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Comment by kirse | Hacker News Reader

Arguably his A64/x86-64 work has been more impactful (so far). Imagine a young Jim Keller from Penn State University, makes you wonder how many SV firms today would toss out that resume in favor of a less... generic... institution. Even worse, he works for DEC, which is a boring big company. This guy is like vomit in the mouth of startup culture.

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That is because the average startup culture thinks everything other than web/mobile is not interesting. All the system architecture guides I see these days consist of load balancers, webservers and databases as if that is all that matters.

Startup culture you describe is more entrepreneurship than high-tech. Business idea and execution makes the difference, not several years of technological edge over competition.

Biotech, medicine, electronics, wireless technology, signal processing, chemistry and material science startups work in different environment. Get good education (PhD is requirement in many areas), work in a firm or research group until you are at top of the game and have learned all practical skills, then start a business.

You can see it in the Rust community. So much of the focus has been on http servers instead of codecs, operating systems, daemons, file systems, etc.

That seems pretty uncharitable, there's more than a few OS projects happening in the Rust space and I know a bunch of people spend time poking at low-level stuff(myself included).

The above poster didn't say that there weren't any OSs or low-level stuff (anyone who frequents HN would know that) they said that majority focus is elsewhere.

To be fair, in a sense it's less surprising when the most notable project in Rust, from relatively early on, was a web browser.

To be fair, the DEC Alpha team was highly respected in the CPU architecture industry.

It's a shame how going through the hassle and politics of getting PhD (from a reputable school) is now almost a requirement for the cutting edge.

Getting a PhD is honestly such a bad deal financially and socially. I'm sure the prospect of sinking ~5yrs into some laser focused sub-field for garbage pay scares away a lot of potential--not including academia's useless bureaucracy cough GRE.

> It's a shame how going through the hassle and politics of getting PhD (from a reputable school) is now almost a requirement for the cutting edge.

Nowadays, a PhD is literally dedicated to carry out original research, which normally entails a curricular part that serves to help a candidate get up to date on the state of the art. Conducting original research is a natural requirement to be on the cutting edge of any scientific or technical field.

> a PhD is literally dedicated to carry out original research

*for ~$30k/yr for five years

> Conducting original research is a natural requirement to be on the cutting edge of any scientific or technical field.

I'm not saying that a PhD won't prepare you. Just that it's inefficient in terms of stress/time/money.

> *for ~$30k/yr for five years

Perhaps that's a US thing. In most european countries (if not all), not only are the costs significantly lower but each state sets up research programs where PhD candidates are actually paid to pursue their studies. Those PhD positions are limited and in some places the pay tends to be somewhat low, but still PhD candidates do get paid for their work.

There are also programs where private companies can participate in PhD programs as part of their R&D investment, and enable their employees to pursuit PhDs while working for them.

I believe the OP is saying that you get paid ~30k/yr for five years which is pretty on the nose with that being the case in the US/Can and european countries as well.

At least for STEM PhDs

Depends on the field though. Although a good school they will pay for your Phd tuition and give you a small stipend(~1500K), which is not great. But there are ways for making up for the lost pay; I do know of a few Data Science Managers who earlier dropped out of their Phd and earned good sums. Some began consulting. Also the big tech firms are recruiting studying Phds to do research for them.

Losing out on an early five years of investing is huge. A ~$30k/yr stipend is not going to be enough to do anything with.

> But there are ways for making up for the lost pay; I do know of a few Data Science Managers who earlier dropped out of their Phd and earned good sums.

Isn't this supporting my claim that a PhD is a bad deal, if people decide they are better off completing the program?

I've also heard the story so many times. Once people have a good idea they realize that completing a PhD is just getting in the way. Instead of researching and studying for ~5yrs they leave and start a company/building a product.

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