[michaelvoz]

"I’ll assume that the second option you are considering is joining a medium-large company (which is likely most common). Ask yourself if you find the following properties appealing: ..."

Why is every conversation about PHDs always cast in the light of as-opposed-to-working-for-the-man? I don't see discussions ever bring up the plethora of other life courses one can take. It is though the author sees a very clear binary: PHD or go work on fixing bugs in Gmail (or some other such cog-in-a-machine project).

Where is the discussion of starting a business? Of making your own company? Breaking free of the political shackles of academia and blazing your own path to glory?

I am all for PHDs, and all for people pursuing, and pushing, the boundaries of human knowledge. I would just like to see that discussion live on its own, without comparison, if that is possible.

[throwawaymsft]

"Properties you find appealing..."

  * Freedom
  * Ownership
  * Personal freedom
  ...

<Later...>

  * Getting into a PhD program: references, references, references
  * Student adviser relationship
  * Pre-vs-post tenure
  * Impressing an adviser
  * (Topic) Plays to your adviser’s interests and strengths

Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to. Reading this, I'm so thankful I didn't enter academia. I still pursue my academic interests on my own.

Edit: A few people insist on casting a float into a bool. Every job has politics, ranging from 0.01% (anonymous author of 1-man SaaS) to 99% (politician). It's not very informative to note that both are non-zero.

[robotresearcher]

> Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics

That's crazy. The way to get a great reference is to do outstanding work. If by 'playing politics' you mean not pissing people off by being an asshole or being unreliable, then, yeah, take care to be a good colleague. But almost entirely: do really good work.

[hueving]

Bash other people's novel work while peer reviewing it anonymously, then steal it and submit for publication at another conference before the rejection notification goes to the original author.

Once someone makes it into the review pools for top conferences, they receive a constant feed of good ideas to harvest in the form of submissions.

[robotresearcher]

That's the pathological case, yes. People can also go steal cars and rob houses. But they usually don't.

Good luck getting a reference from someone after stealing their idea.

[eanzenberg]

From my super-limited experience in academia, I found politics is more important at top schools and much less important when you get to ~40-80 ranked US schools for PhD programs.

[phd_]

I went through a PhD at a non-top-tier school (borderline between second-tier and third-tier). I definitely dealt with politics extensively. A huge amount of people-pleasing, both with your advisor and with others in your chosen research area and the broader field it sits in. A fair bit of funding-related politics. And a fair bit of actual politics politics, if you want to fit in.

There's a lot of in-group / out-group politics in academia; don't make life more difficult for yourself when you know a straightforward way to survive. Learn to deeply bury any opinions you might have that don't completely align with those of people who control your fate, especially in areas fundamental to their in-group identity, and if that fails, lie convincingly. (Remember that dodging a question where enthusiastic agreement was expected is a form of answer, and not the one you want to give.) You might get lucky and work with people accepting of differences of opinion, but I wouldn't recommend risking it when years of your life are on the line.

I don't regret the experience, and quite frankly I learned a few other survival skills in the process that simply hadn't come up as an undergrad, but don't go into it thinking it's a purely technical experience, or that you won't have to deal with a pile of utterly ridiculous BS and unpleasantness.

[pgbovine]

Having spent time at schools of various "ranks" (whatever that means), "politics" (whatever that means ... that's super vague) is everywhere. It's what you make of it. Whenever you have people, money, and status mixing, there is politics. That's not exclusive to academia. Every company I've worked at also had those dynamics. Want to eliminate politics? Be independently wealthy and work alone :) Otherwise everyone needs to learn to work with and transcend the system in their own unique way.

[stared]

Well, with freelancing (in data science) I managed to avoid politics (and bureaucracy) completely (no, I am not independently wealthy).

[throwawaymsft]

That's good to hear. I have the hankering to return to school at some point, and I really just want to learn and contribute.

[eli_gottlieb]

> Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to.

Yeah, internal corporate politics never gets people's entire project canceled with no notice in the corporate world. That would just be mean, so it doesn't happen /s.

(Guess what I found out last Friday?)

[throwawaymsft]

That sucks, but politics in the workplace can be dialed from mega-corp to startup to consultancy to freelancer to anonymous author of a SaaS. How much politics did patio11 deal with when running Bingo Card Creator?

[Ar-Curunir]

Pretty sure that the same applies for academia. It depends on your department culture and lab environment.

[user5994461]

I found the academia to be way more vicious and politics than a company.

In academia, teachers/referees/directors were commonly there for 10-20 years, some will probably never have to live their positions and they have full unlimited authority for many things.

