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Comment by cup | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought that PhD students should band together and refuse to run experiments for one week. The shock that might have on the current academic system, when administrators, managers, supervisors and project leaders start to realise that their careers depend on a constant supply of dependent serfs might shake things up.

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There's always more willing serfs where they came from, especially after the NSF started overfilling the pipeline in the mid-late '80s insisting there was a terrible shortage of them. Of course, they just wanted to spend less money on scientific labor, and things like bringing in many foreigners helped that, while making the job even less attractive to natives.

That will likely hurt the student much more than the PI. Depending on the lab, PIs often have a tech, postdoc, or staff scientist when runs many experiments. The student's time is much more valuable than the PIs as the student only graduates when his/her thesis has enough content to write.

There is no shortage of delusional people eager to sign up for this kind of serfdom.

Probably not too dissimilar to the delusional early employees who sign up for a startup hoping to make millions from their shares...

That depends. Are the grad students making six-figure incomes while they suffer through the experience, as the startup employees do?

They are not. But are startup employees doing something meaningful, or building their own reputations and expertise?

And since you're talking about software startup employees, probably the closest comparison is CS phd students, who are nowhere near suffering. The vast majority of graduate students are at least as satisfied as a developer, otherwise whole programs would have disappeared decades ago from inability to recruit. New admits always ask current graduate students what it's like. There seems to be this dissonance between people here on Hacker News believing that everything is like the horror stories of grad students being abused by psychopathic advisors and at best will get poorly paid adjunct positions before burning out, and what's really happening.

There's a lot of variation, both due to school and due to department. When I did my PhD, I found the Biosciences department to be rather brutal. Drinking and misery poker (and Magic the Gathering) were the standard pastimes, and long, tedious hours were the norm. On the other hand, the CS department was much more laid back, with much more time put into 'cerebral' work. It's not that the CS students were smarter, I knew a number of brilliant biologists, but the nature of subject matter and the culture. Biology experiments are inherently physical, and can fail or die if not attended to properly, putting a pretty tight time constraint on the experimenter. CS work is much more forgiving, and much more of it (proportionally) happens in the mind. Biology is also a much more grind-centered culture, perhaps in part because it lacks a strong history of internal tool building, while tedious work in CS tends to inspire attempts to build automation and higher level methods. I think some of this is the difficulty (tools in Biology are just harder to make), and some of this is purely culture. I would argue that the somewhat bizarre field of Biophysics is, historically speaking, the tooling culture of Biology that was severed off when Molecular Biology became a field in it's own right and the tools were commoditized, and it's partially this split that's responsible for the culture there.

All of which is to say, grad school is horrible. Sometimes. Sometimes it's awesome, and YMMV.

True about the serfdom, but the students aren't necessarily delusional.

The US takes 1.2 million immigrants a year, but it is extremely difficult to gain admission as a random applicant without family connections.

One possible way for in is graduate degrees in STEM fields. There are various work visa programs that are far easier to access through STEM graduate school in the US. You can get here on a student visa, gain some connections, interview on campus, and perhaps get a work visa through a tech employer - and this is easier with a grad degree, as those degrees grant certain exemptions from visa caps. If you remain in the good graces of your employer or university, you may eventually qualify for a green card.

It's a slog, but keep in mind, we're not talking about people with freedom of choice here. It might be more rational to sell real estate, open a sandwich shop, or become a dental hygienist if you were allowed to do so legally without fear of deportation.

But if your options are very limited due to visa and immigration restrictions? Sure, it can be highly rational to pursue a graduate degree in a narrow subsection of STEM fields. Unfortunately, as long as universities have this power, they probably won't have much incentive to make the degrees rational for people with the freedom to choose their careers.

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