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The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010)

47 points by Kopion 14y ago

minimize_me 14y ago
I do sometimes wonder if this "PhD is a waste of time" is being pushed so heavily to get a glut of the best computer science grads, who would otherwise consider a PhD, onto the engineer job market. A cute little trick to drive down the salaries a bit, cut back on the perks... I mean, people posting links like this, on this board, don't really have English lit grads in mind, do they? Not that I disagree with the sentiment entirely, but it seems to be getting a lot of mileage the past few months.
- magic_haze 14y ago
  I think this is just a continuation of the old "College is a waste of time" thought, but I have noticed a _lot_ of people -- especially from China and India -- enrolling in CS PhD programs the last few years. I talked to a few of them from my college, and an exceedingly common theme seems to be family and peer pressure, so personally, I'd really like to understand more about this topic.
  - arunabha 14y ago
    An important, but rarely overtly stated reason for foreigners to attend grad school in the United States is immigration. A graduate degree (esp in STEM disciplines) is a relatively secure way of getting a student visa, getting a job while on OPT, getting an H1B and finally a Green Card. Of course it does not mean that immigration is the sole reason for asians to attend US grad school in hordes, but it is an important one. Funnily enough, when you apply for your student visa, you're required to assert that you will return to your country after your education in the US is over :-)
    - ericd 14y ago
      I don't understand the motivation there at all - shouldn't the US be trying to hold on to the most educated foreigners as much as possible?
      - ufo 14y ago
        You made the mistake of assuming that the US immigration policy is rational.
      - anusinha 14y ago
        One country that does it right is Canada--they try very hard to keep top talent in the country instead of going to their previous homes.
      - jonemo 14y ago
        I used to ask that question and have been told that the US greatly benefits from having US-educated people in positions of power around the world. I don't know if this is true, but what is true that a surprising number of heads of states of countries that are considered political allies of the US have degrees from US universities. I first noticed this trend when reading about Pacific island nations.
        ericd 14y ago
        I suppose, but the number of people leaving the country that that requires is fairly small, unless you're talking about spreading a cultural hegemony. I think it's likely just irrational.
    - otoburb 14y ago
      If we follow this logic for the subset of foreigners attending grad school in the US, why wouldn't they opt for a Masters degree instead of a PhD?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- jarek 14y ago
  I don't think CS grads, however good, will make much of a dent in mech or chem eng salaries and perks...
  - minimize_me 14y ago
    Well, I meant the software engineer job market... I don't think mechanical engineers get any perks anyway.
    - jarek 14y ago
      > I don't think mechanical engineers get any perks anyway. Not unless you consider going home at 5 pm a perk.
- anologwintermut 14y ago
  On HN I doubt it. I'd say we keep seeing the stories up here because people want to validate that they took the right choice. I'd personally say your better off doing that by convincing yourself you are working on something useful, not by shitting on other's choices. It would be the equivalent of justifying a PhD by saying "I don't think our best and brightest should be trying to get people to click on ads."
michael_nielsen 14y ago
I wonder when the first article was written claiming that doing a PhD was a waste of time? I'll bet it was in the 19th century. And we'll no doubt keep seeing such articles until such time as the PhD fades from history. (Nothing against the article in question, which is a better-than-usual discussion of the issue.)
klochner 14y ago
A computer science Ph.D. is nothing like what is described in this article. For various reasons (other opportunities, generous industry grants, minimal financial overhead to run a lab), students in computer science are comparatively well paid and free to work at their own pace. YMMV based on advisor. It's been exhaustively shown that stopping after undergrad or masters degrees will be more financially lucrative, so some reasons to go on: - you want one of the specialized researchy positions that are typically filled by Ph.D. holders - you have a genuine interest in some specialized field and want to work purely on learning/investigating that field - you want to be a professor
- _delirium 14y ago
  Unfortunately the "generous grants" often conflict with "free to work at their own pace". It's getting more common to find arrangements where PhD students essentially have a part-time job working for their RA funding. In the best case this overlaps with their own research, but sometimes doesn't, and may involve considerable additional work that doesn't really "count" as research. Particularly the case if you're funded on a DARPA grant, since those have very specific timelines and deliverables, plus days where you have to be ready for a "site visit" to demo things. Some industry grants are fairly hands-on as well, expecting the lab to basically lend out a PhD student to work part-time on a project the company wants completed. Though others are more hands-off and just donate a pile of money without demanding specific things in return.
