What is life like for PhDs in computer science who go into industry?

http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/29296581613/what-is-life-like-for-phds-in-computer-science-who-go

by gandalfgeek • 14 years ago

122 67 14 years ago

blog.vivekhaldar.com

At my previous employer, we hired on a guy who was very close to earning his PhD in CS from a midwestern university known for a prestigious engineering program. I was excited because I thought that at the very least he would be able to learn quickly and start tackling problems relatively quickly.

I was not disappointed. He was very assertive about not having his hand held wrt figuring out problems, and was proactive in learning new things. When I left to take another position, I felt comfortable that I was leaving the codebase in good hands.

emmapersky2• 14 years ago

I have a Bachelors in Engineering (BEng) in Computing from Imperial College, not a PhD, but I work in a group at Google where a significant percentage of my peers do, but only know this because from time to time people mention the kind of research they did because either it is relevant to what we are doing, or comes up naturally in discussion.

I don't see any difference between what I do, and what others in my group do, we are all in it together, but took different paths to get there. Our group is more research focused (though we are Software Engineers) than many at Google, and this has given me a great opportunity to learn from those with an (even) more academic background.

TL;DR - I don't see any differences between PhDs and otherwise at Google, even in 'researchy' teams.

malloc472• 14 years ago

One very good point this article brings to light is the emphasis academia places on the tenure-track job as the end-all be-all of getting a Ph.D. I can't even begin to count how many times I've heard how getting a professorship is the only worthy job, and how there's no point to a Ph.D. if you don't get such a job.

It's nearly to the point of brainwashing (a sweeping generalization, of course, which likely varies greatly from department to department). As a soon-to-be Ph.D. graduate, it's refreshing to know that industry is not only a viable option, but doesn't have the same [superhuman][1] expectations.

[1] http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Pap...

javert2• 14 years ago

I'm 3 years into a PhD at a "second-tier" department (i.e. not MIT or Stanford, but still a pretty good place), and I've never felt any pressure at all to go into academia over industry. So there's one more data point for you.

Professors can make a huge "real-world contribution" via their students that go into industry. So they should be proud of those students and feel that the effort of educating them was highly worthwhile.

malloc472• 14 years ago

It's good to know there are still realistic perspectives in academia. To be fair, the "anti-industry" attitude is probably adviser rather than department dependent, as I have heard a few first-hand data points regarding advisers that align much more with your experience than mine.

Given the 1/10 statistic, sooner or later professors will have to satisfy themselves with student's "real-world" contributions, whether they like it or not. I'm just worried how often I see real skill sets (e.g. proper software engineering) being devalued among graduate students because it's not directly relevant to a hypothetical future job as a professor. I feel lucky that I've been able to make extra time to write "real" code from my dissertation work, but it's rather unfortunate that this isn't always the norm.

NegativeK• 14 years ago

A professor from a local university was giving a computer science related talk; he was quite proud of how many of his PhD students (graduated and ungraduated) had been recruited by Google.

mathattack• 14 years ago

The incentive system in academia is to produce people who cite their mentors in formal research. That's it. Because universities are non-profits, they go to the indirect incentives. This trumps any altruistic ideals. In their defense, most Phds in computer science are fully funded, so it's not transactional like an undergrad degree.

I've worked with several Phds with background in Stats and Computer Science. I found all to have "Good Background" - they knew a lot about their fields. Some were great at working with others, but some not so much. It wasn't a magical degree. Many regretted not getting the 5 years of work experience instead. Relative to the All But Dissertation crowd, they were a little better at Getting Things Done, versus just talking about things. (Very small sample size, so don't read too much into it)

javert2• 14 years ago

The incentive system in academia is to produce people who cite their mentors in formal research.

Really? My advisor has tenure, and I think he couldn't care less how much his students later go on to cite him. Why should he?

He will get lots of citations anyhow (some from former students) because he does a lot of good work, but that's kind of an orthogonal issue.

sks• 14 years ago

Academia has the same incentive system as other fields, i.e., a combination of money/fame/power and all three comes from doing great research. Great research will get you the citations regardless of the number of former students. Also number of citations is a necessary but not a sufficient indicator of great research.

