Graduate students question career options | Hacker News Reader

Graduate students question career options

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181 pointsclockworksoul228 comments

I got PhD and I am still not sure how I feel. It took me 6 years, a lot of doubts and putting my life on hold.

You never know if you will finish your PhD. In fact, 50% drop out. Imagine spending 4 years of your life and then quitting with little to show for it.

First of all, PhD is too long (in the US). You spend 1 - 1.5 years taking grad classes that have little relevance to your subfield. If you haven't done research in undergrad, you spend the first year figuring out what is research. IF you did, there's still a lot less hand-holding as a PhD researcher compared to an undergrad researcher.

Now let's talk about research. First, you need to come up with a good idea that no one thought of it before. This requires understanding of all the previous research.

Then you try to implement the idea. Even if you implemented everything correctly, if your method is not better than the state of the art, you just wasted your time. (Of course, you need to implement the state of the art also)

Do you want to become a professor? Forget about. There are so many bright PhDs competing for a few academic openings. Even if you become a professor, it will take 10 years and a lot of work to get tenure. And if you finally become a professor, the pay is terrible compared to the industry.

I'm not even talking about PhD in other subfields like Physics, where people become Google's SWE after finishing their PhD. Such a waste.

I think people from the US who consider a PhD should really look outside the US too, as many (not all, of course) of the disadvantages don't apply globally.

For example, in Spain:

- Typical PhD duration: 4 years. It's not even possible to go beyond 5 years (there is a hard cap) and if you want to do it fast, typically 3.5 years or so is enough in most fields if you do it full time.

- Tuition is a symbolic amount (something like 100 €/year or so).

- Most students do their PhD either with a grant or a contract. So it's basically a normal job. Not a high-paying one, mind you, but a job. You typically get something in the range of 1200-1600 €/month and social security. Enough to live reasonably well (not luxuriously, but comfortably) in almost any city that is not Madrid or Barcelona (in those two you'd need to share a flat and it wouldn't be very good, but in most of the rest of the country, a typical rent is around 600 €).

- I don't have figures on drop out but I don't think it's anywhere near 50%, if I had to give a pessimistic estimate I would say 20% at most.

Of course, the bit about becoming a professor is still true (although the competition is somewhat different, less about brilliance and more about sweat... very roughly speaking, churning out more papers than your competitors even if the papers aren't that great. But there are still much fewer professor jobs than PhD candidates).

No remotely reputable STEM PhD program in the US actually charges you tuition, they also pay you a modest wage like you describe in Europe. You might have to TA some semesters if you don't go to a top program or work for a well established prof. But the compensation even for that case includes tuition, health insurance, and stipend. It's not a bad deal especially in the early years of a program when you are actually spending most of your time taking classes and learning other background.

The capped length sounds nice, but I think the years they shave off are mostly just at the start, not the years you spend grinding out research. The first year of a US PhD would typically be separated out as an independent Master's degree in Europe.

I have no idea what the academic culture is like over there, so I can't actually say whether it would've been better with regards to the things I disliked about PhD. But the facts you presented don't make me optimistic. A lot of them I don't consider problems in the US personally, and the absolute biggest problem for me is the ridiculous professorship job pipeline.

I'd also be cautious about that 50% US drop out number. It is likely < 20% at a T25 program in any STEM field in the US, certainly in my field that is the case. Perhaps it is higher in CS because people intentionally master out after 2 years to take a lucrative tech job. But I wouldn't consider that failing with the kind of connotation "drop out" has.

I would suggest extra caution before attending a mediocre (or worse) program of course.

I don't know, when I read US PhD students posting in academic Twitter I'm under the impression that they have to pay huge tuition and go into debt, can barely subsist, are exploited for teaching and can't even do much research, and are often on the brink of depression.

I assumed reality would be somewhat less grim as my sample is probably biased towards the ones who complain, but maybe it's so biased that it doesn't even resemble reality at all.

There is professional school (med school, law school, business school) and there are PhD programs. The former do cost quite a bit in the US, but Ph.D programs in the US (at least in the sciences) don't cost anything if you get in and in fact pay you a salary (I have a doctorate in microbiology and that's how it was for me and everybody I know). That being said, this generosity has a dark side -- there are considerably more Ph.Ds produced than can have jobs in scientific research and that's because grad students are a source of cheap labor for professors.

I think it's true that many PhD students have less time for pursuing their own research interests than they would hope, it is very tied to your advisor's wishes. Brink of depression is probably not a huge exaggeration either, at least for a non-negligible subset.

Barely subsisting is definitely not true for a STEM PhD at a decent program though. You're getting paid way less than you could probably, but as long as you're willing to have a couple housemates (usually fellow students) and are not yet supporting anyone else it's a reasonably comfortable wage. Keep in mind that solid health insurance and student perks like university gym membership are also provided at 0 cost.

This might be controversial, but people who have excess expenses (for whatever reason) in their mid 20s probably shouldn't undertake a PhD in the first place. That's the only way a STEM researcher who didn't settle for a subpar school could possibly end up in additional debt as a PhD student IME.

Post doc wages, given the career stage and associated job culture/benefits, are notably shittier. Debt still feels like an exaggeration to me, but a 35 year old with a lot of training and unclear future career prospects should at least be able to support a middle class family lifestyle with their postdoc wages. A 25 year old that is working towards an actual degree and still benefiting from student status is such a different situation.

In hindsight, the maximally enjoyable thing might be to work for FIRE and then pseudo retire to being a PhD student. A PhD can be inherently valuable, the problem is just how tied it is to an insane career path.

Anyway, it's possible the posting students are humanities PhDs? At a good place they still don't pay tuition, but will often get basically 0 stipend. So they legit need loans for living expenses. Either that or Twitter amplifies complaints from schools that one really should not do a PhD at.

Don't made me start to talking about science in Spain.

> It's not even possible to go beyond 5 years

And we still wonder why nobody is trying to paint a new Giocconda now, and where are the big results

First they repeat "ad-nauseam" that only want the very passionate and ambitious people, but then force you to choose a mediocre theme to work on it, or to solve very complex problems that nobody has figured before in a couple of years, plus one to land and other to write.

- "We have very serious environmental problems that treat our survival as species. What we could do?... Oh; What if we give the people only four years to solve it and save everybody. Just to create suspense?"

This happens by two very simple rules

1. Anybody starting in science must be dumber than this boss. Scientists must be all mediocre and equally talented, have the same background and fit to the current ideas.

If I want to study a complex problem for six or ten, or twenty years with my own money, well... is my problem. I repeat. Is -my- problem.

No other fields have this restriction. You will never see things like:

- "You are an architect? If you can't build an airport or major monument in <4 years you quit and everything is burnt down. This called Sidney Opera is taking too much to build, I can't understand this shape, lets start again and trow the investment in the dumpster"

- "You are a politician?. If you don't became president in three years and a half (or are more than 30 Yo), you are fired"

Who are the politicians to say how much of my time I can invest in something, when they don't apply the same rule to themselves?. Oh, I forgot the second rule:

2. Any grant money graciously given for a politician must benefit the politician career. Period. This means that science is now crushed to fit electoral intervals of four years

Unexpected maternity? Two years of covid?, say bye to your career and the investment of decades of study

And then they delay the grants payment for two or three years, just for laughs.

You seem to make the assumption that large contributions should be made within the duration of a PhD program. In my view, a PhD program's goal is to train new researchers. If awesome breakthroughs are generated before the thesis, of course it's a big plus, but not the point... PhD graduates still have several decades of career ahead of them to paint their Gioccondas. The PhD is just to get them started, when they graduate they should be able to fly alone and generate independent research.

There is the problem that research funding (also after the PhD) is associated to projects that only last for a few years, but that seems to be pretty much universal.

> I think people from the US who consider a PhD should really look outside the US too, as many (not all, of course) of the disadvantages don't apply globally. > > For example, in Spain: > > ... > > - Tuition is a symbolic amount (something like 100 €/year or so).

Is that €400 total to complete a PhD programme? Or do you mean specifically _tuition_ fees are small, but there are still other fees applicable? (Just clarifying, cause in Ireland when I was at university, they spoke a lot about "free tuition fees", but universities still charged thousands per year to students for "administration fees", to cover everything that wasn't explicitly tuition).

Also worth bearing in mind that international students (i.e. non-EU) often have higher fees, which can be as high as double or triple what home students (EU) pay. (Though if the total is only €400 that's still obviously really good!)

Now that you mention it, there is also a final one-time fee for the thesis defense and PhD diploma.

But putting all the fees together, it's less than €700 for the whole PhD programme. There are no administration fees or other large fees.

I can't speak for Spain, but until recently (a bit over ten years) in France university attendance was completely free. Nowadays there's a registration fee, which is 380€ for a doctorate.

Denmark:

- Usually 3 year (a post graduate education expected, otherwise 5 years) - Considered a job, you are paid USD ~4k a month (depending on field)

All true, but in Europe you need a 5-year degree to start a PhD.

Don’t you normally need an undergrad to start a PhD in the US as well?

In the UK an undergrad is 3 years in most cases, then 3 years for a PhD, so 6 years total.

Some institutions will technically admit you for a PhD with no prior degree at all, but nobody does this in practice.

>Don’t you normally need an undergrad to start a PhD in the US as well?

Yes, but not a graduate degree.

For comparison, at least in Austria, you need to have finished both a Bachelor of Science (3 years) and a Master of Science (2 years) in order to be able to start a PhD.

That's usually not the case in the USA (and some common law countries), where you only need the equivalent of a Bachelor of Science in order to start the PhD. You then do a small version of the Master of Science in parallel with the PhD.

Oh, that explains why I see more Americans going for PhD (successfully or not) than, say, Germans. It never made sense to me because I was used to it being the thing you can do after an MSc/MA and those already seemed like a questionable choice for many jobs.

So the UK is probably the best model - 3 years undergrad, 3-4 years PhD max.

It's less common now in the UK to admit people to PhD programs directly from undergrad. In many cases you'd be expected to do a one-year masters first, although that's not a universal requirement.

Nowhere near universal. It’s common to go from undergrad to PhD in the U.K.

Tbh most Master’s, esp MSc, don’t add anything.

Varies a lot from field to field.

It might depend on the field, but in Math/CS at a number of good unis, the standard path is a 4-year integrated MSc (you get a BSc after 3), then apply to PhD.

It is possible to do the MSc over 5-6 years and spend some time working, whether in parallel with studies as a teaching assistant, or taking a term/year out to get some industry experience. But in terms of credits gained, an MSc is 4 years net of studies.

Yes, this is true. You cannot start directly with a US 4-year Bachelor's, you would need a 1-year Master's. I suppose this can be a deterrent for many, but I still see many people with MSc degrees that complain (understandably) about all the hurdles of US PhDs and could benefit from considering Europe.