- shawn-butler 14y ago
  I would limit that to just #2 in your list. The other two carrots are so out of your reach or subject to factors so far beyond your control that a love for learning and a burning interest in your research is the only thing that you can count on sustaining you.
  - larsberg 14y ago
    #1 is also pretty achievable. For example, if you get a Ph.D. studying how to implement compilers and virtual machines, you basically have your choice of which place that implements compiler or VMs to work at (source: I am about to defend my Ph.D. in implementing compilers and VMs).
rayiner 14y ago
I think it depends on whose perspective you're talking about. I think for typical engineers, especially in EE/CS, the increase in earning power from the PhD doesn't make up for the six years of lost income and career progression. But I think from the point of view of society, it's absolutely worth it. The most brilliant engineers I know are PhDs. They have this incredible depth of theoretical understanding of a particular area that I think is hard to achieve without those years of dedicated study.
- beala 14y ago
  It's hard to know which way the causality goes here. It might just be that really exceptional undergrads happen to end up in grad school (because of pressure from professors or family, or simply because "it's just what smart people do"), even though they would have been exceptional engineers either way. I agree that PhDs are very knowledgable when it comes to their precise field of study, but this is often very narrow. How useful is this expert knowledge unless you're hired specifically for it (ie, as a researcher)?
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Socially, there is a big value in getting a very bright person to intensely study a single area for many years. PhDs do usually go on to work in their field, and a vastly disproportionate amount of innovation comes from them. That's why I don't really buy the correlation argument. I don't think even very bright people are going to be able to make contributions like new speech recognition algorithms or new algorithms for wireless networking, robotics, etc, without the kind of dedicated and focused study that comes from a PhD (or an equivalent level of theoretical study outside a PhD program).
- rdl 14y ago
  I think you're right about some classes of PhD and benefit for society. It may be a case of market failure; I'd certainly prefer to support PhD programs in CS through charity and/or taxes than a lot of other things.
crucifiction 14y ago
As a hiring manager of non-specialized software developers, I take people with 4-6 years of real world coding over a phd any day. We generally hire phd's at the same level/pay as a bachelors in cs with maybe only a nominal amount more in salary. the skills you learn as a phd are not really what the industry needs, unless you manage to find one of the small number of jobs that requires whatever specific thing you studied as a phd. like the article says, those are very few and far between compared to the # of students exiting with degrees.
- ideonexus 14y ago
  I concur. My experience with CS PhDs is that they lack the production-oriented mindset needed for the real world. We hired a CS PhD to write reports for us. In six months he did not write one single line of code, but produced a very impressive whitepaper about the code he intended to write. He went on to write more whitepapers for a company specializing in vaporware somewhere else. I've had similar experiences with PhDs in many other fields as well. I have a great deal of respect for the degree, the person who worked so hard for it, and I love to read their often brilliant research, but either the effort of getting the degree or the mindset it takes to want to obtain one makes these people nearly useless in the business world. Give me an entry-level BS degree or 5-6 years equivalent experience any day.
  - tensor 14y ago
    Meanwhile, the top tech firms aggressively recruit CS PhDs.
    - modarts 14y ago
      Well, more power to them. They have the resources to train them up to a level where they'll be productive.
      - tensor 14y ago
        Or perhaps this thread is full of obscene generalizations that are untrue. Hell, it even started off on the wrong foot by invoking "real world". All that term means is that you think your work is somehow relevant while the work of others, in this case PhDs, is not relevant. Parts of this community have a real problem with ego and unsubstantiated generalizations.
pfedor 14y ago
The decision to enter a PhD program only makes sense for one of the two reasons: either you think you're going to win a Nobel Prize one day, or, you don't mind spending five years in a way which doesn't advance any goal (literal quote from a conversation I had, "so you had an offer from Google but you decided to do a PhD instead--why??", "Oh, I just want to do nothing for a while longer".) The two kinds of PhD students may look the same but they're very different. If you belong to the first category, even if you realize you won't get that Nobel Prize, I doubt you're going to regret trying. If you're of the second kind, why yes, you have wasted five years of your life, which is exactly what you signed up for so why do you complain?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- tensor 14y ago
