Consider applying for grad school
80000hours.org
80000hours.org
> We are concerned about untrained amateurs going directly into trying to solve very difficult global problems. They can then cause harm overall, by lowering the average quality of analysis or launching ill-considered projects due to a lack of experience or understanding. A PhD reduces the risk you’ll accidentally do this.
This point is operating off of a different fundamental paradigm than the comments here that are talking about opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is looking at personal benefit, while the above is looking at the effectiveness at solving hard, large-scale problems.
Obviously, money is important, but for many (often those who are fortunate enough to have reached a certain income level), it isn't the only thing or even the primary thing.
I don't have much insight into how true the point actually is, but I found it to be interesting.
Which produces net better global outcomes I couldn’t say, though I have my own intuitions.
Also with highly complex things (large scale - global problems) often it is possible for an untrained amateur to create a solution that is easy to communicate why it should be good, and it works in the short term. However awhile later, it is found that long term failure occurs
Take the Internet -no one had any models for it. You could come up with new innovations and then disrupt other industries or make entirely new frontiers.
But in denser more studied areas - advances are incremental. People don’t come up with magic hashing functions for example.
Or new engine designs - there’s only so much you can do without breaking emissions norms or fuel efficiency or end up having engines which end up getting damaged.
BUT- the dream is always to find that missing or unthought of idea which changes the world.
It’s just relatively easier with an open frontier.
IMO learn to swim in the pool.
I've found a few programs that are open to considering part-time candidates, but they are few and far between, and most of the ones who consider it still strongly recommend against it.
Went (going?) through it. My wife is doing her PhD. From 2 really good incomes to one stipend. We don’t live in campus housing so it’s more expensive (savings helped here initially), but we do know of others there with their spouses and some even with kids that are doing good. I found a job after getting here which helped.
FYI for others wondering about the same, I wouldn't wait the full 10 years unless you are going to study something very industry adjacent like software engineering methodology. I've had to spend a lot of time relearning anything theoretical.
I bet the sweet spot is 2-5 years.
You're right, no trials on methodology that resemble something like clinical trials. And of course the reason for that is it would be incredibly expensive to even run a reasonable pilot (two small teams head to head implementing a realistic system), and if any organization has actually gathered data, it would be the crown jewel of proprietary knowledge. Not something you would ever open source.
The only thing I can say is that an immature field is one with opportunities left. If you can figure out how to jump the hurdles you can make a huge impact.
PS, an example of a bug study like I mentioned (this isn't even that great but just goes to show how hard any sort of software study is): https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.acolyer.org/2018/06/28/how...
A balance of both is perhaps best, which is what industry PhD holders have.
There's a quote I kinda forgot, but it goes something like:
"Did you experience the same thing 10 times, or did you experience 10 years worth?"
And I think this is true for a lot of real world experience, you don't necessarily have 10 year of it even though you've worked 10 years, you have 10 times the same experience.
It's a black and white thinking. Why people who don't have PhD are amateurs? Why person having MBA, MD, JD, MA or BS degree isn't professional?
There's no "single PhDless engineer" who engineers a whole spacecraft.
OTOH not knowing it won't work can help \_(ツ)_/
I really like this, basically sums up my PhD experience so far.
Its not very clear cut, there are some blurry boundaries, but still, would you want people to use that hospital?
What if you have Nurse Practitioners with a Nursing BS, 4 years of nursing experience, a Masters degree in NP, and 4 years of experience diagnosing, managing complex conditions, etc.?
I personally know of several examples of Nurse Practitioners who are a drop-in replacement for an MD and that was achieved through work experience.
But the question was more about, say, should we close now all the MD schools and replace them by the alternative path you describe?
Right...
I've met a good number of PhD dropouts - I am one myself. None of them dropped out because it was too "intellectually demanding." They all dropped out because the work was unrewarding, the odds of employment in academia were poor, and the work in academia was unappealing.
Looking at Computer and Information Science in particular, I might suggest that high availability of high paying jobs in the private sector is worth looking at rather than the "intellectually demanding" academic program.
I went to grad school for chemistry. A PhD in my experience is more an exercise in perseverance than anything. You don’t need to be a genius, just work hard and have some luck as well.
The focus of 80,000 hours is on "effective altruism" where the goal is to have the greatest positive impact on the world.
And it's not super hard to believe that there are quite a few jobs that require a PhD, often due to plain credentialism, that have significantly more impact than your average software developer at a well paying company.
I'm still not going to do a PhD, but I'm really not the target audience here, and it's sort of not surprising since 80,000 hours is an outgrowth of academia itself.
And don’t forget to factor in the opportunity cost of accruing student loan debt (which can’t be defaulted!) against lost yearly income.
