[jondubois]

I didn't go as far as PhD, but when I came out of uni, I knew nothing about life or work. I really wouldn't recommend anyone to try to launch their own startup right out of uni (especially not alone).

When I think back to it; if I had succeeded with my first startup right out of uni, I would have had a seriously distorted view of life.

My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then. Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.

[mikebenfield]

> Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.

Maybe don't belittle things you've never done?

Doing a PhD is not just sitting down and writing a thesis, and it's also not just taking a few classes that occasionally require late nights. A PhD student is typically teaching one or more classes, learning as much as possible about his/her field, reading papers at the forefront of research in his/her field, conducting original research, writing papers on one's research, preparing and giving talks at conferences and seminars, along with writing the thesis and (at least in the first year or two) taking classes.

My thesis was in fact just over 100 pages. It also required a lot intense studying (on top of my basic undergrad and graduate education) before I understood the topic well enough to begin to do research on the topic, and quite a lot more work before I started to find worthwhile original results to write about. Here "a lot of work" doesn't mean a few late nights, it means years of working as much time as possible every week.

As someone who was in the working world for almost 10 years before returning to school, I assure you my thesis represents a lot more hard work than anything I ever did in "the real world."

All that said, this article is nuts. Very few PhDs are in a good position to launch a startup. But not because PhDs "know nothing about life or work," and not because they are unfamiliar with hard work.

[squeaky-clean]

I think you're both making different points. Yes, a PhD is a lot of work (I'd assume, haven't got one). Maybe more work than a startup. But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest. You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it. Your advisor doesn't take on 10 graduate students and encourage practices that will cause 9 to fail but 1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams. Messing it up doesn't mean you don't have to tell 30 people that they need new jobs.

Maybe I'm interpreting the GP post wrong, but I take their use of "hard" to mean "unfair and stressful", and your use of "hard" to mean "high quantity and quality of work."

[etendue]

The attrition rate for a PhD program isn't 90%, but 50% is not unknown; my own was around 30% (measured from matriculation to defense, my class year). Some students were forced out of the program, others left on their own accord.

Also, it is unusual for a dissertation to be outright rejected because of how it reflects on the advisor and committee: the committee is (supposed to be) kept up to date on the student's progress and will recommend against defending if the student is unlikely to pass. Slightly less unusual would be a student being allowed to defend, but then needing to do major revisions to their dissertation for it to be accepted. Keep in mind that at the point one is defending, quite a bit of time and money has been invested in the candidate so there is a good incentive to see the candidate succeed for no other reason. Unsuited students are (ideally) dismissed much earlier, i.e., at admission to candidacy.

One absolutely worries about being scooped on papers, since those are the currency of academia and being scooped usually results in needing to publish your own (now less novel) work in a lesser journal. And as another commenter points out: a professor taking on 10 students with only 1 succeeding, if one defines success as being tenured, isn't that far off from reality.

As an aside, I personally think forming a research group at a university isn't all that different from creating a startup.

[tjl]

I've known students who defended their thesis and were told to do major revisions. Typically, it's because their thesis supervisor didn't do their job properly as they should know not to send that student to defend.

You're right in that they weed Ph.D. students out earlier, during their comprehensive exam. How it's done varies from department to department and university to university. My comprehensive was a lengthy oral exam by my committee with two rounds of questions. The first on background and the second on the written thesis proposal I submitted. I went for 3.5 hours straight, basically until the committee wanted lunch.

Equating a research group to a startup isn't a bad analogy. One of the professors in my department basically uses his students to do research for his company. He even makes them sign over the IP rights to him. Other professors have a continuing line of research across a number of students. Even my Ph.D. thesis was the latest in a number of theses on the same topic, each getting progressively more advanced. My thesis basically finished that line, with other related ones opening up as a result.

[Chyzwar]

Nope, research groups/projects at uni is all about milking money from grants. Running startup is all about making money for investors. Direction is different and risk much lower.

[vonmoltke]

> But it's not "hard" work in the sense that you don't have a 90% chance of your thesis being rejected despite you trying your hardest.

Nor do you have a 90% chance of failing in your business venture despite you trying your hardest.

