Goodbye to academic research

http://blog.devicerandom.org/2011/02/18/getting-a-life/

by rsaarelm • 15 years ago

270 88 15 years ago

blog.devicerandom.org

argv_empty• 15 years ago

I keep getting 503 on the site. Here's a coral cache: http://blog.devicerandom.org.nyud.net/2011/02/18/getting-a-l...

tjmaxal2• 15 years ago

This is a good outline of a problem, with absolutely no insights into any possible solutions. As far as I'm concerned this is a half finished post. It's not enough to simply complain/outline the problem. You have to use that personal experience to offer up some kind of personal redemption or possible global solution to really keep the conversation moving.

mkr-hn2• 15 years ago

You don't have to find solutions to point out a problem. He might be so fried by the experience that he doesn't have the presence of mind to come up with solutions.

It seems like the goal might have been to put academia on notice so _it_ could determine whether or not it cares about the problem enough to solve it.

scott_s2• 15 years ago

I hope this is a farcical attempt to write an academic-style review of his Dear John letter to academia.

chime6• 15 years ago

Reading this article makes me realize I certainly picked the road not taken. Last year I quit my job as the Director of IT at a small pharma, dropped out of a company-paid MBA program, drastically reduced my expenses, and started doing independent research. A lot of people around me thought I was crazy especially since I wasn't going the PhD or startup route either. In my mind though, it seems pretty logical - I want to do real computer science research without all the BS that goes on with academia or corporate research lab.

I'm more productive when working solo than in teams. And I already have a specific research project in mind. All I needed was to plan my life so I'd have 50-60hr/week free after my bills were paid. For the past two months, I've been working on my research project diligently and without any external delays. I know I won't get a degree out of this and I doubt I can get published but since that's not my end-goal, it doesn't matter. I am looking for a hardware hacker if anyone is interested - it is a very fun/rewarding project: http://ktype.net

tjmaxal2• 15 years ago

Are you just doing research for researches sake? If so good for you. If not, why try and do it independently? Don't you think you deserve to be rewarded for your work? i.e. compensated either with prestige or money? At the very least would you like to be compensated for you contributions to the field?

nutanc• 15 years ago

Prestige and compensation are two ways of being rewarded. Another way is to just see your work make the world a better place and feel satisfied.

chime6• 15 years ago

I guess I'm doing it for the end-goal's sake. I really do want people with disabilities to be able to communicate better, including my own cousin. As long as my bills are being paid (regardless of the source of income), I don't need any rewards. I'm not a saint or anything - I just don't want to deal with the overhead of funding, grants, scholarships, sales, marketing, clients, customers. I want to make a usable, innovative product and keep improving it. A few years ago my preliminary version got #1 on HN ( http://chir.ag/projects/ktype/ ) and since that day I have been working hard to change my life so I could work on it full-time. Took over a year but I can finally do it now, so I'm very happy.

jazzyb• 15 years ago

What is the ultimate goal of your research? If you are simply doing research for the fun of it, then you can only continue it without funding for as long as you have runway capital. I ask this question because I've thought about doing the same thing, but I'm not sure I could productize the research I want to do, so it scares me to begin and basically throw away my savings for no tangible benefit. I'd appreciate your thoughts.

chime6• 15 years ago

I was very careful to pick realistic, targetable goals for my research project, KType. World peace wouldn't cut it. KType has the goals of:

  * Improving communication for people with disabilities
  * Creating low-cost software / hardware tools, customizable for each individual
  * Providing useful research material and articles for families & friends
  * Sharing case studies of actual users

Money doesn't factor into this because over the past few years, I've worked hard to ensure my bills are paid without me having to work full-time. My research project goals have to do with the real project's usability and accessibility and not orthogonal accomplishments like publishing papers, getting grants etc. That's all I need to keeps me in focus. Every minute I work on KType, I am actually working on KType. It's a very slow process but at least I know I'm moving in the right direction.

chwahoo• 15 years ago

Doing independent research like this is very cool. I admire your willingness to take such a risk and make this sacrifice. One comment I would add is that, while you might be more "productive" solo (less context switching/blocking I assume ;), working with others forces you to maintain a persuasive, crisp story about why what your doing is the right thing. While early, exploratory research can temporarily delay the need for this story, it can't be delayed long!

From the info on your website, it looks like you are developing keyboard layouts that would be useful for people with disabilities. However, I was unable to figure out what your elevator speech for this work might be. What is your hypothesis? What evidence do you have for it? What disability(ies) are you targeting? How will new mobile keyboard help?

Lastly, this looks like a useful project for others (you're not just proving random theorems in your basement :)! Why not re-frame this in your mind as a startup? Good luck!

chime6• 15 years ago

I am definitely getting input from as many people as I can. Within a month, I'm going to start working with my potential users and their caretakers so that'll be real feedback.