The worse that could happen in academia as a student is to have politics goes against your back. You will be blocked from graduating, you will loose X years of study unlikely to start over or graduate at another place, and be stuck with your debt and no diploma.

In a company, the worst that could happen is simply to be fired. You look for another job and keep your money, you keep your diploma, keep your experiences.

In fact, if you have a problem with your boss at work, you can always change job. If you have a problem with your PhD (or master's) teacher in academia, you can't leave without failing your studies and you're fucked.

[euske]

> casting a float into a bool

Haha, a geeky yet very apt expression.

[baby]

Spoiler Alert: politic is everywhere.

[throwawaymsft]

Yes, but (importantly) degrees vary. The politics of working for an adviser chasing tenure are different from, say, running a SaaS, writing an ebook, or selling a plugin.

[baby]

You mean, politic is different if you're not working for anyone? I can't even agree with that. You will still have politic in place if you have people working for you, or if you have critics reviewing your ebook, or if you're trying to get your plugin accepted in a store, etc...

cqfd

[throwawaymsft]

Correct. And are the politics of getting your plugin accepted in the Wordpress directory more or less than getting tenure?

See the edit above. You are saying two things must be equal because they are both non-zero. It's a very strange argument.

[baby]

Getting tenure is a life accomplishment. Getting a plugin accepted in a wordpress directory? Come on, we're comparing apples and oranges.

If you look at some parts of getting a tenure, they are without politic as well. Example: studying a subject.

[JoshTriplett]

Agreed completely. I did a PhD knowing that I had zero interest in going into academia, and it provided a major boost to my professional career. I find it surprising when people talk about doing a PhD as exclusively useful for academics.

[Xcelerate]

Agreed. The main reason I got my PhD was because all of the jobs I found interesting after finishing my BS said "PhD required" on their application. I never planned on going into academia.

[eanzenberg]

Same! I was super-interested in research and that's why I pursued a PhD. I never thought of running a lab or teaching classes.

[tostitos1979]

A friend and I (both PhDs) were just discussing how difficult having a PhD has made getting engineering positions.In the course of interviewing at top-5 companies, we both have experienced a$$hats/interviewers with complexes who seem bent on showing off how they are smarter than the PhD interviewee .. curious if you have run into this as well, and any strategies to guard against this? I've also seen people who think PhDs can't code to save their life (I've seen such people but those are very obvious ... people who couldn't do fizbuzz) or think PhDs would get bored and leave easily. How does a competent PhD job seeker deal with this crap?

[sidlls]

Seek jobs for which a PhD is a minimum requirement, or else leave the fact that you have a PhD out of your application materials if you're dead set on jobs without that requirement (and it's possible to do). I've seen some success in both cases. Also consider that you may have some confidence/arrogance issues of your own. Not to be accusatory, and certainly I'm projecting a bit here, but having left my academic life behind some years ago, when I look back on it I see a certain arrogance in the pride of having a PhD that I'm embarrassed by now.

If you're running into these problems for jobs that do list PhD as the minimum requirement, you should consider it a strong signal that avoiding working there is a net positive for you.

And if you think you have it rough, try getting jobs after having dropped out of a PhD program a few years into it. For some reason, at least in the sphere of my friends and associates, this signals "quitter" and "not as smart as a PhD person". I've interviewed such candidates and I'd say it's a mixed bag with respect to whether I've preferred them over PhD candidates I've interviewed for jobs, but almost uniformly I've had one or more colleagues raise the question of said candidates' ability and determination.

People (employers and PhD holders alike, really) need to understand that having a PhD is a strong signal for exactly three things, in this order: a person's willingness and ability to tolerate a certain kind of experience in the very narrow context of academia, some minimum level of expertise in the field above the typical undergraduate degree holder, and some further expertise in a very narrow slice of the field above a typical Master's degree holder.

[kd0amg]

leave the fact that you have a PhD out of your application materials

How would you explain the several year gap in history without mentioning the PhD program?

[JoshTriplett]

I didn't run into any of that in any of the companies I interviewed with; if anything, I found that coming in with a PhD resulted in correspondingly higher expectations. I'd treat any of the items you mentioned as warning signs and look for a better opportunity.

To specifically counteract the "can't code" item, have plenty of practical items on your resume; include your published papers and conference presentations, but also include projects you've contributed to and similar. (For people doing a PhD who plan to work in industry, make sure you present at some industry conferences, not just academic conferences, and publish your code as/into Open Source projects.) A CV for an academic position doesn't work unmodified as a professional resume (with possible exceptions if you want to work in an industry research lab).