Practically: no, not really.
Yeah if you're looking for more money, maybe don't do a PhD. If you're looking for the time and space to find satisfaction by working on a unique problem, then it's hard to find something that gives you that in our industry to the same degree.
I'm not sure it has to be immediately, but your point still stands, and it's often ignored by proponents, which is that merely acquiring a graduate degree does not automatically guarantee all those intangible benefits.
One has to actually secure employment with those benefits. Whether that's easier than finding employment with salary benefits instead (or in addition) seems to be still an open question.
Friends getting phd's - poorer, later start in life to almost everything (family, house etc) and the job market is not great.
Another, less universal aspect is that many folks I know who went for one have attenuated interest in typically 'normal' life-goals - one or more of things like marriage, kids, 2.4 picket fences, etc. are either not part of the plan or substantially less important to them than to other people. (Though this may be bias introduced by me, because I also fit that description, and family-less folks over a certain age tend to find each other.)
But practically speaking, in the real world we reside in, approximately no one authors peer reviewed research without at least being in graduate school. You frequently see "talks" at conferences given by non-PhDs, but it's exceptionally rare to find math or computer science research published in reputable journals or conferences by non-PhDs.
The dirty secret is that the formal barrier to entry was never really the problem. It's extraordinarily difficult to learn how to conduct meaningful research. The structure of a PhD is imperfect, but it places you in direct collaboration with an experienced researcher who can mentor you. Half of the entire work of a PhD program is precisely learning how to learn on your own so you can find interesting research questions.
I don't think it's productive to talk about what's merely possible. A more realistic barometer is what's plausible. Anyone who can bootstrap themselves up to original research in math or computer science through independent study is extremely gifted. You don't want to set a goal that requires you to be extremely gifted right from the start.
Additionally, nothing has been done to separate the issue of correlation and causation. If research capable individuals pursue a PhD because it interests them, who's to say that their research capability came from the PhD versus it being intrinsic.
One can learn a lot from a PhD. But saying that it's a practical requirement for research in this modern era of information access is without definitive evidence.
The "all information is free and you can study anything using just a computer" is a stupid meme that doesn't work for the vast majority of people.
The parent commenter seems to be suggesting that a PhD isn’t a requirement to work successfully on interesting research problems. It’s possible to go online and read the same papers everyone’s reading. You can still talk to people to get guidance and find out known things that are not published.
Sure you can learn a lot from just the literature but in my experience there is a set of heuristics and common understandings/techniques that are often passed on through instructors or peers you're collaborating with that are absent in textbooks. More importantly, points of emphasis and exigent problems in an era of information deluge often come through only when in regular contact with practitioners and attendance of conferences.
These are thoughts that have crystallized for me over a 4 year period of starting math late in undergrad, struggling through and putting a lot of time into non essential aspects in the process of self study to get up to speed, hitting a road block when attempting to self study graduate level material but ultimately managing upon working in an academic setting.
It's technically possible, but it's unrealistic. The work that is published in journals often demonstrates results that are known by the community years before the actual publication. There's effectively a "secret club" in many disciplines that you need to have connections to in order to actually understand the current state-of-the-art. Without those connections, it's hard to understand what is high-impact and meaningful. This means the research you would do is likely to be insignificant, or already done and pending publication.
An easy way to avoid this is to start attending conferences and working with establishment players, which is exactly what doing a PhD entails.
I was hoping for some reason I hadn't considered, to consider grad school.
As it stands I have no idea why I should go to grad school lol, I'm already happily employed. I guess it's not for me!
1. What kind of information you will find in each section of a research paper in your field.
2. What are the major research programs in your field and where they disagree.
3. How to identify where a paper's author stands with respect to the major disagreements in your field.
4. How to decide that a paper isn't worth your time without reading all of it.
5. How do you write a research paper?
6. How do you decide what research to do? (This decision will often be made for you for the first couple of years.)
7. Where you stand with respect to the major disagreements in your field.
8. How to synthesize half a decade's work into a realtively brief document.
Notably, these skills don't help you do any of the following:
1. Manage a research group in an academic setting.
2. Teach undergraduates.
3. Manage people in industry.
You might pick up applicable skills along the way, but these are incidental. Any specific skill, any particular knowledge, can be obtained without getting a Ph.D. The Ph.D. teaches what you need to know to advance the field.
I'd like to return for a second to talk about teaching undergraduates. It's a very important thing to do. Ph.D. training ought to include pedagogy. Standards for university instruction are shockingly low, and professors are rarely held to account for failing to teach the material well, especially at R1 institutions. However this comment is not about what you should learn, but about what you'll actually learn in a Ph.D. program if you decide to enroll tomorrow.
