
Tell HN: Doing a PhD is good - Loic
Or having a higher education. A general trend here is to discard PhD/higher education as a waste of time or money when one want to go the startup way. Effectively, you can become rich without such education, but very few of them get really rich and on the barrier to entry, if you consider a field where you can be disruptive without education is rather low.<p>The real good point of having a PhD is not in the title you get, it is in the network you can build and the problems you try to solve. By definition, most of the scientific PhD are to solve industrial problems. This means, you have a complex problem and customers, directly, right now, during your studies.<p>If you are smart, you can already have a portfolio of customers at the end of your PhD, you can have your product nearly ready and you will be able to charge your customers more in thousands of Dollars than in $9 per month.<p>Bonus point, the barrier to entry will be high for the competition and it is relatively easy to become an expert in your field.<p>So please, if you want to do a PhD, do it and do it wisely.<p>A short list to think about:<p>1. Get a supervisor known to give his students a lot of freedom.
2. Do your PhD in a country where you get a good pay (most of the EU countries pay well for a PhD).
3. Go in a university with a good budget for travel to conferences.
4. Find labs with intensive industrial collaboration.
======
kgo
Tell HN: It's your fucking life, do what the fuck makes you happy.

If you find being an undergrad painful and you're bored to tears, and you're
only doing it is because your parents and peers tell you you'll end up as a
janitor without that piece of paper, and you're literally itching to get into
the 'real world', drop the fuck out and work on that startup.

If you're fascinated with Viking Poetry, and it's all you can think about, and
people are telling you what a waste of money that Viking Poetry PhD is, tell
them to fuck off and get that PhD anyway.

If you wanna be an actor, move to NY or LA, get a job as a waiter, and bust
your fucking ass working on your craft. Don't stay at home and get that HR
degree from University of Phoenix.

Both this post and the "X isn't worth it in the long run" articles it's
responding to make the same mistakes. Assuming everyone has the same path in
life. I think ultimately, deep down, all the posters want you to chase YOUR
dream. But instead they take their dreams or their choices and find evidence
prove to themselves that it's the right choice. And it probably is the right
choice for them. It may or may not be the right choice for you.

As long as you're making the choices because that's what you really want, and
not out of fear, they're the right choices. So yeah, if the only reason you
didn't go to college was because your high-school sweetheart was a year
younger, you made the wrong choice.

Why am I a software professional? Not because it pays well, but that sure
helps. It's because I used to sit mesmerized in front of a computer typing in
code from magazines, amazed that they followed my commands. It's because even
before I had a computer to type the code into, I used to read the same code
listings in the books, fascinated by them, even though I couldn't even run
them. I didn't read the Economist's list of hot-fucking-jobs-for-the-next-ten-
years and pick the top item on the list.

~~~
siddhant
> _Tell HN: It's your fucking life, do what the fuck makes you happy._

Yes. But also make it a point to listen to people who've been there (which is
exactly how I see these "Tell HN" and the "X isn't worth it in the long run"
posts). Doing what makes you happy might make you happy in the short term. It
might not necessarily be the best choice in the long run.

~~~
kgo
Well yeah, but if you're on the fence about a big life decision, you should go
out and research it, and not rely on hacker news to spoon-feed you the
appropriate info.

I'd hate to to think that someone considering a PhD program read yesterday's
'not worth it' article, but didn't get online over the weekend, missing the
'yes it is' article, and made his decision accordingly. I think we all agree
that would be absurd, possibly even insane.

That's why I always feel like these articles and their upvotes are more about
hn'ers trying to justify or rationalize their choices, than trying to help
someone else out.

~~~
Loic
I am sorry if you interpreted my post this way. The thing is that this year
has seen many many articles in big journals about the "education bubble" etc.
Basically, a lot of higher education bashing. And pg, with YCombinator is also
kind of going that way with the mantra to get new entrepreneurs as young as
possible. If you start a business being 18, you will never have the
opportunity to discover then learn enough in some really interesting fields of
engineering. This is what longer education provides.

I just wanted people not to forget about the good sides of a longer education.
Nothing more.