Going from the statistic "90% of businesses fail" to "you have a 90% chance of failure when starting a business" is an incorrect deduction. The latter only follows from the former if business success is almost entirely random chance. It isn't. Some people are almost guaranteed to fail because they have no idea what they are doing or what they are getting into[1]. Some business ideas are just bad. On the flip side, some people are really good at running businesses, take the time to understand what is required, wait until they have a realistic idea, and through all that give themselves a very good chance of succeeding.

I wish we, as a community, would stop parroting this abuse of statistics.

[1] I'd wager that this explains the vast majority of restaurant failures.

[mattkrause]

In a similar vein, about half of all marriages end in divorce, but half of the people you know are (probably) not divorced.

[cderwin]

Out of pure curiosity, what makes you think that someone on hn is more likely to be successful running a startup than anyone else?

[beachstartup]

because they/we are more likely to have worked at one, and see how it actually works, or doesn't work.

same goes for any high stress, high risk business, like running a restaurant. if you've worked in one for years, you're more likely to succeed in running one yourself.

there is a running joke in the restaurant business about rich semi-retired professionals opening up a restaurant and failing miserably, because they simply don't realize how much work it is. they think because they're great home cooks and can throw an awesome dinner party, they can all of a sudden run a commercial kitchen and dining room. wrong. very, very wrong.

same goes with startups. most people fail because they don't understand how much work it is, and simply give up.

[wott]

> because they/we are more likely to have worked at one, and see how it actually works, or doesn't work.

They were talking about building a startup right after a PhD.

[throwaway729]

> You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it

It's called "scooping". You do have to worry about other academic groups doing that, depending on the area you're working in.

And you may even also have to worry about Google or MSR scooping you.

In fact, I know of one person who had his thesis basically scooped by a large corporate research lab. Not so much his exact ideas, but they out-performed his would-have-been thesis work in every meaningful way in a sufficiently small sub-problem that he had to pivot.

> Your advisor doesn't take on 10 graduate students and encourage practices that will cause 9 to fail but 1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams

I guess that depends on your advisor and program and your field of study. These sorts of attrition rates aren't unheard of in Math, for instance.

> Messing it up doesn't mean you don't have to tell 30 people that they need new jobs.

That is certainly true. But the upside is also significantly bounded.

> Maybe I'm interpreting the GP post wrong, but I take their use of "hard" to mean "unfair and stressful", and your use of "hard" to mean "high quantity and quality of work."

80 hr weeks working on something that the academic community might choose to reject for whatever reason all while making 20k/yr could be described as both...

[ramblenode]

Since so many people here seem to be in the business of peddling cherries, apples, and oranges, I thought I'd throw my own analysis in the mix:

First, the likelihood of earning a PhD shouldn't be viewed as p(graduate) but as p(graduate | admitted) * p(admitted). Once you factor in the high rejection rate of competitive PhD programs, the success rate drops off pretty sharply. Additionally, the applicant pool tends to self-select toward people who at least believe they are minimally qualified because of the time and expense in completing applications and gathering letters of recommendation.

Second, the random error term is much larger in the hypothetical formula for startup success than it is for PhD success--in fact, it's probably much larger than any variable one can control. A consequence of this is that a unit increase of talent/skill/drive will move the needle further toward success in the PhD world than in the startup world. Comparing successful or unsuccessful individuals across worlds tells you very little.

Third, for all the parroting of the "9 in 10 startups fail" statistic, there seems to be almost no work in connecting its relevance. A startup is not a person. A person may found multiple companies in their lifetime. A person only needs to earn a PhD once to be considered a PhD. I could go on, but I think "apples and oranges" is sufficient.

[squidfood]

> take on 10 graduate students and encourage practices that will cause 9 to fail but 1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams.

Sounds like a pretty good description of the academic job market to me.

[ska]

9:1 is too optimistic though

[ska]

I think you are mischaracterizing both startups and academic work. A few things to think about:

-A Ph.D. usually often isn't the end point. If your end point is a tenured academic position, your odds are much, much worse than startup success

-About 50% of Ph.D. students don't complete, ever.

-"1 to succeed beyond anyone's dreams" seems odd. Most people who succeed in startups succeed precisely in scope of most peoples dreams. There are outliers, sure, but they are exactly that.

-You aren't scared of Google publishing before you - but in some areas you are justifiably scared of other people publishing before you and making your work unpublishable. You may know these people personally.