_delirium• 14 years ago

I don't think your analysis of the incentives is accurate at all. If I were to oversimplify similarly, I'd say instead that modern incentives in CS academia, for non-tenured faculty at top research universities, heavily favor money, wherever it comes from (in large part because with budget cuts, professors have no choice). Grants are good, industrial partnerships are good, basically anything that brings in money is good. Citations are secondary, and used mainly as a stepping stone to bring in money. From that perspective, students going to a big company are good, especially a big company like Microsoft, IBM, or Intel that funds research. Students going into academia to write papers that cite the advisor are also good, but not as good as students who go somewhere that has money.

azakai• 14 years ago

Good points, as a PhD in the industry this all aligns pretty well with my experience as well.

The only comment I have is regarding

>> Do people usually work alone, or with others?

> Again, the answer to this question does not depend on what degree you have. The simple truth is there is no job in the modern tech industry that involves working alone.

Agreed that this probably does not depend on what degree you have. But there is a lot of variability in terms of how many people you work with. I worked almost alone for a while, and in large teams at other times.

I suppose there is no job where you work 100% alone, with no contact at all with anyone, ever, but I doubt that was the original question.

flatline• 14 years ago

> there is no job in the modern tech industry that involves working alone.

Positions with aspects of management or sales typically involve actually working with people, but this can be hard to achieve for many others. The high tech field can be great for people who want to work in isolation, and fairly lonely for people who do not. I have never worked in a place that effectively implemented things like mentoring programs, for PhDs or anyone else. I am on the East Coast, I suspect that this trend is less prevalent out West. You may form bonds with people through a work environment, but the majority of your daily (and weekly, and monthly) effort is a solitary endeavor. I have heard this complaint from people working on PhD-level industrial research, to coding, to website design. Getting in with a company that recognizes and values real teamwork, assuming you are able to communicate effectively with others, will make nearly any job a much more pleasant experience.

emmapersky2• 14 years ago

I think this is really interesting.

What "working alone" means is complex. For example, at Hashable, I was effectively working alone, despite there being a wider notion of collaboration. More over, when other people came in to contact with parts of the code I was actively working on, instead of trying to work through those components together (not neccsarily in a pairing way, but just a more general collaboration), the standard was to make you change and not care about the consequences.

In a code base without tests this was a nightmare.

If / when I am next looking for a job, really understanding how a company collaborates is high up on my agenda of questions.

tensor3• 14 years ago

The only exception I take with this is the part about coding in an interview. My complaints there are not specific to having a PhD though.

I understand the need for practical tests like these, but whiteboard coding is not a good way to do it. People dont' typically program on white boards, they do it alone with a compiler, reference manual, and the ability to test. Put them in a room with a terminal and ask them to write a straight forward program in 30 minutes. If you have to practice for the interview, what exactly are you determining in the interview? Their ability to program? Or their ability to practice interview tricks?

Immediately discounting a candidate because they are annoyed at your question to whiteboard code also seems rash. Asking someone experienced to write the "print a string in reverse" algorithm will naturally insult them. Especially so if the candidate has a CS PhD and spent time grading students on more complicated programs, or especially if their CV includes links to public repositories containing thousands of lines of code they wrote. On the other hand, asking a candidate to sketch a genuinely complicated algorithm on the board is a reasonable question.

rm999• 14 years ago

>Their ability to program? Or their ability to practice interview tricks?

Often, neither. It can be the ability to think clearly and communicate that thinking. I personally avoid whiteboard coding questions when I interview people, but the good ones I've been given involve a good back-and-forth, basically working on the problem together.

I usually ask more open-ended questions, like "how would you go about solving this large, potentially ambiguous problem". Both types of questions give the interviewer the ability to gauge personal skills and mental clarity. Whiteboard questions provide some ability to test technical ability in exchange for some ability to test higher-level knowledge. They both work in the same kind of way, though.

Silhouette• 14 years ago

When I started my career, I also used to find trivial interview coding questions irritating.

As I developed and started applying for more senior positions, I started to find them downright patronising.

As I developed further and started to sit on the other side of the table, I realised that they aren't there to catch out the people who forgot a closing brace, they are there to catch out the people who don't know what a closing brace is even for.

The first time you do the interviewing from the other side, it is truly amazing how many people with extremely impressive-looking CVs fall into that latter category. Having a CS PhD and experience assessing undergraduates on more complicated programs is no guarantee of any sort of programming competence by professional standards. Neither is having been a Senior Software Engineer leading a team of developers at a past employer, for that matter.

rogerbinns2• 14 years ago

This is a side effect of the broken hiring process. Typically candidates are found by acronym matching. The folks who are below average (don't know what a closing brace is) will keep tweaking their CV/resume until they get called since it is pretty easy to guess what acronyms are being looked for.

