Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees | Hacker News Reader

Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

nature.com

234 pointsrntn467 comments

There are countless pragmatic reasons to avoid a PhD, and no doubt both the article and other commenters will bring them up. The most constructive thing I can do is share a personal perspective.

I am 30 years old. I am working through my last few months as a computer engineering PhD student. Eventually, it went good. Not great (the world gives zero f*cks about my work, nobody has offered me a job yet), but not hellish either (didn't quit, still mostly sane, learned a ton of stuff that I never had the guts or prudence to delve into as an undergraduate, and most importantly, I decided I like computers).

Now my background is anything but academic: none of my parents finished high school, people from my village consider me either batshit crazy or a genius. I mean, I was thrown into the PhD archipelago by life itself, rather unconsciously. I just knew that "corporate IT" wasn't my thing, and as for the cool computing jobs, I wasn't their thing. Again, I spent my years as an ECE undergraduate burying my insecurities instead of building my future. To understand the degree of mental fragmentation I was under, I had never made the connection between my digital design courses and my operating systems courses (all of this is the story of the computer, stupid, it's in the title of your degree for God's sake!).... Anyways.

It took me six years to get to today. I am another person now. The PhD (well, and the pandemic, and all that followed) crushed all of my assumptions about the world, myself, the meaning of life. There's no way to put it in the condensed form that an HN comment requires without sounding naive, but I'm telling you the truth. Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again. It made me.

At the end of the day, talking sh*t about hard stuff is sooo easy. You could replace any polemic against a PhD with one against starting a family, or a company, or in any way rejecting "safety" for the potential of leaving your own mark on the world. Being you. Like that poem by Robert Frost, these things make all the difference.

Another great thing about PhD programs is you generally don’t end them with 6 figures in college debt from the degree. As long as you get the PhD in something that gives you a marketable skill, it’s not going to hurt too much vs all the MBAs and Lawyers I know with a ton of debt and just marginally increased career choices.

You are discarding opportunity cost in your assessment.

Their assessment seems to be talking about the debt load, in which case, the opportunity cost isnt especially relevant.

The counter party to your opportunity costs doesn't send collection agencies, though.

$250k in savings in six years is doable with a salary of $125k after undergrad.

But can you still get $125k directly after undergrad? How many employers are willing to pay 2x the median wage to someone with no experience and no demonstrated skills, simply because they went to a school? To someone who is likely to make a net negative contribution until they learn how things work and require less guidance? To someone who is at a high risk of taking another job after a couple of years?

It's more common that entry-level jobs in highly paid fields start at close to the median wage. Salaries can rise rapidly once you have demonstrated your worth. But unless there is a talent shortage in your field, it doesn't make sense to pay much for an unknown quantity.

FAANG or some company in a high-rent area where you could most definitely not save that kind of money, as far as I know.

And, I love how making $125K is some sort of great salary. I live in MN and while it’s above the median HHI for the state, it’s by no means a comfortable enough wage to save that kind of money unless your housing is covered by family or something.

Here in the MSP metro, you’re looking at $2500/mo for rent + utils or $3500/mo for mortgage + utils for what’s a pretty average living arrangement. Unless you’re making $200K+ you’re definitely not saving shit.

Using paycheckcity.com, I see that a $125K gross salary is $7360 a month in MN. If you max out your 401K, that’s still $5988 a month.

The median household income in Minneapolis is around $77K and they are somehow surviving.

It's amazing how out of touch people are. It's one thing to say your lifestyle choices make it hard to save money at that income level, but it's certainly also true that many folks are perfectly able to save a lot at that income level. Out of college, rent in my area was $1500 for a one bedroom, but I was able to rent a house with a few friends for $800/month per person. Even with frequent eating out and outings I saved up over half my income per year, making under 100k the entire time. If you want a really nice car, travel a bunch, or similar, or live alone, I'm sure it gets much harder to save much, but those are lifestyle choices.

Yes? That seems to be the standard entry level salary in the Bay Area.

If you’re doing a PhD in anything other than the highly paid field of “computer stuff”, the opportunity costs look much, much different.

When I did my PhD, I was making roughly the same money as all of my friends (none of whom were in tech) except I had waaay more freedom and job satisfaction.

If your other opportunities are things like a school teacher or generic “office job”, a PhD program doesn’t really have an opportunity cost penalty

Unrealistic unless you’re talking about eating beans and rice, and sharing an apartment with a few other people for all six years. Remember taxes, etc.

Maybe, but if you compare paying 30-50k per year plus living expenses for an average masters program for 2-3 years and then paying student loans for a really long time because you couldn't afford it in the first place vs paying no tuition and getting a $30k-40k stipend for 4-5 years. The advantage of a year or two of additional work isn't as great as you think, when you subtract out tuition and the stipend they give you during the PhD and compare the pay differential and job prospects when you finish.

It depends on your career prospects. If you can expect to make $200k out of grad school then it’s definitely not better to spend your time in school, financially. But yeah it’s a math question at that point.

I don't think even smart folks here realize how much of a boost is some good income cash when you are starting your life from poor background. But one has to save it and not burn on 'better' lifestyle with trying to match peers or impress women (clue - if they don't like who you really are, no shiny expensive thing will ever make it work long term and you will just attract very wrong crowd).

I can attest it allowed me to do literal jumps way above what my peers and rest could do setting up much better life path. Pure numbers don't do this justice, not sure how to explain it properly.

Now it may not be your goal in life and thats fine, this comes from a guy who spent 6 months on unpaid backpacking all over India and Nepal well into his career work days, but be sure you are really fine with these decisions long, I mean LONG term. And we don't know who we will be in 2 decades.

Also a good quick start could easily mean retiring much earlier if one has a bit of luck and can control expenses growth (and they will grow regardless of your life path). One can focus on academia then.

You could always do what I did, get your employer to pay for the Masters, still work full time.

No debt, no opportunity cost.

Wish one would let me do the same with a PhD.

Some do.

Lots of masters students are also research / teaching assistants and end up finishing with little debt.

You can also just not get a masters.

It depends on what you want to do. I think 90% of the people here are computer science / programmers / IT people. There are people who don't even have a college degree and are self taught.