I'm targeting http://ktype.net/wiki/research:disabilities which prevent people from talking or using a keyboard - Stephen Hawkings of the world as well as autistic children with major speech problems. There are many existing solutions out there to help people with disabilities but there are also very wide gaps in between. I'm trying to catalog everything I can find to help fill in the gaps and I will make my own bridges if necessary.

The new keyboard is an iPad app (Demo: http://ktype.net/wiki/dev:demo ) and it will be extremely customizable. On the iPad itself, you can already define your own keys/layout: http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20110204

Additionally, I'm working on a vastly better auto-suggest feature: http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20110209 than a cellphone T9. Also, I want to make it work with a variety of hardware input devices. If you are a researcher making a brain-reading interface for paralyzed patients, don't hook it up to Windows! KType will learn from each user's patterns and will be customizable enough to support easy communication. I'm also going to integrate Twitter/email etc. soon enough - http://ktype.net/wiki/dev:roadmap

Don't get me started I can keep talking about this 24/7 :)

david9273• 15 years ago

I did the same thing about ten years ago: I quit a high-paying job in Zurich, moved to Prague on-the-cheap, and hired two Czech PhD students part-time. We spent five years doing CS research and it was always two-steps forward, one back. Every three or four months we would throw everything out and start again; and we had the freedom to do so. There was no installed base, no one tapping their fingers expectantly. Looking back, I wouldn’t have done it any other way. I think you made a great choice. Good luck!

jlmendezbonini• 15 years ago

Would you mind telling us what has happened since?

rapicastillo• 15 years ago

This is the exact same thing i am planning to do. i am currently in a lavish tech consultancy firm, but the whole idea of being a "resource" is really stagnating my brain, and also objectivizes humanity. I still can't stand being called a resource.

Im planning on quitting soon, and doing independent research while creating non-startup apps. Posts like this (and the link above) really motivate me. :)

Best of luck to ya!

chime6• 15 years ago

Thanks! Same to you. Feel free to keep me updated with your research projects.

hessenwolf• 15 years ago

Watch for the 8 month wtf collapse, stay in bed for the requisite week, and then just get back up again.

NY_USA_Hacker6• 15 years ago

You wrote:

"I know I won't get a degree out of this and I doubt I can get published"

Sorry to disagree! :-)!

For getting published, try some journal on human-computer interaction. Since you know much more about your field than I do, look for other journal 'varieties' as well.

For what you are doing, that is, a lot of independent, call it, R&D, if you get results anything like what you want, then it would be surprising if you didn't have something publishable. If this argument is not enough, then look at much of what does get published and conclude that much of it is not very high quality stuff!

Uh, one way to improve your paper a notch or two over what is common is just to write well, say, well organized, clear, including writing good English with good spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

Once you are published at least once, better, say, three times, sorry, but you should be able to get a Ph.D.! :-)! Maybe this is a big disappointment, but it's true!

How then to get a Ph.D? Four points:

(1) At at least some of the best US research universities, there is no coursework requirement for a Ph.D.

(2) The requirement for a dissertation is, say, "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication". Since you've already been there, done that, got the T-shirt, there's no question. Big, huge advantage.

(3) One more requirement would likely be the qualifying exams. These exams are to show that you are 'qualified' to move on to research and do research. But, uh, did I mention that you've already been there, done that, got the T-shirt? The difficulty of the qualifying exams varies widely, but generally the 'polish on your halo' can be important in deciding who passes.

So, it can be good to have some high quality halo polish; here are three: (A) Some of the best halo polish is published papers, the more papers, more highly regarded, the better the polish. (B) More halo polish is when it looks like you might be a successful entrepreneur who gets good publicity for the university and, maybe later on, is, uh, 'thankful and generous'! (C) More good polish is that you actually did this work, conceived it, took it on, got it done, independently, which means you are promising as a good researcher for the future bringing more good publicity to the university.

(4) There may be a requirement for 'residency' for a year. This can mean that maybe you show up on campus some day in September and again in the spring to defend your dissertation which you submit by taking a stack of your published papers and putting a big staple in the UL corner.

For more:

You should pick the university and department carefully. You might try, say, the bio-engineering program at Johns Hopkins. I would focus on such higher end engineering programs with 'biology' contact. Of course try MIT and Cal Tech. Don't settle for Southern Sawgrass U.

You may be able to get a research grant, before, during, or after your Ph.D. program: At your university, ask the people who know about grant sources. Maybe the US DoD VA would give you a grant. A research grant is the 'magic bullet' to rapid progress in academics because you are bringing money to the university! You will understand better when you see what fraction of the money the university keeps for 'overhead'! Did I hear someone say, "Money talks."?

Uh, one way to pick a department and prof: Pick your journal carefully! That is, if you want to get into program A with full prof P editor of relevant journal X, then submit your paper to journal X and, if it is accepted, then, uh, take 'advantage' of this contact you made with prof P to get your Ph.D. Note: It can be possible for prof P to 'direct' your dissertation at a school not his.