~~~
kgo
I'm actually sorry. Apologies. I know the core of your message was "you can
get a PhD, and things will work out okay." I might be being intentionally
provocative up above, because I too am sick of the many articles about
education sucking, and comments that equate happiness in life with the Golden
Rule. (The guy who has the most gold wins.) Maybe I'm just mad that it's
gotten to the point that people feel they need to post rebuttals to these
silly articles.

------
dshankar
"at the end of your PhD, you can have your product nearly ready and you will
be able to charge your customers more in thousands of Dollars than in $9 per
month."

PhD vs non-PhD does not determine whether you charge $1000/mo or $9/mo. It's
what you actually build with your talent.

A PhD building a mobile service is still limited by the economics everybody
else faces.

~~~
sedachv
I don't see too many PhD dissertations on iPhone fart apps getting published.

~~~
dshankar
You missed the point.

If you're build mobile services like mobile payment platforms, video games,
ecommerce solutions etc., a PhD isn't going to get you more money from a
customer.

~~~
sedachv
No, you missed my point. No one is building "mobile payment platforms, video
games, ecommerce solutions" in academia, either because those problems aren't
interesting, or more likely because they will not get you grants. The point of
a PhD is to work on fundamental problems in your field of study. This is
something that is often ignored by people claiming to be studying computer
science, which is why people constantly argue that it is not a science.

~~~
Someone
Well, actually people are building these things, but they are focussing on one
aspect, and skipping any non-interesting parts as far as possible. So, that
payment system will have one or more innovative aspects, but it will likely
not be robust, fast enough to handle thousands of customers, secure, capable
of handling international payments, etc, and it will certainly not be all of
them.

------
jlees
Anecdotally (why my PhD turned out to be a bad idea):

1\. I got a supervisor who gave her students a lot of freedom but it worked
entirely the wrong way.

2\. The UK doesn't pay well.

3\. I didn't get any money for conference travel as my PhD stipend was a grant
from my college.

4\. Yeah, this is the fun one - you're doing a highly research focused degree
and finding somewhere that actually has a foot in the real world, in the exact
area you want to study and build a startup around, is difficult. But if you
can pull it off, I'm sure it could work.

I got a lot of credit for starting a startup around my PhD topic - but I was
forced to do so because I simply couldn't continue working on this stuff in
academia any more, as it was too applied for my university.

------
_delirium
As an American PhD student currently finishing up and moving to a European
faculty job, I was quite surprised at #2. Typical pay for a CS PhD student in
the U.S. is somewhere in the $16k-24k range. In Denmark, it's $45k!

(I clearly did things backwards, because the opposite is true of faculty pay.)

~~~
InquilineKea
How is the Canadian stipend? And do higher-paying countries tend to pay lower
stipends?

Do schools in Scandinavia and the Netherlands even care if your only language
is English?

~~~
ndrarmst
From what I've seen, the Canadian stipends range from a low of about $15k, for
those on research assistantships (paid out of their supervisor's research
budget) or on provincial scholarships, to a high of about $21k (NSERC or other
tri-council federal scholarships). There are a limited number of higher-paying
tri-council scholarships as well.

Some universities will top up a federal/provincial scholarship (Waterloo tops
up by $10,000), and teaching assistantships are available as well. However,
part-time work hours (TA or otherwise) are usually limited by the terms of the
scholarship/assitantship, so there is a limit to how much a student can
reasonably earn while doing a degree (NSERC limits to 10 hours worked/week,
the expected hours for a TA).

Tuition is paid out of the student's stipend amount, though it's often quite a
bit less than undergraduate tuition in CS and similar programs. My fee bill
dropped in half when I finished my BASc and started an MASc.

------
rywang
It is easier to acquire specialized skills in computer vision and machine
learning in grad school than in industry. I've also personally had a good
experience incubating technology during my PhD, although this depends on your
advisor and your country. The PhD programs in the US are usually longer than
the EU (6 versus 3 or 4 years), but typically provide more freedom and less
pressure to publish constantly.