I'm in integrated circuit / semiconductor design. I only have a bachelors degree but that was 30 years ago. These days the vast majority of new graduates that we hire have a masters degree. IT's really hard to stand out with only a bachelors in my industry.

I suppose it depends on the field but there are plenty of Master’s programs that have no tuition plus stipend.

If you consider opportunity cost is above fulfilment don't do PhD.

Poetic. I can't do anything else but say you could have passed this off as my experience as well. It changed my life so much for the better.

> Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again.

I can't agree more. My sister died at the hardest point of my PhD and I buried myself in my work for nearly every waking second for years, confident that at least I was doing it for myself. I couldn't have done that if I were working a normal job.

In STEM in particular the opportunity costs of a PhD are extremely high and with little payoff at the end. Even if you want to stay in academia, which is the only real reason to do a PhD now, there are far more PhDs graduating per year than open faculty positions. Many get stuck in Postdoc or adjunct hell for years and can never get a tenure track role.

There are many research jobs at Microsoft, Google, etc., that require a STEM PhD.

True, but how competitive are those jobs to get? If one goes to a lesser-known university that has a PhD program and does related research are they getting an interview, or are these research jobs intended for specific university pipelines (Harvard, MIT, the usuals, etc.)?

Exactly, they will be H-1B visa worker over someone with a PHD from a non-Ivy League/non-big-name college

The interview process for a place like Microsoft Research is essentially the same as for a faculty position - give a talk on your research, spend the day talking to researchers about your research, their research, convince them you have an interesting research agenda. Have dinner with more researchers, for a notionally more relaxed discussion :) [Tried, failed ;)]

As with university recruitment, this isn't a case of "you must come from specific pipelines", but of "you must have done interesting research, have an interesting plan". It's just that those two criteria are strongly correlated...

You’re forgetting the part where the interview is just a formality and sanity check. They have to recognize you or your advisors name.

I have a CS PhD from a good (but not top 5) program and have published in top venues. I perceived my chances of getting a job at Microsoft Research (MSR) to be low (on par with getting a faculty position at a top place) and didn't feel like going through the unpleasant prospect of coming up with job talks and slides, sending off to universities while I'm at it, writing diversity statements, etc, for fairly low chances at getting something at MSR.

I could have gotten something at a 'lesser' place, but my guess is they'd be even more likely to be disrupted by budget cuts.

Even getting one of these roles though leaves you in a position where the next guy who wants to save money can just axe the whole division and then you're on your ass and due to a general paucity of research roles and high competition, this can be very, very bad.

I went bog-standard industry and the PhD probably didn't help much there. My industry job largely wastes my training and research experience. In retrospect, I was foolish to get a PhD and people choosing to not do so are generally making the right choice.

> then you're on your ass

My understanding from PhDs in the research business at major companies is that once you're in the club, it's a lot easier to get a position at another one.

(No, not me, I don't have a PhD.)

I have anecdata that shows that plenty of intelligent, highly motivated, affable people with (hard science) PhDs still struggle to obtain employment of the "club" caliber, even after they're in the "club".

You'd want to keep your network alive. Publish, be on program committees doing reviews, etc. If the number of jobs is fairly static and you're doing this and your area doesn't collapse, (e.g., the AI winter), your network can probably land you okay. Networks in the academic world is a pretty big deal and it's a small world. Some people like doing this kind of 'service,' I wasn't one of them.

If there are general headwinds (i.e., research spending in general drops, which seems to have been an ongoing trend), there is almost definitionally more people getting cast off than there are actual researcher roles, not including new entrants to the market.

As with all things, the better off you do (very high quality lab, for instance), the more places you have to try to grab onto if you get cast off.

My peers from grad school have gone every which route, industrial labs, academia, more applied research-lite positions, finance, and fairly direct software engineering jobs. A decent chunk that started in academia or at labs have migrated into more standard software engineering roles. Personally, I really miss research, but it is what it is.

> True, but how competitive are those jobs to get?

Personally knowing a couple PhDs who did the rounds, it is highly competitive.

I want to vaguely highlight that they are not that competitive. Headcount is not that great; there is usually a citation/research impact floor; the ivory tower "oh our advisors are friends" thing likely also applies.

Research Scientist positions are also embedded in product teams in Google IIRC, certainly less "prestige" than DeepMind though, and probably easier to get into

(Also for the broader audience: Harvard here probably carries less weight than the likes of UT Austin)

Can't say for certain if they will be around 4-5 years down the line.

If anything, they're the jobs more likely to still be around (what those people will be doing is a different matter altogether).

Why pay an American worker 100k + benefits out of college when you can pay an H1B worker 60k for the same level of education and also have a massive amount of leverage over them?

Because this is ostensibly illegal, and it would be nice if someone enforced the fucking law (H1Bs must be paid the market rate, and it's supposed to be enforced by the Department of Labor). But the entirety of US government apparati are geared toward helping big corps make money. It's just a question of which big corps (modern Democratic party is soooo captured by Big Tech).

Of course, one of them also supports fascism; I'm not "both sides"ing.

President Musk specifically said he wants to focus on getting more H1-B visa holders in the US

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/musk-vivek-ramaswamy-h1b-vi...

I'm not surprised the richest man in the world will commit all manner of sin, because one more dollar might be the one to fill that gaping hole where his heart should be.

This doesn’t contribute to the discussion

Sure it does, wealth hoarding is a significant factor in students enrolling in doctoral degrees. Be it because it is a step towards more wealth, or because it's not (and as such a group that might be a good fit, but prefer more wealth over deeper education will no longer enrol).

Combine that with very visible people actively promoting that, or representing that, you get yourself a discussion about knowledge, money, and capitalism. And if you dig deep enough you get current affairs and later on, philosophy involved as well.

If you were to remove all incentives on "get educated so you get paid more" and only focus on "get educated so you'll enjoy what you learn more" that might change the enrolment, but as a side-effect, it might also make it harder to find enough people for all manner of work.

Going down this thought a bit more, how much is enough? (money, knowledge) Is there such a thing as a goal or limit? Or better yet, is there a fixed quantity where it's all turned into a zero-sum game? Probably not.

