

The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010) - Kopion
http://www.economist.com/node/17723223

======
klochner
A computer science Ph.D. is nothing like what is described in this article.
For various reasons (other opportunities, generous industry grants, minimal
financial overhead to run a lab), students in computer science are
comparatively well paid and free to work at their own pace. YMMV based on
advisor.

It's been exhaustively shown that stopping after undergrad or masters degrees
will be more financially lucrative, so some reasons to go on:

    
    
      - you want one of the specialized researchy positions that
          are typically filled by Ph.D. holders
      - you have a genuine interest in some specialized field and
          want to work purely on learning/investigating that field
      - you want to be a professor

~~~
shawn-butler
I would limit that to just #2 in your list. The other two carrots are so out
of your reach or subject to factors so far beyond your control that a love for
learning and a burning interest in your research is the only thing that you
can count on sustaining you.

~~~
larsberg
#1 is also pretty achievable. For example, if you get a Ph.D. studying how to
implement compilers and virtual machines, you basically have your choice of
which place that implements compiler or VMs to work at (source: I am about to
defend my Ph.D. in implementing compilers and VMs).

~~~
seanmcdirmid
But how many places are there that do that? You have google, Microsoft, maybe
intel, a few companies in the valley. PhDs are very specialized, and so they
really can be at the mercy of their hot skill.

And even google...might tell you to go work on ads with your hot VM/compiler
skills. Disclosure: I'm a PL PhD who got out of the vm/compiler area to focus
on PL design, which is even more esoteric.

~~~
larsberg
I don't know about google - all the PL people I know who went to google no
longer work on PL stuff, though I don't know if that's because of working at
offices where PL work is not supported rather than a lack of company-wide
freedom.

From conversations with hiring managers at each, Apple, Microsoft, Intel,
NVidia, and Adobe all have far more positions than they can fill for people
with PhD-level VM/compiler writing skills. Heck, we can't turn out experienced
_undergrads_ fast enough for their tastes. I assume there would also be stuff
in embedded systems, particularly FPGA compiler-related, though I don't
personally know hiring managers at the big firms in that area.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Google has found PL PhDs very versatile I guess. Many of their top people are
in PL, so it could also just be a top down hiring bias.

I'd be weary taking just any job in VM/compilers, much of it is quite tedious
and boring for a PhD. Intel used to have compiler groups filled with PhDs, Sun
also. Them there are smaller companies like coverity.

------
minimize_me
I do sometimes wonder if this "PhD is a waste of time" is being pushed so
heavily to get a glut of the best computer science grads, who would otherwise
consider a PhD, onto the engineer job market. A cute little trick to drive
down the salaries a bit, cut back on the perks...

I mean, people posting links like this, on this board, don't really have
English lit grads in mind, do they?

Not that I disagree with the sentiment entirely, but it seems to be getting a
lot of mileage the past few months.

~~~
magic_haze
I think this is just a continuation of the old "College is a waste of time"
thought, but I have noticed a _lot_ of people -- especially from China and
India -- enrolling in CS PhD programs the last few years. I talked to a few of
them from my college, and an exceedingly common theme seems to be family and
peer pressure, so personally, I'd really like to understand more about this
topic.

~~~
arunabha
An important, but rarely overtly stated reason for foreigners to attend grad
school in the United States is immigration. A graduate degree (esp in STEM
disciplines) is a relatively secure way of getting a student visa, getting a
job while on OPT, getting an H1B and finally a Green Card. Of course it does
not mean that immigration is the sole reason for asians to attend US grad
school in hordes, but it is an important one.

Funnily enough, when you apply for your student visa, you're required to
assert that you will return to your country after your education in the US is
over :-)

~~~
ericd
I don't understand the motivation there at all - shouldn't the US be trying to
hold on to the most educated foreigners as much as possible?

~~~
jonemo
I used to ask that question and have been told that the US greatly benefits
from having US-educated people in positions of power around the world. I don't
know if this is true, but what is true that a surprising number of heads of
states of countries that are considered political allies of the US have
degrees from US universities. I first noticed this trend when reading about
Pacific island nations.

~~~
ericd
I suppose, but the number of people leaving the country that that requires is
fairly small, unless you're talking about spreading a cultural hegemony. I
think it's likely just irrational.

------
rayiner
I think it depends on whose perspective you're talking about. I think for
typical engineers, especially in EE/CS, the increase in earning power from the
PhD doesn't make up for the six years of lost income and career progression.
But I think from the point of view of society, it's absolutely worth it. The
most brilliant engineers I know are PhDs. They have this incredible depth of
theoretical understanding of a particular area that I think is hard to achieve
without those years of dedicated study.

