4 ms·
Sorry, but I see bad advice here. "Waste of time"? No, it's not. Academia as a career, unless you're unambiguously one of the top minds of your generation, is
by michaelochurch 13y ago
Sorry, but I see bad advice here. "Waste of time"? No, it's not.
Academia as a career, unless you're unambiguously one of the top minds of your generation, is a bad idea. That boat has sailed and sunk.
However, a PhD in math or CS will make you eligible for higher-quality jobs more quickly than a Master's degree. There's a certain prestige that PhDs have that someone like me probably won't, and by the time you're 35+, it's almost impossible to go back, due to a combination of financial problems and admissions (you're now what is called "non-traditional").
I left a math PhD program for an internship on Wall Street. It was the right decision for me, especially because it got me on the job market before the Crash of 2008. Would I recommend that for everyone? No, I wouldn't.
By the time you are 40, whether you have a working brain or not will be a function of the quality of work you did in your 20s and 30s. If you do a decade or more of stupid work-- and the work most people get assigned is that-- you'll have lost your edge. On the other hand, if you keep doing exciting stuff, you'll be one of the sharpest people out there (and running circles around young people falling flat on mistakes you've already made). For your future, interesting work matters, and a PhD is a powerful asset (though it doesn't guarantee anything) in the battle for the scarce interesting projects.
- anxx 13y agoI find myself agreeing with you on many things. I first noticed your username after the real-googler discussion and what you saw at Google is so similar to what I saw in my job in a bank. Without external or positional prestige, there is little interesting work for even the bright young staff engineers.
- michaelochurch 13y agoValve figured it out: let people move around the company at will. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/dont-look-now-but-valve-just-humiliated-your-corporate-culture/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/dont-look-now... http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/tech-companies-open-allocation-is-your-only-real-option/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/tech-companie... Anything else falls down, both because the interesting work gets hoarded and distributed as a political token, and because the best people find it easier (after 3-5 years at most) to leave then to get the work they want internally. Good companies are out there, but they tend to be slower growing. This ties in to my r/K-selection analysis of capitalism: http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1es505/corporate_work_is_the_most_elaborate/ca3od3d http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1es505/corporate...