Specifically,
1. Senior PhD students in many research groups can become de facto managers of the group, especially when the professor is on sabbatical. PhD students are often involved in the funding, presentations, recruitment, and represent the group. Some PIs/professors empower their PhD students to run a mini research group within their group.
2. I've seen some PhD programs have a strong emphasis on teaching undergraduates, both as in teaching undergraduate courses directly (which many PhD students in the humanities and social science already do), serving as teaching assistants with a substantive educational role (not just grading), and mentoring them in research or more general advising. For example, Brown University and Princeton are known to have a good research-teaching balance for PhD students. Brown has a large number of programs that help PhD students get more involved in undergraduate teaching [https://www.brown.edu/sheridan/programs-services/certificate...]
There’s an enormous amount of valuable non-procedural knowledge that most doctoral degree holders have and most non-holders don’t but the average doctor, lawyer or senior civil servant does research that would be impossible without skills 1-4 without ever doing a Ph.D.
edit: adding a few links to reading material
One of the main things is to focus on maximising your savings rate, i.e. your amount of savings divided by your revenue (for most people this would be their income from their job, minus income tax). You can increase this by making lifestyle changes that let you sustainably decrease your expenses, and by getting a job that pays you more, or other sources of income.
William Bernstein has written a bit about investment and asset allocation. He has a free publication titled "If You Can" geared at young people to help them plan for retirement: http://efficientfrontier.com/ef/0adhoc/2books.htm One of his general pieces of advice is to invest 15% of income every year into low-fee investment funds, i.e. to achieve a savings rate of 15%. If you do this consistently for around 30 or 40 years, you can retire.
Things get much more extreme for higher savings rates. For example, if you hit a savings rate of around 75% year after year (saving three quarters of what you earn after tax) and invest this, then with some assumptions about rates of return on investment, after about 8 years there should be enough income from investments to cover your expenses:
https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
You need to be a bit careful re: assumptions about stock market returns over the next few years or decades, some markets (e.g. the US stock market) are priced very highly compared to historical prices, so assumptions about rates of return from investment that seemed reasonable a decade ago are probably over-estimates now.
I was doing my masters with focus on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I was considering PhD but after talking with academic advisor, I realized having PhD will limit my options to either research labs or academia, for which jobs are few and far between. For industry jobs, I felt I didn't need PhD. Yes, you might be few steps below in the ladder but you can quickly catch-up as you climb.
So everyone should seriously consider where they want to end up. If research is something they fancy and their field has ample research opportunities or can be leg up in the industry with PhD then PhD is a great option given the opportunity costs.
Thought the program hasn't started yet, I hope that this is an alternative path for those interested in research but not quite ready for a full PhD.
"All engineers will become as rich as the founders and investors if this company succeeds."
Instant productivity increase.
About 22 minutes in, a researcher is discussing a study he did where they paid participants a months wage for a single task to see if they would perform better. They didn’t. They actually performed worse! A follow up study at MIT found this to be particularly true for cognitive tasks.
Would this apply to a job over time instead of a single task? Probably not, but I’m also not convinced that salary will increase productivity after some relatively low amount.
A classic "efficient" market should close any gaps between these two definition, but it doesn't work perfectly in practice.
I'm not sure if anyone else covered it but you have to have a certain amount of money to get a PHD. I was approved to enter a doctorate program at Stanford. I couldn't afford it so I went to HP to earn some money. After the five-year approval expired I was disappointed that I could never afford it. (We're talking astronomical numbers here).
Don't know how things are now, or how they are in other fields.
Now, of course free wasn't exactly free, because studying in grad school was potentially at the expense of working a regular job. That's another topic.
Hell, last I looked, Standford won't even let you self-fund all the way through, at least in my field.
Doctoral programs pay you through stipends. You shouldn't have to pay for any doctoral program, ever.
Pricing on Stanford website (https://registrar.stanford.edu/students/tuition-and-fees):
Each graduate Engineering unit above 18 is $1200.
Notably, this typically isn't the case for Masters programs, which are cash cows for universities like Stanford and charge $40k/yr+ for students.
Like the other commenter said, any Ph.D. program that isn't covering your tuition and providing a reasonable stipend has huge red flags all over it. They aren't the norm, either.
Remember that we're responding to:
> I can count on one hand resumes of people that gets a CS BS degree THEN a MS degree in CS [15 years of looking at resumes].
In fact most people who get an MS in CS got a BS in CS first. And all MS programs have prerequisites.
You internalize those, combined with your experience, and you'll be better off than a lot of CS grads.
Getting a Master’s in a different field from your Bachrlor’s is so common as to be unremarkable. The ones which are only available to those with significant prior study in the field are the exception, not the rule.
