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Comment by papeda | Hacker News Reader

For anybody interested in the computer science PhD process, a good complement to the featured article is Philip Guo's "The PhD Grind" [1]. It's a long (115p, but with big text) blow-by-blow account of the author's PhD at Stanford in the late 00s. It's neither sensationalized nor sanitized, and it's weirdly engrossing for an account of PhD research. I read it before starting grad school and I think it helped my "meta" PhD skills a lot.

[1] http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf

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Thanks for the recommendation. I'm currently doing a PhD and spent a few years in the corporate world.

I've only read a fifth of it (the downfall) and I feel like some of his not so good experiences could actually be easily avoided by anyone with some work experience. Im already accustomed to knowing that half of the time the leader/professor might not actually know what he's doing or get you to do something that's obviously not gonna work because what the hell why not. Usually I just do enough to keep him happy but not get too emotionally invested, like I don't intentionally muck it but I don't get so committed that I feel depressed.

I'm almost done with my first year and I was pretty much aware that I wouldn't be able to do any decent research so I just tried to get as much of my coursework out of the way as possible

+1, no one has any idea what they're really doing. This lets people suggest random projects, if you keep prodding them. As your username suggests: "it's a trap!"

I just read the first half of it, and want to ditto how engrossing of a read it is.

I followed the path in his prologue: a BS/MS student with a lot of internships, which were mostly uninspiring but less uninspiring than school. Always vaguely disappointed that problems weren't "big" or "intellectual" enough (something I kind of look back on in shame). However, I took a different turn by getting very "in" to the engineering part of software in my last two years.

This led me to being purposefully selective with my last internship and eventual job search (optimizing for hard problems, interesting business models, and OSS/mature infrastructure), and I ended up very happily in industry, satisfying my intellectual curiosity at work and on the side.

And yet, I have always wondered what it would have been like to be a PhD student instead. From this narrative, it sounds very similar to being a junior engineer: you don't really know what's going on, and you're dependent on the graciousness and good will of more senior people to point you in the right direction, until you can build a compass of your own.

Thank you very much for this link, it's like gazing into another branch of the universe for me.

Man, I just read through the memoir (it's a pretty engrossing read) and it's a ride. I really want a sequel though. Why/how did he end up back in academia? What do the other parties, e.g. Dawson, Margo, etc. think of these recollections? How far has he shifted his research? How different is it now that data science is such a pronounced field? I definitely feel like his tools anticipated stuff like Docker and data science tooling. Maybe he would have had better success in industry with these ideas.

Not quite a sequel, but he recently gave more details on the post-phd transition here: http://pgbovine.net/one-weird-year.htm.

Interesting that he doesn't seem to debate or reconcile how painful he found working on his PhD, with his decision to rejoin academia. He makes the persuasive point that he doesn't have the freedom to pursue long-term research in the industry, but he documented all the trade-offs inherent in that freedom in 'The PhD Grind'.

Is it just that he's on the other side of the advisor-student power-balance? Or that he has the experience and skills to negotiate them better?

IIRC, one reason his PhD was so hard is he spent a bunch of time working in a grind-it-out field (automated bug-finding) with an advisor who was sort of an outsider in the field. That's a recipe for a ton of hours spent on the wrong stuff with little agency. He only pivoted toward his current focus on HCI, learning, visualization, etc incidentally near the end of his PhD.

Since he's now familiar with and known in his chosen area, he may honestly be able to say to his students "I can help you do meaningful and rewarding research".

(Of course, I dunno what the actual story is.)

That seems right, the advisor/subject-matter/interest mismatch seems to be at the core of a lot of his struggle.

I kinda viewed it as a "the grass is grayer on the other side". Like he tried the other side, realized it wasn't that great either and went back.

I read his book as well! It's an amazing book. It helped me to come to terms with whether I wanted to do a PhD or not. The result: maybe later in life, but not now. The risks are way greater than I expected.

Well what's interesting is that in the end he did become a prof, so perhaps it should be updated

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