~~~
beala
It's hard to know which way the causality goes here. It might just be that
really exceptional undergrads happen to end up in grad school (because of
pressure from professors or family, or simply because "it's just what smart
people do"), even though they would have been exceptional engineers either
way. I agree that PhDs are very knowledgable when it comes to their precise
field of study, but this is often very narrow. How useful is this expert
knowledge unless you're hired specifically for it (ie, as a researcher)?

~~~
rayiner
Socially, there is a big value in getting a very bright person to intensely
study a single area for many years. PhDs do usually go on to work in their
field, and a vastly disproportionate amount of innovation comes from them.
That's why I don't really buy the correlation argument. I don't think even
very bright people are going to be able to make contributions like new speech
recognition algorithms or new algorithms for wireless networking, robotics,
etc, without the kind of dedicated and focused study that comes from a PhD (or
an equivalent level of theoretical study outside a PhD program).

------
crucifiction
As a hiring manager of non-specialized software developers, I take people with
4-6 years of real world coding over a phd any day. We generally hire phd's at
the same level/pay as a bachelors in cs with maybe only a nominal amount more
in salary. the skills you learn as a phd are not really what the industry
needs, unless you manage to find one of the small number of jobs that requires
whatever specific thing you studied as a phd. like the article says, those are
very few and far between compared to the # of students exiting with degrees.

~~~
ideonexus
I concur. My experience with CS PhDs is that they lack the production-oriented
mindset needed for the real world. We hired a CS PhD to write reports for us.
In six months he did not write one single line of code, but produced a very
impressive whitepaper about the code he intended to write. He went on to write
more whitepapers for a company specializing in vaporware somewhere else.

I've had similar experiences with PhDs in many other fields as well. I have a
great deal of respect for the degree, the person who worked so hard for it,
and I love to read their often brilliant research, but either the effort of
getting the degree or the mindset it takes to want to obtain one makes these
people nearly useless in the business world. Give me an entry-level BS degree
or 5-6 years equivalent experience any day.

~~~
tensor
Meanwhile, the top tech firms aggressively recruit CS PhDs.

~~~
modarts
Well, more power to them. They have the resources to train them up to a level
where they'll be productive.

~~~
tensor
Or perhaps this thread is full of obscene generalizations that are untrue.
Hell, it even started off on the wrong foot by invoking "real world". All that
term means is that you think your work is somehow relevant while the work of
others, in this case PhDs, is not relevant.

Parts of this community have a real problem with ego and unsubstantiated
generalizations.

~~~
crucifiction
No, real world = in production for potentially a long time, iterated with
customer feedback. phd/ms work = functional hacks that maybe a professor or
the student ever looks at/codes against and that are eventually thrown away _.

_ except in very rare circumstances

------
asynchronous13
This article was pretty good at identifying drawbacks of higher education.
(unlike the recent article by the literature PhD)

There's so many assumptions surrounding a PhD degree. "I'll make more money!"
Maybe, but it takes a lot of years to make up for making $0 for several years.
"the only jobs for a PhD is in academia" depends on the subject, last I
checked google hires lots of PhDs. "I'll only work 5 hours a week!" just
because you only saw your professor when you showed up for class does not mean
those were the only hours your prof was working. "PhDs are super smart!"
maybe, or they're just good at jumping through hoops.

The article pointed out that there is a glut of PhDs compared to available
academic jobs. But then laments that only 57% of PhD students finish the
degree within 10 years. The author seemingly argues that more people should
graduate sooner, and increase the glut?

It's not about smarts, self-motivation and leadership are required to finish a
PhD. If someone expects to have their hand held and be told what to do, they
might never finish.

The article also says that these students are the smartest of their class. If
that's true, then they are smart enough to view the job market and weigh the
pros and cons of higher education themselves. (if they can't do that, then I'd
argue they are not the brightest in their class after all)

------
michael_nielsen
I wonder when the first article was written claiming that doing a PhD was a
waste of time? I'll bet it was in the 19th century. And we'll no doubt keep
seeing such articles until such time as the PhD fades from history.

(Nothing against the article in question, which is a better-than-usual
discussion of the issue.)