Uh, once your paper is accepted, prof P may invite you to present your paper at his conference on Computer-Human Interaction or some such. Likely accept! Then that's two bullets on your CV.

Note: When you submit your paper, likely you do not have to give any significant biographical information at all. So, you don't need a high school transcript! In particular, it doesn't have to be clear if you have a Ph.D. or not. So, before your Ph.D., you are fully 'qualified' to submit a paper.

Note: Commonly a journal plays pocket pool with your paper for a year before sending you results of reviews. So, two rejections and one acceptance would take three years. Bummer.

So, to speed up the process, go online, find maybe 50 appropriate journals, to the editor in chief of each, via e-mail or on paper, write a nice, one page letter outlining your paper and asking "might your journal be interested?", enclose a copy of your paper, and, then, only from the responses make a 'formal submission'.

Uh, the research universities make a big, huge deal out of 'research' both for the faculty and for at least the Ph.D. students. Else they'd have to know something about the real world and teach it, right? Horrors!

Uh, the research universities long since concluded that by a wide margin the most difficult part of a Ph.D. and the usual point of failure is just the research for the dissertation. For some students, that work is hard enough to threaten their life (literally). For others, it's put their feet up for an afternoon, think up some good stuff, write it up, send it in, get it accepted for publication, and shout "Done!".

In my opinion, you've already passed the main obstacle: You've decided to do some independent work.

For more, you've picked a problem, have some productive lines of attack, and are making progress.

For more, if you get the research results you have in mind, then you will have something "new, correct, and significant": "New"? No doubt what you are working on does not yet exist. "Correct"? It works! "Significant"? Ask Hawking or many people and/or groups working with the handicapped. E.g., ask the US DoD VA.

You can do something cute here: You satisfy "significant" because you solve a practical problem and not because you have a theorem or counterexample that settles some old conjecture about differential cohomology that only six people in the world know about. Readers listen up: This example makes a useful, general point!

Presto: "New, correct, and significant" are the usual criteria for publication!

That is, you've already given up on taking a problem from a prof, pleasing a prof, caring mostly about what will please a prof, looking for praise, approval, status, prestige, guidance, 'mentoring' from a prof, etc.

But, but, but, your work would never get venture funding, right? Wrong! One of the 'themes' Brad Feld likes to pursue is human-computer interaction, especially without a traditional keyboard! Uh, if you had Hawking, the DoD VA, and some organization for the handicapped on your side, had some beta testers, ..., then you might get a venture capital check -- it's not hopeless.

Sorry to disagree with your:

"I know I won't get a degree out of this and I doubt I can get published". :-)!

There's an old quote: "Be wise; generalize.".

Okay: How I got a Ph.D.: I started with a practical problem I'd identified and worked on before grad school. I saw a solution intuitively. In my first year in grad school, I took some advanced math that let me turn my intuitive stuff into some solid theorems and proofs for a solution, and in my first summer independently I did that. That work was all but the software and typing for my dissertation.

For some interim 'halo polish', I saw a problem, thought for a few evenings, roughly saw a solution, and then signed up for a 'reading course' on that problem. I worked for a few more days and saw a much nicer solution, wrote it up, turned it in, and was done with the reading course in two weeks. The work looked publishable and was -- I published it later. So, in two weeks I'd created "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication", that is, satisfied the requirement for a dissertation. Good halo polish.

A student who does such independent work is "difficult", but on this point read the recent Fred Wilson blog at his AVC.COM.

You will not be the first to do some independent work and later get a Ph.D. for it. Uh, one of the biggest topics now in computer science is a 'good' algorithm as in the set of algorithms P as in the question P versus NP. Well, likely and apparently the formulator of a 'good' algorithm was Jack Edmonds. Can get a start on him at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Edmonds

Yes, he also won a von Neumann prize, etc. Little things like that!

As at Wikipedia, he was at University of Maryland (UM). Uh, as I heard the story, he was not a happy Ph.D. student at UM so left to the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) about 40 miles away. Then he published some good work in graph theory. Finally some of the math faculty at UM, feeling a little guilty, drove to NBS, smoked a peace pipe, and said essentially "Put a staple in the UL corner of your papers and we'll be pleased to call it a Ph.D. dissertation in our department.".

Final point: Of course, D. Knuth knows about academics. Well buried in 'The TeXBook' is:

"The traditional way is to put off all creative aspects until the last part of graduate school. For seventeen or more years, a student is taught 'examsmanship', then suddenly after passing enough exams in graduate school he's told to do something original."

Yes, there very much is a conflict here: The approach to getting into grad school can strongly conflict with the approach to writing a dissertation.

elai• 15 years ago

Thank you for the very useful comment, but why do you have so many uh words in your comment?

lazyjeff• 15 years ago

This is a very interesting comment. It reads a bit like "phd hacking". Did you try this? The work done by the OP is indeed has potential to be published. The above comment, while written in an encouraging tone, has some caveats that might be worth pointing out.

