[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.

[beachstartup]

and i'm obviously not.

[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.