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Comment by smanzer | Hacker News Reader

A few words of caution from a recent Ph.D. graduate: a big problem you will face if you do this is the all-or-nothing nature of the degree. If you are five years in, you will put up with a huge amount of abuse to avoid throwing away that time. Departments and your advisor know this - they will abuse you in lots of ways (stiffing you on reimbursements, making you teach constantly, etc.) because you are stuck - if you leave, you will be perceived as having failed and derive little career benefit from those years of your life. I would also caution that the author's good outcome (assistant professorship at a top tier school, straight out of grad school), would be considered impossibly unlikely in my field, chemistry. I can't speak to CS though.

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I quit recently after 5 years. I don't think I regret it - the improvement in my mental health has been dramatic. I found it difficult to trust any of the advice I was getting from supervisors etc. because our interests weren't aligned.

I can say that I'm significantly more highly skilled than when I started though. Knowing that I didn't want to stay in academia, I spent a lot of time working on my transferable skills (i.e. tech).

Sounds like you played it smart developing industry-relevant skills. I lucked out with that myself and got a thesis project that helped me get a software engineering job afterward. This is really one of the things they should emphasize to new students: the odds you will get a good academic gig, even if grad school works out well for you, are very low, so make alternate plans. Glad to hear things have gotten better for you after getting out - good luck!

Right. It's a lot like deciding to set out on a risky mountaineering expedition where success is determined only by reaching the summit. Along the way, there are numerous pitfalls that can be your undoing regardless of your level of preparation. However, adversarial, abusive, non-cooperative overlords can make it arbitrarily hard, and even impossible, for you to succeed. They get to define what "summit" means and they can move the goalposts at a moment's notice. There is no recourse for you, and there is no oversight.

Playing the game without having benevolent overlords is a fool's errand, but many people do not learn this until it is too late.

One of the most important lessons that can be taken away from grad school [1]: "If you compete, never leave your fate in the hands of the judges. In regular life, never leave your fate in the hands of other people."

[1] https://www.t-nation.com/powerful-words/4-things-you-can-lea...

I am doing thesis based masters (kind of micro or nano PhD) in CS at a Canadian university. My experience is same. My supervisor is text-book narcissist, pathological liar, and abusive. He would always hire international students from third-world countries to ensure that he can get away with abuse since he knows they will do anything to get a degree. And the worst part is the whole academic system is designed around exploiting and abusing (maybe not in some top schools) grad students. In may respect, modern academia is new form of slavery.

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