  I did a PhD to learn and to contribute some small bit to our collective knowledge. I didn't do it to be rich nor famous. As far as "waste of time" goes, there is nothing to me more important than contributing to the worlds knowledge. Pop stars come and go and the rich are forgotten and irrelevant just as fast. Knowledge is the only thing that accumulates and continually helps future generations.
- darxius 14y ago
  This is a very ignorant and short-sighted response. While I agree that getting a PhD is not for everyone, you can't make a blanket statement regarding its uselessness.
- lallysingh 14y ago
  As a relevant data point. I did a PhD because I wanted to learn a lot more about Computer Science. I did most of it while working at pretty good software development firms. Most of the people I work with have PhDs. They use some of what they studied at work, and I doubt undergraduates would be nearly as effective. There are a lot of advantages for PhDs in CS, if you like learning and studying. If you don't, there's really no reason to do a PhD, you're not going to get an outcome that you'd like. The types of jobs that work well for PhDs require (at least) some continuing research.
pagekicker 14y ago
old news
asynchronous13 14y ago
This article was pretty good at identifying drawbacks of higher education. (unlike the recent article by the literature PhD) There's so many assumptions surrounding a PhD degree. "I'll make more money!" Maybe, but it takes a lot of years to make up for making $0 for several years. "the only jobs for a PhD is in academia" depends on the subject, last I checked google hires lots of PhDs. "I'll only work 5 hours a week!" just because you only saw your professor when you showed up for class does not mean those were the only hours your prof was working. "PhDs are super smart!" maybe, or they're just good at jumping through hoops. The article pointed out that there is a glut of PhDs compared to available academic jobs. But then laments that only 57% of PhD students finish the degree within 10 years. The author seemingly argues that more people should graduate sooner, and increase the glut? It's not about smarts, self-motivation and leadership are required to finish a PhD. If someone expects to have their hand held and be told what to do, they might never finish. The article also says that these students are the smartest of their class. If that's true, then they are smart enough to view the job market and weigh the pros and cons of higher education themselves. (if they can't do that, then I'd argue they are not the brightest in their class after all)
marianne_navada 14y ago
I've been "All But Dissertation" for two years now for a PhD in sociology. I haven't touched my dissertation after having my proposal approved. Instead, I co-founded an organization that addresses the problem that I discovered in my preliminary research. Right now, my decision feels right.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Are you sure you aren't just procrastinating? I'm joking, it sounds like you are doing the right thing.
  - marianne_navada 14y ago
    Hehehehe, this is what my advisor thinks :) But honestly, right now, it just feels so good to reject the idea that a doctorate is everything. I've been in school for 12 years!
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      I was in school for 13 years (5+8). Procrastination is a common grad student problem.
graycat 14y ago
Getting a Ph.D. is "often a waste of time". Sometimes it's much worse: I've seen too many lives seriously hurt or even destroyed, as in they died, e.g., from suicide from clinical depression, from the stresses of a Ph.D. program. Some of the students hurt or killed were brilliant, some of the best undergraduate students in the world, PBK, 'summa cum laude', Woodrow Wilson, NSF, etc. Still the fact that a Ph.D. is "often a waste of time" should not be regarded as very important. Why? Because that statement is essentially a probability. So, if W is the 'event' of a waste of time and P is a probability measure, then the claim is that the probability of W, P(W), is too large. I'd agree P(W) is too large. But a given student usually doesn't have to 'face' only P(W) and, instead, has information about some more 'events', say, A, B, and C, that are relevant, and then gets to observe an estimate of the 'conditional probability of W given A, B, and C', that is, P(W|A, B, C). Then, even if P(W) is too high, P(W|A, B, C) can be quite low in which case that student might go ahead. We know that a Ph.D. is the 'union card' for professors in college and universities. While there can be a lot to discuss about a career as a professor, I set that aside as, at least for HN readers, not very interesting. But, what about a Ph.D. for careers other than being a professor? Okay: I limit my discussion to Ph.D. degrees in 'technical' fields. I omit biomedical fields due to my limited knowledge of those fields. There are pros and cons: Cons. In nearly every line of work other than being a professor, having a Ph.D. is 'unusual'. So, in particular, if a Ph.D. takes a