
The Illustrated Guide to a PhD - pietroglyph
http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
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commandlinefan
When you finish a bachelor's degree, you know everything.

When you finish a Master's degree, you realize you know nothing.

When you finish a PhD, you realize nobody else knows anything, either.

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Bellamy
Brilliant pictures and an explanation. That's exactly what PhD is about!

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amznthrowaway5
Meaningless spam, advertises as a guide to PhD and gives a few meme images.
Academia is very political, I saw senior folk looking down on writing actual
code while glorifying corruption and the publishing of fraudulent or
meaningless papers. These are closer to the realities you have to deal with
getting a "PhD", even in computer science.

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SimplyUnknown
Everything is political. It's a waste of time to pretend they aren't. However,
in academia these effect are amplified due to perverse incentives (publication
count over doing meaningful research) and power dynamics (senior advisor
pushing his/her agenda over what is The Right Thing).

But it is important to remember what you are doing. In a PhD you should be
pushing the boundary of knowledge. As a programmer in a company, you should be
solving problems to generate value for your customer and your company.

If you aren't doing these things, you are in the wrong place.

~~~
amznthrowaway5
> But it is important to remember what you are doing. In a PhD you should be
> pushing the boundary of knowledge. As a programmer in a company, you should
> be solving problems to generate value for your customer and your company.

You don't need to get a phd to push the boundaries of knowledge, and often
people who get phds aren't actually doing that. PhD is just a fake status
indicator like an MBA.

A lot of work that generates real value is also pushing the boundaries of
science. Good scientific work often has real world impact.

I noticed you used "programmer" to refer to the person working in a company,
but programming is also an essential skill for pushing the boundaries in just
about any field now. Many "scientists" are not capable of it and look upon it
as grunt work, which says a lot about their true competence.

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shard
The parent is talking about intent, not result. The work a PhD does is meant
to push the boundary of knowledge, not that a PhD is required to push the
boundary of knowledge. Same for the work of a programmer in a company, it's
meant to generate value for the customer and company, not that it's the only
way to generate value.

A PhD works as a status indicator is valid in the sense that a Github account
with lots of accepted PRs into major OSS is a status indicator: that you have
done the work and it has been found by academics in that field / the code
maintainers for that OSS to be of high enough quality to be accepted. The work
(thesis / PRs) and the credentials of the academics and academic institution /
the code maintainer and the OSS project are probably public information that
can be verified if there is doubt as to the worth of the credential.

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amznthrowaway5
Lots of people get these degrees simply for the status aspect. I take
meaningful Github OSS contributions much more seriously than PhDs, given all
the garbage I have seen in academia. I don't understand how that can be called
anecdotal when you can pick up any scientific journal and see that most of the
papers are usually trash.