So if someone will put effort in their hoard, would it then be good or bad for society at large? And either way, would such a person do it regardless of the side-effects on everyone else? Even if it has an outsized impact? Would we then not want to talk about someone with a big hoard trying to add a relatively small amount to that hoard at a cost that might be relatively big for everyone else?

If you read a biography of Musk, you'll find that he did not hoard wealth. At each step in his rise, he bet essentially all of his fortune on the next step.

After all, investing in Tesla was not a sane business decision. Nobody had ever started a successful car company in America since the 1920s or so. Bricklin, Tucker, Delorean, the path is littered with utter failure.

Neither was investing in rockets. At one point, he was down to bankruptcy if one more rocket exploded. What car executive would be crazy enough to bet it all on reusable rockets?

Reading a biography mostly informed me about the lack of general empathy, remorse, sympathy. Only regret came forward a little (and only once).

> be crazy enough to bet it all

Anyone who doesn't suffer any real consequences. Having parents with a lot of money makes it not matter all that much.

As for the other bad decisions; it doesn't really show much positive except maybe persistence, but persistence in a vacuum is not a good thing. In a way, it mostly read like "a skewed mind made a bunch of bets and got lucky". Perhaps mostly an example of survivorship bias in a business sense.

Now, if we go back to the hoarding; it's not about when someone didn't hoard, it's about the here and now. I'm pretty sure we can find a period of time where Gates or Kamprad didn't do any hoarding, or not the hoarding we'd expect. But concentration of anything doesn't really happen by accident, and wherever we see it now, we can assume it was intentional.

There are of course also examples of people on their death bed realising their hoard doesn't really matter anymore and they might give most or all of it away. But that doesn't mean the hoarding never happened. It doesn't turn someone into a genius or a saint. When such things happen, we might consider it commendable, but that doesn't mean history disappears.

In a way it works not like a balance or a sum but more like a ratchet; it's about the degree to which someone hoarded stuff and how they acted with their hoard (doesn't have to be money, can be property or secrets or power or knowledge etc).

Musk used his "hoard" to revolutionize the car industry, then the rocket industry, then the communications industry, etc.

Did you know he gave away free Starlink to victims of hurricane Helena and the LA fires? When FEMA did nothing?

He's also going to rescue the astronauts abandoned in space.

My gawd, Elon is pure eeevil!!

How did FEMA do nothing?

FEMA failed to provide communications.

> Anyone who doesn't suffer any real consequences. Having parents with a lot of money makes it not matter all that much.

You're not going to starve in America if you lose all your money.

Besides, Elon's dad at one point invested in Elon's company. Elon was already a success in business by then. From $20,000, he became the richest man in the world. All by luck! Pretty amazing!

Me, I could scrape up $20,000. Could I turn it into the richest man in the world? Nope. I would never have taken the risks Musk did. Nor do I have his work ethic. Nor am I as smart as he is. So I'm not envious of him.

> You're not going to starve in America if you lose all your money.

Walk down my street with me and I’ll show you.

> Nor am I as smart as he is.

Are you kidding?

I've had the opportunity to know and work with many people who are way smarter than I am. I know one when I see one.

Lots of people seem to think that Musk has blundered his way from success to success. Nobody blunders $20,000 into richest man in the world.

Being in the right place at the right time with the right connections and not having your equity diluted helps.

There are plenty of “smart” people who aren’t rich.

I live in New Orleans. I went to the same school he did. Thank you for conveying my point.

I see nowhere in Musks history that he went to school in New Orleans

I meant as WalterBright, and the school wasn’t in New Orleans.

I could have been a billionaire many separate times. I failed to notice the opportunity.

> There are plenty of “smart” people who aren’t rich.

Of course. And the biggest barriers to success are:

1. not getting educated in what you want to do

2. being risk averse

3. not willing to commit to the work needed

4. doing drugs and alcohol

5. believe your friends and acquaintances telling you you can't make it

This forum is part of ycombinator, an outfit looking for startups to fund. You're already in the right place at the right time.

You can either not be hoarding, or you can be richest man in the world. You can't have it both ways.

> You're not going to starve in America if you lose all your money.

claim, meet data: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10990269/#:~:text=%...

> Now, if we go back to the hoarding; it's not about when someone didn't hoard, it's about the here and now. I'm pretty sure we can find a period of time where Gates or Kamprad didn't do any hoarding, or not the hoarding we'd expect. But concentration of anything doesn't really happen by accident, and wherever we see it now, we can assume it was intentional.

I’m no fan of Musk, but he clearly isn’t guilty of the hoarding aspect, as WalterBright pointed out.

> ostensibly illegal

I think we’re at the “so what are you going to do about it” phase where the courts and congress are going to tisk tisk at the most, because they don’t want the deep pockets of Elon and Co to primary-them-out

We are so cooked. I don't see a clear pathway out of this. I fear we've crossed the Rubicon and people will choose willful ignorance or the people who believe they stand to benefit will silently stand by. After decades of Neo-Liberal austerity measures, the rise of fascism is inevitable.

On H1B, its abuses, and big tech capture in general, it's a shame we can't generally admit that the democrats are terrible on this without others perceiving this as an endorsement of everything the other side wants to do.

Both major parties suck really bad here. I'm not partisan anymore, I'll vote split-ticket for whatever individual best represents my individual interests because if I'm going to exercise my apparently useless vote, I might as well use it to meekly voice my preferences in the extremely remote chance someone will decide pretending to give a shit would be helpful for them.

Our problems predate the current regime and they'll last past it. Pretty pessimistic if I'm honest.

it's only illegal if it's enforced, which it isn't

My impression is that there are prized PhD jobs that people go back to school in anticipation of and there are essentially non-PhD jobs that are filled by people who don't go back or H1B workers who have a PhD.

These days it is like why even hire H1B's when they can simply outsource the talent? Even companies like American Airlines are opening big offices in India etc...

If you haven't noticed, people are forgoing the H1B and just remoting them in for $40k.

This is an incredibly small slice of roles available to CS PHDs and sometimes adjacent fields. Not really indicative of the larger STEM market and basically irrelevant to non STEM programs.

it’s literally a pyramid scheme

It's a luxury consumption good.

Also it makes getting visa way easier.

