Your experience mirrors mine in many ways (especially Hunt the Supervisor.. oh, the fun we had). Sounds like you were/are also in the UK -- 3-4 years for a PhD

Your experience mirrors mine in many ways (especially Hunt the Supervisor.. oh, the fun we had). Sounds like you were/are also in the UK -- 3-4 years for a PhD is considered fast over here in the US! I think the most unexpected part of my PhD experience was the sheer mind-numbing slog that research can become, either your own project or assisting your supervisor. Writing a pretty easy script and then running it 1000 times with different variables on different datasets. Reviewing a metric ton of papers for a forced lit review. etc. I loved the freedom of thought, and learned a lot about what I was interested in and motivated by. I loved the structure of academia, the familiar support networks, and I found I really enjoyed teaching. I particularly liked thinking up bizarre ideas and having the skills and tools at my disposal to see if anyone had done it before and quickly knock up a messy but functional way to test it out. For me, it boiled down to wanting to do work on messy, imperfect data that came from the real world, which was at odds with the highly curated and neat datasets that can get you nice, repeatable results suitable for a PhD. Would I have stuck it out if I could have done the research I really wanted? Having seen friends go through the writing up stage and break under the pressure, I'm not sure. I'm not intending to go back and finish it, that's for sure. Side note: the font size for your Joel on Software quote is insanely large (Chrome/Windows).