[shas3]

I think it's more of a continuum than you suppose in your comment. It's not a binary of "great" vs "average" PhD. There's plenty in between and many types of averages. Karpathy had it good, as did Might, Guo, and other purveyors of wisdom on PhD. But that doesn't invalidate their arguments and observations.

[glangdale]

I think I covered some of that. And yes, it definitely is a continuum, agreed. A semi-superstar could probably have a pretty decent life working very comfortably on an interesting problem, if not necessarily a Hot Problem At The Best Institution.

However, continuum aside, there are a LOT of PhDs produced worldwide, and a LOT of good ones, and very few particularly good academic jobs. A lot of my observations of why things are kind of shitty lie not from my own career (which was largely my fault) but from observing smarter, harder-working, more organized people a couple of rungs up and realizing what a cruddy experience they were having in the middle tier. And also thinking: "man, if I just got my shit together and worked insanely hard for a few years, I could be as unhappy as Professor XYZ".

I wouldn't say "don't do a PhD". Just "know the odds"; i.e. know how many of the positions you could see yourself doing are available vs. PhD students emerging at a similar tier, and ask yourself whether you're going to be in that percentage, and what your plans are if you aren't. I learned a lot from my PhD, even if I sucked, and it turned out my backup plan was really much better than I realized it would be.

[Ar-Curunir]

I wouldn't say Guo had it good, I mean his book is called the PhD grind; that's not a particularly happy sounding title.

[gajomi]

I very much enjoyed reading through Guo's PhD grind, which came out as I was nearing the end of my PhD. However, the picture he paints of the grind, where he stumbles along a few different projects that end up in top tier journals/conference with intermittent internships at high profile companies is a thing to envy for the vast majority of PhD students. I'm not saying he didn't work hard, that his experience wasn't genuine, etc., but the memoir is hard to read as anything other than a string of incredible successes when compared to a typical PhD student's experience. In the narrative of the book they only sound like failures because he is comparing himself to Stanford professors who are at the top of the food chain.

[pgbovine]

best comment today :) thanks. i managed to recover, though, thankfully. should write a new epilogue sometime, but haven't gotten around to it.

[gajomi]

Well now I feel a bit embarrassed about the sibling comment I made... since the man himself has appeared I just wanted to reiterate that I enjoyed reading your memoir, as did several students in the lab I worked in. We even went and tried out IncPy for a bit, which was fun :)