-Academic work is often best characterized as being unfair and stressful

-The 90%:10% statistic is just that, and you aren't really applying it meaningfully

-Like companies, Ph.D.s aren't fungible

[pjc50]

> You don't have to be scared of Google catching wind of your thesis and publishing a better version before you can finish it.

People have had the problem of being beaten to publication by another researcher and having to re-start their PhD.

The big thing that both PhDs and startups have in common is that you have to do a lot of lonely work for years before you know whether you've succeeded.

[kriro]

Counterpoint of sorts, taking German PhD programs as an example... You usually have to work on it for 3-6 years (many professors assume you'll use the full 6 years or it can't be interesting enough research), often times only being on 50% contracts making about 1k/month after taxes. Typically you only get 2 or maybe 3 year contracts at a time. And worst of all you're not really in control over this. If you run a startup you can at least theoretically influence your own income. Depending on the field your PhD skills are often considered rather worthless outside your specific niche. If you fail the PhD there's a huge negative stigma attached to it and your skills don't carry over which puts you in a horrible career spot. For most startups (depending on the country) it's fairly healthy for your career even if you fail.

Doing PhD research is basically a horrible job choice (imo).

[bdcravens]

Are PhD candidates more self-selecting? I've met some very clueless people who tried to startup, and they contributed to that 90%. Sometimes it wasn't because it was hard, but because it was a really bad idea, or the founder(s) really lacked talent. PhD candidates on the other hand to even be eligible had to succeed already, whereas anyone can startup. I'd argue that a 50% PhD failure rate is comparable or more significant than a 90% startup failure rate. (unless we can qualify those startups by industry experience, previous businesses run, etc)

[wuschel]

Seconded.

1) A PhD is a very personal experience, but hard work is the common denominator.

2) The article is off - very much because there is a multitude of outcomes when it comes to personal development during a PhD.

[dfsegoat]

This. Only BA here. But I worked in a forensic genetics laboratory with 2 Ph.D candidates from start to finish and learned to mimic their work ethic and methods: They do not sleep. They teach, then they crank out publications, and in between maybe they can work on their thesis so that in 7 years it will be ready to defend.

It is an obscenely grueling path that let me know it wasn't one I wanted to head down.

[jondubois]

It's interesting how people are calibrated differently it comes to measuring 'hard work'. The difficult thing about startups is that the correlation between hard work and success isn't very strong.

It might be the case that a PhD is very hard. My idea of it is just based on third-party observation and discussions with people who have done it. I suppose some people have a harder time than others.

I worked on two open source projects for 6 years in total for about 20 to 30 hours every week in addition to my 40 hour per week day job. My first project had around 500 commits and was about 10K lines of code. My latest project has well over 1000 commits and probably 15K lines of code (I contributed about 80% to 90% of the code and it went through several rewrites). I also wrote the documentation for the project mostly on my own - There are almost 30 pages of technical documentation - About 15K wordcount. I did it for $0 - All I got out of it was experience, industry connections and some nice job offers.

I feel like I worked hard. Almost certainly harder than anyone I know. But I know for sure that some people on HN will read the paragraph above and think that I'm actually a lazy entitled millennial.

[mattkrause]

For what it's worth, I don't think you're a lazy entitled millennial. I do think that you may not understand what doing a PhD involves.

People find academic careers hard for a lot of the same reasons that startups are difficult: there's no clear roadmap for moving forward, tons of hard work is necessary but definitely not sufficient for success, and although you have frustratingly little control over outcomes, it feels like all of your 'eggs' are trapped in one basket.

[triplepoint217]

Writing the 100 page thesis is not the hard work part of a PhD. Doing the research to have the results to write that thesis is the hard work. Unless you are uncommonly lucky, you will fail at some avenues of research and have to slog through lots of painstaking work. I don't (yet) know how that compares to the challenges of a startup, but a PhD is an entirely different animal than an undergrad degree (for better or worse)

[jondubois]

I worked on some pretty big projects and did a lot of research. That was easy.

Part of the reason why it was easy was because I knew that if I put in the effort, I would almost certainly pass the course. At uni, if you're smart, the odds are always stacked firmly in your favor.

Failing a PhD thesis during the defence is apparently a 'rare occurrence' in most universities.

By contrast, the odds of your startup not failing are like 10%. Now if we're talking about actual 'success' then that's like 1% or less (it certainly feels like that from where I'm standing).

