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Comment by throwawaymsft | Hacker News Reader

"Properties you find appealing..."

  * Freedom
  * Ownership
  * Personal freedom
  ...

<Later...>

  * Getting into a PhD program: references, references, references
  * Student adviser relationship
  * Pre-vs-post tenure
  * Impressing an adviser
  * (Topic) Plays to your adviser’s interests and strengths

Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to. Reading this, I'm so thankful I didn't enter academia. I still pursue my academic interests on my own.

Edit: A few people insist on casting a float into a bool. Every job has politics, ranging from 0.01% (anonymous author of 1-man SaaS) to 99% (politician). It's not very informative to note that both are non-zero.

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> Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics

That's crazy. The way to get a great reference is to do outstanding work. If by 'playing politics' you mean not pissing people off by being an asshole or being unreliable, then, yeah, take care to be a good colleague. But almost entirely: do really good work.

Bash other people's novel work while peer reviewing it anonymously, then steal it and submit for publication at another conference before the rejection notification goes to the original author.

Once someone makes it into the review pools for top conferences, they receive a constant feed of good ideas to harvest in the form of submissions.

That's the pathological case, yes. People can also go steal cars and rob houses. But they usually don't.

Good luck getting a reference from someone after stealing their idea.

From my super-limited experience in academia, I found politics is more important at top schools and much less important when you get to ~40-80 ranked US schools for PhD programs.

That's good to hear. I have the hankering to return to school at some point, and I really just want to learn and contribute.

Having spent time at schools of various "ranks" (whatever that means), "politics" (whatever that means ... that's super vague) is everywhere. It's what you make of it. Whenever you have people, money, and status mixing, there is politics. That's not exclusive to academia. Every company I've worked at also had those dynamics. Want to eliminate politics? Be independently wealthy and work alone :) Otherwise everyone needs to learn to work with and transcend the system in their own unique way.

Well, with freelancing (in data science) I managed to avoid politics (and bureaucracy) completely (no, I am not independently wealthy).

I went through a PhD at a non-top-tier school (borderline between second-tier and third-tier). I definitely dealt with politics extensively. A huge amount of people-pleasing, both with your advisor and with others in your chosen research area and the broader field it sits in. A fair bit of funding-related politics. And a fair bit of actual politics politics, if you want to fit in.

There's a lot of in-group / out-group politics in academia; don't make life more difficult for yourself when you know a straightforward way to survive. Learn to deeply bury any opinions you might have that don't completely align with those of people who control your fate, especially in areas fundamental to their in-group identity, and if that fails, lie convincingly. (Remember that dodging a question where enthusiastic agreement was expected is a form of answer, and not the one you want to give.) You might get lucky and work with people accepting of differences of opinion, but I wouldn't recommend risking it when years of your life are on the line.

I don't regret the experience, and quite frankly I learned a few other survival skills in the process that simply hadn't come up as an undergrad, but don't go into it thinking it's a purely technical experience, or that you won't have to deal with a pile of utterly ridiculous BS and unpleasantness.

> Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to.

Yeah, internal corporate politics never gets people's entire project canceled with no notice in the corporate world. That would just be mean, so it doesn't happen /s.

(Guess what I found out last Friday?)

That sucks, but politics in the workplace can be dialed from mega-corp to startup to consultancy to freelancer to anonymous author of a SaaS. How much politics did patio11 deal with when running Bingo Card Creator?

Pretty sure that the same applies for academia. It depends on your department culture and lab environment.

I found the academia to be way more vicious and politics than a company.

In academia, teachers/referees/directors were commonly there for 10-20 years, some will probably never have to live their positions and they have full unlimited authority for many things.

The worse that could happen in academia as a student is to have politics goes against your back. You will be blocked from graduating, you will loose X years of study unlikely to start over or graduate at another place, and be stuck with your debt and no diploma.

In a company, the worst that could happen is simply to be fired. You look for another job and keep your money, you keep your diploma, keep your experiences.

In fact, if you have a problem with your boss at work, you can always change job. If you have a problem with your PhD (or master's) teacher in academia, you can't leave without failing your studies and you're fucked.

> casting a float into a bool

Haha, a geeky yet very apt expression.

Spoiler Alert: politic is everywhere.

Yes, but (importantly) degrees vary. The politics of working for an adviser chasing tenure are different from, say, running a SaaS, writing an ebook, or selling a plugin.

You mean, politic is different if you're not working for anyone? I can't even agree with that. You will still have politic in place if you have people working for you, or if you have critics reviewing your ebook, or if you're trying to get your plugin accepted in a store, etc...

cqfd

Correct. And are the politics of getting your plugin accepted in the Wordpress directory more or less than getting tenure?

See the edit above. You are saying two things must be equal because they are both non-zero. It's a very strange argument.

Getting tenure is a life accomplishment. Getting a plugin accepted in a wordpress directory? Come on, we're comparing apples and oranges.

If you look at some parts of getting a tenure, they are without politic as well. Example: studying a subject.

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