Most stem PhDs actually go into industry. In fact, in my department I would say 60% or more go directly to industry and we are a field with growing faculty opportunities.

The immediate post graduation employment of all PhDs is very high 74% in 2023 up from 68% in 2018 and the highest since 1993. Interestingly difference between stem and non stem is effectively moot.

I continue to be shocked in this thread at the factual statements being thrown around that there is easy data to push back on from the nationally managed survey of earned doctorates.

Whats the ROI vs a Masters for people going directly to Industry? Did they even intend to do that or realized the Academic Door was closed for them and had no other choice?

Not sure on this, but the type of job you can get in industry differs if you have a Master's or PhD... the difference between being a technician in a lab, and running a research lab, at least in my field. Also somewhat true for federal jobs. There are master's jobs, and PhD jobs.

The fields where you are bound to academia for a reasonable ROI are definitely the humanities, since there is essentially no demand for a history PhD in the private sector, or an English PhD. It can help for job hunting in an unrelated field, I guess. But, a chemistry PhD? or any other applied lab PhD, it's not like you're shooting yourself in the foot by getting an advanced degree in such a field.

this is true of CS, not sure that it's true of STEM in general (engineering, life sciences)

As usual, lot of PhD bashing in the comments. My experience was generally positive.

The good things

1. I had mostly fun doing it. Being paid to learn things is great.

2. I got to work in different countries, and travel to many places

3. I was able to have more than one career. PhD + academia, before switching to industry. Gave me more perspectives.

4. I did learn a few things and skills (public speaking, I learned a lot of things while teaching too).

The bad things

1. Opportunity cost. I could have earned more but, would have I had the same career with the PhD? hard to tell

2. A lot of what I learned is totally useless.

3. Doing a PhD was fun, being a professor wasn't. Boring administrative work, lots of bitterness among academics, unhealthy competition. (and I wasn't good enough).

Overall, I would probably do the PhD again, but wouldn't go to academia. I find that working for a big corporation can be depressing/stressful. I'm glad I did other things in my life.

I had a ton of fun in my PhD. It probably wasn’t the best route if I was trying to maximize total lifetime earnings, but I’m happy with the route I took.

In fact I liked it enough that I often joke that my retirement plan will be to get into another PhD program for the stipend/insurance and just do projects to help some junior prof get their career going

I agree that it can be fun. I also devised a retirement plan as a graduate student, figuring out what sum of money I would need to live the rest of my life living the graduate student lifestyle without the hassle of being enrolled. Less than a decade after finishing my PhD I was able to walk away from my career into that lifestyle. Certainly not for everyone, but if it floats your boat, it is certainly an achievable plan.

> my retirement plan will be to get into another PhD program for the stipend/insurance

Imagine being a young ambitious student not getting placed into a PhD program because some old dude doing it for the benefits and the lolz took the spot.

It is not a zero sum acceptance.

Regarding Opportunity Cost...

For a long time, I felt stupid for getting my PhD during the buildup before the 08 bubble. I could have socked away a lot more money than my measly stipend. And afterwards, I always had decent jobs but not SV style salaries. That made me feel like it was all a bad decision.

But now that I'm approaching my 50s, I feel a bit differently. I traded variability for steady consistent growth. When SV lays of 80% of the work force and a bunch of people lose their jobs and their fancy SV salaries go to 0, I've luckily (knock on wood) never had that experience.

I bet in the long run a person making SV salary right out of college and invests smartly will still out perform economically than a steady growth after a delay for the PhD. But mentally the lack of variability has been good for me. YMMV.

Maybe it depends on the institution? I, and many of those I know who went to the same institution, had terrible PhD experiences. I burnt out and left with a Masters, others just quit, one committed suicide. Even those who completed the PhD said it was miserable.

Its hard to know if the risk of a bad time is always high or if it is dependent on culture etc, but I do not recommend PhDs as a pathway anymore.

You can have a poorly paid bad time doing lots of things. A PhD isn’t the worst option by a long shot haha.

It is if no one in your area hires for jobs that consider the PhD skills worth paying for.

I had pretty much the same experience, except I left for industry right after finishing my PhD

So many people love doing research but find the actual academic career path miserable. I think it's a shame, because it pushes a lot of talented people out.

> A lot of what I learned is totally useless.

I feel like everyone says this regardless of what level of education they have. I have a PhD and I've never felt this way. Everything I've learnt has contributed to the whole. The broad, shallow exposure from school has been extremely useful. I think I've used just about everything at one time or another. The PhD was less about learning in the specific area and more about learning how to do a PhD. You have to learn how to study a field and get on top of it, how to organise and assimilate that information, and how to build on top of that. This is definitely still useful to me and I'm not sure I would have learned to do it without actually doing it.

A few extra thoughts since I wrote the parent comment

- I did my PhD in Europe where it's only 3 years after master, so the opportunity cost is less

- I noticed a lot of frustration with PhD candidates comes from applying to academic positions. If this is not the end goal, this could also lead to a better experience.

- I said a lot of what I learned is useless, this can be mitigated by carefully choosing a topic, although not easy when you have little perspective, and possibly limited options (lots of candidates pick a topic in their local university for instance). It's also possible to intern in companies during a PhD.

- Having a PhD can open new doors.

The smartest people I’ve ever worked with to date were from physics grad school. Still remember the time my coworker was doing code profiling, decided he was unhappy that the exponential function from the standard library was too slow, and decided to write a Taylor series approximation that gave him the precision he needed and cut the run time in half. He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry. And these were just every day occurrences that made it a thrill to go to work. Working with talented people is a drug.

Some tips for younger people considering it: get involved in undergraduate research, apply to fellowships, shop for an advisor with a good reputation, start anticipating and preparing for an industry transition early, travel, date, and enjoy life!

I don't want to take away from his brilliance, but generally Taylor approximations perform far worse than the standard library implementations. It's also the first tool of choice for physicists, so who knows ...?

My guess, though, is that if he improved the performance, he used some other wizardry (Chebyshev or something similar).

Sometimes what you need is less precision, much faster. Carmack's famous inverse square root falls into this category.

If anything it's a lesson that the definition of brilliance is being in the wrong place at the wrong time... ;-)

I think Carmack credits someone else as the origin - possibly some magazine entry.