"(1) At at least some of the best US research universities, there is no coursework requirement for a Ph.D."

* I find that to be untrue. In my case, I had a M.S. before applying, and still had to take nearly 2 years of required coursework. It depends on the program, but I have not heard of any U.S. program that will accept a B.S. and not have required classes.

"(2) The requirement for a dissertation is, say, "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication". Since you've already been there, done that, got the T-shirt, there's no question. Big, huge advantage."

* Most students accepted to the best PhD programs (computer science) will already have top-tier publications before entering. It is definitely a good thing to have a publication, but rather than being finished, you will have just begun.

"(3) One more requirement would likely be the qualifying exams. These exams are to show that you are 'qualified' to move on to research and do research. But, uh, did I mention that you've already been there, done that, got the T-shirt?"

* Quals will still require reading deeply from the literature. You will be expected to know all the fundamentals in your computer science area to pass. Having published is irrelevant here.

"Maybe the US DoD VA would give you a grant."

* Often only professors can apply for the big grants, and writing a grant is actually non-trivial. They need to see a fantastic track record, a solid proven team, and often nods to diversity and educating the public. Some students will help their advisors write the grant, but in the end it's the advisor who doles out the money and is the PI.

I feel the attitude of professors/academia being so easy to fool to be somewhat overstated here. I won't go into the "ease of publishing" comments, but my first top-tier publication took 3 years with many rejections, when I was an a non-student doing research. I also did a lot of research that was rejected and went into the "paper graveyard". After doing it a few times, publishing is significantly easier since you will better know the methodology, literature, and how to write academically. I'm not trying to be discouraging, but I find the above comment to be optimistic but a bit exaggerated.

kirubakaran• 15 years ago

I'd like to get in touch with you sometime. Can you please share your contact info? If you don't want to put it in your profile, you can email it to me kirubakaran@gmail.com

snippyhollow• 15 years ago

It is a matter of finding balance: finding the right advisor, keeping some time for your other life (your girlfriend, your friends) even if you will have deadline rushes and think about your problem under the shower. This is a common problem to all passionate people more than only "scientists". It just seems that you find a lot of passionate scientist in academia.

This writing seems about right (except that I didn't experience that much bad collaboration/competition though, even if I know it exists) to me, a second year Ph.D student in AI applied to RTS games. I don't really like that you have to work 24/7 to not be left behind, and I don't work that much indeed. Life is too short to have yours dictated by the actions of others. If you want to stop at 50hours/week while doing research, just try and make it so (focus your topic and focus on your advantages). But I'm happy pursuing a Ph.D. I don't have a fixed mindset/idea of what I would like to do next though: a startup? Working at a big firm? Seeking tenure? All options will be considered, but right now: I enjoy being paid (not much, particularly compared to my Masters prom comrades) to work on interesting topics and sometimes teach guys at the University about one of my passions (CS), with a great advisor (I picked him socially great and scientifically sharp, the mid-low h-index and the beard are byproducts), and so much intelligent people all around.

rflrob• 15 years ago

> This is a common problem to all passionate people more than only "scientists". It just seems that you find a lot of passionate scientist in academia.

The reason you find a lot of passionate people in academia, I think, has a large part to do with the PhD process. The monetary compensation isn't great for highly skilled labor, so the only way you'll be able to get through 5+ years of it is if you think it's the most fun thing you can be doing (or at least you think that for some large-ish fraction of the process).

rubidium• 15 years ago

Thankfully this guy figured it out when he was only 30. He's still got lots of time to figure out new ways to use and market the skills he has acquired.

New thought: academia isn't broken, there are just too many people who want to be academics. What do people think?

robryan• 15 years ago

In a perfect world, the growth in automation that improves efficiency should create more places for people who can engage in academic research for more longer term goals. Obviously wealth distribution is far from perfect.

I think it's really a wasted opportunity that so many are ready and willing to devote their lives to research and we can't make the economics work for it.

achompas2• 15 years ago

New thought: academia isn't broken, there are just too many people who want to be academics. What do people think?

Not too much of a new thought, the recent Economist article [0] on academic made a similar assertion.

[0] http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223

mhartl3• 15 years ago

Indeed, the OP cites the very same article.

narkee• 15 years ago

I've observed that success in an academic environment requires more than simply scientific acumen. It also requires relentless self-promotion, networking and a passion not only for science, but for winning the academic game.

There are a lot of good science minded people, and there are a lot of good, driven self-promoters. Most successful scientists you encounter (apart from the odd genius) belong in the intersection between groups.

jeffdavis• 15 years ago

Well, some amount of self-promotion is necessary for success almost anywhere.