That's not necessarily true in the UK. Many masters courses, like mine, take a total of four years. In some cases you can even get lucky and go straight from undergraduate to a PhD. I know at least one person who did that.

This is actually not a hard requirement, you can start after your bachelor's. Not sure about having no degree at all like a sibling comment mentioned, maybe that's possible too.

The thing that bugs me most about the PhD is how much of the final years are controlled by your advisor and the committee. You have a bit of leeway in your first few years to do some "blue sky" research, scoped by the grants your advisor has of course, but the last 1-3 years can be a nightmare since you're expected to produce work that is funded by and within the scope of your grant BUT also be innovative and something that your advisor and committee approve and let you graduate with.

> but the last 1-3 years can be a nightmare since you're expected to produce work that is funded by and within the scope of your grant BUT also be innovative and something that your advisor and committee approve and let you graduate with.

Great summary! This is exactly how it feels at 3 years in. Every sentence in a paper is a careful balance between adhering to science, the funding agency, the supervisors, and myself.

An important caveat I think: your mentor is critical. I’m a PhD student, and I have an incredibly lucky mix of subject matter and mentorship (my mentor has actually gotten some awards in the past for being a good one). (Also, he’s funny.) Every day my research is a blast. My mentor is truly an expert in his field (he’s actually mentioned in Norvig’s AI textbook introduction) and has the answers to my questions. I get just enough steering to make sure I’m on track to producing something novel, but I’m totally free to explore. This is all bolstered by me being truly extremely intrinsically interested in my sub field. It’s really a very pleasant experience. I’m not terribly worried about the prospects afterwards as furthering humanity’s knowledge is rewarding enough to me. Heading to industry as a code monkey afterwards wouldn't upset me as I’m really just having fun as a PhD student, and it’s all because my mentor is incredible.

It’s important to try working with multiple mentors if you can. I actually started with a different person, and he probably would have been considered by most to be ideal. I was basically totally funded to do whatever I wanted with very little mentor interaction. Interestingly, this wasn’t great for me. In part I wasn’t interested in the subject, but more than that I greatly benefit from weekly mentor interaction to check in with my direction. Now I don’t have funding (working to support myself while doing research), but I’m happy as a pig in mud.

Isn't working towards the top of any field going to have just as many chances of failure at every step? My wife was the very top candidate for her surgical sub-specialty in the year she completed her fellowship and she still barely got an attending position due to how few openings were available. I am nowhere near as talented as she is, but I still had a tremendous battle to get where I am in tech and I watch brilliant engineers tap out before hitting even PE routinely. Working hard for 4 years and having nothing to show for it is de rigueur. Most effort spent in the world is spent in vain, but you have no chance of winning if you don't play the game.

The difference with software engineering is even if you "fail" you usually have a nice pile of money to show for it. If you drop out of a PhD all you have is some cool stories and obscure knowledge.

> all you have is some cool stories and obscure knowledge

As if obscure knowledge is worthless. Trading the opportunity to make money for obscure knowledge is the whole value proposition of a Ph.D.! If one doesn’t value obscure knowledge, yeah, a Ph.D. Might be a bad value proposition for that individual.

Definitely this. You're still very comfortable if you only end up as a Senior SWE.

Nope. You can go ahead and make a startup which can fail and then you're left with burnout and an empty bank account. Wasting time is an integral part of life.

Most fields don't require all of the people working in them to be at the top of their field.

And the ones that do pay orders of magnitude more.

Orders? Plural? This is not true. Youre likely to make 90 percentile

Sorry, I suppose being a professional musician is one field with similar requirements for skill versus pay. Nobody's going to pay any money to a middle-quintile piano player, just like nobody in academia is going to pay any money to a freshly-minted middle-quintile PHD.

Middle quintile?

In percentiles, 40% to 60%.

Someone in the middle 20% of competence at a skill or profession.

Sorry, what's PE? /Junior engineer in non-english country

I assume it’s principal engineer.

Professional engineer. That is, a official state licensed engineer.

> I'm not even talking about PhD in other subfields like Physics, where people become Google's SWE after finishing their PhD. Such a waste.

There are senior high - paying FAANG roles outside webdev where quantitative skills like the ones acquired in subjects like Math/Physics/Theor. CS are imperative, in which you can get straight into after graduation without even having to go through the absurd LeetCode hiring process (it's significantly easier if your advisor recommends you to an old friend on the industry).

> Do you want to become a professor? Forget about. There are so many bright PhDs competing for a few academic openings. Even if you become a professor, it will take 10 years and a lot of work to get tenure. And if you finally become a professor, the pay is terrible compared to the industry.

This is very accurate, especially in the US where tenure seems to be largely reserved for people that come from financially strong families who effectively support them from undergrad to tenure track.

For comparison - UK/mathematics, I went into research on day one, my supervisor set me an 'easy' problem straight off the bat, and I learned on the job. A couple of extra research problems came up naturally during my PhD. Had a paper submitted by end of year 1, was ready to write-up my thesis by end of year 3. I had some teaching responsibilities, but nothing heavy like running a course. Not saying it always goes this smoothly, but I rarely felt like I wasn't moving towards the end goal. +1 to 'forget about becoming a professor though/pay is terrible' though!

I left the US to do a UK PhD for this reason. No teaching responsibilities and you can just do the PhD. And they really try to kick you out after four years (at least in Cambridge).

I did 1 year pre-apprenticeship, then 4 years apprenticeship (Baker). Then shortly after that I left the industry and got into IT.

shrug I think that life is a process of navigating obstacles while acquiring skills. Its not a RPG with you choosing a character that you have to stick with until the end.

Branch out... you'll be surprised at where your PHD learned skills will lead you.

A trick that made my PhD a great experience: getting married right at the start. My life wasn’t on hold, I enjoyed a very long honeymoon :)

I did that too, then I got a divorce at my third year. :)

Sounds cool, how did you finance the honeymoon? :)

there is more than one way to honeymoon; they aren't all trips to the Maldives.

Most important part is quality, low-stress time with your beloved.

I have friends who recently lost most of their physical possessions (including house) to a volcano, and they don't have high income or good insurance. They are rebuilding from a low place.

The wife is an absolute gem. Keeps talking about the flow and accepting the moment. She radiates optimism and joy.

I tend to agree with you, but I don't think it's that black though.

> Even if you implemented everything correctly, if your method is not better than the state of the art, you just wasted your time.

You didn't waste your time as you know now the state of the art, and also why your method isn't better.

> Do you want to become a professor? Forget about. There are so many bright PhDs competing for a few academic openings.

The world is a big place. There's more to academia than Ivy League in the US. And don't believe all professors are geniuses! I think it's possible to somewhat assess your odds to get an academic position when you start a PhD.

On the downside, academia is very competitive and being a second rank professor drowning in teaching and administrative duties isn't the most rewarding thing to do.

> Even if you become a professor, it will take 10 years and a lot of work to get tenure. And if you finally become a professor, the pay is terrible compared to the industry.

This also depends in which industry you want to work. Not all fields/companies pay as a well as Google. And having a PhD can also open doors in industry.

> Do you want to become a professor? Forget about.

Unless you want to be a professor of computer science. There, everyone is hiring.

Because who wants to be an assistant professor making $60k/yr or god forbid an adjunct making $30k/yr when you can work for a startup making $150k or FAANG making $400k or more?

I'm frugal by nature, and from Eastern Europe. How comfortable a life can one afford with $60k/yr or $30k/yr in the US? With this level of income, would you actually find any essential things or services lacking in life?

In other words, what's the actual, practical need for a person (or a smaller nuclear family) in the US to actually earn $400k a year?

Similar to the US, university-employed PhDs definitely tend to make less than many industry professionals in my country as well. Then again, it is nonetheless a very acceptable standard of living. As civil servants, life is very stable (as compared to e.g. one-person companies), and they are by no means poor. Most importantly, though, a doctorate program will very probably train you into a better, more analytical thinker (I've seen very few examples of the contrary).

For that reason, I've always found it questionable when PhD vs no PhD is debated solely on the basis of expected income. Maybe I should remove my pink glasses, but there is, still, a little more to it, isn't it?

The US is big in every sense of the word, cost of living varies hugely in different areas. There are places where $60k is more than enough to live nicely, and there are places where $60k would mean sharing an apartment, and being very careful about spending your money.

One thing to keep in mind is that you might $100k+ in student loan debt by the time you actually get your phd. So for that reason you go for the higher paying job.

Note that those figures vary wildly by field and institution.

The lowest salary offer I got on my faculty job search, with an apology re: salary bias against folks without clinical degrees, was half again what's quoted there.

> For that reason, I've always found it questionable when PhD vs no PhD is debated solely on the basis of expected income. Maybe I should remove my pink glasses, but there is, still, a little more to it, isn't it?

There's certainly an argument to take a pay cut to do a PhD if you enjoy doing it.

The thing is - go ask real PhD students 2 years into their PhD whether they're enjoying themselves. Given the 50% drop-out rate, you can probably guess what the answers will be...

> How comfortable a life can one afford with $60k/yr or $30k/yr in the US? With this level of income, would you actually find any essential things or services lacking in life?

It really depends where in US. $60k/yr in NYC or SF or Seattle will be hard -- you'll need to get housemates to share the costs of housing. But $60k/yr is some small town in Vermont or Montana is comfortable in my guesstimate.

The question is not "comfortable", but "how comfortable", which is an important distinction.

Does comfortable mean being able to find specialist doctors? Or even just enough doctors? Being able to eat a variety of fruits/vegetables year round? Constant supply of avocados? Being able to live near family? How secure is one's income, or how many possible buyers are there for what you are selling? How are the schools for one's kids? Will the school community be of acceptable quality?

Of course, these answers will vary person to person.

MIT has a living wage calculator that claims in my U.S. county a single person not in a relationship needs $ 37,169 before taxes to support themself.

If you believe this is accurate 60k is doable, 30k is not.

I doubt you could do 38,169 without a roomate.

From my experience your first number is off by 3X and sometimes more depending on the university.

But yes, you make less as a professor than you do in industry.

That definitely depends on the school. At my undergrad, tenure track CS faculty only got around 70k, going up to 90k over time. Lecturers got 55k. Adjuncts got paid more in exposure and good feelings than money. My grad school is a much bigger research school instead of a teaching school and the pay is surprisingly not much better (better, but not 180k until full professorship if ever from what I've found) from what I've heard.

For reference, at my uni (public) full tenured profs are making about $120k-$150k. Adjuncts are about $90k. Lecturers are around $70k. But that's in the CS department. Still, all of these people could be making at least double that in industry (some do double dip though).

Note: The following isn’t intended to be bragging or anything, I’m just making the case for this profession in a place where the role is routinely diminished, so I’m going to make a good case.

Well first of all the front page of HN with tons of companies laying off massive amount of their workforce is one reason. Professors have insane job security.