These days I think the reciprocal square root intrinsic is the fastest where precision is not that important.

I think there was a bit twiddling hack for pop count which was consistently faster than the equivalent cpu intrinsic due to some weird pipelining effect, so sometimes it is possible to beat the compilers and intrinsics with clever hacks.

Carmack denied writing it, and if WP is to be believed, he didn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

Honestly the whole story sounds like a tall tale to me.

> He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry

I doubt this. Really, really doubt this. Sure, geniuses exist, but I don't buy it.

Having seen physicists code, I REALLY doubt this.

Bah! Let's go invert the matrix!

If he already knew how to code in other object oriented languages, and was really just learning C++ syntax over the weekend, it’s not as much of a stretch.

C++ is one of the most flexible and unopinionated languages you could ever encounter.

The idea that someone who knows a high-level object-oriented language could translate that to immediate success in low-level C++ syntax at a level higher than the experts that developed the libraries over a weekend is frankly fantastical.

> the experts that developed the libraries over a weekend is frankly fantastical.

this is not synonymous with "most [C++ programmers] in industry"

The claim was the person learned it better than most people in industry, not most people writing the libraries upon which the industry is based

EDIT: Also we don't technically know when this happened. If this story is from the 1990s, it's a lot more likely, because think of how many shitty C++ programmers there were back then since we didn't have all the language options we do now. It was still the language taught in schools, for example. Then it was Java and Python and JS etc. But back then, Jonny Mackintosh was writing bad C++ out of uni.

Also it's constrained to "most people I've met in industry". If OP doesn't work with C++ developers...

prob why there is so much garbage C++ code. someone needs to set the right way of doing things

It's more likely that he was a decent C developer and learnt the basics of C++ and then ignored most of it.

C++ --

The standard library implementations use Taylor approximations

https://github.com/Duke-QCD/trento/blob/master/src/fast_exp....

Check it out for yourself! I’m not claiming this was some kind of prodigious programming move, just something memorable that stuck with me.

Looks like he’s using a lookup table based on std::exp in combo with the Taylor expansion

The smartest people I’ve ever worked with were college dropouts.

As someone with a phd and is a professor at a community college, with the current governmental chaos there's no way I would recommend anyone starting a phd in the USA. In addition to the poor pay (and I was in the department of communication and I distinctly remember fellow grad students in stem complaining about their pay... which was literally double mine), there is also the fact that no one knows what is going to happen with funding. In my case, not only is there the federal government, but I live in a state with a republican supermajority so I have zero optimism about future prospects of higher education here. I'm just hoping I can hang on until retirement in a 15 years or so.

I totally get the "just hanging on" mindset. A lot of people I know in academia say the same

In the US, note that for many foreign students, PhD is a (in many cases, much faster) pathway to permanent residency compared to your standard PERM/H1B things

Incidentally if you are interested in doing a PhD the University of oslo has 64 open phd and postdoc positions currently. PhDs will get a competitive salary (typically something like 50-55k USD/year, this is much higher than anything in USA for example), free healthcare, pension, in the first year you qualify for cheap student housing if you have moved from abroad, and tbh, Norway is kind of nice to live in in my opinion as long as you pick up a winter sport and don't mind the darkness.

https://www.mn.uio.no/english/about/vacancies/index.html

As someone who moved to Norway (not Oslo) to pursue a PhD in computer science, I highly suggest everyone who might be interested to give it a chance. High quality of life and supportive system and society. Vacancies for University of Bergen: https://www.uib.no/en/about/84777/vacant-positions-uib.

> University of Bergen

Don't forget to bring your rain gear!

> don't mind the darkness

This was weirdly exciting and depressing at the same time :)

What are the chances in trying to go for a non-STEM Masters/PhD (or higher studies in general) in Norway (or one of "those" countries) after studying E for UG and then working in E for more than a decade (in the third world) and having no other experience at all? Or anywhere for that matter? Is there a way to go about it? (Now, this might sound entitled, and I apologise if it does, but without having to pay (at least) tuition for that higher education)

> This was weirdly exciting and depressing at the same time :)

And, depending on how far north you go, should be taken seriously. In Iceland, out of my exchange students cohort of ~10, once the winter hit, one had to escape home and two were hospitalised after too much drinking. It can be a really tough experience, especially when you don't have close friends/family to contact and lose track of time.

Yeah, not all humans do well in the dark. I wonder if this happens for some of the submariners ? Maybe on boomers (the nuclear powered missile submarines) since those spend a very large proportion of each mission underwater ?

I expect I'd be fine with this because I don't normally interact much with sunlight, the windows in my home have the blinds down 24/7, etc. But you can't really tell for sure without trying it.

I think that there is some options at University of Oslo for example. I work in geophysics and ML, so I don't know so much. But at some point I entertained the idea of doing a PhD in science fiction which is an option at UiO. There is also a large linguistics department and social sciences faculty as well as two centers for education research.. I imagine there are many options, but I think it is hard for me to know since I don't do that kind of work.

> (typically something like 50-55k USD/year, this is much higher than anything in USA for example),

This is not my experience (close friend in a flyover state makes 55k), so I googled and found this website: https://postdocsalaries.com/results

55k looks to be well within the normal range of American postdoc salaries.

The 50-55k range is for PhD students, not postdocs. PhDs in Europe often get a much higher pay than in America.

You've looked at postdoc salaries, not PhD salaries. very different. For example in the UK a PhD will get somewhere aroun £19-21k a year, whilst a postdoc will get anywhere from £37-45k a year......

Thanks for the correction, posting too early in the morning. :)

My wife earned that as a postdoc at Stanford, but as a PhD in Oxford earned £14k per year. $55k as a PhD is really really good.

> pension

Not sure that is a perk. In EU (not sure about this exact offer in Norway) to get ANY money out of pension, you have to work like 30 years at the very same country (not EU). But it is mandatory social insurance (tax) of 10% to 40% of your income.

> In EU to get ANY money out of pension, you have to work like 30 years at the very same country (not EU).

Quite far from the truth.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/work/retire-abroad/sta...

Eligibility periods

In some EU countries, you must have worked for a minimum period of time to be entitled to a pension.

