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Comment by xhkkffbf | Hacker News Reader

These are all solid points. The issue is that in many cases the PhDs work along side people with masters or bachelors. In some tech fields, they even work along side those who didn't bother graduating from college.

That's not a bad thing. I think the businesses are doing as good a job as they can spotting and promoting talent. It's just a good argument against getting a PhD if you're just going to end up in industry. And by some measures anywhere between 80-95% will end up in industry or government.

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I have a PhD from a top Econ department in the US (I finished it a couple of decades ago, so things might have changed).

Of course a PhD is not the best decision if you are only looking at optimising your path to industry. However, during my PhD I had a fantastic time. I studied what I wanted to, I had a lot of free time to develop any skill I wanted to.

It was also very useful to jump start my career. Instead of having to work for X years until o reach a certain position, I was able to go straight into a high paying job.

I came from a poor and rural part of South America. For me, the PhD was the best and easiest path to getting a top paying job in the US. I'm not saying this is for everyone, but it can be a very nice choice for a career in industry. I even met PhDs from low ranked universities during my career.

> Of course a PhD is not the best decision if you are only looking at optimising your path to industry. However, during my PhD I had a fantastic time. I studied what I wanted to, I had a lot of free time to develop any skill I wanted to.

Same. And I would say that the PhD "rapidly" forced me to learn to take on large, ambiguous projects and see them from conception to completion. This was, by far, the most valuable result of the experience. Anecdotally, this seems like a rare skill, even in tech -- though it is not necessarily as recognized as it should be.

I put "rapidly" in quotes up there because if I have one piece of advice to PhD students, it's to get the hell out of grad school as soon as you can. Like the parent, I had fun exploring my interests, and it was a period of intellectual freedom that most people never get. I relish that time, but I also regret the costs. I was idealistic and unwilling to compromise my personal goals, which ended up delaying everything. If I could go back and do it over, I'd be more mercenary about finding an already successful collaborative project, contributing a little bit, and getting out. Grad school is a job -- a particularly abusive, low-reward job -- and the only goal is to finish. You get no trophies for knowing more stuff at the end, and spending time gratifying your curiosity or being a perfectionist might seem appealing ("why would I be putting myself through this if I weren't going to indulge my intellect?"), but it's ultimately a trap.

(Unfortunately, the nature of grad school is that nobody who is pre-disposed to wander aimlessly will listen to my advice, while those who understand what I'm saying probably just think I'm stating the obvious.)

> I put "rapidly" in quotes up there because if I have one piece of advice to PhD students, it's to get the hell out of grad school as soon as you can. Like the parent, I had fun exploring my interests, and it was a period of intellectual freedom that most people never get. I relish that time, but I also regret the costs. I was idealistic and unwilling to compromise my personal goals, which ended up delaying everything. If I could go back and do it over, I'd be more mercenary about finding an already successful collaborative project, contributing a little bit, and getting out. Grad school is a job -- a particularly abusive, low-reward job -- and the only goal is to finish. You get no trophies for knowing more stuff at the end, and spending time gratifying your curiosity or being a perfectionist might seem appealing ("why would I be putting myself through this if I weren't going to indulge my intellect?"), but it's ultimately a trap.

I feel the same in many ways. I went into the PhD without a specific project and it was extremely complex. I was fortunate enough work in a theory heavy field, but had friends with more data-related interests. They had a really hard time finding data. Unless you are in top places in the US, data is almost impossible to get.

I highly recommend project PhDs (if you want to choose the PhD route), which are the norm in Europe/UK. You can choose very good universities in cheap cities and have some great 3/4 years. Travelling in Europe is quite cheap, food is cheap enough.

Yeah, anecdotally, all of my European/UK friends with PhDs had a much shorter experience. The UK system, in particular, seems far more sane: 3 years is a pretty common duration, vs the 5-7 that's typical in the US.

1. At least in CS, the role of a PhD is typically different. There are many groups in industry where entire orgs up to SVP are PhDs, and those groups are growing quickly. Hell, consider IBM Research, where thousands of folks have their entire management chain as CS PhDs all the way up to the CEO who has a CS PhD! The work done by PhDs in industry is different from the work done by people with bachelors/masters, even when they sit in the same group. This isn't true for everyone, but it's true for a lot people.

2. "you'll work with people who don't have phds" is also true in Academia. R1 faculty are research group managers. Almost none of their direct reports have PhDs.

I’d push back slightly on the idea that a PhD isn’t an optimal route to industry careers.

Due to the variety of experiences and knowledge I acquired in grad school, I became conversant in a few different fields, which allowed me to cross disciplines to a very nicely compensated career path WITHOUT meeting many of the relevant criteria that new grads might be subject to.

So sure, maybe a PhD isn’t optimal if one values money and is certain that they are on a lucrative career path, however, it has opened doors for me to enter a career path where individual enrichment is a large focus since the prestige of the company is built upon the accomplishments of individual employees.

If nothing else, I got to spend five years enriching myself, studying what I love and getting paid (modestly) to do it. While there are certain aspects of academia that are off putting, grad students are mostly shielded from politics and get to spend time focused on learning their field and becoming experts with no serious expectation of a useful deliverable at the end. You might argue that the thesis is the deliverable, however, since one is working at the boundary of knowledge, there’s often very little oversight and one can justify chasing down exploratory research directions that turn out to be dead ends. My experience in industry is that it is more a zero sum game, where you have to carve out opportunities to enrich yourself and hours and productivity are tracked much more closely.

The PhD track in industry has high variability. If you do something unrelated to your PhD, it's likely that you won't gain much benefit from it. If you do something related to the PhD e.g. ML, DBs, Economics, Statistics etc. then it can be a huge leg up.

However there may only be so many options related to your PhD.

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