------
graycat
Getting a Ph.D. is "often a waste of time". Sometimes it's much worse: I've
seen too many lives seriously hurt or even destroyed, as in they died, e.g.,
from suicide from clinical depression, from the stresses of a Ph.D. program.
Some of the students hurt or killed were brilliant, some of the best
undergraduate students in the world, PBK, 'summa cum laude', Woodrow Wilson,
NSF, etc.

Still the fact that a Ph.D. is "often a waste of time" should not be regarded
as very important. Why? Because that statement is essentially a probability.
So, if W is the 'event' of a waste of time and P is a probability measure,
then the claim is that the probability of W, P(W), is too large. I'd agree
P(W) is too large.

But a given student usually doesn't have to 'face' only P(W) and, instead, has
information about some more 'events', say, A, B, and C, that are relevant, and
then gets to observe an estimate of the 'conditional probability of W given A,
B, and C', that is, P(W|A, B, C). Then, even if P(W) is too high, P(W|A, B, C)
can be quite low in which case that student might go ahead.

We know that a Ph.D. is the 'union card' for professors in college and
universities. While there can be a lot to discuss about a career as a
professor, I set that aside as, at least for HN readers, not very interesting.

But, what about a Ph.D. for careers other than being a professor? Okay:

I limit my discussion to Ph.D. degrees in 'technical' fields. I omit
biomedical fields due to my limited knowledge of those fields.

There are pros and cons:

Cons. In nearly every line of work other than being a professor, having a
Ph.D. is 'unusual'. So, in particular, if a Ph.D. takes a a job, say, job J,
at company UGE, then somewhere in the path in the tree of the organization
chart of company UGE from job J to the CEO likely there will be a person S
without a Ph.D. where person S has a Ph.D. reporting to them. This is an
uncomfortable situation; lawyers know this, and supposedly their profession
tries to arrange that any working lawyer reports only to a lawyer. This
unfortunate situation is a special case of the larger situation that Ph.D.
holders in technical fields do not have a strong 'profession' to protect them.

A Ph.D. in electronic engineering can at times want to swap their degree for
an electrician's license -- good union card, key to a sole proprietorship that
commonly pays well enough to buy a house and support a family, a rock solidly
stable industry, a great geographical barrier to entry.

Why "awkward"? Because person S will be afraid of two cases: (1) The Ph.D.
training is irrelevant so that the Ph.D. holder will have their degree
influencing their job performance in ways irrelevant to the job. (2) The Ph.D.
training is relevant in which case the subordinate may conclude that their
supervisor S is low on competence and, thus, be insubordinate and, with their
extra competence, may be a threat to the career of person S.

So, if get a technical Ph.D. and pursue a non-academic job, then likely will
be in an awkward position without help of a recognized, respected profession.

Pro. One aid in making 'the big bucks' is to do some work that meets three
criteria: -- powerful, valuable, and new. If everyone over at UGE is
determined to hire people only like themselves, keep down any additional
competence, and, net, just keep doing things they way they long have been
doing them, then a person with work meeting the three criteria might have a
golden opportunity. Call it 'innovation', 'creative destruction', 'survival of
the fittest', or just blowing the doors off those other guys, getting the big
house, winter vacation house, summer vacation house, sports cars, good, old
Stradivarius violin for a talented daughter, help getting into Princeton for
another child, yacht, for wine for dinner parties, shopping, for a few dozen
cases, between Beaune and Dijon, seat at the Round Table of the university
president, for a child help getting through graduate school and seed funding
for a startup, etc. Or just quite a lot of additional financial security.

Of course, in this case will be 'different'; maybe in a good way different but
definitely not the same. Often will not 'fit in'. E.g., would not be hired at
UGE.

But being different is commonly what goes with success, which in itself is
'different'.

So, what does a Ph.D. have to do with doing some work that has the three
criteria of powerful, valuable, and new? Answer, a lot: Those three criteria
are essentially those of some successful original research -- the usual
statement is "new, correct, and significant" but for non-academic work we can
substitute the three criteria I gave. So, the crucial work is necessarily
about 'research'.

So, how to do 'research'? Well, history shows that commonly it's not easy, but
there's education for that, called Ph.D. programs at the best 20 or so US
research universities -- many of the names are well known, Harvard, MIT,
Cornell, Brown, Yale, Columbia, NYU (and Courant), Princeton, Johns Hopkins,
UNC, Georgia Tech, CMU (see, Jerry, I didn't leave you out!), University of
Chicago, University of Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, Cal Tech.

