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I did a PhD while continuing to pursue an entrepreneurial career. While it worked out well in the end, I borderline regret it. I found academia incredibly frustrating. If you're used to Internet time, the pace will drive you insane. You submit a paper to a journal, get comments back 2 months later, submit a revised version, than get approved 1 month after that. Then you're published 6 months later, and then 9 months after that (do the math) the first citations of your work start to appear. So the feedback cycle is around 18 months. And instead of having your ideas tested in the marketplace (near impossible to fake), you're judged by a small number of people who are highly protective of their egos and careers. The whole industry is driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to make or promote useful things. Kissinger said that the reason academic fights are so brutal is that the stakes are so low. A lot of truth in that. On the other hand, if you want to be a top-notch tech entrepreneur, a PhD is CS has a huge amount of value. Just make sure you pursue a field which lets you learn and apply lots of useful algorithms and data mining techniques, e.g. bioinformatics, information retrieval, image analysis. I regularly use a lot of the things I learnt during my PhD - not the theoretical stuff, but the experience I gained in dealing with messy data. These kind of "deep tech" skills are desperately lacking in the Web 2.0 developer community, and will help you truly delight your customers. You needn't look any further than Google to get the point. My two most successful web projects both have a strong mathematical/algorithmic element which has made them very hard for most programmers to reproduce. Still, these kinds of techniques are becoming better known in the Web developer mainstream. For example, the book "Programming Collective Intelligence" is a good first taste. So on balance, I'd say skip the PhD, but invest seriously in educating yourself about the kinds of things that are still mostly taught at PhD level. |