

Ask HN:  Hacking for the career, PhD for the fun stuff? - tom_b

Lately, I think about hybrid opportunities.  There is no doubt that my MS in CS had a better bang for the buck than staying for a PhD.  But now, I tend to be a "pure IT" software dev and rarely work on deep, interesting problems.<p>I sometimes think that doing a PhD to scratch that itch to work on deeper stuff, maybe publish in journals without the "or perish" mentality, and be someone who can lecture/mentor the next generation of hackers while still earning most of a living from hacking work rather than chasing grants all the time would be an interesting life.<p>HN'ers are an interesting bunch - are there hackers on around here (other than our own PG) who have a PhD, mainly work on startups and in industry, but also do some research or teaching in a university setting on the side?<p>Did any of that subset <i>plan</i> to do that (as opposed to getting a PhD, planning to hunt down tenure at a university, but wound up doing startups or industry work instead)?
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cperciva
I have a DPhil in computing. When I started it, I thought that I was
_probably_ going to go straight into an academic career, but as time moved on
I started to feel that a detour into industry might be a good idea. I'm now
firmly in industry, but I still have strong ties to academia and expect that I
will return to it in due course (say, once I'm rich and not spending all my
time on Tarsnap).

I would strongly dispute any suggestion that a PhD is only useful for people
who plan on staying in academia. I've found my doctoral experience to be very
useful both while working on Tarsnap and while doing outside consulting; and
in talking to other people in the startup ecosystem I've noticed a distinct
difference in the quality and well-formedness of ideas coming from PhDs and
PhD students compared to their less-educated colleagues.

