There are countless pragmatic reasons to avoid a PhD, and no doubt both the article and other commenters will bring them up. The most constructive thing I can do is share a personal perspective.
I am 30 years old. I am working through my last few months as a computer engineering PhD student. Eventually, it went good. Not great (the world gives zero f*cks about my work, nobody has offered me a job yet), but not hellish either (didn't quit, still mostly sane, learned a ton of stuff that I never had the guts or prudence to delve into as an undergraduate, and most importantly, I decided I like computers).
Now my background is anything but academic: none of my parents finished high school, people from my village consider me either batshit crazy or a genius. I mean, I was thrown into the PhD archipelago by life itself, rather unconsciously. I just knew that "corporate IT" wasn't my thing, and as for the cool computing jobs, I wasn't their thing. Again, I spent my years as an ECE undergraduate burying my insecurities instead of building my future. To understand the degree of mental fragmentation I was under, I had never made the connection between my digital design courses and my operating systems courses (all of this is the story of the computer, stupid, it's in the title of your degree for God's sake!).... Anyways.
It took me six years to get to today. I am another person now. The PhD (well, and the pandemic, and all that followed) crushed all of my assumptions about the world, myself, the meaning of life. There's no way to put it in the condensed form that an HN comment requires without sounding naive, but I'm telling you the truth. Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again. It made me.
At the end of the day, talking sh*t about hard stuff is sooo easy. You could replace any polemic against a PhD with one against starting a family, or a company, or in any way rejecting "safety" for the potential of leaving your own mark on the world. Being you. Like that poem by Robert Frost, these things make all the difference.
Another great thing about PhD programs is you generally don’t end them with 6 figures in college debt from the degree. As long as you get the PhD in something that gives you a marketable skill, it’s not going to hurt too much vs all the MBAs and Lawyers I know with a ton of debt and just marginally increased career choices.
> Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again.
I can't agree more. My sister died at the hardest point of my PhD and I buried myself in my work for nearly every waking second for years, confident that at least I was doing it for myself. I couldn't have done that if I were working a normal job.
In STEM in particular the opportunity costs of a PhD are extremely high and with little payoff at the end. Even if you want to stay in academia, which is the only real reason to do a PhD now, there are far more PhDs graduating per year than open faculty positions. Many get stuck in Postdoc or adjunct hell for years and can never get a tenure track role.
Most stem PhDs actually go into industry. In fact, in my department I would say 60% or more go directly to industry and we are a field with growing faculty opportunities.
The immediate post graduation employment of all PhDs is very high 74% in 2023 up from 68% in 2018 and the highest since 1993. Interestingly difference between stem and non stem is effectively moot.
I continue to be shocked in this thread at the factual statements being thrown around that there is easy data to push back on from the nationally managed survey of earned doctorates.
Whats the ROI vs a Masters for people going directly to Industry? Did they even intend to do that or realized the Academic Door was closed for them and had no other choice?
This is an incredibly small slice of roles available to CS PHDs and sometimes adjacent fields. Not really indicative of the larger STEM market and basically irrelevant to non STEM programs.
True, but how competitive are those jobs to get? If one goes to a lesser-known university that has a PhD program and does related research are they getting an interview, or are these research jobs intended for specific university pipelines (Harvard, MIT, the usuals, etc.)?
Why pay an American worker 100k + benefits out of college when you can pay an H1B worker 60k for the same level of education and also have a massive amount of leverage over them?
As usual, lot of PhD bashing in the comments. My experience was generally positive.
The good things
1. I had mostly fun doing it. Being paid to learn things is great.
2. I got to work in different countries, and travel to many places
3. I was able to have more than one career. PhD + academia, before switching to industry. Gave me more perspectives.
4. I did learn a few things and skills (public speaking, I learned a lot of things while teaching too).
The bad things
1. Opportunity cost. I could have earned more but, would have I had the same career with the PhD? hard to tell
2. A lot of what I learned is totally useless.
3. Doing a PhD was fun, being a professor wasn't. Boring administrative work, lots of bitterness among academics, unhealthy competition. (and I wasn't good enough).
Overall, I would probably do the PhD again, but wouldn't go to academia. I find that working for a big corporation can be depressing/stressful. I'm glad I did other things in my life.
For a long time, I felt stupid for getting my PhD during the buildup before the 08 bubble. I could have socked away a lot more money than my measly stipend. And afterwards, I always had decent jobs but not SV style salaries. That made me feel like it was all a bad decision.
