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Comment by baka367 | Hacker News Reader

I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high.

Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since.

Is casual coding more interesting than research/teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me.

I also still find how to get some of the joys of academia in industry, namely, mentoring/holding workshops/writing design specs/turning the cluttered documentation into a nicely flowing coherent one~

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I stopped doing a PhD after about 5 years - I was a Research Associate in a UK university so I actually got a salary which wasn't too bad but quite a bit below the going rate (I had a few job offers during that time).

I left to co-found a start-up - never regretted it as I was "hyper cynical" (a direct quote from a colleague) about the whole academic world and how easy it was to play the "publish or perish" game.

I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.

> I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.

I had the same feeling!

And as it turns out, many of the skills are transferable: https://twitter.com/mizzao/status/1505529213612609536

> I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.

Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn't very interested, since I wanted to make things people will actually use. His response was there was a team in Utah that helped make part of the USB spec the decade previous. I was attending the University of Minnesota.

Yeah, no thanks.

I think this is a short sighted perspective. Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app. Just because you don't see immediate impact doesn't mean it isn't there

Sure, I'm glad people do that work. But it's not for me.

> Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app.

Those aren't the only two options and even they were, it isn't always true.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't do basic research, far from it, more that I learned that given the way basic research actually works then I had relatively little interest in actually doing it myself.

This is definitely false in many cases.

Source: I’ve worked on both.

That particular argument also falls flat, at least with the given information, since there have been plenty of industry partners in defining the USB specs.

My guess is that if you want to be paid full-time to work on USB, you'll probably find more (and better-paid) positions in industry.

Yeah, but outside a borderline prodigy or no lifing to get the knowlegde and experience or a lucky recruitment at some university event, I doubt the industry was letting fresh new grads work on something like the USB spec.

There may have been junior people on the teams at the various companies like Intel that developed and implemented the spec. No, those junior people probably weren't really developing the spec. (The person at Intel who is most credited for the spec with his team was already pretty senior and later became an Intel Fellow.) I also sort of doubt a university group in Utah was a major contributor--although I could be wrong.

I admit I might've got the details wrong. The gist of the anecdote is the best response he had to me wanting to do impactful work was, "some people who didn't even go to this school were a part of something you've heard of ten years ago," which I didn't find terribly compelling.

Arethuza, I'm a bit confused by this comment. PhDs in the UK don't last over 4 years. Would you mind clarifying?

From a personal perspective I don't regret my PhD, though it was charity funded so it was topped up to be around £20 000 instead of the usual £14000ish per year. It was an opportunity to engage with a small group of experts in research that was engaging and of use to the wider world, and present it internationally. I also tried to start a start-up during this time, but the underlying idea failed to pass preliminary trials (I work in healthcare). So the two are not mutually exclusive.

People's experience tends to vary. I think a lot depends on how much you research the group and supervisors you will be working with beforehand, and how much you engage them in the research you do.

Technically the PhD was part time although most people in my position took 4 to 5 years. This was also the early 90s so times may have changed..

I was lucky enough to get involved in the web very early (1992) and present papers at the first few web conferences - though that wasn’t my day job.

Edit: I worked on a couple of EU Esprit 2 projects.

Ah that makes sense. The rules have changed since, though a part time PhD would still take 6-7 years.

I imagine that must have been quite interesting!

A PhD can mean a lot of different things. Personally, I'm employed as a research associate while doing a PhD, which in theory means I should do the PhD as part of my job. In practice, I do not get to do any actual research during the job and the PhD is relegated to weekends.

What I find curious: I get paid to do lots of things which are clearly complete nonsense, but the funding comes with the requirement that these specific nonsensical things must be done. I could do lots of useful things, but I do not get paid for those.

I'm far enough into the process that I've decided to just collect the stupid credential before I move on. Which is funny because I did not get into this for the credentials, but dropping out at this point would just look weird on my CV.

What are the nonsensical activities you get paid to do?

For example solving specific problems in a data-driven way when there is no data and there never will be any data.

Developing all sorts of platforms that will theoretically benefit the public / researchers / whoever, but in actuality will never be used by anyone and in fact will be shut down as soon as the corresponding project ends.

Those are the two generic examples I can think of, for everything else I'd have to give too much context.

Yeah, I quit after my Masters. I do miss the challenge, the feeling of achievement when you crack something, just the whole feeling of being close to the edge of human knowledge, it's all so much more exciting than development where you know your answer is basically already out there.

But yeah, you gotta do what pays the bills. I'm not making triple figures in dollars, but in my country it's six times what I would get during a PhD program.

Doing a PhD and getting a job as a software developer afterwards seems to be a pretty common route nowadays

Almost the same experience, 4 years. I've even stayed after it for another ~3 years because it was ~3x pay as a tech for doing less restricted stuff (no need to convince my committee what I do is important) and learning to run essentially a mini-startup within a lab, while being restricted in my portability due to visa policies.

If you did a full PhD in what sense did you 'scrap' it? You just didn't do the defence?

It sounds like he went ABD.

In the US, PhDs can take 6-8+ years. There are some shitty advisors who delay their students' graduations to get additional low-wage labor. Also, the academic job market is terrible and has been for 30+ years, so it takes a full year just to do the search.

Expanding the acronym for non-academia, ABD is "all but dissertation". After the first 2-3 years of a PhD program, the coursework is finished, you're into mostly independent research, and so you've completed "all but dissertation". This is a nebulous time that could be as short as 1-2 years, and could be as long as 5-10 years. The shorter durations tend to be in the sciences, and the longer durations in the humanities.

Because the duration is so dependent on the program, and the only end is when the advisor agrees that sufficient work has been done to merit a PhD, it can stretch on without much hope in sight.

Isn't ABD status the time from successfully proposing a dissertation to a specific committee until successfully defending that dissertation in front of that committee?

The former step is intended to clearly define what is sufficient work. In effect, it is the contract that eliminates some of the risk of the advisor's whim.

Some people say ABD is 'all but defended' as in you wrote your thesis you just didn't do a defence, some people say ABD is 'all but dissertation' in that you didn't get the point of writing the thesis. That's a pretty big difference. The former is you basically did your entire PhD, the latter is you didn't really start it.

the latter is you didn't really start it.

That seems unfair. By the time many people get started on their dissertation they have often done years of research and have gotten several papers published. Starting your dissertation basically means that you're 'done' with your PhD and ready to summerize what you've discovered.

There's also a difference in US and Europe conventions. In Europe, there's typically a 2-year MS followed by a 3-6 year PhD. In the US, these are typically combined into a single 5-8 year PhD program. So an "all but dissertation" phase in Europe is the entirety of the program, it's only the second (and most important) part in a US program.

Yeah, and so if you skip the masters then day one of your PhD is the start of your dissertation.

I though dissertation referred to the final written document you had to produce to get your PhD. Most people I know with PhDs stared writing that during the last year of the PhD program.

When you're writing papers during your PhD you're basically writing chapters of your dissertation.

In practice in the U.S. the early part of a PhD program can be very similar to a master's. It's relatively common for people who leave PhD programs to walk away with a master's degree they didn't intend to get. It's called "mastering out."

Yes you can also leave with an MPhil in the UK if it goes wrong.

In my university the first part ("successfully proposing a dissertation to a specific committee") was called the preliminary exam ("prelim"). In principle, you should do this decently early in your thesis. In practice, many advisors would tell their students "Go do 90% of the research and when you're close to defending, do the prelim". They didn't want to commit to a project and later fail to achieve it.

So with those advisors, it was normal for people to graduate six months after the prelim (because the department required a minimum of 6 months between the prelim and the defense).

> Because the duration is so dependent on the program, and the only end is when the advisor agrees that sufficient work has been done to merit a PhD, it can stretch on without much hope in sight.

At least one world famous research university has a fix for this problem of "... when the advisor agrees":

The official statement of the university is that the Ph.D. student must submit "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication".

So, if a student believes that they have done such work, then they are free to, and maybe should, submit it for publication. When the work is accepted for publication, the student can then so announce to the professor, department school, and university.

> The official statement of the university is that the Ph.D. student must submit "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication".

> So, if a student believes that they have done such work, then they are free to, and maybe should, submit it for publication. When the work is accepted for publication, the student can then so announce to the professor, department school, and university.

For many fields, this would not work. My advisor required a journal publication to get the Master's degree, and several to get the PhD. He (and many others) would have failed any candidate's defense if they had just one paper if they were in their committee.

(Yes, it's crappy).

Huh. My department requires one paper just to attain PhD candidate status.

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