[scottishcow]

> Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time.

Is it? Some of my friends went on to start successful companies after getting their PhDs. I'm a bit envious of them actually, I didn't have that option as my research was on an obscure topic with zero commercial potential.

> The Ph.D. is a tremendous opportunity. You get to pick an advisor in any research area you like and then you get to do research in that area, receive mentoring, think deeply on problems, publish papers, become famous, while paying zero tuition for 6 years and receiving a salary.

Yes it is a great opportunity, but considering how universities benefit massively from the work generated by their PhD students they're grossly underpaid (at least in STEM).

Overall this seems like good practical advice, but it's firmly written from the perspective of a true believer in the PhD system (and academia in general). My take is a bit different, I really think academia is broken in some fundamental ways.

[mayank]

> Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time

I'm in this camp (haven't published since I graduated and joined industry), and I also strongly disagree with this statement. The value of the PhD is how it changes the way you think, how you break down big fuzzy problems, and how it helps you navigate the literature when you need help, and how it helps you know where to look and who to ask.

I've worked on much harder problems than my PhD, but none have felt as hard as the PhD, because of the PhD.

[jvanderbot]

The problem is the definition of "research". If you call it "publication", then yes, it seems like a waste.

If you call it "development of new widgets after principled approaches consistent with or beyond the state of the art", it starts to feel like a Ph.D can be training to do really great work in industry.

[glangdale]

Very much this. I have spent a considerable post-PhD period developing "new widgets" as you put it, and I constantly feel the benefit of (a) the early training of my PhD and (b) the benefit of commercial work done in the framework of "(a)". That seems a bit obscure, but think of it as this analogy:

Person A never does any serious training in a sport, and then goes on to spend 10 years playing "hit and giggle" tennis (say). They probably get a bit better.

Person B spends several years in their youth doing tennis lessons at a high level. They then never take another tennis lesson, ever, but they spend the same 10 years as person A playing recreational tennis, using the skills they have built in their youth as a framework.

I feel that a lot of the stuff I've done recently builds more on the work I did as a commercial researcher (2006-2017, particularly) than it does on my PhD work, but I also think that the 2006-2017 work greatly benefited from my PhD.

[mettamage]

I have one anecdata point, kind of. It's not PhD level but master versus the non-academic route.

TL;DR: my friend is more practical (e.g. better at bandaid solutions). I am more integrated with theory and practice (e.g. diagnosing issues from sillicon to high level). When things are simple, he is faster. When things are harder, I am the only one who can solve it.

===== THE WHOLE STORY ======

I simply did a bachelor + master in CS (security + web/mobile). My friend is a semi self-taught web developer and (soon to be) pentester.

Friend in Web:

When he became serious about web development, he went to a coding bootcamp. When I started teaching web, he had 1 year of company experience.

Me in Web:

I had some hobby experience with web, but because I had CS fundamentals and a good teaching style, I was hired to start teaching his course.

Result:

My friend was more practical than me. He came with more bandaid-style solutions which were sometimes warranted (time-constraints) and sometimes they weren't. For me, it helped me to bridge theory and practice.

Alrighty, round 2: pentesting.

Friend in Pentesting:

It took him a year (!) to get his bearings and find a curriculum he wanted to learn. In this year he learned a lot about pentesting which is how he could verify that he found "the magic bullet" of curriculums. By the way the "magic bullet" for entry level pentesters is: go to hackthebox.eu and if you want to get certified (i.e. recruiters will notice you), do OSCP. He did a lot of different stuff before he got to this conclusion (honorable mention: VHL - Virtual Hacking Labs).

Me in Pentesting:

My friend invited me to join him on hackthebox.eu because he knew I did courses in web + network security, binary & malware analysis and hardware security. I go in and slay the boxes together with him. The key difference: he is fast, I am slow but I am capable of hacking the most difficult levels (which they call insane boxes).

Result:

We teach each other a bit of what we know. He helped me get faster with easy boxes. I helped him to (almost) hack insane boxes. In doing so, I taught him x64 assembly and some C.

[dan-robertson]

Surely this is a question where many opinions will be biased.

If you did a phd and stayed in academia then you are likely to feel that having people do phds and leave academia is a waste of resources (maybe this is wrong and phd students are so cheap that they are net contributors).

If you did a phd and left academia then you are perhaps likely to feel that your phd bestowed benefits to you outside of academia and that those benefits ought to be afforded to people in later generations.

I suppose if one doesn’t have a phd then one might have either opinion, or some other opinion eg that phds are entirely a waste of public money.

[tnecniv]

>> Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time.