Another reason is that professors only have to work 8 months of the year. Quoted figures for professor salaries are for 9 month contracts. Your quoted figures are too low by 2-3x. Only the smallest no-name colleges pay $60k, and there’s no point in being an adjunct in cs with so many instructor openings at top schools.

To make up the difference in salary, I’ve established my own consulting firm and I do tech consulting. So I have the best of both worlds: stable salaried employment and I’m my own boss.

Speaking of being my own boss, I really don’t have one. The chair isn’t really a supervisor, and while I have accountability, how I teach and what I do day to day is determined by me.

Work life balance is really nice. Some days I’ll go in at 11:00 and be done by 4. Today I won’t be going in at all and I’ll work from home for 30 minutes and be done for today.

The rest of the time I spend on “research”, which is just my open source passion project. Most hackers are trying to figure out how to work on their own open source project full time, this is how I’ve done it.

Before being a professor it was impossible to get people to contribute. Now I have dozens of students who make contributions, and every year there is a fresh group who wants to get involved.

Also I’ve got access to alternative funding sources not available to people who aren’t professors. Yes, you may have a 400k salary at FAANG, but I’ve got a $4M government grant that I use as fun money to buy my own hardware for my own flights of fancy. Literally whatever I want to do, not what some FAANG CEO like Musk or Zuckerberg wants me to do.

Anyway, I like it, and I’ll never these kinds of job perks are hard to put a price on.

Also in academia with a comparable lifestyle. I am not as established but pursuing a similar path.

I didn’t realize it was possible to do this without a PhD. I want to do research, I’m working as SWE at a startup and finishing MS now, but it is online without advisor or anything. If that’s possible, that’s awesome, how does that work, like to get the position and so on, I’m guessing you would need to publish some work on your own first.

If you want to publish papers, you'll need to be a PhD or extremely good in the research division of a major company - e.g. Microsoft Research, but it'll be difficult to get there without the PhD and previous research to show (but possible).

I wouldn't hesitate to take that assistant professorship for a second. A life of the mind beats the hell out of building yet another web site or CRUD app for decades on end, which is what most in our profession do.

Sorry, are the down votes because people don’t believe CS departments are hiring? My department has been hiring continuously for 6 years and has had many failed searches. Our peer institutions haven’t fared much better. There are tons of openings, just visit any academic job board to see for yourself.

I did a PhD. It was the most interesting and productive time of my life|*

Aside from actually enjoying the work, I had a salary / scholarship that where I went to school was the same or more than most of my peers who went right to work made (because of tax implications), and when I got a job, I got a better one than I would have otherwise. Plus, many people I started school with had barely finished their undergrad by the time I was done a PhD because of the usual breaks and major changes and failing courses and stuff.

I'm not saying this to brag (I've made all sorts of terrible choices since then), only to say that it's possible to do a PhD, have fun (specifically in the sense of learn cool stuff, although I enjoyed the social life), and not make a "sacrifice" in terms of money or starting a career. It's like any other job. You can make all kinds of early career decisions that help or hinder you later, generalizing a "phd" as some specific thing doesn't work

* (I like to think I'm coming back to another such period 15+ years later, but anyway)

I agree with your general experience, I'm in the middle of my PhD and so far I find it to be some of the most interesting and productive time I've spent thus far.

I'm not really interested in continuing on to academia, but this has been a good transition period for both building confidence and exploring other topics without having to worry about finances (besides of course making sure to keep up with advisor grants).

It has helped me learn and improve a lot about myself without the pressures of a more typical job. I'd say I was still pretty immature after undergrad, I wasn't really independent and didn't really think for myself (to the point that I didn't even realize I ought to be looking for a job until I had graduated and had family asking what my next step would be), which, after a year spent languishing led me to going for a Masters. Then my research work got me recruited for a PhD. Since then over the past 3 years I've been learning to be more independent which I feel works better when still having the freedom a PhD offers compared to a SWE job. If I had gone straight into the workplace I'd probably be in the process of overworking myself into burnout right now.

A side benefit is that having a PhD is very helpful for speeding up the immigration process and opening up possibilities elsewhere in case my current plans don't work out.

Out of curiosity. What was your family like, stable nuclear family? Middle income, did you fully support yourself, on your own during your studies? Did you have any other work or responsibilities? Did you get cash or material gifts and support from family? etc etc.

You described almost a very insta perfect version of the experience which doesn't play out most of the time.

They didn’t claim that their experience represented the average experience, instead describing the personal experience in their program.

I think this sort of response is extremely rude, and I know how dismissive and silly it sounds. It’s also extremely off-putting without adding much value. It feels like you’re looking for a reason to explain away their positive experience. I think the reason your comment has me flustered is that OP seemed to implicitly address many of your questions. Finally, is having a nuclear family really so remarkable and rare as to be a privilege worth sussing out?

Parent is clearly suggesting that the poster is most likely (as you agree) the product of an environment that the overwhelming majority of folks are not. Nothing wrong with someone being set up well by their parents (isn’t that the point?), and nothing wrong with someone pointing out that someone was setup well. And yes, having a stable, well-ish-to-do family that actively encourages the pursuit of a career via higher education is a pretty remarkable thing. #perspective

I don't see where you get any of these assumptions. If anything I'd say a phd is disproportionately attractive to poor students precisely because it pays living expenses, unlike many popular professional degrees which are much more daunting financially (i.e. medicine).

And students literally are killing themselves at universities because of how well they are "set up by their parents" to succeed. This whole line of thinking seems extremely naive when it comes to what people have to sacrifice to succeed in any pursuit in life. Personally I'd say the single most important thing needed to be happy in grad school is friends and a social life. Like everywhere else in life. Liking what you do comes in second.

>>>> You described almost a very insta perfect version of the experience which doesn't play out most of the time.

I got a PhD 30 years ago, and had similar advantages: Supportive middle class family (both parents scientists), free ride plus stipend thanks to NSF, met my spouse there, etc.

I think that while it's correct to point out the benefits of such advantages, the same advantages apply to success in almost every realm, from K-12 through college, in business, even in the arts and professional sports.

Fields where a poor person has a chance at overcoming the obstacles and getting a lucrative job are few and far between, and computer programming is the only one that I can think of.

Note: I chose the word "chance" carefully, not "certainty."

Not OP, but had a similar graduate school experience.

What was your family like, stable nuclear family?

No - child of divorced parents

Middle income, - yes

did you fully support yourself, on your own during your studies? - my dad chipped in $4k toward the first year of undergraduate, after that I was completely on my own.

Did you have any other work or responsibilities? I did work through school - event setup, grounds crew, working in a computer lab, and eventually working with a group on campus that helped professors put their courses online.

Did you get cash or material gifts and support from family? etc etc. - nothing beyond the $4k mentioned before. But I did get straight As, so I had academic scholarships that helped with tuition. At least during my undergraduate years.

  “… which doesn’t play out most of the time.”

Do you have any evidence to support that? AFAIK most people I went to grad school with were supporting themselves with the stipend offered by the school, and did not have other work or responsibilities.

I had a great time in grad school and think it was definitely worth it, and you don’t have to be rich to go, but at the same time I wouldn’t recommend it if you have others financially depending on you.

Even people supporting themselves off grad school are usually not making “about the same as peers who went straight to work”

Are you sure you’re not only thinking of CS (and STEM and business) salaries for comparison?

I’m quite sure. Some specific people I’ve known have included grad students in history and physiotherapy, for example.

I know a number of first generation grad students who get really mad at the "unlivable poverty wages" rhetoric when they're making more than anyone in their family does.

The only colleague I’ve ever had who was supporting herself via work during her PhD was an international student. Everyone else was close to the experience you call “insta perfect”

I didn’t know there were programs that payed that well. What field did you study?

To give one data point, at Stanford CS this year we're paying PhD students $64,110 a year plus fully funded health insurance and tuition, but that figure comes with some caveats:

- A chunk of your money will go towards a Stanford-subsidized dorm room or apartment

- Even beyond housing, the cost of living around here is not cheap

- You may not love Stanford's student health plan, in which case if you're over 26 (and can't be on a parent's plan), you're looking at paying for your own health insurance via the ACA market or otherwise

- To be making the full $64,110, you need to have advanced to candidacy (generally this is 3rd-year students and later) and stay for the summer with a "full-time" [90%] RAship. Many students do summer internships in the industry instead, in which case you're probably making way more money.

- Even with recent economic pressures, this is still much less than you can probably make in the industry, and for some subareas of CS, much much less.

I think the summary would be that if you're in a place where you have the luxury of mostly just needing to support yourself, and your health needs are well-met by a student health plan, you can afford to get a PhD here and focus 100% on it and enjoy a reasonable "student+" lifestyle for the 6ish years that will take. (Or a better lifestyle if you take summers to intern in the industry.) There's still a huge opportunity cost. The people for whom this doesn't work are often people with families to support (e.g. children and/or a partner without their own source of income) or other demands on their time or finances.

(I took two tries to get a PhD, but the second time was great!)

This might be the case for CS PhDs, but it certainly isn't for the vast majority of Stanford PhD students in other departments - many of whom are earning less than half the amount you cited. A large percentage of Stanford PhD students work at least one additional job, so the reality is that outside of a select few departments you cannot "focus on it 100%."

I'm much less familiar with the financial model in the humanities, but I don't think your information is correct. (What's your source?) Across the whole university, Stanford's minimum salary for graduate research assistants this year is $12,054 per quarter (four quarters per year), and $12,522 per quarter when serving as a teaching assistant. (https://gfs.stanford.edu/salary/salary23/salary_tables.pdf, and here's what the financial package looks like for a PhD student in, e.g., education: https://ed.stanford.edu/admissions/financing/doctoral)

I'm definitely not telling you to go get a PhD in English/history/education/theater for the money, but if you did, my understanding is that the salary you could expect here is around $48k-$49k a year (+ health plan). I don't think any PhD student is earning less than half the amount I cited.

When you say "A large percentage of Stanford PhD students work at least one additional job," if you mean TAing, then yes, that's true -- I think every PhD student has to TA at least a few times, and more depending on how well-funded their program or advisor are and whether they have their own fellowship. (Regular faculty also have to teach on top of our research responsibilities.) But if you mean some outside-Stanford job, I don't think this is common.

> To give one data point, at Stanford CS this year we're paying PhD students $64,110 a year plus fully funded health insurance and tuition

Tuition is fake so it shouldn’t be included as a benefit. If you can get into Stanford CS PhD you can get a job at a FAANG. They pay a lot better than $70K a year

Tuition is not fake. It's not like that's monopoly money or something. That's real money that is actually paid for real resources that are consumed by the student on the campus that need to be paid for (instructor time, instruction space, etc).

It is fake after your first year usually. You arent taking any classes but you are signed up for a few credit hours of some fake grad student class with 300 people you don't know and a professor you never heard of teaching it in a classroom that says TBD for the entire semester, because the class doesn't exist and only serves to check a box for the administration that you are in fact a student and eligible for the student health insurance plan.