Sure, if you come up with something miraculous, then it markets itself. But otherwise you have to make sure that the right group of people knows about it or your idea will just fade away.

beetmik• 15 years ago

Just to put it in perspective, I'm sure it's a real curse to have to spend the rest of your life doing something you purportedly absolutely love to do in a hell-hole like Pisa, Italy. That said, my heart absolutely goes out to this person who is apparently really depressed. Hope he can find his happiness in life.

yummyfajitas• 15 years ago

According to someone I know who got a job there, Pisa is a very boring town. Some scenery plus a few tourist traps, low standard of living compared to the US [1], very little to do. Sounds fun before you go, much less fun after you've been there a few months.

[1] For hard numbers, I found this site, suggesting a professor in Italy has a real income about 2/3 that of a US professor: http://www.worldsalaries.org/professor.shtml

Panoramix• 15 years ago

Pisa is a nice (but tiny) town, which will be boring if you are young and are use to the big city life. That being said I don't agree that the standard of living is low compared to the US; the standard of living really depends on what you look for. For me the salary is a poor indicator of quality of life. I'd rather earn less and have more holidays, live in a place with great food, art & culture, slower rhythm of life, less pollution, health care, and nice landscapes.

ot• 15 years ago

I spent 7 years in Pisa and I moved to Cambridge some months ago.

Cambridge is way more boring and depressing than Pisa.

duncanj• 15 years ago

My current theory for success in academia (and I'm not an academic so take it with a grain of salt) is a sort of synthesis of Dick Hamming's thoughts and other things I've read.

1. The purpose of a Ph.D. is to become a pre-eminent expert in a field. It's not to get a piece of paper. If you're not working on a career that will make you an expert, you'll be disappointed with your options after you have achieved your doctorate.

2. Find the interesting problems that people are afraid to work on and work on them very hard.

3. Use lots of techniques and approach your problems from many sides. Often something cool will shake out of the mix, and it won't have been in your research proposal.

4. If you aren't self-motivated, it's not right for you. If you don't enjoy the work, take your masters and go do something you enjoy.

5. Prepare your life for long hours and low pay with lots of frustration. Research doesn't proceed easily from point to point and it's all about being around when you accidentally make a breakthrough.

I'm sure I'm about 90% wrong, but perhaps less wrong than the naive, "Ph.D. is a way to stay in school and not have to face the real world" point of view.

yogsototh• 15 years ago

My vision:

A rabbit is writing into a forest.

A fox see him:

Fox: "What are you writing?"

Rabbit: "How rabbit eat Foxes"

Fox: "It is completely wrong! You deserve I eat you now!"

Rabbit: "Please, just go see my supervisor before. He's in this cave."

The Fox enter into the cave and never go out. The rabbit continue to write.

The same occurs with a wolf. And a bit latter with a bear. Except the bear cannot enter into the cave. Then a Lion go out and kill the bear.

Conclusion. No matter if you are good or not. No matter the subject of your thesis. Only matter who's your supervisor.

gort• 15 years ago

A nice parable, though bears would destroy lions in combat if they met. :)

achompas2• 15 years ago

There is a second option, which is bare survival.

What about the third option: get your PhD and work in industry? I keep coming across statistics and CS PhDs who now work for Twitter, the New York Times, and industry research labs (AT&T, Microsoft). Why isn't an industry job a viable option?

barry-cotter2• 15 years ago

Because a Masters is almost as good for getting an industry job, and a Masters plus a 4 years relevant job experience is superior for the majority of positions where they hire Ph.D.s. And during those four years, the doctoral candidate was getting paid crap, the Masters's graduate raking it in.

timr2• 15 years ago

"I keep coming across statistics and CS PhDs who now work for Twitter, the New York Times, and industry research labs (AT&T, Microsoft). Why isn't an industry job a viable option?"

Because (speaking as one of those people), a PhD is total overkill for nearly all industry jobs, and it costs a lot more to get one. It also probably works against you in most parts of the tech industry, where there's a surprising amount of blind opposition to anyone with a doctorate.

Finally, remember people with PhDs who work in industry have made a difficult, conscious decision to abandon the academic life. It's not the expected outcome, and there's an intense cultural pressure not to leave the ivory tower.

bd2• 15 years ago

"It also probably works against you in most parts of the tech industry, where there's a surprising amount of blind opposition to anyone with a doctorate."

I didn't encounter any doctorate-opposition per se. I think it's more opportunity cost issue.

Tech industry is quite meritocratic. Problem for many people with PhDs is that this is the only thing they can show after many years spent hidden in academia, working on esoteric things.

If you keep up your real world skills during graduate school, I believe nobody is going to hold your degree against you.

At least that was my experience (and experience of my classmates from graduate school).

We did a lot of nitty-gritty software engineering during graduate school (ideas from our papers had to be implemented and integrated into bigger projects, that's how funding pipeline worked).

Also it helps not to act smug about your degree - industry is full of very smart people who didn't even go to university.

neworbit• 15 years ago

As one major exception, Google looooooves PhDs

scott_s2• 15 years ago

There are few industries which do the kind of research that they hire PhDs for.

