[BrandoElFollito]

Another thing is that there is not enough pushback from the community at large.

My PhD thesis was less than 40 pages long. The introduction was 1/2 a page (basically "if you need an introduction you should not read this, here are 3,4 books to get you started").

Then I copied/pasted from my articles and then came the acknowledgments (which I actually fund valuable because I wanted to thank my advisor for his non-science-related help and a friend for her magnificent idea that turned around the thesis. And my parents, wife, dog etc.)

Then the conclusion ("brilliant work")

And then a discussion with myself about everything that I fucked up and what could be improved (my advisor fainted on that one).

The jury was 8 people. The younger/more dynamic ones were super happy (especially that they made their review a page long as well). The older ones were disgusted and said that clearly. I got my PhD.

I fought in Academia for a few years to bring some change but eventually left (also for other reasons). If I was to stay for my whole career I would have tried again and again to change the status quo.

[dotnet00]

A friend who recently finished her PhD had a similar experience, where all the senior scientists at our lab were concerned because her thesis was "only" 100 pages long and she didn't go through a professional editor to have it perfected.

My preliminary defense thesis had to be 50+ pages, but during the presentation, it was pretty obvious that the committee had at best looked at the table of contents. It all feels like such an unnecessary waste of effort. Even with my own thesis, over half of it is just padding with very fundamental background information because the work isn't really so complicated as to require that many pages to discuss, it's just demonstrating more advanced simulation capabilities by implementing GPU acceleration for a niche but simulation heavy field.

[BrandoElFollito]

Theses at my time were about 200 pages long. A friend of mine wrote two tomes.

I clearly stated that I would not waste my time and the reviewers are free to provide comments and we will see during the defense.

I found out that a lot of these "rules" are traditions that one can challenge and suddenly they are not traditions anymore.

[dotnet00]

Yes, the only hard rule in my department is having a minimum of 50 pages, the idea that 100 pages is not enough came from the scientists applying their own experiences from years ago. Technically there was nothing they could do about her thesis having fewer pages, but as inexperienced students, it's obviously a little scary when people you look up to sound concerned (since academia is full of all sorts of unproductive and unstated expectations).

A friend at another department only had a minimum requirement of 5 pages, and his thesis ended up being just a collection of his publications.

[BrandoElFollito]

> his thesis ended up being just a collection of his publications

We have in France the concept of "thesis on publications" where you write an intro, an outro/conclusion, and bind your articles in the middle. This is very helpful when you have already published everything that builds your thesis.