a job, say, job J, at company UGE, then somewhere in the path in the tree of the organization chart of company UGE from job J to the CEO likely there will be a person S without a Ph.D. where person S has a Ph.D. reporting to them. This is an uncomfortable situation; lawyers know this, and supposedly their profession tries to arrange that any working lawyer reports only to a lawyer. This unfortunate situation is a special case of the larger situation that Ph.D. holders in technical fields do not have a strong 'profession' to protect them. A Ph.D. in electronic engineering can at times want to swap their degree for an electrician's license -- good union card, key to a sole proprietorship that commonly pays well enough to buy a house and support a family, a rock solidly stable industry, a great geographical barrier to entry. Why "awkward"? Because person S will be afraid of two cases: (1) The Ph.D. training is irrelevant so that the Ph.D. holder will have their degree influencing their job performance in ways irrelevant to the job. (2) The Ph.D. training is relevant in which case the subordinate may conclude that their supervisor S is low on competence and, thus, be insubordinate and, with their extra competence, may be a threat to the career of person S. So, if get a technical Ph.D. and pursue a non-academic job, then likely will be in an awkward position without help of a recognized, respected profession. Pro. One aid in making 'the big bucks' is to do some work that meets three criteria: -- powerful, valuable, and new. If everyone over at UGE is determined to hire people only like themselves, keep down any additional competence, and, net, just keep doing things they way they long have been doing them, then a person with work meeting the three criteria might have a golden opportunity. Call it 'innovation', 'creative destruction', 'survival of the fittest', or just blowing the doors off those other guys, getting the big house, winter vacation house, summer vacation house, sports cars, good, old Stradivarius violin for a talented daughter, help getting into Princeton for another child, yacht, for wine for dinner parties, shopping, for a few dozen cases, between Beaune and Dijon, seat at the Round Table of the university president, for a child help getting through graduate school and seed funding for a startup, etc. Or just quite a lot of additional financial security. Of course, in this case will be 'different'; maybe in a good way different but definitely not the same. Often will not 'fit in'. E.g., would not be hired at UGE. But being different is commonly what goes with success, which in itself is 'different'. So, what does a Ph.D. have to do with doing some work that has the three criteria of powerful, valuable, and new? Answer, a lot: Those three criteria are essentially those of some successful original research -- the usual statement is "new, correct, and significant" but for non-academic work we can substitute the three criteria I gave. So, the crucial work is necessarily about 'research'. So, how to do 'research'? Well, history shows that commonly it's not easy, but there's education for that, called Ph.D. programs at the best 20 or so US research universities -- many of the names are well known, Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Brown, Yale, Columbia, NYU (and Courant), Princeton, Johns Hopkins, UNC, Georgia Tech, CMU (see, Jerry, I didn't leave you out!), University of Chicago, University of Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, Cal Tech. Nearly always the main difficulty in a Ph.D. program is the research part. For a good, succinct description of much of the challenge, buried in at least the machine readable copy of D. Knuth's 'The TeXBook' is "The traditional way is to put off all creative aspects until the last part of graduate school. For seventeen or more years, a student is taught examsmanship, then suddenly after passing enough exams in graduate school he's told to do something original." And there can be other challenges. But as difficult as the original work is via a Ph.D. program, commonly such work is more difficult otherwise. So, for someone in business trying to do work with the three criteria I listed, a Ph.D. program should be a big help. In my Web 2.0 startup, the computing is often a pain in the back side due to poorly written documentation, system management headaches, security holes, ..., bugs but is all just routine. The key to my startup, if it is successful, will be some work that meets the three criteria, and for that work I have to admit that my Ph.D. program helped. So, right, glad you noticed: If get a technical Ph.D. and want to use it outside of academics, then are heavily betting on doing some work that meets the three criteria and being a founder of a successful startup. Maybe there are too few examples successful Web 2.0 companies founded by a Ph.D. who did some research crucial to the success of the company. Then can take this situation as evidence that (1) a Ph.D. and some research are not powerful or (2) there is a wide open field full of opportunities. My guess is (2). I know; I know: But why can't there be just a nice, easy, secure, 20-30 hour a week job that will provide good financial security for life? Well, Obama already has that job (that's intended to be a joke!).
Create 14y ago
"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

