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Comment by Athas | Hacker News Reader

Can't speak for everyone, but for my PhD I was trained for doing research. What else would it be? That kind of research is (presumably) also useful in R&D positions in industry, and I certainly see most of the PhD graduates here eagerly hired by companies with advanced products. Actually, what I was not directly trained for is exactly what you need only in academia: writing grants, managing small teams, supervising students, and so on.

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The thing that killed the appeal of academic research for me was that I found I was playing the "publish or perish" game too well an it was actually making me (as someone observed at the time) "hyper cynical".

I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers about about how to build things that people will almost certainly never use.

I’m 6 months in and already became a bit too cynical for my own good. Your last paragraph exactly describes a feeling I have been for months. Having a paper written in 10 days accepted in the best conference of the field increased both my imposter syndrome, and the feeling that we are writing useless crap.

So, in this end what did you do? Are you able to build product you care about now?

My experiences were a while back (I was in academic research from '89 to '95) - I left to co-found a startup in '95 and did OK.

I've never regretted leaving academia for a single moment - that's not to say I don't have fond memories and I learned a lot there but ultimately I have always liked building stuff and ultimately that's only worth it if people get value from what you build. I knew a lot of great people in academia - but I was conscious that there was very much a game to be played (as is the case everywhere) and the game from what I could see wasn't one that interested me.

> Having a paper written in 10 days accepted in the best conference of the field increased both my imposter syndrome, and the feeling that we are writing useless crap.

Are you sure you are not harsh on yourself? :) Maybe it was a good paper. If you are so worried, you can always ask the conference reviewers for comments; maybe they thought it was excellent.

> useless crap

You get enough "useless crap" down as knowledge and, who knows, one day you get to flying cars or the proof of Goldbach's conjecture.

What about working on stuff that no one will care about in the immediate future for various reasons, but that you definitely consider important to study?

Don't get me wrong - I loved the area I worked in, I think I just saw a bit too much of how the sausage is made in "big science" projects and I got rather disillusioned by the approach that seemed to be required to succeed at a "management" level in academia and decided that as a long term career goal it didn't interest me at all.

NB It probably didn't help that I spent 6 years working on symbolic AI at the start of the 90's at it was becoming increasingly apparent to me (correctly as it turned out) that this fundamental approach didn't really work no matter how fascinating it was.

I get what you're saying. Pure math is much more palatable. Less "big science" and more individual/small-team work.

To a first approximation that describes most research on literature. I’m sure there are other fields where that’s true but most academic press books have a first printing run of under a thousand and don’t have a second edition.

It probably depends a lot on the specifics of the situation. For my PhD, the funding was secure up front. This is not unusual in Europe, but I hear the USA is sometimes different. I was given a lot of freedom, and ended up spending a lot of time on creating generally usable software artifacts (specifically: I do PL and compilers research, and I documented and made available the implementation of my compiler).

It probably depends on the field, also on the supervisor, and how much clout or willpower the student employs to force through their own vision. I made it very clear during my PhD that I was in principle paying a significant sum to be a PhD student (comparing my PhD salary to what I could go and earn in industry), so my tolerance for constraints was low.

My non PhD experience is totally the opposite. When I was studying physics, while there was interesting stuff and I enjoyed trying to build things, my professors and senior students hammered me with all the petty stuff I needed to organize the projects and get money.

Suffice to say, I dropped out of college and chased a quick buck on IT. At least on my university, it as expected that you'll get to academia, and of my friends, those who didn't went to other career path, are still waiting for a place in academia.

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