Nearly always the main difficulty in a Ph.D. program is the research part. For
a good, succinct description of much of the challenge, buried in at least the
machine readable copy of D. Knuth's 'The TeXBook' is

    
    
         "The traditional way is to
         put off all creative
         aspects until the last part
         of graduate school.  For
         seventeen or more years, a
         student is taught
         examsmanship, then suddenly
         after passing enough exams
         in graduate school he's
         told to do something
         original."
    

And there can be other challenges.

But as difficult as the original work is via a Ph.D. program, commonly such
work is more difficult otherwise. So, for someone in business trying to do
work with the three criteria I listed, a Ph.D. program should be a big help.

In my Web 2.0 startup, the computing is often a pain in the back side due to
poorly written documentation, system management headaches, security holes,
..., bugs but is all just routine. The key to my startup, if it is successful,
will be some work that meets the three criteria, and for that work I have to
admit that my Ph.D. program helped.

So, right, glad you noticed: If get a technical Ph.D. and want to use it
outside of academics, then are heavily betting on doing some work that meets
the three criteria and being a founder of a successful startup.

Maybe there are too few examples successful Web 2.0 companies founded by a
Ph.D. who did some research crucial to the success of the company. Then can
take this situation as evidence that (1) a Ph.D. and some research are not
powerful or (2) there is a wide open field full of opportunities. My guess is
(2).

I know; I know: But why can't there be just a nice, easy, secure, 20-30 hour a
week job that will provide good financial security for life? Well, Obama
already has that job (that's intended to be a joke!).

------
marianne_navada
I've been "All But Dissertation" for two years now for a PhD in sociology. I
haven't touched my dissertation after having my proposal approved. Instead, I
co-founded an organization that addresses the problem that I discovered in my
preliminary research. Right now, my decision feels right.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Are you sure you aren't just procrastinating? I'm joking, it sounds like you
are doing the right thing.

~~~
marianne_navada
Hehehehe, this is what my advisor thinks :) But honestly, right now, it just
feels so good to reject the idea that a doctorate is everything. I've been in
school for 12 years!

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I was in school for 13 years (5+8). Procrastination is a common grad student
problem.

------
Create
"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years
in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified
to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

------
pagekicker
old news

------
pfedor
The decision to enter a PhD program only makes sense for one of the two
reasons: either you think you're going to win a Nobel Prize one day, or, you
don't mind spending five years in a way which doesn't advance any goal
(literal quote from a conversation I had, "so you had an offer from Google but
you decided to do a PhD instead--why??", "Oh, I just want to do nothing for a
while longer".)

The two kinds of PhD students may look the same but they're very different. If
you belong to the first category, even if you realize you won't get that Nobel
Prize, I doubt you're going to regret trying. If you're of the second kind,
why yes, you have wasted five years of your life, _which is exactly what you
signed up for_ so why do you complain?

~~~
rayiner
Look at the interesting things Google is doing. Driverless cars is headed up
by Sabastian Thrun (PhD). The technical lead on Google Glass is Thad Starner
(PhD and professor at my alma mater). Heck, Page and Brin were halfway through
their PhD program at Stanford (both have an MS from there) before they founded
Google. PageRank was exactly the kind of thing that comes from PhD projects
(extension and application of theoretical principles to new areas). And Dr.
Starner has been working on wearable computing for two decades.

All these things didn't just appear out of nowhere because Google hired a
bunch of bright fresh college graduates.

~~~
trhtrsh
Google's early success was much about the supportive environment for founding
a company, not the academics: networking with investors and early hires,
getting recommendations from influential professors, than it was about the
"PhD project" of PageRank. It was a standard graph algorithm executed on the
Internet, not a ground-breaking academic project. (Obviously -- they left
school before they did much any work on PageRank)

If PageRank were a new idea now, Google.com could have come up through YC.

~~~
rayiner
It's not that simple and they did a prototype and published a paper before
they left Stanford (three years in). See:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank>. It was conceived as a "citation graph
of the web" based on theoretical work in that area:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20020506051802/www-
diglib.stanfor...](http://web.archive.org/web/20020506051802/www-
diglib.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/WP/get/SIDL-WP-1997-0072?1).

You say that today they could've come up through YC. I'm not sure that's true.
Would they have the necessary grounding in those "standard graph algorithms"
if they had just come straight to YC (or bearing in mind Stanford
undergraduates benefit tremendously from the graduate program--skipped college
entirely?) I think you're downplaying the interaction of study and invention
here.