47 points by Kopion 14y ago

I do sometimes wonder if this "PhD is a waste of time" is being pushed so heavily to get a glut of the best computer science grads, who would otherwise consider a PhD, onto the engineer job market. A cute little trick to drive down the salaries a bit, cut back on the perks... I mean, people posting links like this, on this board, don't really have English lit grads in mind, do they? Not that I disagree with the sentiment entirely, but it seems to be getting a lot of mileage the past few months.

magic_haze 14y ago
I think this is just a continuation of the old "College is a waste of time" thought, but I have noticed a _lot_ of people -- especially from China and India -- enrolling in CS PhD programs the last few years. I talked to a few of them from my college, and an exceedingly common theme seems to be family and peer pressure, so personally, I'd really like to understand more about this topic.
- arunabha 14y ago
  An important, but rarely overtly stated reason for foreigners to attend grad school in the United States is immigration. A graduate degree (esp in STEM disciplines) is a relatively secure way of getting a student visa, getting a job while on OPT, getting an H1B and finally a Green Card. Of course it does not mean that immigration is the sole reason for asians to attend US grad school in hordes, but it is an important one. Funnily enough, when you apply for your student visa, you're required to assert that you will return to your country after your education in the US is over :-)
  - ericd 14y ago
    I don't understand the motivation there at all - shouldn't the US be trying to hold on to the most educated foreigners as much as possible?
    - ufo 14y ago
      You made the mistake of assuming that the US immigration policy is rational.
    - anusinha 14y ago
      One country that does it right is Canada--they try very hard to keep top talent in the country instead of going to their previous homes.
    - jonemo 14y ago
      I used to ask that question and have been told that the US greatly benefits from having US-educated people in positions of power around the world. I don't know if this is true, but what is true that a surprising number of heads of states of countries that are considered political allies of the US have degrees from US universities. I first noticed this trend when reading about Pacific island nations.
      - ericd 14y ago
        I suppose, but the number of people leaving the country that that requires is fairly small, unless you're talking about spreading a cultural hegemony. I think it's likely just irrational.
  - otoburb 14y ago
    If we follow this logic for the subset of foreigners attending grad school in the US, why wouldn't they opt for a Masters degree instead of a PhD?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
jarek 14y ago
I don't think CS grads, however good, will make much of a dent in mech or chem eng salaries and perks...
- minimize_me 14y ago
  Well, I meant the software engineer job market... I don't think mechanical engineers get any perks anyway.
  - jarek 14y ago
    > I don't think mechanical engineers get any perks anyway. Not unless you consider going home at 5 pm a perk.
anologwintermut 14y ago
On HN I doubt it. I'd say we keep seeing the stories up here because people want to validate that they took the right choice. I'd personally say your better off doing that by convincing yourself you are working on something useful, not by shitting on other's choices. It would be the equivalent of justifying a PhD by saying "I don't think our best and brightest should be trying to get people to click on ads."

michael_nielsen 14y ago

I wonder when the first article was written claiming that doing a PhD was a waste of time? I'll bet it was in the 19th century. And we'll no doubt keep seeing such articles until such time as the PhD fades from history. (Nothing against the article in question, which is a better-than-usual discussion of the issue.)

klochner 14y ago

A computer science Ph.D. is nothing like what is described in this article. For various reasons (other opportunities, generous industry grants, minimal financial overhead to run a lab), students in computer science are comparatively well paid and free to work at their own pace. YMMV based on advisor. It's been exhaustively shown that stopping after undergrad or masters degrees will be more financially lucrative, so some reasons to go on: - you want one of the specialized researchy positions that are typically filled by Ph.D. holders - you have a genuine interest in some specialized field and want to work purely on learning/investigating that field - you want to be a professor