------
sedachv
The thing about doing a PhD in CS today is that from reading about all the
famous people who did PhDs in the US in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, it seems they
were much better off. ARPA/DARPA funding was plentiful, industrial research
labs were at their peak, commercial firms seem to have been hungry for
consulting. I forgot where I read it, but someone was writing about how their
PhD advisor wanted his students to spend half their time consulting at
commercial firms outside the university.

I don't have any first-hand knowledge of this, maybe it is just the opinion of
the successful and/or lucky people who had a good time and wrote about it, I
would love for people to confirm or deny this perception. But the contrast
with people I know who are/were doing their PhDs today is night and day.

"Starving grad student" is an accurate stereotype. I really can't see myself
spending 5 years earning barely $30k a year, busting my ass TAing undergrads,
dealing with publishing deadlines and BS from the supervisor and university
(you'd be surprised at the amount of people who end up with asshole
supervisors!), practically begging for grants. I don't know any PhD candidates
who regularly do consulting, or anyone who has a comfortable annual income.
And the stress is crazy. I don't know why anyone would do this to themselves.

To add insult to injury, I know I'm making the same or more money than many
people my age (or a year or two older, I'm 25) straight out of CS PhD
programs.

If I want to hack on interesting R&D projects, I can do that as Free Software
in my spare time (which I do). The contrast is I have actual users instead of
papers to submit. If I had to write an interesting system for a dissertation,
I'm practically guaranteed that no one will use it because everyone knows that
software that comes out of academia is shit.

So, what's the point?

~~~
tincholio
If you think doing a PhD in CS is about writing software, you don't know what
you're talking about, dude.

You started your post with a coherent argument, but the ending was completely
WTF material.

~~~
sedachv
If I wanted to do more math, I'd go to grad school for mathematics (one of my
undergrad degrees is in math).

I don't want to beg Sun for grant money to develop new ways to make Java less
shitty (you would be amazed at the number of papers that have been written
about this topic), since they don't want to invest the money in setting up a
real R&D lab with real-world salaries.

I'm not interested in type theory, complexity, encryption, or formal
verification. Are there any other areas of CS research where I can get away
with not writing any software as a grad student?

~~~
tincholio
There are plenty! But that's besides the point. You most likely will end up
writing some software as part as a PhD in CS, but that's not the objective.
Most of the time, the software will be proof-of-concept stuff to validate some
of the research you've done. Or to assess the performance of a new algorithm,
or whatever. Your comparison of equating R&D to hacking on some open-source
project is really apples to oranges. In any case, a PhD in CS is, 99.9999% of
the time, not about hacking, at all.

~~~
sedachv
If a grad student writes a software prototype and no one uses it, does it make
a sound?

The fact that "99.9999% of the time" is spent doing other things is the
problem. If you're doing applied math like type theory and make an
advancement, that's research. If you're doing anything else, that's the
Development part of R&D.

Computer science doesn't exist in a vacuum. Unlike math, you can't come up
with some new algorithm without first having a problem that that algorithm is
intended to solve (again, this doesn't apply to complexity-related research
because that is applied math).

So we can't claim CS arises a priori (unless it's just applied math like type
theory), so then you have to claim that what your CS research is doing is
empirical. Good luck with that. Because, you know, Java is a naturally
occurring system.

Let's take two concrete examples of projects I hack on:

<http://common-lisp.net/project/eager-future/>

<http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/>

Both of these topics (using futures for parallelism, and language X to
JavaScript compilation) have had and continue to have a lot of academic
research devoted to them.

These two systems I contribute to happen to have interesting and original
properties that I've arrived at in a process that can only be described as
hacking.

I'm convinced that I never would have been able to have these hacking
breakthroughs without the freedom and time to reflect that I have outside of
grad school.

It doesn't matter how supportive your advisor is, there is still the question
of grants and publishing deadlines. And I know a thing or two about working
the university system to create a supportive environment for myself - as a
math undergrad, I had my own cubicle in and run of the AI lab, had support
from a number of CS professors, one of whom had a spot reserved in the CS MSc
program for me (I obviously didn't go). I spent a lot of time around grad
students at the AI and other CS labs, so I got to know what grad student life
looked like.