But now that I'm approaching my 50s, I feel a bit differently. I traded variability for steady consistent growth. When SV lays of 80% of the work force and a bunch of people lose their jobs and their fancy SV salaries go to 0, I've luckily (knock on wood) never had that experience.
I bet in the long run a person making SV salary right out of college and invests smartly will still out perform economically than a steady growth after a delay for the PhD. But mentally the lack of variability has been good for me. YMMV.
Maybe it depends on the institution? I, and many of those I know who went to the same institution, had terrible PhD experiences. I burnt out and left with a Masters, others just quit, one committed suicide. Even those who completed the PhD said it was miserable.
Its hard to know if the risk of a bad time is always high or if it is dependent on culture etc, but I do not recommend PhDs as a pathway anymore.
I had a ton of fun in my PhD. It probably wasn’t the best route if I was trying to maximize total lifetime earnings, but I’m happy with the route I took.
In fact I liked it enough that I often joke that my retirement plan will be to get into another PhD program for the stipend/insurance and just do projects to help some junior prof get their career going
I agree that it can be fun. I also devised a retirement plan as a graduate student, figuring out what sum of money I would need to live the rest of my life living the graduate student lifestyle without the hassle of being enrolled. Less than a decade after finishing my PhD I was able to walk away from my career into that lifestyle. Certainly not for everyone, but if it floats your boat, it is certainly an achievable plan.
> my retirement plan will be to get into another PhD program for the stipend/insurance
Imagine being a young ambitious student not getting placed into a PhD program because some old dude doing it for the benefits and the lolz took the spot.
I feel like everyone says this regardless of what level of education they have. I have a PhD and I've never felt this way. Everything I've learnt has contributed to the whole. The broad, shallow exposure from school has been extremely useful. I think I've used just about everything at one time or another. The PhD was less about learning in the specific area and more about learning how to do a PhD. You have to learn how to study a field and get on top of it, how to organise and assimilate that information, and how to build on top of that. This is definitely still useful to me and I'm not sure I would have learned to do it without actually doing it.
A few extra thoughts since I wrote the parent comment
- I did my PhD in Europe where it's only 3 years after master, so the opportunity cost is less
- I noticed a lot of frustration with PhD candidates comes from applying to academic positions. If this is not the end goal, this could also lead to a better experience.
- I said a lot of what I learned is useless, this can be mitigated by carefully choosing a topic, although not easy when you have little perspective, and possibly limited options (lots of candidates pick a topic in their local university for instance). It's also possible to intern in companies during a PhD.
So many people love doing research but find the actual academic career path miserable. I think it's a shame, because it pushes a lot of talented people out.
The smartest people I’ve ever worked with to date were from physics grad school. Still remember the time my coworker was doing code profiling, decided he was unhappy that the exponential function from the standard library was too slow, and decided to write a Taylor series approximation that gave him the precision he needed and cut the run time in half. He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry. And these were just every day occurrences that made it a thrill to go to work. Working with talented people is a drug.
Some tips for younger people considering it: get involved in undergraduate research, apply to fellowships, shop for an advisor with a good reputation, start anticipating and preparing for an industry transition early, travel, date, and enjoy life!
I don't want to take away from his brilliance, but generally Taylor approximations perform far worse than the standard library implementations. It's also the first tool of choice for physicists, so who knows ...?
My guess, though, is that if he improved the performance, he used some other wizardry (Chebyshev or something similar).
As someone with a phd and is a professor at a community college, with the current governmental chaos there's no way I would recommend anyone starting a phd in the USA. In addition to the poor pay (and I was in the department of communication and I distinctly remember fellow grad students in stem complaining about their pay... which was literally double mine), there is also the fact that no one knows what is going to happen with funding. In my case, not only is there the federal government, but I live in a state with a republican supermajority so I have zero optimism about future prospects of higher education here. I'm just hoping I can hang on until retirement in a 15 years or so.
In the US, note that for many foreign students, PhD is a (in many cases, much faster) pathway to permanent residency compared to your standard PERM/H1B things
Incidentally if you are interested in doing a PhD the University of oslo has 64 open phd and postdoc positions currently. PhDs will get a competitive salary (typically something like 50-55k USD/year, this is much higher than anything in USA for example), free healthcare, pension, in the first year you qualify for cheap student housing if you have moved from abroad, and tbh, Norway is kind of nice to live in in my opinion as long as you pick up a winter sport and don't mind the darkness.
