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I think I'm pretty qualified to talk about training people outside a PhD. I had a high-school intern who worked with me and hit the top of Hacker News with a n

I think I'm pretty qualified to talk about training people outside a PhD. I had a high-school intern who worked with me and hit the top of Hacker News with a new compiler optimisation she invented. I still think a PhD is the best for most people in most cases, if you want to be doing genuine research.

bumby 4y ago
I'm interested enough that I could change my mind (although I thought it was curious that you said "I can't be convinced"). But your responses are somewhat vague and defensive in the tone of "I know what I'm talking about" without the specifics as to what I'm actually asking. To be specific, what do you think an PhD course offers that training through other means does not? For example, what do you define as "genuine research"? How does the training differ? IMO, employment research offers many advantages. For one, it forces somebody to focus on the application and how it would genuinely be of value, so that one doesn't get bogged down into "neat" but ultimately impractical efforts that are little more than academic exercises. IMO, it opens the projects up to more interesting problems because they don't get cornered into the "publish or perish" paradigm. People easily get paid 3-4x (or more) what they would as a TA. They have daily access to experts in their field rather than relying on piecemeal meetings with their advisors. It also tends to open one up to larger resources for their investigation; for example, the people in PhD programs at my last job were given ample access to multi-million dollar rocket test stands and the anonymized data from them; if that were a university resource it would be hard to gain that same level of recurring access. Now I'll grant that there are certain PhD programs that are better suited to specific types of fundamental research that would otherwise be difficult to get funding while an employee. Nuclear physics would be one example. But I would venture that the majority of research is on the applied sciences/engineering side.

bumby 4y ago

I'm interested enough that I could change my mind (although I thought it was curious that you said "I can't be convinced"). But your responses are somewhat vague and defensive in the tone of "I know what I'm talking about" without the specifics as to what I'm actually asking. To be specific, what do you think an PhD course offers that training through other means does not? For example, what do you define as "genuine research"? How does the training differ? IMO, employment research offers many advantages. For one, it forces somebody to focus on the application and how it would genuinely be of value, so that one doesn't get bogged down into "neat" but ultimately impractical efforts that are little more than academic exercises. IMO, it opens the projects up to more interesting problems because they don't get cornered into the "publish or perish" paradigm. People easily get paid 3-4x (or more) what they would as a TA. They have daily access to experts in their field rather than relying on piecemeal meetings with their advisors. It also tends to open one up to larger resources for their investigation; for example, the people in PhD programs at my last job were given ample access to multi-million dollar rocket test stands and the anonymized data from them; if that were a university resource it would be hard to gain that same level of recurring access. Now I'll grant that there are certain PhD programs that are better suited to specific types of fundamental research that would otherwise be difficult to get funding while an employee. Nuclear physics would be one example. But I would venture that the majority of research is on the applied sciences/engineering side.