Tuition is not just used to fund classes, it supports all kinds of campus resources for the student. Tuition dollars are used to pay salaries, it couldn’t be any more real.

I mean usually those external resources are paid for by the student activity fee, a line item that grad students usually cover out of their own pocket. The other stuff I mean I guess you can get pedantic and say money is fungible, this gets used to keep the lights on at some building or whatever, but its important to know that these salaries are not making or breaking any department. A department might only have a few dozen grad students, these aren't significant amounts of money for a university. Keep in mind you have to pay this fake tuition for your student after the department takes half your research grant already. Some times its cheaper for a professor to hire a post doc than a grad student even with the salary differences given the tuition requirement.

It is fake.. it's just a plot to siphon grant money.

$64k, unreal.. For me I made a dismal $18k stipend.

Mine was similar, closer to $13k but along with tuition reimbursement through my MA and then a slight bump to the stipend during the PHD.

64k a year is a lot better than I imagined. That makes me feel a little better about considering grad school in the near future!

Your story gives me hope. What country are you in?

I got a Ph.D. in computer science a long time ago, and I think it was the worst mistake of my life. 6 years wasted, for no obvious benefit. I don't know why I did it, other than wanting to learn more computer science stuff. And I think I could have learned a lot more by just working in the industry.

I have been reading essays about the pitfalls of academia for decades (sample: https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science; I wrote my own "humanities PhDs are bad" one: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo..., which I still get emails about). The main thing of note about the one above is the venue.

Angry emails? The observation seems exceedingly obvious. Either you limit yourself to a very narrow career path or you dont use it.

Sure, it might make sense for a few. A very select few.

> I got a Ph.D. in computer science a long time ago, and I think it was the worst mistake of my life

I can't tell you how many PhD's I know the resemble your remarks. Quite a few of them (most?) are not doing anything related to their field of study. For example, one with a PhD in Physics owns a small vocational school teaching nursing and some IT courses.

The following is going to sound horrible. Over the years, having worked with thousands of people over a career spanning about five decades and across a range of disciplines, I developed this strong belief that if you need to get things done you should not hire PhD's.

In fact, speaking of technology, some of the most creative and talented people I have worked with were university dropouts who, for the most part, got tired of the slow pace and wasted efforts (i.e., having a year of general education coursework for an EE or CS degree) and went off on their own. I am talking about people who had a direct hand in delivering millions of dollars of revenue for the companies who employed them and doing so at breakneck speed. The going joke at one place where I used to work was something like: If you need it done right and in 6 to 12 months, get a college dropout with enough schooling to be able to do the job. If you have four years and don't are about making a prouct, hire a PhD.

I know, harsh. I did warn it would be.

That said, I have met many brilliant PhD's. I just don't know how the skills, capabilities, creativity and productivity metrics distribute in that population. No clue at all.

You missed the point of hiring PhDs. You don't usually need them unless you are on the literal bleeding edge of a very minute subfield-of-a-subfield.

You hire PhDs as a value signal. "We have 6 PhDs from ivies working on solving X, Y, and Z". It doesn't even matter what X, Y, and Z are. People will THROW, THROW money at you.

The only PhDs who, by my estimation, enjoy themselves are in their late 60s to mid 70s, have had tenure for 25+ years, and just do whatever they want in the fields they enjoy. It's equivalent to earning something like an Engineer in Research position. The utility you bring to industry as a PhD is almost nothing - except those 3 letters. Who would've thought 3 letters could net you so much damn money from stupid investors.

> You don't usually need them unless you are on the literal bleeding edge of a very minute subfield-of-a-subfield.

Not necessarily true. I have been there many times. We did not need PhD's to solve the problems.

One thing people might fail to understand is that there are professionals who not only invest the proverbial 10,000 hours to become experts in a field but go way beyond that and live and breathe the stuff for decades.

I don't want to sound like I am hating on PhD's. I am not. Just saying that they might just lack the marketing value some assign to the degree, that's all. You don't need N years of torture at a university to become an expert on something at the bleeding edge. In fact, in some cases this is almost impossible because the resources and "rules of engagement" in a university research context are very different from that of a business environment where your competitors are trying to eat your lunch every day and you have to perform or die.

You are absolutely correct in saying that certain industries favor having PhD's on the roster.

Here's what's interesting about that. We have done a range of aerospace projects for DARPA-related work. What happens more often than not is that the PhD's go get the funding and then discover they can't build it. That's when they shovel money our way to actually make it happen. I don't have a single PhD on staff. We get shit done. No matter how complex. From industrial products to sending hardware to the Space Station and (hopefully soon) the moon, 'been there, done that.

If the problem you are trying to solve doesn’t require niche scientific knowledge, you don’t need PhDs. That sounds like common sense?

This discussion reminds me of a book called Range. The author’s premise is that most high achieving inventors, creatives etc are not successful because of high level of specialisation, rather it’s a their broad sampling across unrelated domains and their ability to essentially cross pollinate from their experiences that is their key to coming up with novel ideas. The kinds of people who rapidly sample and acquire range I’d say are also likely to be college dropouts.

> The author’s premise is that most high achieving inventors, creatives etc are not successful because of high level of specialisation

This makes sense to me from a range of perspectives. A simple example of this --too simple, yes-- is when I hired an EE out of Intel. I was looking for someone to take on a range of responsibilities. He claimed he could do what I needed. After hiring him I started to realize he had been "creative" in the profile he painted for me. It turns out he had only worked on power supplies at Intel. And by that I don't mean full product cycle. He designed them. On paper. Never even ordered a single part. Never laid out a PCB, etc. It was bad. I ended-up having to be "Professor Martin" and teaching him a bunch of stuff. Not a good outcome. Great guy, just didn't work out in the end.

In sharp contrast to this, I worked with people in the motion picture industry who were nothing less than amazing. One guy had a degree in music, he had studied to be an opera singer. He self-taught software and hardware development, mechanics and all kinds of other things. He ended-up building and owning on of the most well-known visual and special effects companies in Hollywood. The people he hired had similar eclectic backgrounds.

It was very interesting and revealing. This experience definitely opened my eyes and mind and, honestly, made me less of an elitist dick when hiring people. I could not care less what degrees someone brings through the door. I have learned this has no relationship whatsoever with creativity and raw job performance. What you are looking for is the ability to learn and what they have done in the last n years. That's it. A non-asshole who is driven to learn difficult things can run circles around almost any degree. Frankly, part of it might be that they have to in order to survive.

Of course, there are regulated industries where you have to hire degrees due to liability exposure. Medical is an simple example of this. Self driving cars might be another. If you sued and the lawyers discover critical staff doesn't have university degrees it could be a royal mess (or, at the very least, cost a ton more money to defend technical decisions).

In other words, there's an industry-dependent bias that might favor one or the other.

I mean, this is the premise of interdisciplinary practices at pretty much every university. Interdisciplinary research is one of the big buzzwords you hear in grants and interviews. Interdisciplinary PhD programs are big for this reason.

why do you consider it wasted? spending 6 years learning some cool stuff seems like a good life to me.

This ignores opportunity cost. If you flourish during the PhD, that's great

Or you could struggle, go through tons of stress, have no time to give to friends (and lose touch with friends), no time for a relationship, etc. etc.

Not to mention the financial opportunity cost

Or it could be both.

Personally I struggled, had tons of stress, no time for relationships, and all that. But it was also an intense time of personal development. I learned a lot about myself and a lot about how to work hard and get stuff done.

I used to tell people that if you don’t regret starting your PhD when you’re halfway through, then you’re not doing it right. I’ve since moderated that stance - a lot - but there’s still something to be said for so-called “character building experiences” even though they suck at the time.

> I learned a lot about myself and a lot about how to work hard and get stuff done.

But that's not unique to a PhD. That's growing up.

Sure, for sufficiently advanced definitions of “growing up”.

Opportunities to push yourself all the way to the limit don’t come around every day. Nor do a bunch of smart, experienced people who are willing to give you brutally honest feedback.

But you can get that in industry, often with serious financial benefit. It’s not like that is a unique situation

I think the experiences of a PHD program versus working in industry are sufficiently different enough to say that they are not as easily comparable as you are making it out to be.

Hes not broadly comparing them. Hes correctly pointing out that "learning about oneself" and about "how to work hard and get stuff done" isnt unique to getting a PhD.

If anything, its shocking that someone does not realize that's just a part of growing up.

You definitely can get that in industry. Or the military. Or lots of places.

However I think where you go in industry matters a lot. Doing a PhD at a serious program is more like starting a startup than like writing CRUD apps at a megacorp. More like going to the SEAL teams than being a supply clerk.

This has been the opposite of my experience with PhDs. Most can’t handle leadership or any sort of standard workplace interaction.

It's not en entire benefit, that six years could have been spent making a salary, saving up retirement, starting a family, etc. It's pretty disheartening watching your peers while in graduate school

He’s probably out a good mil in opportunity cost maybe more over a life time

I think every high schooler should be taught how to project cash flow and figure out quality of life based on various scenarios. There is so much pay and expense data available now, there is little reason these kinds of opportunity costs should be a surprise.

This is half the battle. The other half is getting in front of folks at that age, versus them not learning these lessons, painfully, until midlife.

Lots of apathy and intentional malevolence creating friction in this regard. Knowledge is power.

I meant teaching it to high schoolers in high school as part of class work, hence getting in front of folks.

With CA/NYC/CO/WA all requiring job listings to show pay range data, it should be a reasonable project to assign.

Any recommendations on materials that teach these subjects?

Bogleheads forums.

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Household_budgeting

But I just mean making a spreadsheet calculating income/expense/savings by year until you are age 100. Of course, assumptions have to be made about inflation, investment earnings, payrates, and benefits.

https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/quickcalc/

Thinking about what huge sweeping world events happened from 1922 to 2022 and how it affected people around the world… for an ordinary person there’s really no point in making such a spreadsheet. (Well, unless you’re born in one of those filthy-rich elite families like the Rothschilds, who have all the power they need to plan ahead…) I mean, maybe it’s a good idea to plan a few years ahead to survive in a ruthless capitalist society, but other than that I really don’t see the point. Only a few of us are going to buy an actual damn house at this rate nowadays.

I think it’s best to think that (for the majority) our very moment of our life is contingent on the historical forces of the world, and there is no stable-enough historical tendency that we can exploit to calculate out our whole life trajectories.

>I mean, maybe it’s a good idea to plan a few years ahead to survive in a ruthless capitalist society, but other than that I really don’t see the point

The purpose is not to pinpoint whole life trajectories. Obviously predictions decades into the future are a crapshoot. But it does not cost anything to copy paste the formula down that many rows.

The purpose is to establish upper and lower bounds and adjust expectations properly. In the context of this thread, it does seem reasonable for a high schooler to be able to predict some spectrum of their quality of life if they were to pursue a PhD in <x> field.