As someone who moved to Norway (not Oslo) to pursue a PhD in computer science, I highly suggest everyone who might be interested to give it a chance. High quality of life and supportive system and society.
Vacancies for University of Bergen: https://www.uib.no/en/about/84777/vacant-positions-uib.
This was weirdly exciting and depressing at the same time :)
What are the chances in trying to go for a non-STEM Masters/PhD (or higher studies in general) in Norway (or one of "those" countries) after studying E for UG and then working in E for more than a decade (in the third world) and having no other experience at all? Or anywhere for that matter? Is there a way to go about it? (Now, this might sound entitled, and I apologise if it does, but without having to pay (at least) tuition for that higher education)
> This was weirdly exciting and depressing at the same time :)
And, depending on how far north you go, should be taken seriously. In Iceland, out of my exchange students cohort of ~10, once the winter hit, one had to escape home and two were hospitalised after too much drinking. It can be a really tough experience, especially when you don't have close friends/family to contact and lose track of time.
I think that there is some options at University of Oslo for example. I work in geophysics and ML, so I don't know so much. But at some point I entertained the idea of doing a PhD in science fiction which is an option at UiO. There is also a large linguistics department and social sciences faculty as well as two centers for education research.. I imagine there are many options, but I think it is hard for me to know since I don't do that kind of work.
Unless someone really want to become a postdoc or tenured PI similar to the calling of a teacher, it's really difficult to justify the lower opportunity (time and money) cost of a Masters' or PhD in the US in tech, for example. After just a few years, one can make 250k USD/yr sometimes without even a 4-year degree in CompSci or related STEM field. I honestly feel dumb for pursuing the equivalent of a reputable BS EE/CS when I could've been making 400k/yr in dotcom times.
More power to pure academics who don't pursue money or fame, and instead make an impact.
I am more motivated to find jobs that let me think my thoughts than jobs that maximise my income. People often say well but if you make a lot then you can pay for this. I have found that those that make a lot never find the time to pay for it.
Not sure that is a perk. In EU (not sure about this exact offer in Norway) to get ANY money out of pension, you have to work like 30 years at the very same country (not EU). But it is mandatory social insurance (tax) of 10% to 40% of your income.
In some EU countries, you must have worked for a minimum period of time to be entitled to a pension.
In such cases, the pension authority has to take into account all the periods you've worked in other EU countries, as if you'd been working in that country all along, to assess whether you're entitled to a pension (principle of aggregation of periods).
How your pension is calculated
Pension authorities in each EU country you've worked in will look at the contributions you've paid into their system, how much you've paid in other countries, and for how long you've worked in different countries.
You've looked at postdoc salaries, not PhD salaries. very different. For example in the UK a PhD will get somewhere aroun £19-21k a year, whilst a postdoc will get anywhere from £37-45k a year......
There are no language requirements to be a phd or postdoc at the university of oslo except in the cases where you may need to speak a scandinavian language to study it such as if you are working at the center for nordic linguistics. So no, you do not need to consider this an issue at all.
I considered a PhD in machine learning. It’s mostly downsides. Granted, most fields are not like this but:
1) The field moves too fast to focus on a single thing for 4 years. A lot of people were devastated when ChatGPT essentially solved their NLP tasks.
2) Cutting edge NLP/vision research is being done in industrial labs as much as universities. And industry will probably outgun you with equipment (GPUs) and high quality data.
3) Pay sucks. You can make 3-5x working in industry. The opportunity cost could be a half million dollars.
4) You can get a lot out of a Masters in half the time or less.
What sort of benefits come from getting a Masters? Everyone I talk to seems to say a Masters in CompSci is useless, and that you may as well do a PhD instead.
A lot of job requirements that I see ask for Masters or PhD, so you’re hitting the minimum requirement plus giving yourself a shot of having applicable work experience (read: doesn’t write spaghetti code). That said, there’s probably a huge selection bias due to my background.
I believe a masters has helped me stand out as a candidate at least. Plus, I learned a great deal about computer engineering! The fundamentals have come in handy.
It helped me get a visa for Italy (I took part in a startup accelerator program).
Other than that not much else... I mean you learn things, but you could also learn things from watching YouTube, doing courses and reading books!
