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Comment by shawn | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to. Do graduate programs accept devs who have been working the last decade?

There are areas I feel I could be helpful with, e.g. creating reproducible experiments or ensuring a codebase could be open sourced in relation to a paper. It's a lot of grunt work that nobody really has time to do.

If that were possible, I'm not quite sure where to start with executing that plan. (Chicago area, FWIW.)

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I left another career (military, rather than tech though) to go back and do a PhD. I didn't really find any barriers to it - I just applied like anyone else. I basically cold-emailed some professors doing things I was interested in and went from there.

> There are areas I feel I could be helpful with, e.g. creating reproducible experiments or ensuring a codebase could be open sourced in relation to a paper. It's a lot of grunt work that nobody really has time to do.

Whoah caution there. Don't go into a PhD with the idea that you can be helpful with someone else's work, or doing grunt work. Doing a PhD is very personal - you need your own big idea to work on. You may be part of a lab, your work may even be one part on a larger project, but you must carve out your own very distinct part of that and generate your own research. You can't really do a PhD by helping along with something else. Open sourcing a code base is not a research contribution.

You could make a PhD about how to make science more reproducible, though. You'd need some big idea about how to do that.

It sounds like you might be interested in looking at being a research engineer as well. Prestigious places like Microsoft Research hire quite a few of these I believe.

https://rse.ac.uk

What sort of stuff does MSR task research engineers with?

Yup, there are a number of well regarded CS professors who recruit burnt out industry programmers as students. Check out Peter Alvaro at UCSC for one.

6 years ago I was wondering how anyone gets burnt out from getting to program for a living. How naive I was :)

Yes. I did this a few years ago after working for ~9 years. The trick is getting good letters of recommendation that far out. In my case, I got letters from supervisors/colleagues and applied to Masters programs, then used my Masters as a springboard to a PhD. It's been great, I would highly recommend it.

I'm in the same boat - The PhD admissions proces over-indexes on Letters of Recommendation from other academics. I don't think I can get those because I have not actively stayed in touch with my professors.

I went through the existing process once and promised myself I would never waste that much time again. But if there's a program that genuinely values industry experience, and is willing to look past recommendation letters from academics, I'd jump at it.

Get a Master's first; that way you can get a taste of whether you even like the field enough

A significant number of PhDs drop out, and likely literally everyone undergoes some sort of huge realization of how doing a PhD is completely and surprisingly unlike what they expected (which is still true even with all the advice telling people that doing a PhD will be surprisingly unlike what you expect). Someone dropping out of a lab is a significant loss in time and resource investment which labs would prefer to avoid, and the biggest predictor for staying in a PhD is substantial experience doing research (to have some sense of what the lifestyle is like) and little experience with higher paying jobs (here at MIT, I see many PhD programs prefer people straight out of undergrad, even though older people are orders of magnitude more productive in the early phase of their PhD).

Nobody has time to do those things because they are valued less than publishing new research, and thus are of lower priority. You'll have a frustrating time in academia if you define yourself around your ability to do things that the people evaluating you believe to be unimportant.

If you can meet or exceed expectations on delivering research and get all those lower-priority things done, you'll be very well-liked. Just remember that the former is a requirement and the latter is icing on the cake.

"Or ensuring a codebase could be open sourced in relation to a paper"

This is required in a 1.7 million dollar grant I'm the PI on. I run a computational lab - making sure my research code base is high quality is one of my highest priorities, and I've seen people have very fruitful careers doing just that.

If those things are valued, the academics will be doing them. Like in your lab, for instance.

"If those things are valued, the academics will have already be doing them. Like in your lab, for instance."

We're trying to. Doesn't mean I wouldn't like to hire someone whose better at it. Just like we do a lot of mathematical analysis, but I was still excited about hiring an applied mathematician.

And when I said I knew people with fruitful careers, that implies I know academics already doing them.

That's great to hear. I do think those values are spreading, but they are definitely not universal yet.

If a prospective student wants to be sure that sort of contribution will be appreciated, they should seek out groups who have expressed interest in those skills.

Indeed. But I think the demand is there - most of my colleagues are actually having trouble recruiting people with those skills.

We complain about it on...a regular basis.

I think your best option is to apply to a masters degree. These are easier to get into, especially for someone out of school for a few years. This is also an opportunity to find professors doing research in topics of your interest.

It has it's plussses and minuses. One thing about a Ph.D. program is that it's relatively easier to get funded. Master's students are more likely to have to pay tuition. On the other hand, you can bang out an M.S. in two years. 1.5 in some cases. If what you're after is knowledge and skills, like a BS++, do a Master's. If you want to learn how to advance the field, do a Ph.D. If you're on a mission to fix undergraduate education, please be aware that the problems are deep and systemic, and you will probably not find your idealism welcome.

That is indeed a major one - I can't fund a Masters student.

At one point i was considering going for a research engineer position. That seems a bit rarer than a straight PhD program, but involves pretty much exactly what you describe. Pay of course won't be what you're used to in industry, but in my experience (several friends hold such positions) you have excellent job security and a very laid-back work life. I think you often are expected to already hold a PhD to guarantee that you'll actually be familiar enough with the things you're building out/for, though YMMV.

Source: i'm an escaped academic.

Check out Georgia Tech's online MS in CS program - many students who have been industry for some time.

You're in very much the wrong part of the country, but I'd absolutely hire a dev who had been working for the past decade. And find them hugely valuable.

Hell, one of the rising stars of my field started as a dev.

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