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Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

> Abandoning a PhD indicate it's not the former

How is that? PhD is just a title indicating some relationship to science. If you have successful career as a goal, you started PhD thinking it will be useful, the got better understanding of your needs and switched to something else, that is called being able to make a tough call. If anything, experience of pivots is a startup person quality.

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A PhD only proves you can stick through on a research project for 4-5 years and can convince 3-4 other PhDs that you are a competent scientist

So it doesn't necessarily correlate with research aptitude. I've known incompetent PhDs and incredibly talented folks who only had a BS

...but for a company as distracted by shiny things as Google, where a major trust problem is that they get bored and drop products after a couple years, maybe they should look at "ability to stick things through" as an important qualification

But Google doesn't drop projects because some researchers or devs got bored. That's a management decision.

Pretty sure the lack of focus from the top. From what I understand people working there are as confused as the general public when something gets dropped or the 10th messenger service is announced

Moonshot to me indicates there is a specific goal versus simply making a startup that may pivot utterly. If the Apollo project ended up building a high speed train then it'd have been a failure no matter how good that train was.

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