RiderOfGiraffes• 15 years ago

You're only getting one side of this, and before you find yourself in complete agreement ask yourself this: Are you agreeing because it confirms your bias and opinion of the academic system?

I got a PhD from Cambridge. Everyone I worked with was helpful to a fault. Everyone shared credit when it was due, and declined offers of credit when they felt they hadn't contributed enough.

I got my PhD, got a 3 year post-doc, changed fields into another 3 year post-doc, then got head-hunted into industry.

My experience of academia couldn't be more different from the one described here.

There's a story told of an elderly gentleman sitting sunning himself outside the city gates when a traveller came by. "What are people like here?" asked the traveller. "What were they like where you came from?" asked the elderly gentleman. Then no matter what the answer, he'd always say: "You'll find people here pretty much the same."

I'm not saying that this individual didn't have bad experiences, I'm not saying he deserved them, I'm not saying academia is all roses, and I'm not saying manipulative sociopaths don't exist. They do.

But my personal experience is different.

mkr-hn2• 15 years ago

That's the hard part about things like this. It's almost completely subjective, so doing a study would be difficult. We're left with dueling anecdotes from credible people.

_delirium• 15 years ago

Different fields vary a lot also, so it's probably not that useful to try to talk about "academia" as a whole. Not only do we have dueling anecdotes, but they aren't even anecdotes on the same subject. =] Imo, the pros and cons of being a physics versus a philosophy versus a CS academic just aren't that similar.

I can believe that the 'hard' sciences are roughly like he says, at least at many places. It's common for there to be a sort of "lab" mentality, with a lot of grad-student cogs in a famous-professor-lab machine, and credit tends to go to the head of the lab (especially if the paper has 50 authors or something, as is common in some areas). Partly that's because it takes a lot of money to set up a physics/chem/bio lab, and there is a lot of grunt-work to be done.

That's less common in CS, I think. Not inexistent, but you can find a research group that isn't like that. It's even less common in the humanities, but then you have a whole different set of problems (less money, fewer jobs).

bbgm• 15 years ago

I complain about the state of academia all the time and went straight from my PhD to a startup, but I completely agree with you. My experience was rather wonderful.

yungchin• 15 years ago

Exactly - it sounds like he might have stumbled into the wrong lab. Like you, my experience has been very different, but I've certainly heard stories like his from house mates. It seems we were lucky.

The other thing that occurred to me when I read this, was that he's constructed a false dichotomy for himself: work in a world-class place, which is probably indeed much like being an olympic athlete, or work in an absolutely rubbish place, which can't really support your research. Anything missing in the middle??

crocowhile2• 15 years ago

If I remember correctly you studied math, didn't you? Competition for a job in math is way lower than it is for biological sciences. The reason is that the current model of a successful biology lab is that of a PI leading a number of students and postdocs anywhere from 5 to 20. There is NO WAY that all of them are going to find a job in academia. Germany alone produces in one year the same number of PhDs as there are professors in the country. Ratios are not very different in UK and US. Most of the competition happens in the biological sciences: you can run math or CS research by yourself. Difficult to do the same in biology.

I've written about it here: http://gilest.ro/2010/what-has-changed-in-science-and-what-m...

gaurav_v2• 15 years ago

"Competition for a job in math is way lower than it is for biological sciences."

Actually, the opposite is true, at least in the United States. Many more Biological Science PhDs are granted relative to mathematics, but there is also a lot more funding in the life sciences relative to mathematics.

The mathematics job market is more similar to the notorious humanities market than to the life sciences.

roadnottaken• 15 years ago

I second this. My experience getting a PhD in grad-school (biochemistry) was a wonderful time in my life where I was surrounded by bright, helpful, passionate people. While I was in that lab I saw lots of people get nice academic jobs and other people get nice jobs in industry. Now I'm in a post-doc in a happy lab full of bright passionate people. I regularly see people around me get good academic jobs. It is not easy, and does require a lot of devotion, skill, and luck (what doesn't?) but no-one should read this article and think that everyone in science is miserable. It works out for some people and not for others... just like everything else.

ylem3• 15 years ago

I think it varies drastically by subfield. I'm a physicist, and while there are some subcommunties that are cutthroat, there are many that are small and where people are pretty helpful to each other. I think a lot of it may also depend on the size of the community and the amount of money involved. The stories my ex-girlfriend told me about pharma research sounded pretty horrible...

amh• 15 years ago

Having spent some time in the academia sausage factory, I think this guy is fairly close to the mark. A lot of time and effort is consumed simply writing grants and genuflecting for government money. A perpetual stream of cheap labor (postdocs) is necessary to keep the cash spigot flowing, even though many of them have zero chance for a real career in their chosen field. I've seen incredibly petty behavior over attribution and credit on papers.