In the specific context of CS, if you look at medium to large companies, you should already ask questions about the technical job ladder (such as making sure that one exists, rather than the only promotion path leading into management). Ask specific questions about how a PhD affects your starting position on that ladder. If it doesn't at all, then seriously consider looking for somewhere that it does. A company that values PhDs seems less likely to hold the misconceptions you mentioned.

[eanzenberg]

Yes I've run into this. It's frustrating and there's not much you can do because of the power-imbalance between interviewer and interviewee. I try to be content with the fact that interviewing is mostly arbitrary with high variance. If you're set on a single company you want to work for keep trying and never burn bridges there and eventually you'll get in.

In data science which is the track I'm on, I've run into situations during interviews where

1) I can only scratch the surface of what's being asked

2) I answer the question to the satisfaction of the interviewer's skill level

3) I answer the question beyond the interviewer's skill level.

Only #2 is good. #3 happens rarely but you'd be surprised at how often it happens even at top5 companies. I've been dinged from interviewers in the #3 camp who were looking for the simpler answers. #1 is always a learning experience for me :)

[nickpsecurity]

"Where is the discussion of starting a business? Of making your own company? Breaking free of the political shackles of academia and blazing your own path to glory?"

Good point. Several, nice examples from my field of study are AbsInt, Kesterel, Galois, and AdaCore.

https://www.absint.com/products.htm

http://www.kestrel.edu/home/about.html

https://galois.com/blog/

http://www.adacore.com/academia/projects

AbsInt turns elite work of Ph.D.'s into commercial products and enhances them. Doubt it's boring. Kesterel has people doing academic-style research on hard problems and applying it to real-world. Galois does that too. AdaCore does a combo of tooling for grunt work, advanced tooling (esp compiler), and cutting-edge work (eg SPARK provers) involving academics remote or in-sourced. A good PhD in relevant subjects might get a job at any of these companies with similarly interesting work. Or, if tool is good enough, make a company out of it by partnering with people good at the business/sales side.

So, definitely opportunities here beyond black and white of academic-only or grunt work.

[eli_gottlieb]

>Where is the discussion of starting a business? Of making your own company? Breaking free of the political shackles of academia and blazing your own path to glory?

The discussion of what now? Not everyone wants to start a business. Not everyone has the domain and market knowledge to start a successful business. "Blazing your own path to glory" fails 90% of the time, usually repeatedly.

If you're gonna be that damned persistent, you might as well have the freedom of academia.

[Chinjut]

Hm... are there any options other than hoping against all odds to successfully navigate the tenure-track rat-race, working for The Man as an anonymous cog at BigCorp, or starting a business and pouring myself into businessy businessperson busywork? I'm afraid... I'm afraid I may be a defective individual in that none of these sound terribly appealing as a way to spend the bulk of my life.

[tgarma1234]

Please, don't do a PhD. The tenure track treadmill is brutal and on the wane. You would be much happier just getting a job. A normal job. With ordinary people. And I say that after a masters degree, many years in a PhD program and the having a normal job. A PhD is sort of useless at this point in history.

[Chinjut]

Good advice, but bad news: Too late. (Well, I quit ABD (with a consolation Master's) and got a BigCorp job, but wasn't too thrilled with that, and since now I've got this monkey on my back, I keep trying to finish writing my dissertation again, pointless though I know it to be... Actually, sounds like our experiences are quite similar except for the last bit!)

[No one's ever going to put in the effort to de-anonymize me off Hacker News, right? Just in case: Dear future potential employers reading this, A) Please don't, and B) Hey, I was totally kidding about not being thrilled with the BigCorp job. I love working for The Man! Go you! You The Man!]

[Chinjut]

I got downvoted for that? (I was sincere in saying "good advice"; just giving context on my background in this conversation as well)

[michaelvoz]

Sure! I merely presented a few of the more common case paths! For instance, a good friend of mine (who shall remain nameless for anonymities sake) is currently exploring the world, working as a cook in cafes, restaurants, etc, never staying anywhere for long, living out of a backpack. Very romantic, I could never do it myself, but his life is his own.

I dont think man has ever been as truly free as we are today, you can really do anything you set your mind to, not confined to the short, somewhat stuffy list you and I have walked over together.

[Retra]

Break free of the political shackles of academia and go on trying to convince people to invest in your business, become employees, and convince customers to use your services? At least the political shackles of academia are intellectually stimulating and not pure dreary salesmanship like the political shackles of business ownership.

[p4bl0]

Your comment reminded me of a 5 years old blogpost of mine: https://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html.

Eventually I decided that I wanted to do research and I couldn't be more happy about it. My experience as a PhD student was awesome, I did a postdoc on a topic that interested me very much but quite different than what I did during my PhD, and I've just landed a permanent position in academia as an associate professor!