Finding a partner, buying a home, having children, etc all happens within 10 to 20 years of high school. They can take their student loans, amortize them, and calculate if $70k/$100k/$120k/$250k per year will buy them the future they want. And they may decide that a PhD in whatever has too low of a probability of allowing them to achieve other goals they have, such as having kids or living in a certain region or owning a certain type of home.

And it goes beyond money. Kids should be taught to research or ask people what their day to day, month to month, year to year is like. A 16 year that wants to research medicine should get data from a 25/30/35 year old about what to expect, such as hours worked per week, vacation time, where the jobs are, job security, etc.

You know all kinds of things can happen during a PhD right? Many don't even make it to the end, some get burnt out and leave without a degree (along with their career prospects), some meet abusive professors, some find themselves in illness (bonus points if you are in America, don't know wtf is happening with their healthcare system), some find their advisor suddenly leave academia and their lab fucking disappears (which I have experienced), etc.

Anyways, I think planning decades into the future to get what you want with a spreadsheet is only possible from a petit-bourgeois "middle-class" standpoint. From David Graeber's paper "Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class" [0], he talks about what that mentality is:

> What being middle class means, first and foremost, is a feeling that the fundamental social institutions that surround one—whether police, schools, social service offices, or financial institutions—ultimately exist for your benefit. That the rules exist for people like yourself, and if you play by them correctly, you should be able to reasonably predict the results. This is what allows middle-class people to plot careers, even for their children, to feel they can project themselves forward in time, with the assumption that the rules will always remain the same, that there is a social ground under their feet. (This is obviously much less true either for the upper classes, who see themselves as existing in history, which is always changing, or the poor, who rarely have much control over their life situation.)

And guess what, that middle class is shrinking (since the things that welfare capitalism has promised are starting to not be true anymore, like if you work hard enough you can buy a house and start a family...) Many people in first-world countries have already been woken out from that fantasy.

[0] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau4....

I think we are talking past each other. I agree that life is volatile. And it is very lucky to be able to even plan a few years into the future.

But I do not think Graeber's quote is applicable here. The exercise of planning future cash flow can help you increase the quality of the bets you place (and/or adjust your expectations). Singular choices have no guaranteed results, but the sum total of choices can be influenced by gathering information about the world and keeping your models updated, allowing you to make choices where the odds are more favorable to you.

and with that mil he could retire early and spend time studying cool stuff, exactly as he was doing in graduate school. To some, phd is skipping the line to doing stuff they want to do.

Massive opportunity cost. And you don't learn all that much.

Your twenties are some of the best earnings years of your life.

WTF, no. In what universe was this ever true? 40 - 60 are the prime earning years, and always have been, except for maybe mercenaries and pirates.

its a waste of time if you are not the elite landlords whose children academia was made for

out of several hundred or really thousands of years, its only been several short decades where everyone else was unobjectively convinced that academia was relevant for them, and now we are reverting to the mean

It’s only been a few more decades that everyone was unobjectively convinced that literacy was for them, are you expecting that to revert as well?

Literacy is a lot more relevant to most people than academia.

no, was there intended to be a moment of introspection introduced by that strawman?

it is coincidence that jobs failed to find a way to sort job seekers except by gatekeeping with higher education. higher education did not adapt to this purpose, and doesn't need to and never will need to. the utility of the working class needing higher education will have more diminishing returns, whereas literacy will have less diminishing returns.

I do sympathize for many graduate students who are chasing dreams of making a contribution in their fields and to push the edge ever so slightly, not pursuing graduate school purely for vanity sake.

But it's apparent to me that academia is straining under the system in which it exists. Incentives are misaligned, from the bottom of the hierarchy to the top. Economic strain puts pressure to produce rushed research, at the expense of PIs and the students and limits the allocations of grants to proven institutions and individuals.

The issue is so complicated that I don't even know where to begin to address it without sounding like a Kacyznski-nut. From a naturalist's perspective, maybe this was bound to happen as 'real' innovation dries up.

It seems that the only rational conditions to pursue a graduate degree in this economic climate is 1) purely for intellectual reasons, the challenge and the growth, 2) to put a small pimple on the butt of your field and given that it takes off, pick the fruits until the tree is bare. To expect glory and honor is setting yourself up for bitterness and from a purely vocational perspective, many have remarked at the negative opportunity cost.

> The issue is so complicated that I don't even know where to begin to address it without sounding like a Kacyznski-nut.

I don't find it complicated at all. The root issue is that there is too much supply and too little demand. There are too many people willing to work in the academia, while the rest of the world is only willing to feed far fewer academics. Everything else is just symptoms. This was already clear when I did my PhD 10-15 years ago. In the past couple of years, the job market finally reached some kind of breaking point and started to rebalance itself.

Only an idiot would pursue a life in academia.

I'm overstating it but there is some ironic truth in that observation.

A Ph.D. really is about the journey. I'd be surprised if anyone ever thought it represented more money. It's unlikely to matter for that.

The time I spent getting a Ph.D. was one of the best times of my life. Not just the work, but the environment, the other people in the same situation, and the personal growth. I pursued it because 1) I really did love learning about Computers, and 2) I just loved the University environment. Every time I "graduated" I just signed up again for the next degree.

I never thought much about "using it" after I got it. I think it got me a higher starting title at a company or two and impressed a few (probably easily impressed) people along the way. I think the most measurable* impact however was listing it on my dating profile.

Again - it was a journey worth taking without much thought of the destination.

*Note, I said "measurable", not "good" or "bad"

What did it cost? Seems like it's not worth it unless it uniquely qualifies you for something.

I think part of the problem for current graduate students (well, for the last generation or so) is that while the past idea / lore of graduate school modeled by mentors (professors, parents) was built on a growing post-war pyramid of faculty jobs and research opportunities, now it has become a saturated pyramid in many fields. So then students find themselves not competing easily for a growing number of jobs, but waiting to see which senior professor retires or dies and opens up a spot. Or else leave for industry. And woe to those who go into fields where there is not a lot of industry to exit to.

You've probably heard in your field of the old professors who got a faculty job after one postdoc, or even out of grad school? Well, those days of yore are long gone. And don't think that it was just because they were incredibly smart (well, some of course were) but that the field had ripe jobs for them to fill. Do you see some colleagues going to "odd" countries for positions lately? It's where the money is -- we just didn't realize in the past it actually was tied to where the money was (hidden in the form of jobs).

Anyway, also now it has almost become a baseline credential for certain jobs or advancement (like college), further filling up the pipeline with competitors for those jobs.

Don't get me wrong, for some people graduate school can be great, a great time to explore and satisfy an intellect that wants to gather and contribute to knowledge. But for others, the idea of graduate school is no longer what it was. You're in for a multiple-postdoc, where-is-this-going-on-the-faculty-track questioned existence, seemingly at the whim of advisors who hardly have time to spend on helping your career.

Of course, it varies by field. Chemical engineering, probably ok no matter how relatively bad it seems. Astronomy? Not so much. Biology? Better exits, but you're also competing against everyone who can afford a hot plate and PCR rig. Computer science / ML? Your competition is every student in China who has access to a couple hundred hours of GPU time. (exaggerating a bit of course)

Just go into it knowing the situation.

> I think part of the problem for current graduate students (well, for the last generation or so) is that while the past idea / lore of graduate school modeled by mentors (professors, parents) was built on a growing post-war pyramid of faculty jobs and research opportunities, now it has become a saturated pyramid in many fields. So then students find themselves not competing easily for a growing number of jobs, but waiting to see which senior professor retires or dies and opens up a spot. Or else leave for industry. And woe to those who go into fields where there is not a lot of industry to exit to.

I was basically told I would not graduate my PhD program if I didn't do my dissertation in a machine learning application of my field of interest.

The intersection existed but after a year of trying to motivate myself I could not. I ended up quitting. It's more politics than it's worth and I was in competition with students from other countries who had infinitely more funding, infinitely more time, and infinitely more energy than me. I was doing night classes and spending every other waking hour I wasn't working pushing my research.

There is a lot of myth baked into the PhD along with a lot of romanticization of deep innovative work. From school that is pretty much fed to you of scholars and that you need to get a PhD to be known as one. E.g. Newton, Gauss, Kelvin, Tesla, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, etc.

There is a massive misreading of the general situation though like the parent comment mentions. I think until before WWII academia was a rich mans profession. I would bet that people who got into academia were those whose parents had the means to support their education and that they could either independently or through patronage carry out research. This is what most people miss about a PhD or a scholar. It was exclusively a rich mans (and in very exceptional cases a woman married to a rich man or a man married to a rich woman) business. A more extreme example Carl Jung’s wife supported her husband’s research even when he was having an affair with another woman. Remember that cabin he built so eloquently described in “Deep Work” with a walk in the woods. It might have been with the wife’s money.

Post WWII government funding for research exploded but there were not enough researchers. Universities brought in more and more professors for their government funded programs and government funded student loans. All professors want tenure track. To handle tenure track you need publications. But now we have a problem - the professors aren’t wealthy. They need to apply for patronage (ahem - government grants) and need to write proposals. The problem is “professorship” is an up or out profession. You get 7 years to move up or get out. In time, the government grants have reduced, the number of professors has ticked upwards. You have a complete rat race for scraps. There are some well-funded departments that continue to attract great students. But by and large its the stress of grant writing that will eat at you.

So, in the end the profession itself hasn’t changed much. You’re still petitioning the “rich man” for “patronage”. It’s just that now there are many more petitioners. It’s just not worth it.

That being said, there needs to be some mechanism to acquire deep advanced skills as you continue along your professional journey. A masters with a thesis mostly works and can get you a considerable way through. It could be specialized so that you get more time for focused research as opposed to filling up your time with pointless credits. I did a PhD when I was working. It was stressful - but only from a time perspective. I never had stresses of money or career for which I’m thankful. I also had a very considerate advisor. I cannot think of a position in industry today except in research labs that really need a PhD. Everyone going for it needs to look out and understand that.

> I think part of the problem for current graduate students (well, for the last generation or so) is that while the past idea / lore of graduate school [...] Astronomy? Not so much. [...]

Ph.D. in astronomy has been "do not expect a job" for at least 2 full generations now. I recall talking to an astronomy professor from (?) Univ. of Michigan ~1982. Supposedly, it was SOP to tell the kids in UM's "freshman astronomy for potential astronomy majors" course that Ph.D.'s should not expect jobs. Jobs were "possible" at lower levels, if you were clever about it. (Make sure you got lots of experience running the planetarium, maintaining high-end astronomy equipment, etc.)

I'd been working as a research assistant in a university lab during and after my undergraduate degree, for about a year, and my supervisor was trying to convince me to do a PhD with him.

However, I'd already had several months of getting to know PhD students there and in neighbouring labs, and it made me realise two things. Firstly, how much stress and long working hours they were all enduring. Secondly, for many of them, how fascinated they seemed with their research topics despite this.