I think most scientific progress happens in spite of the academic system, and not because of it. In some ways the old system of patronage was superior -- you had a direct connection between a king or wealthy merchant who had an interest in something, and the scientists who needed funding to investigate it, instead of a vast bureaucracy that probably consumes more than the total amount it exists to allocate.

jtbigwoo• 15 years ago

This is how many, many professions work. Musicians, writers, inventors, athletes, research scientists, pilots, and even small business owners all have the same career path. A few really driven, really lucky ones win the lottery and get to be household names. A small minority (maybe 1 - 5%) make an upper middle class living. The other 99% work for poor wages until they give up or get used up. It sucks, but it's hardly unique to science. If you're in a profession with a massive oversupply of labor, you can pretty much be guaranteed to see this kind of structure.

I also spent half the article thinking that the author's struggles with vocabulary and grammar might explain his/her struggles to get ahead. Perhaps he/she is a non-native speaker and that's adding to the trouble?

mhartl3• 15 years ago

I also noticed the many grammatical flaws in this post. I did a little digging, and the author does indeed appear to be a non-native speaker. (He's Italian: http://wiki.devicerandom.org/Who_am_I.)

msluyter• 15 years ago

As an ex-classical musician, I can attest to your first point. However, the science Ph.D. glut seems to be generating more angst these days than it used to. I attribute this in part to rising tuition costs and greater student debt loads and an ever increasing disparity between supply and demand. I believe this Economist article was recently referenced on HN:

http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223

Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships. Using PhD students to do much of the undergraduate teaching cuts the number of full-time jobs.

tzs• 15 years ago

For pilots, I don't think you want to be one of the ones who gets to become a household name, as that generally only happens when you are the pilot during a crash or serious emergency.

miraj• 15 years ago

"Perhaps he/she is a non-native speaker and that's adding to the trouble?" - that's a red herring.

mdink• 15 years ago

Isn't the real problem here that we rely on "academia" to be the "experts"? I know a number of very accomplished and intelligent folks that did not pursue PhD and have done phenomenally well in their own research. But sadly many, for credibility's sake, had to advertise themselves as think tanks. Why can't we just put the damn degrees down and listen to the person to judge their competency??

16s• 15 years ago

Self taught mathematicians used to be very common (100 years ago).

josgraha• 15 years ago

Here's a link to that article on The Economist that states there are too many people doing too much of _everything_ and life is hard in general. Oh wait, that doesn't exist yet perhaps because that's reality. It sounds like he has spent so much time doing everything but what he _should_ be doing which is looking for something he actually _enjoys_ doing. Not that the article wasn't insightful or lucid or anything but this article struck me in he clearly enjoys complaining about his work life than doing it so there's a problem. I don't love my job but I enjoy doing it most of the time and I have great hobbies, a great partner in life and am happier and fitter than I have ever been. Perhaps he should try doing different things and see how that works out as when you are doing something you don't have any expectations. Why would you say "I love science, I just don't love doing it?". I love Formula One cars but don't know anything about driving them but I love riding motorcycles, and riding bikes. He needs to find the action verb that defines his work life and not impose any expectations from a noun he associates with "love."

arjunnarayan• 15 years ago

I'm going to have to disagree with the article for many reasons: First, I'm a Ph.D student and thus obviously biased. But second, while Ph.Ds can be unwise life decisions for many, it really depends on your field, and the most relevant field to this demographic is computer science. It really doesn't work that way in CS because such a high volume of computer scientists leave academia post-Ph.D into industry. CS industry (and the finance industry) has an insatiable thirst for deeply knowledgeable qualified Ph.Ds. I don't know what the cost benefit is (of spending 4 years in academia vs getting paid high industry salaries) and I'm sure you could make more money going straight into a tech job; but I'm going to assume here that we are maximizing more than just $\sum_{life} income$ here.

PG has a Ph.D; he did fine (yay anecdote). In my various internships around tech companies, there were plenty of senior coders who had Ph.Ds. And if you have a Ph.D in a relevant niche, you're probably going to be headhunted and well sought after. Where else does Wall Street or Google hire top machine learning specialists?

Now a Ph.D in sociology on the other hand... where do you go from there?

NY_USA_Hacker6• 15 years ago

Sociology Ph.D.? The better sociology programs try hard to be mathematical, in particular, good with non-parametic statistics, all of multivariate statistics, and log-linear.

Also actually doing science in sociology is tough because have to be so careful about problem formulation, controls, spurious correlations, sampling, measures (reliability and validity).

So, for any solid quantitative work on marketing, ad targeting, public relations, public opinion polling, social program design and evaluation, organizational design and evaluation (i.e., high end HR) a good sociology background is about the best.

As I recall, P&G knows this, but I don't know how many others know it!

retube• 15 years ago

WELCOME TO LIFE. I've worked in academia, industry and finance. It's all a pyramid. Play the game or you'll be passed over.

defilade• 15 years ago

Exactly. Those of you who think the world is fair or based on merit need to read "Power: Why Some People Have It - And Others Don't" by Jeffrey Pfeffer.

