
Ask HN: How to recruit PhD students in software engineering? - azhenley
I&#x27;ll be starting as a professor in a few months where I&#x27;ll be doing research on developer tools. I have seen that it is <i>extremely</i> difficult to recruit good PhD students in this topic area (even at elite schools), since most of them are heavily recruited by industry.<p>Any advice on attracting talented grad students in a topic area that has to compete with high paying companies? I do have funding for these students but it isn&#x27;t anything like industry.
======
majos
How is it better for them to work for you and get a PhD rather than working in
industry? I ask this as a computer science PhD student on the
theory/algorithms side, where opportunities to learn how to do research fresh
out of undergrad are pretty much exclusive to PhD programs. This doesn't seem
to be the case for your area, but I imagine there is _some_ edge?

~~~
azhenley
This is a great point, and one that is difficult to answer.

The biggest reason I did a PhD is the freedom to explore the problems that I
wanted. I didn't want to be told what to do or worry about short term
contributions to a product/company. I imagined it a bit like doing my own
startup where I have 4-6 years of funding.

~~~
majos
Not a bad pitch, but I suppose the main difficulty is getting the pitch to
potential students in the first place, which is much harder past the very top
schools.

If the nature of your funding allows it keeping a close eye out for motivated
undergrads and actually employing them could work to raise your profile to
attract grad students. As I understand it identifying good undergrad
researchers is quite hard, but it may be a good low-financial-commitment way
to spin up a group of sorts?

------
mchannon
79% of all CS grad students are international.

You may find a somewhat rich applicant pool of international talent that can
get student visas but not work authorization. Fish in a barrel.

My college advisor was Turkish. Over 75% of the grad students in the
department were Turkish. This was no coincidence. Start warming up those
contacts at IIT and other well-regarded (outside the US) universities, and you
may find yourself beating them off with a stick.

------
happertiger
Why is it in the best interests of those developers to persue an academic
degree rather than real world experience, setting aside the rather hefty
financial reasons for a moment? That seems to be the underpinning question
here...

~~~
azhenley
Definitely. I think you are hitting on the same point that majos did. The best
answer I have is the reason I did a PhD: freedom. It gave me many hours of
unstructured time to explore problems I was interested in, which I would not
have been able to do while working full time (I tried).

------
dman
Is there a sub specialization you are looking at? - tools to write software /
querying tools / visuzalization tools?

~~~
azhenley
I mostly work on the human aspects of code editors. My process is: observe
actual developers to understand their problems -> design and build a tool to
overcome a problem -> evaluate the tool with real users.

For example, we observed devs spending a lot managing tabs in Eclipse/VS and
scrolling through files. I built a code editor that does away with tabs and
instead has a novel interface for navigating code.

Brief summaries of my projects and all of my publications can be found on my
website: [http://austinhenley.com/](http://austinhenley.com/). I'm interested
in many different areas of SE and would be happy to let a motivated student
explore their interests.