With these sorts of odds, you don't have this feeling of 'meritocracy' that you might get if you came right out of uni.

[mikebenfield]

> Failing a PhD thesis during the defence is apparently a 'rare occurrence' in most universities.

Yes, but not for the reasons you think. Typically the advisor and thesis committee simply will not let the student defend (or at least will strongly urge the student not to defend) unless they are extremely confident the student is ready and will pass. A student failing the defense would be embarrassing for everyone, and so the real judging happens well before that. These days the defense is mostly a formality.

Moreover, students are not even admitted to the program unless they show very strong promise of being able to complete it. If you want to look at low success rates, here is one place to see it. Very few students graduating with a BS in any given field (computer science, mathematics, whatever) have any chance whatsoever of getting admitted to a decent PhD program in that field.

Why is it so hard for you to believe that getting a PhD (something you've never done and know nothing about) is hard?

[gbrown]

You do not have the experience or expertise to justify your claims; a PhD thesis is in no way like doing a regular research project, or passing a course in university.

The reason why failing a PhD thesis defense is rare is because your adviser should prevent you from defending until the product is sufficiently strong. Many, many, many more people fail by dropping out of a PhD program during their dissertation than fail by doing a poor defense. Comparing successful thesis defense rates to startup success rates is not valid.

[semi-extrinsic]

> The reason why failing a PhD thesis defense is rare is because your adviser should prevent you from defending until the product is sufficiently strong.

This. Failing a public defense is not like a startup failing, it's more like an IPO failing (as in, stock goes to zero within a short time). You don't do it if you aren't 99.9999% sure it won't fail.

[dnautics]

It's worth noting that some PhD students get passed because their advisors feel bad for them after they drop 8 years in the program and the advisors are too incompetent to actually bring up a student through the PhD with a successful project.

I've seen it happen five or six times (usually it's the same group of professors) at a top-tier research institute.

[tjl]

The external examiner should allow that to happen, if they're doing their job. The whole point of the external examiner is so professors can't just collude to pass people.

I've seen a number of things happen during a defence, but not this. The worst was seeing two professors (one of whom was the candidate's supervisor) on the committee argue with each other while the candidate just had to watch. It took a lot of work for the chair to reign them in. I think it was difficult for the chair because they were arguing in German and the chair didn't speak it since he wasn't from the German department (my friend was getting her Ph.D. in German literature).

[ramblenode]

> I worked on some pretty big projects and did a lot of research. That was easy.

Yes, I remember those days too. It was easy. It was also nothing like PhD research.

> Failing a PhD thesis during the defence is apparently a 'rare occurrence' in most universities.

In the US, most committees won't even let you schedule a defense unless they are prepared to pass you. What usually happens is the "all but dissertation" (ABD) route where one is writing in perpetuity or leaves the program without finishing.

In any case, why do you feel compelled to justify how much (harder?, richer?) your chosen path has been than a categorically different alternative path which you admittedly have no experience with? Please, at least rise above the level of posting misinformation.

[kyrre]

are you confusing the terms 'study' and 'research'?

[argv_empty]

Almost certainly, or his defense of the earlier claim would include some description of what new knowledge or novel techniques he developed with this research.

[achileas]

Going through a graduate program, especially in the sciences, can really prepare you with a lot of the soft skills (and even more of the 'hard' skills) necessary to do so.

>Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.

You already said you didn't get a PhD, you didn't need to say it twice.

[kyzyl]

I opened this thread in the morning, got to that '100 page' remark and belly laughed. Then my day took over, and I just refreshed and saw your comment, and belly laughed again. I'd say it's been a successful day. Thanks ;-)

[amelius]

> Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either

Except if you stubbornly decide to fully understand LaTeX in the process.

[pyromine]

Dear lord, I've started writing all of my mathematics homework in LaTeX, it's not even remotely reasonable.

Though interestingly, having to be more deliberate in my operations do make me have a much more rigorous understanding of what I'm doing.

[arcanus]

> it's not even remotely reasonable.

What is more scary: I exclusively write LaTeX equations in emails, raw to my colleagues. We have all been working with it for so long it is a native language.

Math does funny stuff to your brain.

