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Comment by priley | Hacker News Reader

It's totally not worth it unless you want to be a professor. Trust me.

Disclaimer: I am in geoscience, not CS, so my situation isn't the same as the blogger's. But much of the important things should still apply.

There are a lot of sacrifices to be made, it's really not for everyone, and timing is pretty important, but...

Though I'm not sold on becoming a professor, getting my PhD was a great experience, and really has set me up for a lot that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. Especially in the US system, where most students are required to do some teaching and a good amount of coursework in addition to rigorous research projects, there is a lot of personal/intellectual/character development that comes from not only balancing these responsibilities but being able to intellectually parse, synthesize, improve, and communicate the content. Granted, there are other ways to get some of these experiences, and a lot is missing, but there is some serious Gestalt here. Qualifying exams, as fear-inducing and social-life-destroying as they may be during preparation, really do whip you into intellectual shape.

And if you are really interested in your research, and your methods of inquiry are sufficiently compatible with the 'establishment' to keep you out of too much trouble, the opportunity to immerse yourself in your interests is rare elsewhere, especially if there isn't a lot of immediate monetary incentive to study the subject.

I do industry consulting as well as academic research now, and the industry stuff is still considered 'research'. Neither position would be available to me without a PhD, and I like both jobs much more than the work I see people with BS/MS degrees doing (or what I see most faculty doing), even though I am currently a bit underpaid.

So I would say that it's not always bad practical choice, even for those who aren't interested in professorships. Again, not for everybody, but it seems like the OP knows what he's getting into.

It's totally not worth it unless you want to satisfy your own curiosity rather than work on someone else's (usually stupid) startup idea. Trust me.

The author's reasons are valid. I hope he looks into doing research in live programming, which seems to be within his interests.

It's not for everyone, and maybe it's not for you, but my PhD was definitely worth it, and I was never going to be a professor.

I'm sorry that it didn't work out for you, and that you feel you wasted your time, but don't presume to speak for everyone.

You don't speak for me.

> and now I know not to trust you.

Was that part really necessary?

As soon as I submitted it I went back to remove it. But thanks for calling me on it anyway.

But perhaps you can find a more diplomatic way to say the same thing. When someone says something that's clearly an opinion, and wrong in my experience, and follows it with "Trust me," it's a guarantee that I will regard everything they say with suspicion.

Should that not be the case? How else should I point out the consequences of their utterance? Or should I let it pass, and not try to help them see the consequences?

I'd be interested in your thoughts on that.

Ah, so that was a response to the commenter's "trust me" remark. Perhaps "why should I trust you over some thousands of grad students," but it's difficult to gauge the amount of thought or research the commenter puts into "trust me," which is thrown around pretty liberally in modern English. When a friend says, "trust me, don't drink the water," and clearly his experience with water was not representative, if you want to keep the friend you're probably better off addressing it as a water quality issue instead of a trust issue. I'd say let the trust subject pass, and probably also save vocabulary like "utterance" for your enemies, or people wearing sith lord halloween costumes, etc.

Noted - thx.

WRT "utterance", it's probably a hangover from my lojban days. Different cultures use language differently. In my context, "utterance" is a common term, whereas "Trust me" is taken more sriously than you imply. Awareness of such issues is valuable - I'll look out for my usages of "utterance" in the future.

Thank you.

It really depends on what you value to be "worth it".

If you value the end goal of becoming a professor, you'd agree the Phd is "worth it"; perhaps this provides a career-oriented perspective.

But consider the other values:

If you want to explore a novel, foundational (perhaps theoretical) area of the field, academia represents a good venue. The journey is what is "worth it" to the value of intellectual curiosity.

Similarly, if you value gaining extreme depth in a narrow topic area to the end of advancing that topic area, academia enables an appropriate level of focus for that.

Blanket statements of what academia is useful for are biased by individual values, and are thus generally unhelpful. Not everyone pursues a path for its ends or career utility.

Ten years after getting mine, I'm still glad I did, even though I wound up deciding not to be a professor after all.

Suppose that I want to do basic research in, say, physics. How would I do so without a PhD?

If you were doing that, you'd likely either be a professor (of some kind), or on that track post-doc, etc... or the national laboratory equivalent. I don't know how many PhD-level "staff" positions there are on the big physics experiments.

It's probably more accurate to say "unless you want to be an academic" as opposed to "unless you want to be a professor", but since becoming a professor is usually the goal of an academic career, it's a fair statement to make.

Thank you for the reply. So the only, or at least best, way of doing science research is to be an academic, or work at a national laboratory (does that count as academia?)? Thus, the statement "only reason to do a PhD is to be an academic" is isomorphic to the statement "only reason to do a PhD is to do basic science research"?

You can definitely get a job as a staff researcher at a national lab or small applied-science company (there are a ton of companies doing DARPA research). Note that due to the way the world is, you may not be able to be the prime scientist on a contract, but that does not stop you from doing basic research via collaboration.

If your contributions become noteworthy in the field, then along with the relationships that you've generated with your DARPA/NSF/? partner, you will eventually be able to be a prime.

To reiterate some of the other comments here, you may not be able to pick the 'basic research' that you want to work on in the above scenarios... usually the grant sponsors decide that.

Thank you for the reply. Do you mind if I ask some more questions? Suppose that I am financially independent and do not care about being paid, then would that open up more paths for me?

How basic, and what qualifies as research?

http://thinkinghard.com/blog/AmateurTheoreticalScience.html

>In recent times, science has become very professionalised. Many of the steps in the list above serve specifically to maintain high professional standards. For example, step 5 – complete a Ph.D. – is a way of measuring an individual's likelihood of making significant contributions to scientific knowledge.

You wouldn't be able to. But keep in mind ... (1) It's extremely difficult to get a job doing basic research in physics, even with a PhD. (2) The OP hasn't said he wants to do basic research.

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