_delirium 14y ago
Unfortunately the "generous grants" often conflict with "free to work at their own pace". It's getting more common to find arrangements where PhD students essentially have a part-time job working for their RA funding. In the best case this overlaps with their own research, but sometimes doesn't, and may involve considerable additional work that doesn't really "count" as research. Particularly the case if you're funded on a DARPA grant, since those have very specific timelines and deliverables, plus days where you have to be ready for a "site visit" to demo things. Some industry grants are fairly hands-on as well, expecting the lab to basically lend out a PhD student to work part-time on a project the company wants completed. Though others are more hands-off and just donate a pile of money without demanding specific things in return.
shawn-butler 14y ago
I would limit that to just #2 in your list. The other two carrots are so out of your reach or subject to factors so far beyond your control that a love for learning and a burning interest in your research is the only thing that you can count on sustaining you.
- larsberg 14y ago
  #1 is also pretty achievable. For example, if you get a Ph.D. studying how to implement compilers and virtual machines, you basically have your choice of which place that implements compiler or VMs to work at (source: I am about to defend my Ph.D. in implementing compilers and VMs).

rayiner 14y ago

I think it depends on whose perspective you're talking about. I think for typical engineers, especially in EE/CS, the increase in earning power from the PhD doesn't make up for the six years of lost income and career progression. But I think from the point of view of society, it's absolutely worth it. The most brilliant engineers I know are PhDs. They have this incredible depth of theoretical understanding of a particular area that I think is hard to achieve without those years of dedicated study.

beala 14y ago
It's hard to know which way the causality goes here. It might just be that really exceptional undergrads happen to end up in grad school (because of pressure from professors or family, or simply because "it's just what smart people do"), even though they would have been exceptional engineers either way. I agree that PhDs are very knowledgable when it comes to their precise field of study, but this is often very narrow. How useful is this expert knowledge unless you're hired specifically for it (ie, as a researcher)?
- rayiner 14y ago
  Socially, there is a big value in getting a very bright person to intensely study a single area for many years. PhDs do usually go on to work in their field, and a vastly disproportionate amount of innovation comes from them. That's why I don't really buy the correlation argument. I don't think even very bright people are going to be able to make contributions like new speech recognition algorithms or new algorithms for wireless networking, robotics, etc, without the kind of dedicated and focused study that comes from a PhD (or an equivalent level of theoretical study outside a PhD program).
rdl 14y ago
I think you're right about some classes of PhD and benefit for society. It may be a case of market failure; I'd certainly prefer to support PhD programs in CS through charity and/or taxes than a lot of other things.

crucifiction 14y ago

As a hiring manager of non-specialized software developers, I take people with 4-6 years of real world coding over a phd any day. We generally hire phd's at the same level/pay as a bachelors in cs with maybe only a nominal amount more in salary. the skills you learn as a phd are not really what the industry needs, unless you manage to find one of the small number of jobs that requires whatever specific thing you studied as a phd. like the article says, those are very few and far between compared to the # of students exiting with degrees.

ideonexus 14y ago
I concur. My experience with CS PhDs is that they lack the production-oriented mindset needed for the real world. We hired a CS PhD to write reports for us. In six months he did not write one single line of code, but produced a very impressive whitepaper about the code he intended to write. He went on to write more whitepapers for a company specializing in vaporware somewhere else. I've had similar experiences with PhDs in many other fields as well. I have a great deal of respect for the degree, the person who worked so hard for it, and I love to read their often brilliant research, but either the effort of getting the degree or the mindset it takes to want to obtain one makes these people nearly useless in the business world. Give me an entry-level BS degree or 5-6 years equivalent experience any day.
- tensor 14y ago
  Meanwhile, the top tech firms aggressively recruit CS PhDs.
  - modarts 14y ago
    Well, more power to them. They have the resources to train them up to a level where they'll be productive.
    - tensor 14y ago
      Or perhaps this thread is full of obscene generalizations that are untrue. Hell, it even started off on the wrong foot by invoking "real world". All that term means is that you think your work is somehow relevant while the work of others, in this case PhDs, is not relevant. Parts of this community have a real problem with ego and unsubstantiated generalizations.