In such cases, the pension authority has to take into account all the periods you've worked in other EU countries, as if you'd been working in that country all along, to assess whether you're entitled to a pension (principle of aggregation of periods).

How your pension is calculated

Pension authorities in each EU country you've worked in will look at the contributions you've paid into their system, how much you've paid in other countries, and for how long you've worked in different countries.

In reality the system is already breaking down bc so few people pay into the pension system for so many old pensioners. Idk about Norway tbh - they seem to have a much more solid social system - but in Germany I don’t expect anything from the pension system in 2060+

Norway has an insane sovereign wealth fund worth 3x GDP that they can only withdraw 3% from per year and that oil sales go into (as they’re basically self sufficient on hydroelectricity), they own 1.5% of all global equities. Their pension system is probably the strongest in the world.

Norway’s pension is backed by $1.74T in sovereign wealth funds [1]. I doubt they’ll have the same issues as Germany.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

That’s nice if you’re Norwegian I guess

> to assess whether you're entitled to a pension

But that is what I am talking about! Maybe you get something, maybe not! And nobody knows if Norway will be in EU in 30 years from now!

This is not a stake where you get 10% share of your pension, for working there 3 years (10% of 30 years), but very vague promise.

> all the periods you've worked in other EU countries

What if I worked OUTSIDE of EU? I worked 15 years in Norway, than moved back to US.... Now I am freeloader and get NOTHING!!!

> But that is what I am talking about! Maybe you get something, maybe not!

You wrote that in the European Union (nothing to do with Norway) you don’t get ANY (your uppercase) money if you don’t work « like 30 years » at the « very same » country. If you don’t stand by what your wrote so much better because it was false.

blablabla, I know PhD from Asia, who worked in Norway for 5 years. Their take is any money they get from pension is a bonus. They may get lucky to break even, without counting 24 years of inflation!

> Now I am freeloader and get NOTHING!!!

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/freeload...

a person who uses money, food, a room in a house, etc. given by other people, but who gives nothing to them in exchange

Yes, and because you only worked there 15 years, you did nothing and are freeloader!

Read laws, locals who only worked 15 years are also not entitled!

> Yes, and because you only worked there 15 years, you did nothing and are « a person who uses money, food, a room in a house, etc. given by other people, but who gives nothing to them in exchange »!

Ok then.

> But that is what I am talking about! Maybe you get something, maybe not! And nobody knows if Norway will be in EU in 30 years from now!

I don't know the specific case of the US and Norway, but some EU countries have extra bilateral agreements with non-EU countries. Italy for example has agreements with countries all around the world (among them the U.S.).

If you are worried that you may not get your money in 30 years, other agreements give the person going back to his home country the right to get back the money that he gave to the pension fund (this include the U.S.).

Now, this depends on the country, but I wouldn't discount the destination without checking first.

> If you are worried ... other agreements

I am not worried. I am saying there is no contract that says you get X in N years! Maybe that maybe something, but it is very vague promise.

You mean similar to social security in the US ? Where you only can get anything out of it if you have enough credits?

In fact it is similar in many countries (i.e. UK) where there is a minimum period required to get anything

In the U.S. you only need 40 credits (10 years) to get anything out of it. Less if you collect early due to disability. Not sure how similar this is to any of the EU pension schemes being discussed.

I assume having to learn Norwegian is a small issue?

Norwegians love to speak English.

There are no language requirements to be a phd or postdoc at the university of oslo except in the cases where you may need to speak a scandinavian language to study it such as if you are working at the center for nordic linguistics. So no, you do not need to consider this an issue at all.

Unless someone really want to become a postdoc or tenured PI similar to the calling of a teacher, it's really difficult to justify the lower opportunity (time and money) cost of a Masters' or PhD in the US in tech, for example. After just a few years, one can make 250k USD/yr sometimes without even a 4-year degree in CompSci or related STEM field. I honestly feel dumb for pursuing the equivalent of a reputable BS EE/CS when I could've been making 400k/yr in dotcom times.

More power to pure academics who don't pursue money or fame, and instead make an impact.

I am more motivated to find jobs that let me think my thoughts than jobs that maximise my income. People often say well but if you make a lot then you can pay for this. I have found that those that make a lot never find the time to pay for it.

I considered a PhD in machine learning. It’s mostly downsides. Granted, most fields are not like this but:

1) The field moves too fast to focus on a single thing for 4 years. A lot of people were devastated when ChatGPT essentially solved their NLP tasks.

2) Cutting edge NLP/vision research is being done in industrial labs as much as universities. And industry will probably outgun you with equipment (GPUs) and high quality data.

3) Pay sucks. You can make 3-5x working in industry. The opportunity cost could be a half million dollars.

4) You can get a lot out of a Masters in half the time or less.

What sort of benefits come from getting a Masters? Everyone I talk to seems to say a Masters in CompSci is useless, and that you may as well do a PhD instead.

> What sort of benefits come from getting a Masters

Google will hire you to work on moving protobufs around as an L4, instead of an L3.

This cuts so much deeper than it has any right to.

By the time you get the degree, you could be promoted to L4 and saved money along the way, so you're saying it's a bad idea.

I believe a masters has helped me stand out as a candidate at least. Plus, I learned a great deal about computer engineering! The fundamentals have come in handy.

A lot of job requirements that I see ask for Masters or PhD, so you’re hitting the minimum requirement plus giving yourself a shot of having applicable work experience (read: doesn’t write spaghetti code). That said, there’s probably a huge selection bias due to my background.

A Masters can help with work visas and gaining residencies in some countries

Machine learning could be hardware as well. I'm in integrated circuit design and there are lots of custom hardware AI accelerators in development. Almost all of the new grads we hire have a masters degree in electrical or computer engineering (not computer science)

It helped me get a visa for Italy (I took part in a startup accelerator program).

Other than that not much else... I mean you learn things, but you could also learn things from watching YouTube, doing courses and reading books!

I've also seen people do PhD's and from the outside it seems like a lot of them did it just for the title - one of my friends though seems to love Academia and is now a professor.

As someone who hires, my opinion is the exact opposite. A masters is good, but a PhD is at least a yellow flag.

