Advice for Ph.D. students from Tony Hoare [video]

Every environment is broken in some way or other. Try to make it work for you to do what you want as well as you can. I personally am inspired by all the work that Charles Babbage tried to do and managed to do more than a century ago without having his dream (a computer) at his disposal. Remember, a modern desktop or laptop computer would be a super-computer worth millions of dollars just say 25 years ago. Just imagine what Babbage would give to be in your shoes. So if you own a computer, your environment isn't completely broken. Do the best with the tools you have.

A PhD is about you. Not about your environment. Not about others. Not even about your work. It's about you. What story do you want to tell to your future employers? That you were fed up with your environment and unmotivated to continue? Hell no! You want to tell you a tricky problem, analyzed it thoroughly and fuckin' fixed it! You got funky publications, an interesting network, a smashing thesis (no one's gonna check) and now are ready to take on the world!

Motivation is tricky. Sometimes it's worth it to continue, and sometimes it's not. Only you can make this decision, but you have to listen to yourself and figure out what it is that's bugging you. If it's a transient "motivational crisis" you can take some time off. If it's more permanent, then leave.

Academia sucks, but it's not much better than most corporations are. It's just different. In academia, money and resources are scarce but time is abundant. In corporations, money is abundant but time seems scarce (because of tight deadlines, 90 percent of which are completely arbitrary). So (to simplify grossly) academics build really cool things that no one uses or cares about while corporate employees build ugly commercial things that are actually useful.