pfedor 14y ago

The decision to enter a PhD program only makes sense for one of the two reasons: either you think you're going to win a Nobel Prize one day, or, you don't mind spending five years in a way which doesn't advance any goal (literal quote from a conversation I had, "so you had an offer from Google but you decided to do a PhD instead--why??", "Oh, I just want to do nothing for a while longer".) The two kinds of PhD students may look the same but they're very different. If you belong to the first category, even if you realize you won't get that Nobel Prize, I doubt you're going to regret trying. If you're of the second kind, why yes, you have wasted five years of your life, which is exactly what you signed up for so why do you complain?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tensor 14y ago
I did a PhD to learn and to contribute some small bit to our collective knowledge. I didn't do it to be rich nor famous. As far as "waste of time" goes, there is nothing to me more important than contributing to the worlds knowledge. Pop stars come and go and the rich are forgotten and irrelevant just as fast. Knowledge is the only thing that accumulates and continually helps future generations.
darxius 14y ago
This is a very ignorant and short-sighted response. While I agree that getting a PhD is not for everyone, you can't make a blanket statement regarding its uselessness.
lallysingh 14y ago
As a relevant data point. I did a PhD because I wanted to learn a lot more about Computer Science. I did most of it while working at pretty good software development firms. Most of the people I work with have PhDs. They use some of what they studied at work, and I doubt undergraduates would be nearly as effective. There are a lot of advantages for PhDs in CS, if you like learning and studying. If you don't, there's really no reason to do a PhD, you're not going to get an outcome that you'd like. The types of jobs that work well for PhDs require (at least) some continuing research.

pagekicker 14y ago

old news

asynchronous13 14y ago

This article was pretty good at identifying drawbacks of higher education. (unlike the recent article by the literature PhD) There's so many assumptions surrounding a PhD degree. "I'll make more money!" Maybe, but it takes a lot of years to make up for making $0 for several years. "the only jobs for a PhD is in academia" depends on the subject, last I checked google hires lots of PhDs. "I'll only work 5 hours a week!" just because you only saw your professor when you showed up for class does not mean those were the only hours your prof was working. "PhDs are super smart!" maybe, or they're just good at jumping through hoops. The article pointed out that there is a glut of PhDs compared to available academic jobs. But then laments that only 57% of PhD students finish the degree within 10 years. The author seemingly argues that more people should graduate sooner, and increase the glut? It's not about smarts, self-motivation and leadership are required to finish a PhD. If someone expects to have their hand held and be told what to do, they might never finish. The article also says that these students are the smartest of their class. If that's true, then they are smart enough to view the job market and weigh the pros and cons of higher education themselves. (if they can't do that, then I'd argue they are not the brightest in their class after all)

marianne_navada 14y ago

I've been "All But Dissertation" for two years now for a PhD in sociology. I haven't touched my dissertation after having my proposal approved. Instead, I co-founded an organization that addresses the problem that I discovered in my preliminary research. Right now, my decision feels right.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
Are you sure you aren't just procrastinating? I'm joking, it sounds like you are doing the right thing.
- marianne_navada 14y ago
  Hehehehe, this is what my advisor thinks :) But honestly, right now, it just feels so good to reject the idea that a doctorate is everything. I've been in school for 12 years!
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    I was in school for 13 years (5+8). Procrastination is a common grad student problem.

