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Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

> Second, if Ph.D. students are training for but then leaving the profession, and if the humane, short-term solution to adjunctification is to close down or drastically shrink Ph.D. programs, then universities are effectively admitting that there is no future for those fields.

I think this plays right into other employment issues. There is a feeling that employers will not train you. Many STEM based employers that need highly trained individuals (DoD, Pharma, data-science, etc) are outsourcing some of that training to PhD programs. Thus far, the situation has been acceptable in STEMy fields. But the PhD program is not structured to train the high skills workforce (it just happens to be okayish at doing so) and that mis-match is coming to a head.

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As a DoD employee....you are incredibly wrong. The DoD paid for my undergrad, then paid me a full salary to get a masters, and they do the same for a PhD. This is a very common thing for them to do.

That guy: DoD outsources training to PhD programs.

You: Wrong! The DoD actually outsources training to PhD programs.

The difference is who pays. This mostly matters for undergrad since graduate school pays you.

ha, upvoted!

> you are incredibly wrong

And this is why you are so confident in your claim that you made a new account a few minutes ago to argue with people?

How long have you been on HN using your real account, if I may ask?

Or perhaps you'd like to claim that you randomly stumbled into this board a few minutes ago and happened to see this thread and decided to post with your relevant expertise.

well yes, but DoD is basically an aberration in the labor market from an economics perspective.

First you have to overcome the moral barrier problem to get people to work there these days (resulting in higher conditions for those who do)

Then you have the fact that its products are not easily measurable in terms of consumer utility or organisational profit/ utility, and its own budget/demand side is not based directly on consumer choice, competition or revenue.

DoD has a specific unique position in most of our cultures and market, and its conditions cannot and should not be extrapolated to other parts of economic life/debate unless you can also bring those other aspects of defense which make its particular environment possible (Which is generally neither possible nor desirable).

The moral barrier problem goes both ways. How could you possibly spend your days making addictive games and web trackers when you could instead support your country?

Absolutely, for better or for worse, labor markets will effectively pay a "bonus" for immoral or contentious industries and employment, and discount wages and conditions for those which are virtuous or desirable.

In short, being able to sleep at night is a form of non-cash benefit, and the fact that everyone wants to do it increases the supply of labor for those jobs.

contentious or morally repugnant jobs are just the opposite, shrinking the available labor pool and inducing an intangible cost on normal people who take them on. Of course, if you're a psychopath or morally blind, you as an individual do not pay this psychological cost, and benefit from the increased wages and conditions deriving from the relative shortage of labor.

There's a reason they call it the dismal science... :p

re: "As a DoD employee... [I think] you are incredibly wrong."

DoD is almost certainly the exception rather than the rule.

Some Silicon Valley companies will pay for your master's degree, but usually you still have to work full time for the company in addition to your course work.

I've heard of some companies like Pixar actively training their employees for several months and paying them to learn (rather than expecting them to keep working full time in addition to training) but that seems unusual.

> Some Silicon Valley companies will pay for your master's degree, but usually you still have to work full time for the company in addition to your course work.

Why is this a bad thing - I'm genuinely curious? I completed a masters and a PhD the same way. Of course, the downside is that since I already had a job I wasn't going to deal with the funding rat-race that comes with academia and stayed in industry.

Edit: The biggest upside - career growth, no student loans, regular paycheck, health insurance, etc, etc.

> Why is this a bad thing - I'm genuinely curious?

First of all I admire you for finishing a Master's and PhD while working.

I personally think about going back to school all the time (I didn't finish undergrad) but am pretty confident that if I do I would want to go full time.

My reason is just that working full time is exhausting and I can't imagine being able to give 100% to my studies if I'm also constantly fatigued from work.

I certainly still am able to learn new things after working, but compared to when I was focused on school completely I learn at a much slower pace. There's a lot of cognitive overhead in having to context switch, at least for me personally.

A PhD isn't training to do a job other than research. If it is, it isn't a PhD. Some specific PhD topics have utility in industry, but that isn't guaranteed, and even if a topic does, the people studying that topic won't automatically know how to apply their work to anything a commercial employer would be interested in.

TL;DR: Until commercial employers start to rely on grants, a PhD isn't job training.

>A PhD isn't training to do a job other than research.

That's simply wrong.

>A doctorate (from Latin docere, "to teach") or doctor's degree (from Latin doctor, "teacher") or doctoral degree, is an academic degree awarded by universities, derived from the ancient formalism licentia docendi ("licence to teach") In most countries, it is a research degree that qualifies the holder to teach at university level in the degree's field, or to work in a specific profession.

We've recently formalized it to "doing research", but for most of history it has not been limited to, or even primarily for, research.

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