But aside from all that, the best thing about working on these systems on my
own has been the fact that people actually use them. The feedback has been
invaluable for giving me new ideas and inspiring the innovative hacks.

~~~
tincholio
>The fact that "99.9999% of the time" is spent doing other things is the
problem. If you're doing applied math like type theory and make an
advancement, that's research. If you're doing anything else, that's the
Development part of R&D.

It's not a problem, at all. Whether you're developing new algorithms,
analyzing them, running simulations, studying and understanding the results,
all that _is_ research. I think you're being too narrow in your definitions.

------
crocowhile
I don't know about CS but if you are thinking of doing a PhD in the biomedical
field, do it only if you are really really really attracted by the idea of
doing research and knowing that there is about 1 academic job for every 10-15
people who start PhD. Competition is fierce, pay is miserable, be sure you are
in love with the job.

------
vitobcn
I really don't get this type of statements (and I am referring both to this
article and the opposite one that also got to front page today).

Doing a PhD is neither good nor bad. There is just no right choice for
everybody. Some people will rather pursue one, some others will rather avoid
higher education and go for other endeavors. It is just an individual decision
which will turn out good for some and bad for others.

Personally, I didn't see the point for one and decided to graduate just with
an MSc, but I have many friends with PhDs and in hindsight they are fully
satisfied with their decisions.

------
JeanPierre
A warning before you simply look at just how much every single country pays
for PhDs: Living in Europe, especially Scandinavia, cost _usually_ a lot more
than living in the States. You should take this into account when you decide
where to take your PhD.

As a little tips if you're interested in taking a PhD in Norway: They discuss
whether to halve the amount of PhD-positions and double the pay or not. If
this happens, it will be very reasonable to take a PhD here. If this does not
happen, I would not recommend taking a PhD "for the money", because prices
here are skyhigh.

------
citricsquid
Isn't the _real_ answer that it's different for everyone? Doing any sort of
degree _just because_ is surely wrong, especially in the way you suggest.
Taking funding for a PHD and then working on a startup and moving into that
once you're qualified probably isn't what those who are funding it intended on
you doing... I guess that's what being a hacker is, playing the system, but it
feels morally wrong to me when there are limited funding options etc etc etc

------
tluyben2
Tell NH: don't worry about money so much and if you do want to waste time
thinking/talking about money and the making thereof, don't do a PhD.

------
snow_mac
Do you have a PhD?

------
amichail
Your brain doesn't last forever. A PhD will make it harder to succeed because
your brain will have deteriorated somewhat by the time you finish it.

Try comparing programmers at ages 20 vs 30.

~~~
scott_s
I'm 6 months from 30, and I'm a much better programmer now than when I was 20.
(Which was my junior year of college.) Not sure what your point is.

~~~
amichail
Some things get better with age. Others such as analytic ability, thinking
speed, and energy level get worse.

~~~
keefe
[http://books.google.com/books?id=OXS8XBwP0coC&lpg=PA85&#...](http://books.google.com/books?id=OXS8XBwP0coC&lpg=PA85&ots=syZTCKEPGt&dq=analytical%20thinking%20ability%20age%20decline&lr&pg=PA85#v=onepage&q&f=false)

one source amongst many, note the # of achievements peaks around 40 not 20

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6X08-46P4PSB-1K&_user=10&_coverDate=08%2F31%2F1997&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1583264144&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=fb9fa6a7c29afda6bd2aac0352d624ae&searchtype=a)

". In some cases (e.g., bisection), performance differences between the older
participants and students nearly 50 years younger used in other studies were
negligible."

and so on and so forth, this is by no means a well solved problem that says,
young people are smarter derp

~~~
say_
Achievement is definitely way more than just natural ability. Experience
counts for a lot, and older people will have a large knowledge advantage.
However, he has a legitimate point about natural analytic ability and speed.

See:[http://www18.homepage.villanova.edu/diego.fernandezduque/Tea...](http://www18.homepage.villanova.edu/diego.fernandezduque/Teaching/CognitivePsychology/Lectures_and_Labs/ssssAging/CurrDirAgingSalthouse.pdf)

Seriously, if you need a kick in the ass to get moving every now and then
(like me), then google Timothy Salthouse's research on cognitive aging. It's a
depressing reminder that time waits for no one.

