[kortilla]

That suicide is so unfortunate. As someone who was a PhD student, I understand the perceived gravity of the situation for him. It’s unfortunate he had nobody to put it in perspective.

This is one of the fields that you can easily leave academia for industry or even switch to another academic institution with ease if things start to go bad. Nobody but your own advisor will realistically care about a retracted paper (especially if you do it before publication). And if your advisor does hold it against you, that’s not an advisor you want anyway.

Please, please, please, if you ever find yourself in this situation, just walk away. You are being paid less than a Starbucks Barista to stuff a tenure-track professor’s portfolio with rushed research nobody will realistically care about in 3 years (if it was even relevant to begin with).

A PhD will teach you how to research. 99% of the research that comes out of that process will be useless, incremental crap. Issue retractions, miss deadlines, whatever. The stakes in the CS academic game are so small a complete come-apart as a PhD student can easily be turned into an extended masters degree on a resume.

[dlkf]

"academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small"

[antonvs]

Except the impact on people's reputation, livelihood, and lives are not really small stakes.

I think that quote comes partially from the perspective of someone who doesn't recognize the nature of the stakes because they're different, not because they're smaller - if it was really intended as much more than a snarky critique of academia.

It's not as if everything outside of academia somehow involves much higher stakes. You could basically dismiss the whole of Google or Facebook as being small stakes, following similar logic.

[kortilla]

Mmmm. Is that a reference to Billions or did they lift it from somewhere else?

[antonvs]

Google "Sayre's Law"