The world isn't fair. This is true whether you're in academia or industry, and accepting this fact isn't a bad thing, nor does it mean you've given in to the dark side. As retube points out, if you don't play the game you're conceding before you even start.

ryanjmo• 15 years ago

So, I often have to justify the time I spent getting a PhD in computer science (Cryptography), because I have a start-up that programs Facebook Apps now a days.

The only reason I can, is because I really didn't spend that much time actually working during the whole period and spent a lot of time learning to surf and play tennis well.

I really feel like I learned a lot of valuable lessons from learning to play tennis and to surf. I'm really glad my PhD afforded me time and money to make that possible.

PaulHoule• 15 years ago

I had a similar painful revelation, as do 95% of people who get science PhD's. Fortunately it happened when I was a postdoc, so at least I got my honorable discharge.

marknutter• 15 years ago

When I graduated with my degree in physics, I was introduced to something called Ruby on Rails, and instead of go on to grad school I pivoted into the life of a web developer. Best thing that ever happened to me.

mhartl3• 15 years ago

I did go to physics grad school, but eventually I came around. :-) http://railstutorial.org/book#author

pbiggar• 15 years ago

While I sympathize with the author, I don't think we can generalize from his experience all that much. For a balancing anecdote, here's my life progression to date:

  Bachelors: 22
  Start PhD: 24
  Meet girl: 25
  Get engaged: 27
  Submit thesis: 27
  s/girlfriend/wife/: 28
  Get 6 figure salary working for Mozilla: 28
  Am now: 29

Yes, everything turned out better than expected (though I omitted the bit where I started and folded a company in there), and it could have gone horribly wrong. But you just can't generalize about doing a PhD, or anything really, from his anecdote, or from mine.

ylem3• 15 years ago

I am a researcher who's fortunate enough to have found a permanent position at a place that I love doing work that I enjoy. I've served on program committees of conferences, organized workshops, etc. However, I must admit that some of the OPs thoughts are correct.

There is definitely a problem with an oversupply of PhDs relative to the job market for physics (and likely biology). For a position at say Berkeley for a biology faculty position there used to be approx. 600 applicants per position. For physics at first tier or second tier institutions the number may drop to 200. Even if we are cruel and suggest that half of those are unqualified, that still leaves a large pool of extraordinarily qualified people competing for a rather small pool of jobs. I see this regularly when there are young postdocs with good publication records (Nature, PRL, etc.) who are having trouble finding permanent positions after their postdocs. Part of this may be related to decreased state funding and hiring freezes (in several states, there have been furloughs). Even for postdocs who have decided that they would prefer to work at an undergraduate institution and teach, the competition is fierce. Oddly, even for those that want to teach at a public high school, it's hard because of the education requirements (you can run a facility, teach freshmen at an elite college--but teaching high school seniors....). Things are so fierce that it's rather hard to have much selectivity about geography. This can wreak havoc with relationships and in physics is known as the two body problem--where a couple in science has difficulty finding positions in the same zipcode. As one colleague told me, she'd be happy to just have the same timezone....

For my subfield, industrial research positions have been gradually drying up (at least for doing physics rather than engineering). A number of companies in the past were able to use monopoly profits to drive research (think of AT&T Bell Labs which is now but a shadow of it's former self--when I was there as an intern, it was amazing....). However, many have scaled back. Thus, I have seen a number of people pursuing various exit strategies.

During the internet boom (where I had decided to drop computer engineering as a major because physics was more fun), a number of people who could code dropped out an joined startups. Later, people from Ivy institutions joined consulting firms such as McKinsey (with a "mini-MBA"). Later, a number joined in the gold rush of financial engineering. While that continues, many go through a brief masters first to get their foot in the door. A few turn to more engineering related work. So, while the unemployment rate for physics PhDs is low--not so many are actually still doing physics research.

For myself, I'll take on undergraduate and high school interns. No graduate students. I really respect String Theorists who for years intentionally limited the number of students they would accept due to the paucity of permanent positions. For years, I'd been reluctant to take on a postdoc due to the current situation. Now, I've taken on my first postdoc and will do my best by him--but I have to be honest about the job market and I'm having him learn some programming as a plan B. Plan C is that I'm very confident that he'll be able to get a position in his home country afterwards.

I've seen some people who are bitter (think of the opportunity costs!) when they leave. But, I've seen some who are mellow--"At least I got to work with something beautiful for awhile....".Part of the difficulty is that for scientists, you don't go into it for the money (at least I hope you don't!), you go into it for love. So, doing science becomes not just a job, but rather a calling and a way of life. So, someone's sense of self may often become tied to being a scientist--and that's hard to leave behind...

So to summarize, while all fields of science are not cutthroat, given the level of competition, it is very hard to find a job. Also, given the level, then people have to work extremely hard and it takes a toll on people's personal lives (it's hard to have one when average work weeks extend to 60-80 hrs for a number of experimentalists--my solution has been to sleep less, but I'm told that's unhealthy...).

Goodbye to academic research

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