[lgeek]

Nice read, I always enjoy reading about the grad school experiences of people with similar background to mine.

> The main issue was that I never crisply understood all the use-cases and requirements for the systems I was building. I felt weird making assertions about how people wanted to use something, when I had never operated or used it in the real world!

I think that if you're interested in building systems that actually get to be used <in the real world>, the industry is a better place. Personally, I enjoy doing a PhD because I have fewer restrictions which allows me to focus on the things I really find interesting. For example, I don't have to worry too much about making software user-friendly since it will only be used by myself or a handful of people, I don't have to handle tricky corner cases unless I'm actually hitting them on my data, etc.

You also get to work on problems that will only become relevant in the future, e.g. people who have been doing research relevant to many-core systems for quite some time.