I quickly realised I didn't really give much of a shit about doing any more of this research, at least not compared to the obsessive PhD students I was working alongside, and ended up pivoting to a vulnerability research career instead. Which has been much, much more rewarding and interesting than anything I was doing previously.

I'm incredibly glad I didn't get stuck wasting my life away in academia, which for a time seemed like the default path to take. For a while afterwards I felt like I'd let myself down somehow by not continuing along this path, but I look back in relief knowing now what a nonsense attitude that was.

I did a PhD and it completely changed my trajectory in life.

I would maybe compare the academic path to more like a start up life : most fail, but you will learn a lot and you will be in charge of your own destiny.

Of course the pay and living can be brutal depending on where you choose to do your PhD. But there are phd programs that pay a generous wage (with benefits like health care and retirement) at affordable cities.

I am happy I was able to roll the dice with academia. If it didn’t work out I would still be doing fine in industry.

I don't think that you are truly "in charge of your own destiny" at many programs. I get the comparison, but it's more like you're a startup in an oversaturated market with funders who have very little invested in you (and may not even know/care about you) and constantly demand that you perform circus acts to keep them funding you (sometimes in very paltry amounts) for just a bit longer. They will also be very disappointed if you turn out to be anything other than a unicorn.

And on top of all this, you could just be out of luck due to factors outside your control. I've seen multiple cases of well-published researchers with excellent teaching records, good social skills, and prestigious postdocs spend 2-3 years on the market and get nothing. It's a random roll of the dice, and I would discourage most people from trying it.

I got a PhD in 2.5 years (already had a masters), a very fast amount of time, and the advice I always give people is “pick a program with clear deliverables.”

My advisor said that after publishing 3 articles in good journals, I was done. So I was very motivated, had a clear target, and had a more satisfying and quick experience than probably 98% of PhD students.

I looked at programs in more attractive locations and at better rated schools, where they said essentially “you are done when we feel like you are done”. I turned them down and it was a fantastic decision.

IMO this is exactly not how to do a PhD which should be about exploring a topic and becoming an expert over time. A meandering path concentrated around self directed learning.

If you want clear deliverables and a set path to follow, just get a job in industry.

>If you want clear deliverables and a set path to follow, just get a job in industry.

I find this to be an extremely over-generous view of what industry work is like.

But my actual point is that whether you are in academia or industry, you should prefer a position where you have some real control over the deliverables, rather than being a puppet on the strings of a boss or advisor.

Yes, it's true that industry is not like this all the time. I've done the PhD/Postdoc route now working as a data scientist in mega corp.

The value of a PhD IMO is the pain of forcing yourself to learn things independently, work on hard problems for long periods of time and develop expertise. I think following a set path laid out by a supervisor defeats alot of this as the hard work is being done for you, you're just following your supervisor's set agenda.

Industry simply doesn't allow for this long deep, mostly unproductive work. Things change constantly and projects move, adapt etc. However the goals are for the most part better defined with a clear outcome.

A post below put this well, academia is closer to a start up lifestyle.

Both are not exclusive and at least doing like OP enables avoiding the too common abuse of graduate students in some schools.

3 different papers in 2.5 years with a group? Did they all have to be lead author works? And if so may I ask what is your field?

That kind of requirement would be way too strict for some fields. Flexible graduation guidelines can be abused by bad programs and/or bad PIs, but they also allow flexibility in what you get out of the PhD and when you can leave. I know people that graduated from my program with 0 lead author papers (and <= 2 contributing author papers) because they had already lined up an industry job or a pivot to research in a different field. They'd be in school forever if there were strict authorship requirements.

PS - some PIs, whether intentionally or not, can actually abuse strict requirements more than flexible ones. If you used PI resources to do research, which is often unavoidable in experimental fields, you need their permission to publish. Some PIs have extremely high standards for what journals they will allow their work to be published in. Often students end up with 4th author via a piece of a paper that got published in a journal like Cell, but could've been a stand alone lead author work in a mid tier journal. Nothing wrong with that, arguably it's better from a scientific perspective, but you can see how that might impact student careers.

I find it interesting how many articles and people on HN say something similar. I had basically the opposite thoughts (and outcomes) from my PhD. I loved the 5 years I spent in my program, I learned a ton about super interesting topics, I learned a ton of very applicable skills, I met and befriended many extremely intelligent and kind individuals, and I immediately got a job after graduating. I’m still at that job, and it’s amazing, 2 and a half years later. (And I didn’t do my work at an Ivy League or anything, I was at Wayne State in Detroit).

Frankly, the only thing I wish I would have realized beforehand is that you’re basically forming your young adult friend group with a bunch of people who are going to be spread out over the globe in ~5 years. That part is hard. Everything else was great.

  Frankly, the only thing I wish I would have realized beforehand is
  that you’re basically forming your young adult friend group with
  a bunch of people who are going to be spread out over the globe in ~5 years.

For a lot of us, this is a problem with standard 4-year college as well. It's frustrating that it's so hard to colocate with college friends once your careers have taken you all in different directions (often with very little choice in the matter). I suspect that's responsible for a big chunk of social dysfunction in the USA today: so many people spend 4 years building a circle of friends, and it fractures irreparably 5 minutes after graduation.

What field were you in? I feel like PhDs in fields with a strong job market for R&D (e.g., machine learning, biomedical or chemical engineering) can be worth it. I think, otherwise, it can be really difficult.

Also, remember the survivorship bias inherent in surveys like this. They rarely capture the very large portion of graduate students who leave their program without a degree.

I was one of those, and it’s really difficult for me to look back and see anything positive in the experience. I’m sure if the opinions of dropouts were included, you’d get an even bleaker view of the value of going to graduate school.

Matt Groening on that:

http://magazine.art21.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/life_in...

I love research, but I hated most of my PhD.

"Publish or perish" attitudes caused a lot of friction for me. I try to be more careful in my research than most, and I don't care too much about the sheer number of papers I publish. One great paper beats 100 average papers.

I also think that the (practical) requirement to bring in external funding severely limits what research can be done. There are a lot of great ideas that don't sound good to people in control of money.

My day job doesn't involve any research now. I do research on the side. I am glad that I can do research at my own pace and don't have to ask permission from others before doing research. The main problem is that I don't have a lot of time for my research, but I'm hoping to switch to part-time eventually.

I did a Ph.D. (chemistry) and a M.A. (geology), both at UT-Austin.

I have absolutely no regrets, and knew fully what I was signing up for, unlike many people who are featured in articles like the one referenced here: that is a little puzzling, since you are an adult when you embark on the graduate school journey, and there is no shortage of readily-available information about employability, salary, and so on.

But enough about the bewildered adults who awaken in the middle of their graduate program and wonder what happened and who to blame other than themselves.

Neither graduate degree cost me a dime, as tuition was waived (really, paid by advisor at an in-state rate) and I had combinations of research assistant (RA)/teaching assistant (TA)/fellowship the whole time. There was no assistance at any point from my family. I lived well in Austin in the 1990s, and had a great social life. It was great.

I knocked-out my Master's in just over 2 years, then breezed through my Ph.D. in 4 years. I published 6 first-authored papers by graduation time. My advisers were both nice guys, not overly hands-on with career guidance but I was headed towards a tenure-track position anyway. Research projects were reasonable and that was why I was able to go through smoothly. That and I wasn't walking around asking myself what the hell I was doing in grad school...anyway.

My postdoctoral fellowships - first at UCSF, then at Princeton - were great with the notable exception that the ~$30K/year salaries did not go far in either location.

My tenure-track journey ended with an appointment as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at a small school, and the salary was $52K/9 months. I didn't last long - those deferred student loans from undergrad were due, and the price was steep - but at the rate I was at, if I got a grant with summer salary, I was looking at $70K/year.

Totally great experiences. Low salaries even now, and yes I don't bring in big bucks but I'm not a SWE at a FAANG, but that's not for me.

Highly recommended.

The 1990s were a pretty good time for grad school compared to the 2000s.

The 2000s were pretty good compared to the 2010s.

Things are now at a breaking point.

Last week I had a mentoring conversation with a first year grad student that ended with tears about looming eviction due to over-due rent (un-reimbursed conference travel from months ago) and was followed by a call to a friend who still lives in the area to drop off some food as well as a... perhaps unprofessional... letter to a dean.

Those $30K/year stipends from the 90s were decent money; these days, at many institutions, it's still $30K/year. With a dependent and no family nearby, that's one late reimbursement from homelessness even in a comparatively cheap rust belt city. Remember: if you had a mortgage or owned a home before 2019, you feel basically none of the inflation happening in the USA. (And no, I wouldn't fault a mid-20 year old for not predicting double digit inflation in 2019.)

That's very disheartening to hear.

I can't help but wonder why anyone would go into a graduate program today, given the conditions you describe and the seemingly widening perspective that graduate degrees aren't worth it.

Perhaps we're heading back to a time where the "gentleman scholar" from a monied family is the only person who can survive in that system. That would be a shame.

100% Agreed. To make matters worse, the economic value of the data modeling / computational skills one can learn in graduate school has vastly eclipsed the typical graduate student stipend. Having recently started a graduate program after many years in Tech, I was a bit surprised to learn that most people in my department are implicit data scientists, or at the very least, data-science adjacent.

The monetary opportunity cost is not great for society. In California, typical graduate student stipends are roughly on par with the state's minimum wage ($15 an hour). Good luck trying to buy a house with that money, or trying to recruit anyone who is not straight out of college.

It turns out that before data science was a buzzword, it was called science and done by scientists.

It is much harder now to follow that path you described than it was 30 years ago. That is, fewer portion of people who would like that path successfully get it. (Yeah, the early 90s is 30 years ago. Shocking to me too).

Whether students now "know what they were signing up for" or not (or should somehow be expected to or blamed if they didn't, which is not quite the same question), I couldn't say. None of the survey questions mentioned in the article seem to cover what their expectations were before enrolling, or if they have now changed. I wouldn't assume that they did, or didn't.

It doesnt even sound like a particularly attractive outcome. 70k/year after being a very strong candidate. Wonder what the salary progression has been like over 30 years.

Yes, I absolutely think that it is incumbent that adults who pursue graduate degrees do a perfunctory bit of research on their career options and what they can expect upon entering the job market.

Sure, I mean of course, who could disagree with that statement.

I'm curious. I don't know what field you are in, but if when you pursued a doctorate in the 90s, it had been the case that, say, only 5% of PhD graduates in your field wound up with a tenure-track job in your field (this is a realistic number for many fields/disciplines currently), would you have still done it? Figuring you'd be one of the 5%, or that you'd find a non-academic career path with the PhD instead if necessary? Or, armed with that perfunctory bit of research on the job market, would you have chosen an entirely different path?

I'm in every "data science" field except the one I want to be in (computational chemistry/drug discovery).