> PhD is at least a yellow flag.

Why?

Usually an inability to get shit done, too much of a scientist vs. engineer approach (not good in industry outside of very specific jobs), and a personality type that is not an aggressive go-getter.

Yellow flag not red because this is a general observation with plenty of exceptions, of course.

If I could go back to that age, I'd focus my PhD on actually understanding what's going on in ML models. Industry is always going to be incentivized to build things and not understand, so you can fill in the details. Plus it would be fascinating.

yup, if i went to do a PhD interpretability is the only interesting subject for academia IMO right now

It’s not like interpretability research is immune. You could’ve been in year 4 of your degree when Anthropic released their sparse autoencoder research. It’s just less busy because as you correctly note, industry mostly cares about getting the black box to print money.

> Plus it would be fascinating

You can do research on the weekend even if you’re not in a PhD. I’ve done it. And no one was breathing down my neck to publish it.

From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising.

It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research. It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious fact that it’s an unacknowledged (though implicitly present) assumption in almost every comment here.

The obsession with the ‘STEM’ acronym (well, really the grouping rather than the name) also winds me up, but I better not go there…

The only difference between a PhD and a hobby is money, or the presumption of it indirectly (certain jobs, etc)

Or else we just call it pursing our natural hobbies and interests. You don't need to go to school for that.

If you didn't need more money you wouldn't seek the accreditation.

In many disciplines, it is almost impossible to get oneself into an environment anywhere remotely as rich in collective expertise, resources, and academic-social interaction as a proper graduate research program. There are exceptions (e.g., aspects of tech where money can be made, aspects of social science that intersect with public policy or activism, etc.) but they are rare.

In my experience Academia lacks the resources that corporations can give you. This has been a big problem in AI. The transformers guys probably could not have pulled that off at a university.

You're exactly right. The ill-informed commenters here seem to think everything is about 'AI' and 'tech'. Of course you don't need a PhD to publish bullshit experiments on language models and unwarranted pontification — but try becoming a serious pure mathematician without a PhD.

But I guess the retort of the average tech bro HNer will be something like: 'we don't need pure mathematicians — just learn Rust and you'll make way more money'.

Some people study things that require actual equipment. People who have the money to run a nuclear physics lab in their house are very rare.

I would assume there would be more structure and outside requirements to a phd than a hobby. More feedback and more requirements in general to do things you wouldn't do as part of a free form hobby where you could just avoid the undesirable aspects.

Nah. The difference is one of (learning) rigor. Intellectual and scientific. You learn a lot in the process of getting a Ph.D. about how to think, how to analyze, and how to research.

That sounds awfully generic. It doesn't sound that different from a Master's (heck, maybe even an undergrad) program that requires a thesis. Yes, there's a difference in the sense of supposedly doing novel research, but I'm not sure the degree to which you're theoretically moving the state of the art forward justifies your time investment in many cases.

I'm assuming you don't have a Ph.D. if it sounds generic to you. I think it's really impossible to explain to somebody who hasn't gone through it how much a Ph.D. changes the way you think.

Whether it's worth the time investment is another matter, however, which I'll leave alone.

The change isn’t unique to a PhD though. Plenty of people receive similar or better training in industry.

I hope that most people change after 5, 10 and 20 years of experience in industry and think in different ways than when they started...

It's a matter of degree. A _typical_ undergrad thesis is more spoon-fed from the perspective of "here's the idea, go do it". A typical masters project is still more advisor-generated than student-generated. A typical Ph.D. project is more student-generated than advisor-generated in many cases. Please add copious "not all"s to this paragraph as the variance is extremely high and everyone's case is unique. And the rigor expected increases substantially. Again, generally.

The major thing of a Ph.D. isn't really how much it moves the state of the art forward, it's how much it moves you forward. You will almost certainly approach research and your area fundamentally differently after.

That's true for me as well as a professor with respect to research: I'm pretty convinced that my largest contribution is the Ph.D. students I've mentored more than the chunks of research I've done. I'm proud of the research. But I'm more proud of the students. They've gone on to do wonderful things.

The thing it hangs on is "justifies" - financially, a Ph.D. in CS is hard to "justify." Intellectually, it's easy. Depends a lot on your individual utility function! I could have dropped out of my Ph.D. program to go be a pre-IPO employee at Google or Akamai and, ah, let's say that my financial picture would have a few extra zeros on it compared to where I am now. :-) But I'm really glad I didn't. It's been a very fun journey and I've never felt like I'm just doing the routine. That's worth a lot for me.

You don't really learn how to learn in a masters or undergraduate. You learn how to consume information, but not how to research new things, validate those and defend it to others in a rigorous way.

Whether it's worth the investment depends on ones goals in life.

If undergrad doesn't teach you how to learn at at least some level, that probably makes me question some of the value in getting an undergrad degree at all as that's one of the arguments for going through undergrad. I won't argue that a PhD isn't something of a next level but obviously there's a big cost involved, especially if PhD-type research isn't something you'll be doing.

Sure - it's just a hobby that pays money.

That and the library access, and the fact that you don't have to fit it in around a job, obviously. Kinda goes without saying.

And you get a supervisor who might point you in the right direction and keep you on track - but I'm sure you barely need that!

Of course the equipment access and technician support goes without saying. Not like anyone else is going to be letting you use their scanning electron microscope for free.

Having peers working alongside you who share your values of intellectual curiosity, working in the same field and who are your equals academically is also of little to no importance - who needs 'em?

There's the international travel for conferences, but really that's pretty burdensome. I for one don't want to traipse through airports and mess up my routine just to have conversations with world-leading experts on my topic of interest; I'd rather be at home relaxing.

I can't imagine anyone would be drawn to the 50% female working environment, with hundreds of smart, beautiful single women aged 18-22. Who gives a shit about that? Barely even a benefit really.

Other than the intellectual curiosity, the pay, the library and journal access, the time it gives you to study, the supervision, the equipment and technicians, the peers, the international travel, and all the young women - what have the Romans ever done for us?