[50CNT]

    This is your brain 

    \this{is your brain on Math}

As a less poetic example, playing Dwarf Fortress for prolonged periods of time reportedly has similar effects. The ASCII fades, and mental images take its place. It's freaky when decoding slips into the hardware layer.

[tjl]

Most of my colleagues did this too. I know I've done it with my supervisor. It's just easier when you're trying to write out something complex and everyone who you're writing to knows how to read it without difficulty.

[semi-extrinsic]

I once (only once) live-typed notes from my Quantum Field Theory 2 class in LaTeX. It was on non-Abelian gauge theory IIRC. We had a German professor who was really fast too, and there's so many co(ntra)variant indices it's not even funny.

It took quite some preparation and a shitload of custom \newcommand's, but it was doable, although painful.

[elcritch]

Impressive feat. And I'd buy you a shot of whiskey if I ever met you in person for attempting said feat.

[mablap]

Now try to go back to MS Word and typeset equations. You will miss LaTeX.

[noobermin]

>Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work.

Finishing assignments is to what a PhD student actually does is as `printf("hello world\n");` is to what a developer does.

[dnautics]

writing a 100 page thesis for a contemporary PhD is easy, if you're not an idiot. Do everything in TeX and digitally staple the papers you've written together, and whip up a 10-page introductory statement.

What is hard is the work that you have to go to to get to the 100 page thesis. Try working a 100 hour workweek, including sleeping the lab only to find out that the experiments that you've set up completely go to hell because of a minor detail that you missed at the beginning. Five or six times. (with 75 hour workweeks in between) Over the course of a year. Not taking any vacations. Five years over.

[marmaduke]

If you've not written a PhD thesis, you're not in a position to discount the work involved. Mine was a hundred pages, and I had about two weeks to write it from scratch. I'm not saying it was hard work, but it's not easy either.

[jessaustin]

This raises more questions than it answers. Why did you have such a compressed schedule?

[marmaduke]

Doctoral school refused theses which were simply concatenation of publications and I was also obliged to start postdoc on deadline.. not great but whatever.

[kaeluka]

> My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then.

I'm a phd student and my idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since I started, too. The master's was child's play. Now it's about determination and finding avenues forward when facing problems that are so large that even finding a good question to ask is a major success. Staying up late and putting in the hours is the easy part.

This is not as simple as you imagine it to be.

[lukeqsee]

> My idea of 'hard work' has changed a lot since then.

This. I was just considering this last night, since I was back on my university campus again. While I subconsciously knew the work I was doing in school wasn't real, I still attributed value to it. Looking back, while it had value, it was fundamentally different value than real work. Its value was most temporal, i.e., if I got it done on time, it was valuable. This has little to no direction correlation to real life.

Hard work is valuable when applied to intrinsically valuable work, which will be valuable if you finish it today or tomorrow. And in general, a missed deadline is bad, but doesn't reflect on the intrinsic value of the work (there are exceptions, of course).

Hard work is worthless when applied to intrinsically worthless work, regardless of when or how it is completed.

[santiagobasulto]

This is odd. I was checking socketcluster.io a few hours ago for a side project I'm planning on building. Now I see your comment and Googled you ("because you said 'my first startup', no stalker) and found out you're the main contributor of it. Crazy.

[Kenji]

Staying up till 3am a few times a semester to finish an assignment is not hard work. Writing a 100 page thesis is not hard work either.

If you got through uni by doing this, you went to a bad uni. Same goes for your statement about a thesis. I feel like you don't really have an idea how tough academia can be. Your comments are smug and condescending.

[nsp]

I got through uni by doing this at a top 5 research university (Columbia), it may depend on degree but it's definitely doable at 'hard uni's.

That said, definitely keep my gpa off my resume.

[jessaustin]

Different people's experiences can vary drastically, even at the same institutions. You may have had to study every day, but you had classmates who didn't. That doesn't mean you went to "a bad uni".

[_RPM]

I agree with you, even though I haven't graduated until December. I did 3 internships throughout college, and it really taught me a lot about life. Before that, I too, had a distorted view of life. Working in the real world really opened up my views on life in generally. Your example about hard work is excellent.

I used to think staying up 24+ hours working on something was what hard work meant. Today, for me, hard work means getting adequate sleep, making sure that I have great energy so I can function for 10 hours a day on my personal projects, school, work, and wellness.