogging about it, etc), option C is generally leaps and bounds ahead of the other two. A PhD is worth considering if the thing you're interested in most is not really used widely in industry (perhaps some PL stuff?). Also, prospective PhD students need to consider that there is a very asymmetric relationship between advisor / advisee compared to a normal job. If my job starts treating me like dirt, I can tell them to shove it and quit ASAP because I know that my skills can get me another job in short order. With a PhD, it is almost impossible to quit a PhD and then pick it up again if you and your advisor have some sort of falling out; every future PhD position will look at the prior "failure" with suspicion, losing the nuance of issues besides the actual work that triggered the separation. Basically you need to really understand why you want a PhD (and whether you could do better towards your ultimate career goal without it), and if that's a "yes" you need to really make sure you can get along with your advisor for years. A strong advisor can "compensate" for a weak student (i.e. get them through the program), and a strong student can compensate for a weak advisor (e.g. students who basically do their own thing from the get go, and have high-ranking perpetually absentee advisors who do more research bureaucracy than research and advise by way of ominous single-word emails), but if both are weak it's a recipe for disaster, and only the student gets hurt. Getting a visa into a country via graduate studies is definitely a good reason (especially in the US it seems), but often an MS is sufficient (except if one tries to get in on the green-card fast-track via the O1 visa, which requires an exceptional PhD track record).

dzolob 6y ago

This happened to me when I left academia. No “real credentials”. Math expert with strong computer background (phd, published papers, years of experience in research/teaching) didn’t said more than “one year data science ‘masters’ abroad”. It took me quite some time to translate my expertise into marketable skills. Before that, I got passed on even for entry level positions.

sjg007 6y ago
While a PhD can do the work, you really want the PhD to direct the work and explore new related things. A lot of this will depend on where you apply. That being said the market for data scientists has exploded in the past 2 years. 3-5 years ago things were different. Part of this is due to maturation of the tooling and the development of data platforms with organizations building out their data pipelines etc...
- endymi0n 6y ago
  Thing is, while PhDs are usually by far the biggest domain experts you'll get, the absolute majority of them comes absolutely ill-equipped to lead anything, as university rarely teaches any skills in project, people or resource management skills, business sense, opportunity cost and presentation. I've had disastrous outcomes going by credentials for leadership positions and these days only hire for demonstrated results on a real-world project. Just my personal anecdotal evidence points me towards stellar academic success having a slight negative correlation with on-the-job performance. People who prefer building things with impact over citation rubber points usually don't survive in academia long enough for enduring a PhD.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    Like I said depends on the company.
laichzeit0 6y ago
Well I had a “math expert” join my team recently and the problems were: they couldn’t work in a team, verbally expressed their intellectual superiority to everyone else, didn’t have the technical ability to get anything into production, could not follow instructions from superiors, thought most of the work they were given was “boring” and invented their own projects to work on, etc. I don’t know if that type of attitude is acceptable in academia, but it won’t work in industry. So now I’m extremely cautious about on boarding anyone without a proven track record at working outside academia. I simply don’t have the time to “manage” someone like that, shit had to get done.

currymj 6y ago

your blog is very high quality and i've enjoyed it in the past (Metropolis-Hastings post especially). however there's a problem if everybody is going to do this, if it becomes standard that you want to have a blog in order to promote yourself during a job hunt. i think this is why search results are cluttered with a proliferation of largely useless "awesome X" GitHub repositories, repetitive bad Medium articles on basic ML topics, and so on. I hope we don't end up in the world where everyone has to do this... there's certainly a diminishing social utility.

drorco 6y ago
Then Google will need to build a better search engine, otherwise people will just move to a search engine that can get them the better results.
graeme 6y ago
Not necessarily. OP wrote a blog about their research paper. That is by definition a nov or rare topic. If people use any kind of horse sense when choosing blogging topics they will either choose something: 1. Unique, or 2. Where what they have to contribute beats what already exists To be sure, anything poorly done is clutter. But this applies to the work product itself too. If someone writes garbage, superfluous blog posts, why would you expect good research from them? Despite the massive amount of information that exists the world certainly does not have enough good, specific information yet.
- jefftk 6y ago
  I don't think this is entirely true. Getting in the habit of writing, even if a lot of it is things other people have said better, means that when you do have something novel to say you will be much more practiced. My experience is that when people try to only write the good posts they don't end up publishing things, but if they write hundreds of posts dozens will be good.
  - graeme 6y ago
    I agree, and you’re actually supporting my argument with additional reasons against OP haha. But in the case of a research blog about a new research paper I think my point above trends closer to true, as the novelty of the subject guarantees novelty of the blog.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

Your blog is pretty cool! How did you "[generate] public intellectual capital" though? Posting your blog places, or just by virtue of being able to refer to the blog in your resume it helped your job hunts?