When they don't succeed in getting hired they will keep repeating the process which means they will go through many interviews. A person on the other end of the bell curve is likely to interview a handful of times in their entire career so you are unlikely to ever see them.

bearmf2• 14 years ago

I agree in general, but easy fizzbuzz-type questions are not the main problem with interviewing process by far. There are just too many people who almost cannot write code, including CS PhDs.

tensor3• 14 years ago

This is true. For CS PhDs you should always look to see if they've done any large implementation work or if they've focused more on math. The former will generally have large amounts of source code available for inspection. The latter may or may not be good at programming.

harryh2• 14 years ago

> Asking someone experienced to write the "print a string in reverse" algorithm will naturally insult them.

Why? It's a trivial question that any programmer should be able to answer easily. An interview is a test. An interviewee should be happy if the test starts so simply. It's a chance to warm up and get in the groove.

When you took tests in school were you insulted if the first question on the page was too simple? No, you just answered it and were happy that you earned your first points so easily.

tensor3• 14 years ago

The reason it is annoying for people who are experienced is that generally they are looking for jobs where they get to work on difficult and interesting problems. Being asked such a simple question might indicate that you are interviewing for a position you won't want.

I'd personally be very tempted to answer the whiteboard question and immediately explain that I'm not interested in a job that consists only of writing trivial implementations and ask if they can give examples of real problems they face which are non-trivial.

I have actually had one interviewee ask me such a question, although not in response to a simple test or question of my own. This impressed me, although I get the impression that most interviewers would not appreciate this in a similar way to how they do not appreciate candidates that find their fizz-buzz test annoying.

An interview is not a one way test. It is a two way test where the employer can also fail.

andrewkreid• 14 years ago

Precisely. It's a bozo-filter. _You_ know you're not a bozo but the interviewer doesn't (yet).

I ask questions like this in interviews because experience shows that a significant percentage of supposedly experienced developers have trouble with them.

If you ace the simple questions, you'll get something harder next.

jlarocco• 14 years ago

Actually, the article doesn't mention anything about coding on a whiteboard.

tolmasky• 14 years ago

I felt similarly about whiteboard questions the first time I went through interviews, but after having to interview other people myself (and a lot of them), I quickly realized that I simply hadn't properly understood the purpose of these exercises. They aren't designed to see if you can code (you are usually given the benefit of the doubt on that one), rather they are designed to see how you think.

Usually a whiteboard question (with me) will go something like this: I will ask you to write a pretty simple algorithm, then tell you there are no tricks because people are surprised that is so simple. I then change the problem scope which makes you change the algorithm to something slightly harder. We then spend time debugging it because no one ever gets it "right" the first time. That's fine, a big part of the exercise is to debug it together. And from this I can glean something I never would by just looking at your GitHub commits: how you think about a problem. Do you make a table for yourself and step through the function mentally? Do you immediately think about edge cases? Etc. The way I can figure this out is by the interviewee talking (and if he isn't talking I ask him some questions to get him thinking out loud).

If you just give them a terminal and leave them to program it, it doesn't really tell you anything about these aspects. Unfortunately I can't jump in your head to see what's going on, and if I leave you to start blasting away at a keyboard I probably won't be able to analyze you're wild moving of code around or fast typing, not to mention it being hard to see on a screen over your shoulder. The whiteboard slows down their writing (since they're not typing), forces them to think vs. blindly changing values and hitting run -- again, it accommodates having a conversation about the code. I already know that you can look this algorithm up online or its included as part of the standard libraries for this language anyways, and I'm fairly certain given a debugger and sufficient test cases you could whip it up in ten minutes.

The other reason something simple like "print a string in reverse" is chosen is precisely because it is understood that it is harder to program on a whiteboard without tools and while being watched and nervous. Not to mention if you asked an actually difficult question, it would be really hard for even the interviewer to know what's going on (whether it be looking at the code you wrote afterward or as you wrote it on a whiteboard). I cannot understand being "offended" by an easy question. If its easy then better for you right? You were already planning on spending an hour in the room with me, how could this possibly be a "wasting your time"? Just do it. Also, it is well known that this is part of many CS interviews, why would anyone be surprised by it? If someone gets offended by a whiteboard question its usually a fantastic indicator that they are a bad candidate in my opinion.

