| > 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... |