I've also seen people do PhD's and from the outside it seems like a lot of them did it just for the title - one of my friends though seems to love Academia and is now a professor.
Machine learning could be hardware as well. I'm in integrated circuit design and there are lots of custom hardware AI accelerators in development. Almost all of the new grads we hire have a masters degree in electrical or computer engineering (not computer science)
If I could go back to that age, I'd focus my PhD on actually understanding what's going on in ML models. Industry is always going to be incentivized to build things and not understand, so you can fill in the details. Plus it would be fascinating.
It’s not like interpretability research is immune. You could’ve been in year 4 of your degree when Anthropic released their sparse autoencoder research. It’s just less busy because as you correctly note, industry mostly cares about getting the black box to print money.
> Plus it would be fascinating
You can do research on the weekend even if you’re not in a PhD. I’ve done it. And no one was breathing down my neck to publish it.
Readit News
I am 30 years old. I am working through my last few months as a computer engineering PhD student. Eventually, it went good. Not great (the world gives zero f*cks about my work, nobody has offered me a job yet), but not hellish either (didn't quit, still mostly sane, learned a ton of stuff that I never had the guts or prudence to delve into as an undergraduate, and most importantly, I decided I like computers).
Now my background is anything but academic: none of my parents finished high school, people from my village consider me either batshit crazy or a genius. I mean, I was thrown into the PhD archipelago by life itself, rather unconsciously. I just knew that "corporate IT" wasn't my thing, and as for the cool computing jobs, I wasn't their thing. Again, I spent my years as an ECE undergraduate burying my insecurities instead of building my future. To understand the degree of mental fragmentation I was under, I had never made the connection between my digital design courses and my operating systems courses (all of this is the story of the computer, stupid, it's in the title of your degree for God's sake!).... Anyways.
It took me six years to get to today. I am another person now. The PhD (well, and the pandemic, and all that followed) crushed all of my assumptions about the world, myself, the meaning of life. There's no way to put it in the condensed form that an HN comment requires without sounding naive, but I'm telling you the truth. Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again. It made me.
At the end of the day, talking sh*t about hard stuff is sooo easy. You could replace any polemic against a PhD with one against starting a family, or a company, or in any way rejecting "safety" for the potential of leaving your own mark on the world. Being you. Like that poem by Robert Frost, these things make all the difference.
I can't agree more. My sister died at the hardest point of my PhD and I buried myself in my work for nearly every waking second for years, confident that at least I was doing it for myself. I couldn't have done that if I were working a normal job.
The immediate post graduation employment of all PhDs is very high 74% in 2023 up from 68% in 2018 and the highest since 1993. Interestingly difference between stem and non stem is effectively moot.
I continue to be shocked in this thread at the factual statements being thrown around that there is easy data to push back on from the nationally managed survey of earned doctorates.
The good things
1. I had mostly fun doing it. Being paid to learn things is great.
2. I got to work in different countries, and travel to many places
3. I was able to have more than one career. PhD + academia, before switching to industry. Gave me more perspectives.
4. I did learn a few things and skills (public speaking, I learned a lot of things while teaching too).
The bad things
1. Opportunity cost. I could have earned more but, would have I had the same career with the PhD? hard to tell
2. A lot of what I learned is totally useless.
3. Doing a PhD was fun, being a professor wasn't. Boring administrative work, lots of bitterness among academics, unhealthy competition. (and I wasn't good enough).
Overall, I would probably do the PhD again, but wouldn't go to academia. I find that working for a big corporation can be depressing/stressful. I'm glad I did other things in my life.
For a long time, I felt stupid for getting my PhD during the buildup before the 08 bubble. I could have socked away a lot more money than my measly stipend. And afterwards, I always had decent jobs but not SV style salaries. That made me feel like it was all a bad decision.
But now that I'm approaching my 50s, I feel a bit differently. I traded variability for steady consistent growth. When SV lays of 80% of the work force and a bunch of people lose their jobs and their fancy SV salaries go to 0, I've luckily (knock on wood) never had that experience.
I bet in the long run a person making SV salary right out of college and invests smartly will still out perform economically than a steady growth after a delay for the PhD. But mentally the lack of variability has been good for me. YMMV.
Its hard to know if the risk of a bad time is always high or if it is dependent on culture etc, but I do not recommend PhDs as a pathway anymore.
