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Comment by Umalu | Hacker News Reader

I think if you're smart and you've earned a PhD from a good program, you've proven you have the ability to dig deep into a subject and figure it out and move the ball forward a bit. This is an economically valuable skill that should be broadly transferable into many fields, even those far afield from your PhD studies. I think the problem arises for PhDs when they refuse to leave their narrow field of specialty. A lucky few can continue to specialize in academia, but for the rest the real world requires them to get a lot more general and interdisciplinary in order to succeed, something I fear a lot of them are unwilling to do. Hence our glut of unhappy PhDs. This is not a new problem.

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"I think the problem arises for PhDs when they refuse to leave their narrow field of specialty"

Amen, we have a friend who spent 12 years getting a PhD in Russian History only to get out and face no job prospects. Depressingly, every year he gets ready for the one History Job fair that happens in January, flies down there and presents himself at interviews. 3 years later he still actually believes that he has a chance at getting a job after being out of the game a while. He has no sense to pivot, no sense that maybe he needs to find a new calling in life and utilize his skills in another fashion.

Contrastingly, we knew another PhD in Chemistry from Cornell. He got out and hated academia, but still loved teaching. He decided to teach chem and physics at some fancy prep high school and is doing well for himself.

To me these people need to understand that if they can't find their place quickly to scale that pyramid need to find a more general use for their skills.

There's perseverance and then theres a false sense of hope.

Except the history of academia and science is rife with people who slaved away for their entire life in their narrow field of specialty, before discovering something that changed the world, and their life. There's no objective test to determine the difference between "failure to pivot" and "changing the world with a little more effort."

The guy who developed a proof to Fermat's Last Theorem worked on it for seven years. I suspect people laughed at him, told him he would never succeed, told him he should do other things.

After he came up with the solution, he was knighted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27_proof_of_Fermat%27s_La...

There is a big difference between working on something for a long time and, basically, just keeping hoping for a long time. I wonder how many people who have their PhDs and hope for an academic job are really working at improving their abilities in their fields, or even at keeping up.

> I suspect people laughed at him, told him he would never succeed, told him he should do other things.

I don't think that's true. IIRC, Wiles was pretty successful before he started the work (tenure at Princeton?), worked on it secretly, and still published (though at a lower rate) to cover his secret.

Here's a documentary about him, it's worth watching: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8269328330690408516#

"If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school."

--Paul Graham from http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

That's pretty rare situation nowadays, and relatively specific to maths and few other fields where you can work by yourself. Even Nobel-prize level research is rarely done this way anymore.

Somewhat off-topic, but I've had fleeting contact with a former doctoral student of Wiles', Brian Conrad (math professor at Stanford now), and holy fuck is that guy intelligent.

The problem is not finding work for people with a PhD it's wasting the money handing out PhD's to people who don't end up 95% of what they learned in there subjects. The USSR, before it's collapse, had an extremely educated populace. However, while pumping up the numbers of "highly educated people" looks good on paper it did not fit their economy.

To put it simply much of the time higher education is consumption not investment. Overspending on anything be it Roads, Medicine, the military, or Education is simply wasteful. And not just for the teaching staff your taking a large number of talented young people and keeping them fully engaging in the workforce for an extended period of time.

Exactly: it is very wrong to think PhD are useless because you won't use what you did during your PhD. This is stupid on two accounts: even if you do an academic career, what you did during your PhD is rarely what you will do later, and PhD teaches you many other things.

I only realized it afterwards, but many people are simply incapable of working by themselves without being given precise instruction: PhD teaches you that in some way (of course, there is a selection bias). It also trains you to communicate to other, which is a very valuable skill. You are also used to being criticized on somehow objective criterion: few people are able to take critics in any other way than personal. Finally, you almost always learn tenacity.

For me, saying that PhD is a bubble because there are few academics positions is like saying being an entrepreneur is a bubble because so few people become very rich. Even failure teach you a lot (where failure would be defined as not becoming an academic in the PhD case).

+1 for "you almost always learn tenacity". I've seen many good and bad Ph.D. students, but in the end, the ones who got their Ph.D. were the tenacious ones, not necessarily the best or brightest ones.

This is a really good point. The importance of good written and oral communication skills is often downplayed but likely one of the most important in the workplace.

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