Ask HN: How to recruit PhD students in software engineering? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to recruit PhD students in software engineering?

4 pointsazhenley9 comments

I'll be starting as a professor in a few months where I'll be doing research on developer tools. I have seen that it is extremely difficult to recruit good PhD students in this topic area (even at elite schools), since most of them are heavily recruited by industry.

Any advice on attracting talented grad students in a topic area that has to compete with high paying companies? I do have funding for these students but it isn't anything like industry.

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How is it better for them to work for you and get a PhD rather than working in industry? I ask this as a computer science PhD student on the theory/algorithms side, where opportunities to learn how to do research fresh out of undergrad are pretty much exclusive to PhD programs. This doesn't seem to be the case for your area, but I imagine there is some edge?

This is a great point, and one that is difficult to answer.

The biggest reason I did a PhD is the freedom to explore the problems that I wanted. I didn't want to be told what to do or worry about short term contributions to a product/company. I imagined it a bit like doing my own startup where I have 4-6 years of funding.

Not a bad pitch, but I suppose the main difficulty is getting the pitch to potential students in the first place, which is much harder past the very top schools.

If the nature of your funding allows it keeping a close eye out for motivated undergrads and actually employing them could work to raise your profile to attract grad students. As I understand it identifying good undergrad researchers is quite hard, but it may be a good low-financial-commitment way to spin up a group of sorts?

I’d apply, but I dont want a CS degree.

79% of all CS grad students are international.

You may find a somewhat rich applicant pool of international talent that can get student visas but not work authorization. Fish in a barrel.

My college advisor was Turkish. Over 75% of the grad students in the department were Turkish. This was no coincidence. Start warming up those contacts at IIT and other well-regarded (outside the US) universities, and you may find yourself beating them off with a stick.

Why is it in the best interests of those developers to persue an academic degree rather than real world experience, setting aside the rather hefty financial reasons for a moment? That seems to be the underpinning question here...

Definitely. I think you are hitting on the same point that majos did. The best answer I have is the reason I did a PhD: freedom. It gave me many hours of unstructured time to explore problems I was interested in, which I would not have been able to do while working full time (I tried).

Is there a sub specialization you are looking at? - tools to write software / querying tools / visuzalization tools?

I mostly work on the human aspects of code editors. My process is: observe actual developers to understand their problems -> design and build a tool to overcome a problem -> evaluate the tool with real users.

For example, we observed devs spending a lot managing tabs in Eclipse/VS and scrolling through files. I built a code editor that does away with tabs and instead has a novel interface for navigating code.

Brief summaries of my projects and all of my publications can be found on my website: http://austinhenley.com/. I'm interested in many different areas of SE and would be happy to let a motivated student explore their interests.

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