Additionally, these questions can sometimes also serve as fantastic early indicators that a person is way out of their league. As I said earlier, I don't think I've ever met someone who got everything right immediately (and I agree, if they did, the question would be useless). Lots of people think they did poorly because they choked and missed some edge case that had to pointed out to them -- not at all, I've been incredibly impressed with people that took them multiple revisions to hone their algorithm. However, when someone really doesn't know what's going on its painfully obvious, they usually won't even understand what the algorithm is supposed to do or have never even heard of it. I've had people with Masters take the entire interview, not finish the simple question, and not even be really sure what was asked.

CamperBob2• 14 years ago

"I cannot understand being "offended" by an easy question."

My thought process: Reverse a string? Really? Is this how they hired their existing programmers?

chubot• 14 years ago

Some people will take 30 seconds on a question a tiny bit harder than print a string in reverse... and some people take 30 minutes . Those people have similar looking resumes. It's a useful signal.

So if you are offended by that, then it's really your problem. Just answer it in the 30 seconds it takes and the interviewer will immediately go on to other (harder) things.

Your complaints kind of conflict, because it doesn't matter if you don't have a compiler -- you should able to write code to reverse a string on the board. People realize that it's not an ideal coding situation.

eta_carinae• 14 years ago

> Asking someone experienced to write the "print a string in reverse" algorithm will naturally insult them.

Being insulted is the wrong reaction. Either you are a good coder, you will write it down on the board in one minute and we'll move on, or you are not a good coder, you have a crappy attitude and you are not getting an offer.

rimantas• 14 years ago

How about third possibility: they will think that your company has a crappy attitude and hiring policy and move out?

hessenwolf2• 14 years ago

I did an interview with a C++ exam. They left me in a room for an hour, without the internet. Damn, that was embarrassing. I need to log into facebook to tell you my name and birthday. Who the codes without google?

ltcoleman• 14 years ago

In my experience, the degree has not been a factor at all when it comes to value in industry. I have seen people that didn't have a degree produce more maintainable code in a more productive manner. I also have seen coworkers with bachelors outshine others with masters. I have climbed the corporate ladder at my company and now with my power to influence hires, I rarely take the level of degree in consideration.

Strangely, I have seen the attitude problem with new grads that possess a masters or doctorate. I even had one tell my manager that he had a masters and that meant he shouldn't ever have to do support work, and that he was smarter than my manager. He was a fresh 23 year old grad and eventually left for a larger company because he believed they would appreciate his masters. To add salt to the wound, we found that almost every bit of his code either broke our current projects or just flat out wasn't done correctly because he knew better than everybody so there was no reason for him to ask a senior dev or even a BA any questions about what he was doing.

All that to say, no matter the shop, no matter the degree, business is about money, and we, as coders, produce value which is why our salaries are high. A coder that is seen as valuable will always do better in there career and most of the time his coworkers will see his value and respect him for that.

bearmf2• 14 years ago

Do you work 9 to 5, or do you take your work home with you? This, again, is completely independent of what degree you have. How you structure your priorities and your work to get it done within sane hours, and while maintaining some sort of “work/life balance” (I hate that term, but that is a whole other story) is entirely up to you.

This is indeed independent of degree but highly dependent of company you are working for. There are developers working 10-12 hours a day who cannot structure their work because they are just expected to stay in the office for said time period.

duked• 14 years ago

I have a PhD and I worked for several by industry research labs. So when the OP mentions " he went “oh well, if you must make me code…” That pretty much made me go “no hire.” He clearly is being either dishonest or taking shortcuts, PhD's want to have a job that is interesting if it's to piss code all day I would have stopped at my Master degree. Pissing code, as much as many would like to think is not exactly challenging if you have a PhD (I'm not saying that having highly optimized, readable code isn't but having something that works is not that hard) so if the whole interview process is centered around how well you can write something in A/B/C/D language yes I understand the interviewee.

One funny thing: "Most places will actually pair you up with a mentor who is not your boss" this has to be a joke, I worked for HP-Labs and other big labs never ever had a mentor, usually if you have a issue you are pretty much welcome to discuss it with your colleague, have them review your proposed solution but boy you are on your own when it comes to do implement it.

Again the OP has no clue clue of what he is talking and it's sad because his research interests are security related: "You are much more likely to land an interesting job at the coasts. West more than East." I can prove easily that if you have a PhD in a security or somehow related (formal methods) you have more chances to land a job on the east coast: DARPA,IARPA, MITRE, DoD all these agencies are funding 80% of the security research of the country ! Easier if you are a citizen indeed, but I'm a foreigner on H1B and I still work on a DARPA funded project ... One more joke: "Most industrial positions will not care about your publications" seriously this guy is ridiculous or just unable to think outside his google circle, most labs are indeed more than interested in your publications because it means for them potential patent application, more contacts in conferences and the end goal a better reputation and more easier to build a consortium to respond to call for proposals or BAA(http://www.arl.army.mil/www/default.cfm?page=8). But coming from someone who has not many publication I understand, for information here is his publication list http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/h/...

