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Comment by pfedor | Hacker News Reader

The decision to enter a PhD program only makes sense for one of the two reasons: either you think you're going to win a Nobel Prize one day, or, you don't mind spending five years in a way which doesn't advance any goal (literal quote from a conversation I had, "so you had an offer from Google but you decided to do a PhD instead--why??", "Oh, I just want to do nothing for a while longer".)

The two kinds of PhD students may look the same but they're very different. If you belong to the first category, even if you realize you won't get that Nobel Prize, I doubt you're going to regret trying. If you're of the second kind, why yes, you have wasted five years of your life, which is exactly what you signed up for so why do you complain?

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Look at the interesting things Google is doing. Driverless cars is headed up by Sabastian Thrun (PhD). The technical lead on Google Glass is Thad Starner (PhD and professor at my alma mater). Heck, Page and Brin were halfway through their PhD program at Stanford (both have an MS from there) before they founded Google. PageRank was exactly the kind of thing that comes from PhD projects (extension and application of theoretical principles to new areas). And Dr. Starner has been working on wearable computing for two decades.

All these things didn't just appear out of nowhere because Google hired a bunch of bright fresh college graduates.

Google's early success was much about the supportive environment for founding a company, not the academics: networking with investors and early hires, getting recommendations from influential professors, than it was about the "PhD project" of PageRank. It was a standard graph algorithm executed on the Internet, not a ground-breaking academic project. (Obviously -- they left school before they did much any work on PageRank)

If PageRank were a new idea now, Google.com could have come up through YC.

It's not that simple and they did a prototype and published a paper before they left Stanford (three years in). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank. It was conceived as a "citation graph of the web" based on theoretical work in that area: http://web.archive.org/web/20020506051802/www-diglib.stanfor....

You say that today they could've come up through YC. I'm not sure that's true. Would they have the necessary grounding in those "standard graph algorithms" if they had just come straight to YC (or bearing in mind Stanford undergraduates benefit tremendously from the graduate program--skipped college entirely?) I think you're downplaying the interaction of study and invention here.

I did a PhD to learn and to contribute some small bit to our collective knowledge. I didn't do it to be rich nor famous. As far as "waste of time" goes, there is nothing to me more important than contributing to the worlds knowledge. Pop stars come and go and the rich are forgotten and irrelevant just as fast. Knowledge is the only thing that accumulates and continually helps future generations.

As a relevant data point. I did a PhD because I wanted to learn a lot more about Computer Science. I did most of it while working at pretty good software development firms. Most of the people I work with have PhDs. They use some of what they studied at work, and I doubt undergraduates would be nearly as effective.

There are a lot of advantages for PhDs in CS, if you like learning and studying. If you don't, there's really no reason to do a PhD, you're not going to get an outcome that you'd like. The types of jobs that work well for PhDs require (at least) some continuing research.

This is a very ignorant and short-sighted response. While I agree that getting a PhD is not for everyone, you can't make a blanket statement regarding its uselessness.

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