The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
matt-welsh.blogspot.com
matt-welsh.blogspot.com
But you can shift the balance of the various components if you go to different kinds of schools. To take the opposite end of the spectrum, if you're the CS prof at a small liberal-arts college, your job will involve a lot more teaching and mentoring undergrads, and a lot less grant-writing and research-lab management. It's unfortunately not true that there's a happy medium to fit every kind of temperament, but there are some options at least.
Is there any value in a PhD if you do your own startup, become a dev at a huge company like Google, or become a dev at a small company like Yelp? And if so, what does it get you over having five years of experience? I don't mean in monetary terms -- a PhD is obviously a net negative monetarily; what I'm looking for is the chance to make a living working on 'interesting' problems.
Plus, sometimes new startup ideas, connections, or key skills come out of a PhD. The traditional approach is to found a startup directly from your research, but equally important is the role of PhD projects in helping you identify people who will get things done. If they flake out on helping write an academic paper, what will they do when you're working on a company?
Now sometimes a programme falls short of the ideal. You may end up teaching too much, you may end up working on projects you don't like because the funding is there, and so on. If that's happening, then that is a reason to quit. If you have an incredible opportunity that comes up and isn't compatible with continuing, that's a reason to quit. Just quitting because the grass is greener, though, does not seem like it will work.
This was my attitude going into the program. I'll get to spend five years working on fun problems! Even if I don't land a research job at the end of it, at least I'll have had five years of fun. But when I look at how bitter the people who are graduating now are when they don't get research jobs, I'm not sure that I'll have the same attitude towards things when I finish.
Yes, sometimes new ideas, connections, and skills come out of a PhD. Don't those things come out of working in industry, too?
You may end up teaching too much, you may end up working on projects you don't like
Yes. This. I feel like I had more freedom at my old industry position than I do in my PhD program.
For me the biggest value from my PhD came from the writing up. It is really, really, really hard to get from having "done all of the work" to writing a coherent, well defended thesis on it. You will get very good at spotting holes in arguments (particularly yours, but also other peoples). You will get a very real understanding of how much work is involved in getting from 95% to 100% finished. It's not directly valued in industry but I know that I benefit personally from my writing up experience.
And you get to call yourself doctor. That's nice.
"Hey baby, I'm a doctor. I do radiology." (Both true statements.)
"Ooh, tell me more."
"Trust me, I'm a doctor!"
And dealing with unhelpful customer service:
"We're sorry Mr Smith but we can't do that..."
"Actually that's DOCTOR Smith"
It won't help you get what you want, but the amusement factor will make you feel better.
A friend of mine has Dr on all of his credit cards. He claims to have received free upgrades on rental cars from time to time as a result. Not sure if I believe that.
As somebody who spent some time working and then came back, though, it's just a short hop. The Ph.D. will only open doors for you in the future, and the six-year commitment is not an easy thing to do the older you get, with greater lifestyle expectations, family situation, and the general crotechety-ness that comes with time.
Sure, a PhD will open some doors. So will five years in industry: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373334
I'm not sure what this means—no-one can stop you from doing research anywhere, regardless of your qualifications. Do you mean that most academic research jobs require a Ph.D.?
(I left the bit about industry out of my quote because I don't have the faintest idea. Maybe it's true.)
>I'm not sure what this means--no-one can stop you from doing research anywhere, regardless of your qualifications.
This may be true in CS, but in most physical or biological fields is not fully true. The permits you need for handling certain materials are more difficult to obtain without a PhD, and it's hard to get funded without it as well.
Good point. I'm a mathematician, and the resources that we absolutely must have are even fewer than those of most CSers; I didn't consider life in other disciplines.
If you're studying something hard and you get good at it someone will want to hire you. You will have essentially paid for a good chunk of their R&D for them.
I probably don't want to become a lecturer because I see it as a service job - you're dealing with members of the public. But doing a post doc has paid as much as I'd get in industry, but with a lot more freedom.
If I could find an interesting startup I'd probably leave though.
Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?
Being a staff scientist at a national lab is about as close as you can get to this in the US. Compared to being a professor you'll get similar money (sometimes more), less prestige, more time for research and slightly more annoying bureaucracy. There's upsides and downsides of each.
an academic research lab sponsored by a big company (note that this is not the same as a corporate R&D division) ... in the 1970's, this was epitomized by Xerox PARC and AT&T Bell Labs. today, Microsoft Research is currently the leader in this category.