Anyway I'll stop commenting the rest of his post, his post is not all bad but it's based on his personal experience and he does a generalization out of his limited experience.

jbellis• 14 years ago

I've seen approximately zero correlation between degree status and ability to write code. The best programmer I've ever worked with has a PhD... but so have at least two of the terrible ones.

I also submit that if programming is "not exactly challenging" then you are working on the wrong products and/or at the wrong level of abstraction.

There are legitimate reasons to prefer research, or management, or marketing, or sales over development, but lack of challenge is not one of them.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

The submitted article contains a key fact, "The problem with this picture is that there are 10 PhD graduates for every tenure-track position. And, while I don’t have figures, the industrial labs don’t hire at a much faster rate either. And that left regular industry jobs as the only viable option for the vast majority of PhDs," which actually applies to a lot of academic major subjects. For the most part, sooner or later a Ph.D. holder may have to consider working for an organization in the for-profit private sector rather than for academia, simply because the private sector is where the majority of the jobs are.

I see that the top few comments in this thread as I read the submitted article are mostly about coding tests as a hiring procedure. If the coding test is a reasonably accurate simulation of actual work on the job, it is a very good idea for a company to use a coding test in hiring. From participants in earlier discussions here on Hacker News I have learned about many useful references on the subject of company hiring procedures, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274

http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.

http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.

Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risky to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...

interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that a general intelligence test used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. A company defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more reluctant companies will be about hiring in the first place.)

The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6...

Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes.

http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R...

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl...

Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, for example "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann:

"Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure."

http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...

But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)."

Integrity tests have limited validity standing alone, but appear to have significant incremental validity when added to a general mental ability test or work-sample test.

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

http://apps.opm.gov/ADT/Content.aspx?page=3-06&JScript=1

http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9042/9042.PDF

http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports...

Bottom line: if you are someone with a Ph.D. degree in an academic subject, congratulations. If you seek a job outside academia with good management that understands research, be prepared to do a work sample test to get the job. Companies that hire on the basis of resume biographical qualifications (what degree you have) do demonstrably worse in hiring than companies that make sure that all job applicants can do the actual work of the job. Wouldn't you rather work somewhere where the company focus is on hiring the capable, rather than on hiring the possessors of school credentials?

jseliger• 14 years ago

The humanities are worse: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-kno... .

justin_vanw3• 14 years ago

I can sum up this article:

A PhD is roughly the same as a Masters for getting a job, except that you get paid a bit more if it's a big company with an HR department. You haven't really developed any skills that are useful, and now you are going to be paired up with some 25 year old that has 3 years of experience more than you do at 30. Well, you might be able to do well, or maybe not, some PhD's are great and some are suck, and the same is true for people without degrees. You have to prove you are valuable. This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about, instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia, but you have to eat so you might as well get on with it.

Well, that's my summary :) (I'm a bit biased being a dropout)

pbiggar4• 14 years ago

Your "summary" is bullshit and has completely distorted the article. You're not just biased, you're also completely misinformed.

> You haven't really developed any skills that are useful, and now you are going to be paired up with some 25 year old that has 3 years of experience more than you do at 30.

More likely, you've spent 3-6 years coding, learning to communicate, and work well in a team.

> This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about, instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia.

Most recently hired academics on a tenure track work 80 hour weeks. You've got to teach course, mentor research students, write grant proposals, and produce research. If you don't, you're out the door.

Imagine I were to suggest that because you're a dropout, all you're good for is saying "do you want fries with that?" That's about the level of what you've done with your comment.

bnegreve• 14 years ago

I think justin_vanw wanted to show that the article was not really informative. I agree with that, I haven't learnt much by reading it.

justin_vanw3• 14 years ago

Tenure track profs work 80 hours per week? Really? They work from 8AM to 8PM, 7 days per week (taking only a 15 minute break each day to eat)???

This doesn't seem likely, since they would be completely burned out after only a few months, and you would have diminishing returns after the first week. If you are really working 80 hour weeks then you are being incredibly foolish and wasting a lot of time being completely unproductive due to exhaustion.