graycat 14y ago

Getting a Ph.D. is "often a waste of time". Sometimes it's much worse: I've seen too many lives seriously hurt or even destroyed, as in they died, e.g., from suicide from clinical depression, from the stresses of a Ph.D. program. Some of the students hurt or killed were brilliant, some of the best undergraduate students in the world, PBK, 'summa cum laude', Woodrow Wilson, NSF, etc. Still the fact that a Ph.D. is "often a waste of time" should not be regarded as very important. Why? Because that statement is essentially a probability. So, if W is the 'event' of a waste of time and P is a probability measure, then the claim is that the probability of W, P(W), is too large. I'd agree P(W) is too large. But a given student usually doesn't have to 'face' only P(W) and, instead, has information about some more 'events', say, A, B, and C, that are relevant, and then gets to observe an estimate of the 'conditional probability of W given A, B, and C', that is, P(W|A, B, C). Then, even if P(W) is too high, P(W|A, B, C) can be quite low in which case that student might go ahead. We know that a Ph.D. is the 'union card' for professors in college and universities. While there can be a lot to discuss about a career as a professor, I set that aside as, at least for HN readers, not very interesting. But, what about a Ph.D. for careers other than being a professor? Okay: I limit my discussion to Ph.D. degrees in 'technical' fields. I omit biomedical fields due to my limited knowledge of those fields. There are pros and cons: Cons. In nearly every line of work other than being a professor, having a Ph.D. is 'unusual'. So, in particular, if a Ph.D. takes a a job, say, job J, at company UGE, then somewhere in the path in the tree of the organization chart of company UGE from job J to the CEO likely there will be a person S without a Ph.D. where person S has a Ph.D. reporting to them. This is an uncomfortable situation; lawyers know this, and supposedly their profession tries to arrange that any working lawyer reports only to a lawyer. This unfortunate situation is a special case of the larger situation that Ph.D. holders in technical fields do not have a strong 'profession' to protect them. A Ph.D. in electronic engineering can at times want to swap their degree for an electrician's license -- good union card, key to a sole proprietorship that commonly pays well enough to buy a house and support a family, a rock solidly stable industry, a great geographical barrier to entry. Why "awkward"? Because person S will be afraid of two cases: (1) The Ph.D. training is irrelevant so that the Ph.D. holder will have their degree influencing their job performance in ways irrelevant to the job. (2) The Ph.D. training is relevant in which case the subordinate may conclude that their supervisor S is low on competence and, thus, be insubordinate and, with their extra competence, may be a threat to the career of person S. So, if get a technical Ph.D. and pursue a non-academic job, then likely will be in an awkward position without help of a recognized, respected profession. Pro. One aid in making 'the big bucks' is to do some work that meets three criteria: -- powerful, valuable, and new. If everyone over at UGE is determined to hire people only like themselves, keep down any additional competence, and, net, just keep doing things they way they long have been doing them, then a person with work meeting the three criteria might have a golden opportunity. Call it 'innovation', 'creative destruction', 'survival of the fittest', or just blowing the doors off those other guys, getting the big house, winter vacation house, summer vacation house, sports cars, good, old Stradivarius violin for a talented daughter, help getting into Princeton for another child, yacht, for wine for dinner parties, shopping, for a few dozen cases, between Beaune and Dijon, seat at the Round Table of the university president, for a child help getting through graduate school and seed funding for a startup, etc. Or just quite a lot of additional financial security. Of course, in this case will be 'different'; maybe in a good way different but definitely not the same. Often will not 'fit in'. E.g., would not be hired at UGE. But being different is commonly what goes with success, which in itself is 'different'. So, what does a Ph.D. have to do with doing some work that has the three criteria of powerful, valuable, and new? Answer, a lot: Those three criteria are essentially those of some successful original research -- the usual statement is "new, correct, and significant" but for non-academic work we can substitute the three criteria I gave. So, the crucial work is necessarily about 'research'. So, how to do 'research'? Well, history shows that commonly it's not easy, but there's education for that, called Ph.D. programs at the best 20 or so US research universities -- many of the names are well known, Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Brown, Yale, Columbia, NYU (and Courant), Princeton, Johns Hopkins, UNC, Georgia Tech, CMU (see, Jerry, I didn't leave you out!), University of Chicago, University of Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, Cal Tech. Nearly always the main difficulty in a Ph.D. program is the research part. For a good, succinct description of much of the challenge, buried in at least the machine readable copy of D. Knuth's 'The TeXBook' is "The traditional way is to put off all creative aspects until the last part of graduate school. For seventeen or more years, a student is taught examsmanship, then suddenly after passing enough exams in graduate school he's told to do something original." And there can be other challenges. But as difficult as the original work is via a Ph.D. program, commonly such work is more difficult otherwise. So, for someone in business trying to do work with the three criteria I listed, a Ph.D. program should be a big help. In my Web 2.0 startup, the computing is often a pain in the back side due to poorly written documentation, system management headaches, security holes, ..., bugs but is all just routine. The key to my startup, if it is successful, will be some work that meets the three criteria, and for that work I have to admit that my Ph.D. program helped. So, right, glad you noticed: If get a technical Ph.D. and want to use it outside of academics, then are heavily betting on doing some work that meets the three criteria and being a founder of a successful startup. Maybe there are too few examples successful Web 2.0 companies founded by a Ph.D. who did some research crucial to the success of the company. Then can take this situation as evidence that (1) a Ph.D. and some research are not powerful or (2) there is a wide open field full of opportunities. My guess is (2). I know; I know: But why can't there be just a nice, easy, secure, 20-30 hour a week job that will provide good financial security for life? Well, Obama already has that job (that's intended to be a joke!).

Create 14y ago

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper