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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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!

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