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Comment by nycthbris | Hacker News Reader

I think you are seriously underestimating the value of first hand experience conducting scientific research. It beats into you a mindset you can't get anywhere else. There are no books or manuals or docs to read and master it. There's only the scientific method. You start with a question, conduct experiments, analyze results, adjust your hypothesis, and repeat the process. You get very comfortable with saying "I don't know". You right at the border of the unknown and trying to navigate further.

Companies are using a PhD as a proxy for having research experience because it's the the only qualification like it out there. It's a poor proxy because not all PhDs are created equal.

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> You start with a question, conduct experiments, analyze results, adjust your hypothesis, and repeat the process.

This is missing my pet step: doing the literature review.

I’m pretty ambidextrous when it comes to Python and R, so I’m not typically a combatant in the data science language flamewars.

But... for as much as the Python community likes to assert their superior coding chops, I’ve observed that the R community does a much better job of reading about prior art.

> This is missing my pet step: doing the literature review.

One of the earliest, most important, and most useful lessons I learned from a senior grad student: "a day in the library can be worth a week at the bench."

Or this: you spend 4 months on a project and belatedly notice schmidhuber proved a much better result in 1985 and yells at you and you get kicked out of academia

You don't get kicked out of academia for that... Well maybe if you're a student and you lose your funding. It's really embarrassing and I'm sure frustrating too. I've reviewed a couple of papers where they didn't do their literature review, there were lots of obvious (to people who read) prior work, and I've had to straight reject their papers. I feel bad for them but do your literature review folks!

I was kidding!!! But people do take literature review seriously (which on the balance is good)

What sorts of positions are we actually talking about here? How many companies actually need a research lab? I don't think anyone contests that a PhD is very useful if your job is to actually write and publish papers, attend conferences, present at conferences, etc. But many data scientists and machine learning engineers working in industry don't do any of that, and many companies have no need to have anyone on staff doing any of that either.

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