I loved these classes because the profs were usually really passionate about the subject and that showed in their efforts. There was less droning on and emphasis on arcane, irrelevant minutiae and more "basic principles... now we build stuff and talk about the fun problems there". Those classes were so enjoyable that they almost made me pursue a PhD even though I am not right for that -- at least for now.
Being a pre-tenure professor is way more terrifying than being an entrepreneur was.
And, depending on the field, between 25% and 75% of your salary as a professor will come from being able to procure external funding.
If you can't convince the funding agencies to pay you, then tenure buys you an office, a teaching load and health care.
It's been terrifying for me because my hit rate is about the same as Matt's. I've had very little luck getting funding for my research.
And, at the last funding panel I served on, the funding rate was down to 5%. My own fund-seeking overhead is now at 60% of my time, and I'm still not getting any.
Either we have too many scientists, or not enough science funding. I don't think the current system is sustainable.
A little bit of both, to which I would add a third: the way we fund science is... I'm going to charitably say "sub-optimal"
And if you're expected to pay your students, it takes a lot of money! One student, including tuition, stipend, and departmental overhead, costs around $50k, so if your lab is 5 students, you have to bring in $250k a year just to support your grad students. And if you start dipping below about $150k, so are supporting fewer than half your students, people will start grumbling, and it'll look bad for your tenure case. (You can't avoid it by having fewer students, either, because having only 2 students will also look bad for your tenure case.)
Now you get to work for five years to earn your tenure. You work nights, maybe weekends. Your salary is better, but not that much better than your friends got out of university. At the end of the five years, you may be denied tenure. Are you going to give it another shot after that? Another five years?
Also, "and often times at / above industry (that's true at least in Canada anyways)", I do not see this to be true. Especially not for people of similar technical skill who work hard and long hours.
The biggest reason people do not pursue a tenure track position is a distinct lack of a safety net. The above only deals with the monetary aspect of it as well. The social cost is equally high: you never know where you will end up settling down.
The rewards are there (until someone decides that a restructure will get rid of all the deadwood - people who won the tournament then quite rationally began resting on their laurels) but it's not an easy game to play.
For first-time entrepreneurs I agree, but there are a lot of "serial entrepreneurs" who sold a company for multi-millions, and are now founding new companies. Millions in the bank definitely seems like a big safety net that insulates you from most real-world risk...
For all the talk about costs of colleges going up, I have never seen a single explanation of where the money is going. And if it ain't going into research, then it's gotta be going somewhere.
Much better than research prototypes that go no where beyond a publication or two.
if everyone thought the way that you did, then we'd still be programming by submitting our punch cards to some gigantic centralized machine. think about how much basic academic research occurred before the invention of something like the iPhone became possible
EDIT: I'm not trying to say that pure science is universally unexciting. Few things are. But generally, more people seem to be interested in consumer products than pure science research.
(That said, I wouldn't want this prof's job, because managing a large group of people, whether in industry or a research lab, is not my idea of fun.)
This is why I'm not an academic.
I can respect basic CS research without wanting to do it myself. I use the fruits of it all the time. But when faced with a problem, I'd rather hack up something that's good enough to get something on the screen than spend the time necessary to cross all the Ts and dot the Is for a publishable paper. To me, the code and what you can do with it speaks for itself.
Will Tetris be used? Maybe. But it is a game. It is not solving real problems. Famous people today being recognized far in the futre? Even less likely.
Sure. Likewise. I don't plan on doing a PhD. I was primarly responding to the lack of respect for CS research:
>Much better than research prototypes that go no where beyond a publication or two.
I would rather build novel games based on my ideas for the iPhone than do basic research.
"I know not what I appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, whilest the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Quotations/Newto...
The point of making game is actually in having an effect on people, mostly the point of writing papers is padding out an academic resume.
I left, co-founded a company, moved onto other things and have never regretted leaving academia - I much prefer building things people do use to writing papers about things that people will probably ignore (that being the fate of most academic research).
The only bit about academic life that I wouldn't mind having is the nice juicy final salary pension scheme!