In fact I liked it enough that I often joke that my retirement plan will be to get into another PhD program for the stipend/insurance and just do projects to help some junior prof get their career going
Imagine being a young ambitious student not getting placed into a PhD program because some old dude doing it for the benefits and the lolz took the spot.
I feel like everyone says this regardless of what level of education they have. I have a PhD and I've never felt this way. Everything I've learnt has contributed to the whole. The broad, shallow exposure from school has been extremely useful. I think I've used just about everything at one time or another. The PhD was less about learning in the specific area and more about learning how to do a PhD. You have to learn how to study a field and get on top of it, how to organise and assimilate that information, and how to build on top of that. This is definitely still useful to me and I'm not sure I would have learned to do it without actually doing it.
- I did my PhD in Europe where it's only 3 years after master, so the opportunity cost is less
- I noticed a lot of frustration with PhD candidates comes from applying to academic positions. If this is not the end goal, this could also lead to a better experience.
- I said a lot of what I learned is useless, this can be mitigated by carefully choosing a topic, although not easy when you have little perspective, and possibly limited options (lots of candidates pick a topic in their local university for instance). It's also possible to intern in companies during a PhD.
- Having a PhD can open new doors.
Some tips for younger people considering it: get involved in undergraduate research, apply to fellowships, shop for an advisor with a good reputation, start anticipating and preparing for an industry transition early, travel, date, and enjoy life!
My guess, though, is that if he improved the performance, he used some other wizardry (Chebyshev or something similar).
If anything it's a lesson that the definition of brilliance is being in the wrong place at the wrong time... ;-)
Check it out for yourself! I’m not claiming this was some kind of prodigious programming move, just something memorable that stuck with me.
> He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry
I doubt this. Really, really doubt this. Sure, geniuses exist, but I don't buy it.
https://www.mn.uio.no/english/about/vacancies/index.html
Don't forget to bring your rain gear!
This was weirdly exciting and depressing at the same time :)
What are the chances in trying to go for a non-STEM Masters/PhD (or higher studies in general) in Norway (or one of "those" countries) after studying E for UG and then working in E for more than a decade (in the third world) and having no other experience at all? Or anywhere for that matter? Is there a way to go about it? (Now, this might sound entitled, and I apologise if it does, but without having to pay (at least) tuition for that higher education)
And, depending on how far north you go, should be taken seriously. In Iceland, out of my exchange students cohort of ~10, once the winter hit, one had to escape home and two were hospitalised after too much drinking. It can be a really tough experience, especially when you don't have close friends/family to contact and lose track of time.
More power to pure academics who don't pursue money or fame, and instead make an impact.
Not sure that is a perk. In EU (not sure about this exact offer in Norway) to get ANY money out of pension, you have to work like 30 years at the very same country (not EU). But it is mandatory social insurance (tax) of 10% to 40% of your income.
Quite far from the truth.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/work/retire-abroad/sta...
Eligibility periods
In some EU countries, you must have worked for a minimum period of time to be entitled to a pension.
In such cases, the pension authority has to take into account all the periods you've worked in other EU countries, as if you'd been working in that country all along, to assess whether you're entitled to a pension (principle of aggregation of periods).
How your pension is calculated
Pension authorities in each EU country you've worked in will look at the contributions you've paid into their system, how much you've paid in other countries, and for how long you've worked in different countries.
In fact it is similar in many countries (i.e. UK) where there is a minimum period required to get anything
This is not my experience (close friend in a flyover state makes 55k), so I googled and found this website: https://postdocsalaries.com/results
55k looks to be well within the normal range of American postdoc salaries.
1) The field moves too fast to focus on a single thing for 4 years. A lot of people were devastated when ChatGPT essentially solved their NLP tasks.
2) Cutting edge NLP/vision research is being done in industrial labs as much as universities. And industry will probably outgun you with equipment (GPUs) and high quality data.
3) Pay sucks. You can make 3-5x working in industry. The opportunity cost could be a half million dollars.
4) You can get a lot out of a Masters in half the time or less.
Google will hire you to work on moving protobufs around as an L4, instead of an L3.
Other than that not much else... I mean you learn things, but you could also learn things from watching YouTube, doing courses and reading books!
I've also seen people do PhD's and from the outside it seems like a lot of them did it just for the title - one of my friends though seems to love Academia and is now a professor.
> Plus it would be fascinating
You can do research on the weekend even if you’re not in a PhD. I’ve done it. And no one was breathing down my neck to publish it.