If someone insists on making a hiring decision based on my ability to whip out fizzbuzz on a whiteboard under a ticking clock, find another person and waste their time. I’ll pass.
I'm going to be real, what I'm assuming is a near completed master's student complaining about fizzbuzz not being fair is kind of proving my point.
Interviewing an experienced and credentialed developer like they’re an undergrad sophomore with a one sentence resume looking for a summer internship shows to me that if an employer is going to waste the time of a candidate (and implicitly insult their intelligence and education), then they will waste the time of an employee, and such they represent an organization I want no part of.
Have you ever been a part of the hiring process, or are just stating that it's a waste of time because you think it's somehow beneath you to prove that you can do basic work? You know those annoying people in you group projects who don't do any work, but somehow squeak by? They graduate to, and get a job to.
Is there any way I can skip the BS?
University of Oxford Master’s in Software Engineering ... However, more extensive experience may compensate for a lack of formal qualifications, and a strong, immediately-relevant qualification may compensate for a lack of professional experience.
Job prospects are relatively good. Pay is bad but industry internships during summer can compensate. Academic jobs are not quite as scarce, and R&D jobs in industry are plentiful. There is not an air of failure or taboo about moving on from academia after the degree.
The calculation on a PhD is very different compared to most other fields, and certainly compared to humanities PhDs (which actually charge money to attend!)
http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html
TL;DR. Don't do it!
People saying related things:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20130115173649/http://www.villag...
A previous comment I made with quotes from those links four months ago with various replies (then the topics was "Time to talk about why so many postgrads have poor mental health"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16725676
For all that, there are many good STEM-related jobs which seem to require a PhD these days, so obviously there are nuances to the topic and whether a PhD is worth it. If you are getting a PhD and someone else is paying for it (current job or a fellowship) and you already know and like the professor who you will be working for, and you already know of a good industry job prospect (in five to seven years, so hard to predict), and you like academic work, then it may not be quite as financially risky as otherwise (although it still may be emotionally draining). Also, if you are independently wealthy and do a PhD for fun, then again a PhD can make sense.
For people in the USA thinking about getting a PhD, consider schools in Western Europe as they tend to be more research-oriented with less-to-no classroom busywork.
It's sad things have come to this in a country with as much wealth as the USA -- especially given how much advanced research can (in theory) potentially improve people's lives if you are allowed to research such things.
Bottom line: as people have said here, a PhD represents a tremendous opportunity cost with a significant risk of having nothing to show for it.
There are areas I feel I could be helpful with, e.g. creating reproducible experiments or ensuring a codebase could be open sourced in relation to a paper. It's a lot of grunt work that nobody really has time to do.
If that were possible, I'm not quite sure where to start with executing that plan. (Chicago area, FWIW.)
I went through the existing process once and promised myself I would never waste that much time again. But if there's a program that genuinely values industry experience, and is willing to look past recommendation letters from academics, I'd jump at it.
> There are areas I feel I could be helpful with, e.g. creating reproducible experiments or ensuring a codebase could be open sourced in relation to a paper. It's a lot of grunt work that nobody really has time to do.
Whoah caution there. Don't go into a PhD with the idea that you can be helpful with someone else's work, or doing grunt work. Doing a PhD is very personal - you need your own big idea to work on. You may be part of a lab, your work may even be one part on a larger project, but you must carve out your own very distinct part of that and generate your own research. You can't really do a PhD by helping along with something else. Open sourcing a code base is not a research contribution.
You could make a PhD about how to make science more reproducible, though. You'd need some big idea about how to do that.
It sounds like you might be interested in looking at being a research engineer as well. Prestigious places like Microsoft Research hire quite a few of these I believe.
Nobody has time to do those things because they are valued less than publishing new research, and thus are of lower priority. You'll have a frustrating time in academia if you define yourself around your ability to do things that the people evaluating you believe to be unimportant.
If you can meet or exceed expectations on delivering research and get all those lower-priority things done, you'll be very well-liked. Just remember that the former is a requirement and the latter is icing on the cake.
This is required in a 1.7 million dollar grant I'm the PI on. I run a computational lab - making sure my research code base is high quality is one of my highest priorities, and I've seen people have very fruitful careers doing just that.
We're trying to. Doesn't mean I wouldn't like to hire someone whose better at it. Just like we do a lot of mathematical analysis, but I was still excited about hiring an applied mathematician.
And when I said I knew people with fruitful careers, that implies I know academics already doing them.
If a prospective student wants to be sure that sort of contribution will be appreciated, they should seek out groups who have expressed interest in those skills.
We complain about it on...a regular basis.
Source: i'm an escaped academic.
Hell, one of the rising stars of my field started as a dev.