Absolutely true that I would have still gone the way I did anyway.

Although there wasn't access via the Internet to as much information as people have nowadays to do that perfunctory research, I was well aware of the low pay that the tenure track offered, mostly due to the fact that I assumed that my public school teacher parents (both of them, elementary school) made peanuts compared to the lawyers/doctors/stockbrokers at the time. My assumption that this translated to higher education was not entirely wrong. I just didn't care and thought that making maybe $80K/year sounded damned good to me to do something I loved.

But the point is, I went into it coming from a background where there wasn't a lot of money and I wasn't interested in being a doctor or lawyer or getting an MBA. I might be accused of romanticizing the professorial lifestyle at the time, but I certainly fell in love with the research and the lifestyle.

The other things to note are that my Master's in geology is a very, very employable degree from a top-ranked school. My Ph.D., not so much. So there was/is a fallback option to work in the geosciences - turns out I'm not much of an oil guy, and water doesn't pay much - and I could have gone into industry at any time.

So, yes, I would still have made the decisions I made.

Thanks!

Low pay (relative to other professional careers) is one thing. I have a number of friends who were prepared for the pay, but simply cannot secure a tenure-track position at all. They thought they'd be able to. And yeah, they were willing to move wherever.

I don't know for sure if they didn't know the truly low rate of success here, or just thought they'd be one of the successful ones, or just didn't think too hard about it.

To them, you are living the dream -- that they have not been able to achieve. I don't know about "data science", but in many fields (including things like mathematics and physics, we're not just talking humanities), it is lot harder to do what you did now than it was then. What you did is what they want to do, and would also be happy with $80K (at least in early career; 80K now is a lot less than 40 years ago!) to do something they love too.

But should people know that before going in? And then not complain about it, if they chose to go in anyway? I don't know, I'm not too invested in determining who "should" be complaining vs stoically and silently accepting their fate, I don't think there's really an answer.

I just know that it's really hard in most fields to turn a PhD into a tenure track job now. And that's probably not as widely recognized as it could (or "should") be. I think universities and advisers recruiting hard into their PhD programs despite this, without being clear, are probably not treating their students respectfully, even if the students perhaps "should" see through the recruiting spiel.

(I also have a couple friends with PhDs in the past 10 years who have succeeded in getting tenure track jobs, or even tenure already. it is not unheard of, although moving in that direction. I have a pretty academic social circle)

Having had a lot of experience of academia, I’m probably one its harshest critics.

But - I don’t regret the PhD. I learnt a lot of skills, learnt from other PhD students and postdocs.

I will say, make sure your supervisor is a nice person who does not place their career above all else. I was lucky with that, and I think finding such a person in academic is increasingly difficult. Never do a PhD with a supervisor you are unsure about.

Finish the PhD in 3 years (U.K.) and get the hell out. There is nothing left in academia for people who genuinely want to improve the world.

If your goal is getting paid a reasonable amount for a bit of a silly job, and you can tolerate or enjoy politics and game playing, that’s fine, stay. Hours are flexible, you can get away with not doing anything much at all for your career, and the pensions in the U.K. are still very generous. Over the summers most people don’t actually do any work.

>I will say, make sure your supervisor is a nice person who does not place their career above all else. I was lucky with that, and I think finding such a person in academic is increasingly difficult. Never do a PhD with a supervisor you are unsure about.

This is a great point. A bad supervisor will make your time miserable, and universities generally have no interest in weeding out the bad ones.

There's an academic whisper-net where this knowledge is spread, but undergrad or MSc students generally have no access to the net. Which is a shame as it would protect them from terrible supervisors who look good to the world.

If you're in that position, see if you can find a Prof who you can trust and explicitly ask them about colleagues in a 1-on-1 meeting; at least you'll get some access then.

I agree with the whisper net comment. You learn about who's good and bad pretty quickly once you get into a department, but everyone is hush-hush otherwise. We need a glassdoor for academia.

I spent 3 years in a PhD program, like many of the posters it was one of the most fun experience of my life. I ended up dropping out to do Ycombinator, but it was an incredibly hard decision.

Like many things in life not all PhDs are created equal. In my program I was able to take classes across the University that helped broaden my narrow business / computer science undergraduate experience. I was paid somewhere between 20-30K/year, but was able to take graduate business, econ, architecture, anthropology, and computer science classes. I was able to publish papers and travel internationally. My peers were way smarter than me, and went on to find industry and academic jobs, a few dropped out like me and ended up building very successful careers.

In general my advice would be, find a program that suits your interest. The benefits of 3 years of largely self-directed learning is not for everyone, but can be an incredible way to grow. Also, your advisor will make or break your experience, I worked for an amazing guy, and still stay in touch, even after dropping out.

As a grad student (ML) close to finishing I can say exactly what I want. I want to read math books, program, and publish slowly (papers + blogs) with meaningful and substantial work. I do not want to be chasing benchmarks or worrying about how to play the politics of paper publishing to get through the provably random[0][1][2] noise that is the review process. But no one is going to pay me for this, including academia. I know a lot of my peers are chasing big paychecks but I don't understand why anyone would go through all this just for money. There's much easier ways to make money. If you know of anyone that would actually hire me for this, please do let me know.

That said, I don't regret doing my PhD. There is a lot of personal value in being able to (mostly) freely study a topic in extreme detail. Obviously you need some obsessive behavior to do this. The thing is that I just want to keep doing it. But with a focus on the learning and extending human knowledge part and cutting out the bullshit.

[0] https://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html

[1] https://inverseprobability.com/talks/notes/the-neurips-exper...

[2] Personal experience: I've had reviewers state that a paper with >100 citations is not useful to anyone while many of those citations are from hard sciences using it for explicitly the reason we made it. In another review round a reviewer asked us to include experiments comparing to our main comparitor, which was included in every single graph and table we had in the entire paper (no ability to respond). I've seen rampant abuse of the review system (ACs accepting and rejecting papers in weird ways), collusion rings, and overall benchmark chasing (which hinders a lot of research all together). We are encouraging lazy reviews, everyone agrees, but few are actively trying to make a difference. The worst part of this is that the people hurt the most by these actions are in fact the grad students. Their graduations depend on top tier publications and their ability to get their first jobs highly depend on their top tier publications. Ironically being hired by people who actively discuss issues with the publication system and how much noise there is. It is frustrating.

Government labs, scientific agencies (NASA et al), or any FFRDC might be a good fit. Also old-hat industrial labs. Defense and defense contractors can also be good, if you don't mind that type of work. They don't care much about vanity metrics like publications at top X conferences, and they don't move at the fast pace of product-oriented groups in tech companies.

You can also start an LLC and fund it through SBIR/STTR and/or transition-to-practice style grants, but you'll have to hire a professional admin staff and pay them more than you're making if you want the type of life you're describing (and it'll take some years).

Gov labs aren't too bad, but funding often comes with a lot of conditions. Generally you have unconditional funding for weapons but if you can find your own funding you can research whatever you want. I'd rather not do weapons and it is a reason I've moved away from that route. Also these are mostly hard science type research (physics, chem, climate, etc) and less interested in doing things like building general intelligence. SBIRS are typically too high of a TRL but STTRs are a good route and tend to be more basic research. I am looking into that. But I've also been in the SBIR/STTR life and boy is it a lot of writing.

A few random thoughts based on personal experience:

- A PhD is like a sabbatical in many ways. You are trading off time and money for what amounts to a long break to explore things or work on something that may be difficult otherwise.

- Identifying well defined problems is half the game.

- Finding a good advisor is quite important. Above all, it should be someone you can get along with.

- At least for CS, the tradeoffs are quite reasonable. In a good case, it will open more doors for you. In the worst case, you will be at the same level as a Master's student after having spent a few more years in school.

PhD is a scam that sucks hardwork from smartest individuals while giving them poverty, mental health problems, significant opportunity cost and graduating them with absolutely no skills that are required to make a living in market economy. I have said it multiple times unless you are doing a CS PhD or you are an Olympiad medalist, PhD is a significant net negative for your life and career.

Everything you said about CS PhDs also applies to a lesser (but not insignificant) extent to postgraduate and undergraduate degrees.

You don't need degrees to make it into the tech world. Yes some companies might ignore you in the very beginning of your career if you don't have a degree but there is so much demand out there for tech workers that you will find a job for sure and after one or two years nobody will care that you don't have a degree. By the time your peers graduate you will have multiple years of experience in the field and that's what everyone cares about.

Oh, and doing a CS degree you hardly learn anything about programming and most professors teaching you have never coded anything longer than 50 lines.

I'm not in CS, and it was neither a net negative on my life or career.

Weird to see the PhD is now a trade degree with people expecting to receive technical skill training to increase their chances to get an ok job with benefits working for some corporation.

Possibly the PhD is the new High School Diploma, signifying basic literacy and ability to follow directions.

Everything is a trade degree, unless you're independently wealthy.

Everything is a trade degree, if you lack the confidence that you will figure out things somehow.

Middle-class life is quite comfortable in most first-world countries. If you have the social capital from growing up in a middle-class family, it's often easy to remain in the middle class, even if you fail a couple of times. Upper middle class is another story, because it's characterized by playing the game and winning rather than social capital. If you are trying to remain in the upper middle class, you can't afford some of the luxuries a middle-class kid could.

Now this is what I call a hot take, that a PhD is possibly the new high school diploma.

I put it down to a lack of focus. Research universities had one job, to ensure the undelayed success of someone (or collective) like Yitang Zhang/Katalin Kariko, and it failed, while managing to award tenure to many a downright incompetent or even fraudulent persons and research groups. Surely doing this job is, if not easier, more important than achieving general AI? When I say easier, I refer to the ontopic suggestion of giving every person who gets a PhD a basic income..

I had discussions with my daughter about what she wanted to do in STEMM. I told her a PhD is good if you really want to go that direction, but you need to consider the downsides. In the end, she went for an MD, not a PhD, and we're all happy with how it has turned out.

The second set of graphs must be in error, correct?

67% have attended conferences but only 0.7% have networked...? Only 0.7% have discussed their career with peers/colleagues? That's impossible.

Did they forget to convert these decimals to percentages, or did no one sanity-check this data at all?

Maybe many PhDs attend conferences just because they have to have some paper/poster presentation rather than they are genuinely interested in making new connections? That's what I'm guilty of at least.

During parts of the Cold War, near DC, some knowledge of some STEM topics, e.g., assembler, Fortran, PL/I, C, the algorithms in the relevant book by Knuth, the fast Fourier transform, Kalman filtering, Maxwell's equations, algebraic coding theory, antenna theory, optimization, especially with a Ph.D., could generate a relatively good career in US national security.

Maybe now, not just near DC or in US national security, if can get a job in some organization that is doing important work, then there is a chance that can see an important problem and use good STEM field knowledge and computing to get a very valuable solution -- none of the effort part of the job description.