But, of course, you don't really mean 80 hours, you were just exaggerating a bit to make your point. Fair enough, lets say profs are putting in (I'm assuming a proper research university where tenure track professors teach 3-4 classes at most) 12 hours lecturing each week, for 30 weeks per year. That's (at most) 360 hours of teaching, per year.

Lets say you spend 2 hours per week preparing for lectures (you should know this stuff already, but lets say you just need time to get organized). That's 60 hours, yearly.

Now, lets say you spend 4 hours every day working on research. Everybody probably would like to spend more, but some days you have to see friends or your wife/husband or kids or get your car fixed or whatever. That's 4 * 365, which is probably a huge overestimate for most people, but that's 1460 hours per year.

Now, as for writing grant proposals, or mentoring students, or whatever else, nobody believes you are spending any serious time (more than 5 hours a week) on that. I don't know how long you really spend on it, but I'm going to assume that you aren't writing more than 1 grant proposal per month, so I'm going to just say that I gave very optimistic and too-high estimates for everything else, so this will get rolled in as overhead.

So you're doing (drumroll) 360 + 60 + 1460 = 1880 hours of work per year, all but 420 of which is just thinking about the problems that interest you most.

If you work in industry, you are spending 220 * 9 = 1980 hours per year working on stuff that are not the things that most interest you, and almost none of it is blue-sky thinking of any kind.

Want fries with that?

Edit: With my really crazy overestimates on how tenure track profs spend time, averaged over a regular work schedule it is 42.72 hours per week, of which 9.5 is anything at all besides pure 'research'. Odd that, it's within .5 hours per week of my original guess, and I swear I didn't cook the numbers to come to that.

AlisdairO3• 14 years ago

> You haven't really developed any skills that are useful

That's practically all I did. Doing a PhD gave me both the time and the excuse to pick up both technical skills and soft skills that prove useful to myself and my colleagues on a regular basis. I'm a dramatically better coder for it.

> This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about

I work 37 hour weeks doing stuff that I find really interesting. I made a conscious decision near the start of my PhD that I had no desire to work in academia but that doing a PhD was fantastically interesting, so I'd keep doing it.

> instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia

That might have been the cause of your dropout.

raverbashing• 14 years ago

Very interesting perspective

(Disclaimer: I dropped out, with a little help from my advisor)

I guess it all depends on a lot of things. If you enjoy what you are doing, and have a nice environment, go for it.

But dropping out was something I'm very glad I did. And I learned a lot outside of Academia. (and the money is good as well)

hessenwolf2• 14 years ago

Miaow, bitchy. You are right, however, about it being a bit depressing competing with 25 year olds that have 3 years experience. My first post-doc job started as borderline data-entry (but then in three months I became chief developer on the entire system :)).

TheComedian• 14 years ago

My understanding is that academia is very competitive, so I don't understand how you are only going to work 9 hours a week. Further, you'll probably have classes to teach which surely take up more than 9 hours a week. Also, since tenure is largely tied to the quality of your output, you can't always work on what interests you--you have to work on what you can publish.

pbiggar4• 14 years ago

The major distinction I've found from having a PhD is that you come with built-in "social proof". If you're going for a job, you're very likely to get an interview. If you're talking to investors, you're very likely to get past the first triage. After that it's up to you of course, but that's pretty useful.

magnusgraviti• 14 years ago

Here in Ukraine people write their PhD thesis and work in IT industry because scientist salary is extra low (300$) and average salary in industry is about 1500$+

I found the same situation with PhD status as this article highlights. Degree means nothing here. Really nothing. The only thing which matters are results of your work. PhD should be better in analysis, problem solving etc.

xmpir• 14 years ago

I think in Europe (at least in Austria) a PhD is a pretty huge factor for a job in industry. In my opinion this is a bad thing, but academic degrees are very important here. This does not especially consider the computer science industry, but it happens there as well. There are some positions that are always taken by academics, for the sake of publicity and reputation. No matter what they can do, the only important thing is the PR-effect of a academic degree.

barry-cotter• 14 years ago

Nowhere on Earth has a higher opinion of academic degrees and higher education than the German speaking world. And if anyplace equals it I don't know where it is.

brazzy• 14 years ago

Even within the German speaking world, Austria has a reputation of being obsessed with titles.

arido• 14 years ago

One thing to add: when we interview PhD's we make sure they want to be in industry. There is nothing more off putting when you talk to someone and it becomes immediately clear they much rather would've been in academia but they were not the right person at the right time.

DennisP• 14 years ago

XKCD's perspective: http://xkcd.com/664/

What is life like for PhDs in computer science who go into industry?

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