> Is it? Some of my friends went on to start successful companies after getting their PhDs. I'm a bit envious of them actually, I didn't have that option as my research was on an obscure topic with zero commercial potential.

There's also plenty of industry positions that benefit from you having a PhD. Certain fields can basically require them, like Chemistry. In CS, you might be able to get a lot of them without one, but the PhD lets you get paid to develop your skill set in niche areas.

[ckmiller]

> Is it? Some of my friends went on to start successful companies after getting their PhDs. I'm a bit envious of them actually, I didn't have that option as my research was on an obscure topic with zero commercial potential.

Agreed, a PhD is absolutely not useless in this industry, even if you don't end up in the research community. Understanding where the research frontiers of various fields are and being able to quickly find / digest relevant technical papers feels like a superpower. The gap between an undergrad education and a research frontier is enormous, and only working on a PhD really gives you the time and incentive to cross it. Having done it once, it gets easier to do it again.

For me, it has turned a huge volume of "unknown unknowns" into "known unknowns" and equipped me with the tools to then convert those into "knowns". Without it I'd be a fine coder, sure. With it I can work on a different tier of projects, and direct my career much better.

The costs are very real, though. Giving up ~6 years of early career earnings in a high-paying industry is utterly insane; you will never, ever make it up short of your startup lottery ticket number coming up. It's a meat grinder for mental health. Dozens of things outside of your control can go wrong and torpedo your aspirations. It is the right choice only for a vanishingly small minority.

[tree3]

> Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time.

This statement reflects the writers' large ego, not reality. It's a shame how this point of view is prominent in the scientific community. I've seen similar rude statements from academic scientists who say that working in R&D at a corporation isn't "real science".

[superhuzza]

I think the intention was referring to people who do no further research, whether academic or private (e.g. repetitive work with significant exploration involved). The last paragraph of section 2.6 is about doing research work in private companies, no?

I agree with the author that there is little value in doing a PhD if you don't intend to keep doing some form of research afterwards. There are alternative programs or work that would be much more applicable.

[twblalock]

6 years of a grad student salary is a big financial sacrifice compared to 6 years of a software industry salary, even at non-Silicon-Valley salary levels.

The opportunity cost of a PhD can be pretty high. In CS you could theoretically make back a lot of that money with a higher salary after graduation if you then enter industry, but the gap in lifetime earnings up until that point is huge.

[fooker]

Eh, not everything has to measured by how much money you accumulated.

[twblalock]

That's not the point.

Let's say you spend 6 years in grad school on a stipend of $35k per year. You think you are being paid to get a PhD, but that's just because you are ignoring opportunity cost.

If you took your talents to industry instead, let's estimate an entry-level salary. I will intentionally make it lower than average. Let's say $100k per year, which is on the low end in Silicon Valley for an entry-level engineer, and let's also make the ridiculous assumption that such an engineer would not get a raise for the entire 6-year period.

After 6 years, the hypothetical grad student was paid $210k total, and the hypothetical entry-level engineer was paid $600k total. The PhD cost $600k - $210k = $390k. Would you pay $390k for a PhD?

[fooker]

>Would you pay $390k for a PhD?

Yes, of course, even if you increased it to $800k.

Several thousand brilliant people make this decision every year. Think of it as paying $390k to buy 5-6 years of time, and it starts to sound very different.

5-6 years of time at the prime of your life where your basic needs are taken care of without any enforceable expectations from you.

You can go sit in any of the hundreds of interesting things being taught around you. You can pursue hobbies, go camping in the middle of the week.

If you are lucky, you get to work on interesting bleeding edge projects which may or may not make business sense. For this you get nearly any resource you ask for. Labs in good universities are rather well funded. Supercomputer time to run a random program, easy! Also, most companies are happy to hand out huge amounts of cloud credit, reference hardware.

Compared to making 390k, are you surprised that at least some people would make this decision? Also, 35K per year + well paid internships (~40$k for a summer) is a rather comfortable amount of money for a 25 year old person in most situations.

[2sk21]

And you get a high salary, post PhD only if you are in some hot field. I got one the earliest PhD's in neural networks - but this was in 1992, long before the world discovered machine learning. It took a while for my salary to catch up, although I can't complain, the last decade has been good.

[mcnamaratw]

I think the value of the whole booklet is "here's what we think about our PhD program," not necessarily "what place do PhDs really have in society?"

They could be wrong about the latter, but if they believe it strongly at CMU, it's good (especially for students who might go there) that they say so.

[blamestross]

I don't do any academic research, but I do a LOT of science for my job. My PhD definitely provided me with skills and knowledge I could not have easily aquired in the workplace. I'm working on an almost-FAANG doing distributed systems maintenance and design.