And IMHO computing and the Internet are continuing to explode, that is, have not yet nearly been fully exploited. Then maybe pick a promising problem, use some STEM field knowledge, computing, and the Internet to get a valuable solution, and start a business.

Ph.D.?

(1) Aim for a Ph.D. in engineering.

(2) Take some courses you believe might be helpful for your Ph.D. research and/or your career later.

(3) For your research, find, pick your own problem, maybe from practice outside of academics.

(4) Complete your research on your own and hand the results to your department or advisor(s). At some universities, the official requirement for a dissertation is

"an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication"

So, at such a university and more generally, to remove nearly all doubt about your dissertation, publish your work.

Maybe for your first job, accept an assistant professor position in some engineering school and from there make contacts for a good career outside of academics.

Never a graduate student, but I made the choice to not study computer science in undergrad because I didn't want a lifestyle of sitting behind a computer. Fast forward 8 years and... I'm a full time remote software developer sitting alone in front of a computer.

I tried education for a few years but it didn't pay enough and the work was difficult due to lack of school resources and lack of support. Switched into tech because I knew I had the technical ability to pull it off, and the salary seemed comfortable.

It does feel a bit sad that I spend my time working on random corporate marketing websites instead of helping people learn, but at least I can support my family enjoy a rich life outside of work (including some development side projects).

Even though my eventual major isn't relevant to my current work I still think college was very worth while. I took mostly classes that interested me rather than follow a specific career path and I learned so many things that still feel relevant in other ways.

This was and still is the best guidance[1] I ever indirectly received in uni. I hope it continues to help others.

[1] https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/essay.phd.html

Thank you for posting that essay. Relevant para:

NOT… A way to make more money

While we haven't heard any statistics for the past couple of years, graduate students used to estimate the ``payoff'' using the starting salaries of Ph.D. and M.S. positions, the average time required to obtain a Ph.D., the value of stock options, and current return on investments. For a period of at least five years that we know, the payoff was clearly negative. Suffice it to say that one must choose research because one loves it; a Ph.D. is not the optimum road to wealth.

Academia has never been a way to make a lot of money, but, until ~1975 (https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-l...), one could reasonably expect to eventually attain a reasonable material quality of life while pursuing ideas, the life of the mind, and so on. It could be reasonable to sacrifice 5+ years with the expectation that one would get that reasonable material quality of life after, while advancing human knowledge, etc.

The problem is that today the more likely outcome (there are exceptions, some of them posting in this thread) is that one has wasted 5+ years in, at best, advancing someone else's career.

"I love research" is too often a way for institutions and professors to exploit the young.

I dropped out of my CS PhD program after two and a half years to "go into industry". It was the perfect amount of time to spend in grad school - just enough time to meet my future wife.

The Simpsons' take on grad students:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqrCoyVK80I

(edit: I have a PhD)

I got a PhD in math because it was a life goal for me and it was the best because I had lots of time just to do whatever I wanted and learn some cool math.

I ended up going into a math-related career I hate. But it pays well, and so I became ultra frugal, saved up enough money, got a second remote job doing something I like, and now I'm going to roam as a nomad around the world. Screw 9-5, I'm retiring now. Quitting in a few months and couldn't be happier.

IMO, trying to do something that's usually (a) inherently intrinsically motivated + (b) operates on long timelines, is exactly the sort of thing that:

1. Cannot be easily captured via "metrics", and

2. Is resistant to being "scaled".

Yet, for better or worse, we have ended up with these "mass Ph.D" systems and their surrounding ecosystems, so outcomes like in TFA are going to be increasingly common.

I was working full time and did my PhD at the same time. My employer let me do the work at work (there was a lot of overlap) and only had to travel to university to take a few classes (made up the time by working longer hours and sometimes on weekends) and meet with my academic advisor. I also had an advisor (mentor) at work that I would interact with on a daily basis. The downside was that I had to pay tuition, but the company paid for some and the rest I paid from my salary. I still made more than a graduate student at the institution. Overall, it was a great experience. I would recommend doing it this way if you are interested in going into industry and you already have a built-in job. I was upfront when I got hired and told them I was looking to do a PhD and they agreed.

For PhDs in the humanities in the US, this Brett Deveraux piece is worth reading: https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-...

The TL/DR is basically: don't.

Wow, this is a lot.

It's tricky - I feel like those who get PhD out of true deep love and talent for a field find their way through to happiness.

But sadly, a lot of people go into it for the wrong reasons (family pressure, ego, not knowing what else to do) and alas it doesn't often work out.

I remember on-campus interviewing an Indian guy who got a BS, MS and now PhD in chemistry, only to realize that he doesn't have a passion for it. That's tragic because all this money/lost time down, he's competing with undergrads for entry level roles. Meanwhile kids that finished undergrad around the same time are already starting to become managers.

The world needs PhD level people -- but I just think that your heart has to be into it 10000% and then you'll make it work.

It's pretty easy to be jaded by the end of a PhD even if you went into it for the field. You often don't get true academic freedom until you get a tenure track professorship, which is increasingly hard to come by. Even then you need to spend a lot of time on showmanship.

Doing a PhD for the sake of it is still arguable IMO, I don't regret doing mine. But I wish I didn't go in with the delusion I was pursuing a long term career in academia. Post-PhD academia is a hell of a slog.

The people who I went to university with who now have the most innovative and prosperous companies did their early research as part of PhD programs. In some fields, I think a PhD is a great opportunity to start businesses of real substance

A doctoral program makes sense for someone who wants to spend the rest of his/her life studying something that can't be studied except in an academic context. It makes sense for no one else. In particular, it is usually silly to do a doctorate if one's ambitions are to make money or succeed professionally in business/commerce/engineering. On the other hand, if those are one's ambitions, one generally doesn't have the sort of passion needed for research.

One of the reasons I enjoy my field is that the assumption you're going into academia isn't baked into things.

But I do wonder what these numbers will look like if the SV tech scene starts slowing down significantly. That was always the comparator group people looked toward.

I’ve always felt that for the social sciences, a masters and PhD should not be needed for the job market. However, I can’t help but feel that the demand for these credentials largely comes from a dilution of the marketplace due to the abundance of people with bachelors degrees

Sick of reading about how bleak it is - when are we going to actually do something about academia being so shit? Legislate? Boycott? Offer a competing research structure?

Universities REALLY oversell what they do for researchers. There has to be a better way than this.

Nature writing an article like this is like a newspaper writing that journalism is a waste of time. It's quite odd, perhaps they do it for the clicks.

Nature, and what it represents, is of course part of the problem.

The survey did not include any question about start-up career prospects, I suppose what Paul Graham touted regarding software startups is not widely applicable across most fields.

A lot of these articles seem to be written by people who had such bad grades they weren’t even eligible for grad school. As in, we’ll it’s probably not good anyway lol

A good piece on going to grad school or not. It's tailored to the Humanities, but the advice is still relevant for the Sciences:

https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-...

TLDR: Only go if you meet 1 of 2 conditions:

1) You are rich.

2) You get along with your advisor so well you know within 9 months of meeting/working with them that you'll be at their funeral no matter what. The chance of this is a dice roll with very heavy disadvantage (4xd20, choose lowest).

Otherwise, try it out for a year, then bounce. It's not worth your time.

Any software engineers or other tech workers on HN who went on to get graduate degrees in degrees unrelated to CS/SWE/CE/EE?

Don't worry -- you probably wouldn't "want this kind of life" when you're a corporate drone either.

College is about networking and getting sorted into the right groups more than it is about learning anything.

I don't regret doing mine but at the same time I'd never recommend it to anyone.

Subsidizing loans for whatever 18-year-olds want is a bad idea, news at five.

A good idea for those giving the loans. Can't default, compound interest, etc. Yummy, socially acceptable/shielded (even placed on pedestal) usury.

Is this still about PhD students?

People get onto these expensive dead-end education paths at 18, the ones where MSc/MA/PhD is the only prospect of earning some cash (often by teaching in the same area).

Oh of course I want to be an Egyptologist!

Nature is a science journal. It is surveying grad students in science. You may notice the questions about things like experiments and labs?

I finished my PhD at the top program in my country (which is not the US of course) fairly recently. The system is American "inspired" (fully funded, no mandatory work, international professors).

For me, the research work was enjoyable, and I was happy to do it "while it lasted". However I think the main problem is that for the largest majority of students, there is no academic future.

All of us were top-of-the-class in every scholastic phase up to then. Smart people, all. But after the PhD, and then after the junior job market - there simply aren't many positions anymore. All your academic efforts then culminate into a pack of files describing your merit, a hasty presentation in a hotel or two, and a largely random market deciding whether you will indeed be able to do the job you trained for your entire life, or not! It's a breaking point, and it is stressful not only because of that but especially because everything is uncertain.

Expectations are very high. After all, a lot of money has been spent on the PhD students and placing them in academic positions is crucial for the school. However, the job market is exceedingly difficult (for many different situational and even arcane reasons that differ country-by-country - I was going to write more about it, but everyone who knows knows already).

In consequence, you are never really prepared enough for the job market. At the same time, your success hinges only marginally on your research and more on prep, predigree, fit and randomness. And so, PhDs have to spend more and more time (6-7 years now) to feel somewhat "ready". Others are pushed by their advisors to stay.

During this time, you put your life on hold. You earn as little as the university can get away with in your country. You have to prepared to move anywhere in the world. Family is difficult to realize. Work-life-balance usually non-existent. And the longer you stay, the more you question whether you will ever make it.

For us, there were few tenure-tracked positions to be had in that year. People who stayed in academia started with post-doc contracts - often only for a year - all around the world. A continuation of the above. I am sure some will eventually succeed. I myself decided to take a non-academic position, which was a breeze by comparison.

From my cohort, almost all have ended up with some sort of mental health issue. Even though I never really felt it, I did notice (after leaving) that I had been depressed during the final year. Two PhD students were admitted to the hospital for issues I am 100% sure are stress induced.

At the same time, I don't know how to fix all this. Being a tenured professor will always be the dream for many people. At least as it appears on the surface. For it to be that, there will never be as many positions as applicants.

Another useless thread of sellouts mocking non sellouts for not selling out. Toxic internet mob didn't spare this website.

>; and students’ experience of racism and discrimination

This is the main reason why I am extremely ambivalent about hiring anyone who hasn't quit university in disgust.

The other day I had someone try and call me out for saying "meager options" as the n-word options.

It was a bizarre half hour of being talked at which started with her proclaiming herself a person of colour who has had to deal with discrimination her whole life to get a PhD and went down hill from there.

Somehow I am mostly just surprised that Nature's graphic designers feel that pie charts are an effective visual communication tool.

One of many articles on the topic https://xviz.com/blogs/pie-charts-good-bad-or-ugly/

Most of the charts are stacked bar charts, so I think they went with donuts at the top for a little visual variety.

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