All incredible points, but academia still doesn't appeal to people like me in the slightest. The hierarchy, the bureaucracy, the various costs, the unreliable supposed rewards, none of it was even remotely appealing enough to do an undergraduate, let alone a masters and then a PhD. Funny thing is, the hierarchy, the bureaucracy, the various costs, the unreliable supposed rewards, related to industries of technology, art, music, culture, essentially the exact same environment, did and do, and I've happily paid (in money, blood, sweat and tears) to participate in those.

I wonder what it is exactly that makes the same exact thing appealing wearing one outfit versus the other.

I feel like if we can solve that, we can restore some kind of respect for and desire for "academia", which seems like it's very much fallen out of vogue in culture lately.

I used to think that, money aside, I'd be interested in a PhD in whatever subject.

But really, I can buy the library access at my alma mater for a trivial sum. And, were I in the city, I could access a ton of the other stuff too. No, not the labs for the fields that require them for the most part--or generally discussion seminars, but there's a lot you can access for free-ish if you work at it.

It doesn't need to appeal to everyone. It's also very very lab dependent. I didn't find a lab at my European institute in my area of interest, so ended up not doing a PhD. I still do some science for fun though as a hobby.

I spent some time at Harvard as an undergrad doing research there though, and it was the most intellectually stimulating environment I've ever been in. Maybe YC is similar, but it's a lot about money in those environments and most startups aren't that interesting either.

> I can't imagine anyone would be drawn to the 50% female working environment, with hundreds of smart, beautiful single women aged 18-22. Who gives a shit about that? Barely even a benefit really.

I recall that hitting on undergraduates as an early 20-something graduate student was considered a pretty serious no-no, and barring some tenured professors that feel they're above the rules, it certainly seemed like consequences both socially and formally probably increased the older and further up the chain you got (as they should). It's honestly pretty creepy to talk about them like you do.

Even at what was probably one of absolute best institutions in the world for accelerator physics, which I was interested in, I recall very early on being told by some faculty member that maybe 1 in 10 of us would ever land a tenure track faculty job. Almost everyone I have kept up with that wound up at the best graduate institutions for physics in the world have left, and are all basically doing the same shit I am (doing meaningless shit with computers), almost all of them worse for the wear, especially those who are now leaving after a postdoc or two.

I still have easy access to the local state university's library in its entirety, that is useful, but you don't need an academic job for that. I met plenty of other physics and math graduate school/postdoc drop outs in industry, you can't go far in our field without running into a lot of them everywhere, and most of plenty happy to talk about academic stuff. I don't have the same sort of access to faculty and expensive physics equipment that I did in the past, but given that I was able to actually buy my own home in my 20s with no help, support my own family and not generally have to worry about money and my own future in the same way that almost all of my peers still in academia did and still do, I can't fathom why outside of the absolute most brilliant focused 1 in 100 million minds would bother taking the risk of beating their head against the academic treadmill unless you were already very wealthy. Any justification just feels like massive amounts of cope for not wanting to leave the academic nest.

> I recall that hitting on undergraduates as an early 20-something graduate student was considered a pretty serious no-no

If you're a 24 year old grad student and they're a 22 year old undergraduate in a different department? No big age gap, no power over them like grading their work, no problem.

And as you get towards 27 obviously you won't want to date 18 year olds - but even if the grad students in your department are mostly male and you don't want to create an awkward environment for the female minority, there are grad students in plenty of other departments too.

Is meeting your future wife in grad school super-professional? IDK, maybe not? But it's relatively a lot more professional than trying the same thing at a sausagefest Silicon Valley tech company.

Hardly a quality of the working environment then. You get the same just by working in the vicinity of the institution.

You're still not really internalizing the fact that academia is status-economy job, like being a celebrity. There are orders of magnitude more people willing to be there (under worse circumstances than you) than there are available positions.

How you move socially is going to be one of the biggest factors that can kill opportunities for you or spin you out of academic work entirely. Everyone is out for themselves -- knives out.

As such, you're probably living very dangerously trying to navigate intimate relationships anywhere in the orbit of campus. Sure, it happens, but doesn't always end well.

I'm sorry but you must be confusing something. You're talking about a bachelor's degree when everyone else is talking about PhDs. The vast majority of people do not have the qualifications for a PhD at 18.

If you want to be reductionist, the only difference between eating at a restaurant and cooking at home is money (and also that they’re fundamentally different things). That doesn’t mean that people do one or the other for purely financial reasons.

Also is it still a PhD by your definition if you pay tuition? Or only if you’re paid a stipend?

> It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research.

What people are, quite rightly, pointing out about getting a PhD is the "will live in poverty for a decade+ with better odds of winning the lottery than getting a tenured position to do research".

Even if you want to do research, you have to eat, too.

The actual chances of getting a tenured position (or another permanent academic position with research opportunities) are more like 1 in 3, or even better. Most people who get a PhD and are in priciple interested in staying in the academia leave, because they are not willing to make the necessary choices.

And the biggest reason why people leave is not the pay, the stress, the politics, the struggle for grants, the publish-or-perish mentality, or whatever else people are complaining about. It's the forced relocation. You can choose where you live, or you can try to get an academic job, but you can't reasonably expect both. Universities are wherever they are, and their needs for new faculty are unpredictable and highly specific. If you are not prepared to drop everything else indefinitely and move to a place that is actually willing to hire someone like you, you are not serious about staying in the academia.

It turns out most people are not that career-oriented.

When I was in graduate school the chances of getting a tenured position weren't anywhere close to 1 in 3. Where are you getting that number?

Roughly speaking, there are 10-20 PhDs for every faculty position. But not every PhD wants a faculty position, even in principle.

Many want to do research in the industry, or in public research labs. Many do a PhD because it opens doors in other careers, such as medicine or education. Some PhDs are hobby projects people do in retirement. Some are side projects for people who want to study something relevant to their main job (those are quite common in social sciences).

Then there are those who actually want a career in the academia. But many of them are not trying seriously, because they restrict their job search to a single city / region / country. The 1 in 3 chance is for those who are flexible enough and committed enough and accept the realities of the academic job market.

Most of my classmates would have been very interested in an academic career if they thought their chances were even one in ten and this was in a top tier program. And they were all totally willing to relocate too.

The best estimate I can find is that about 3.5 million people in the US have a PhD or another research doctorate. That includes non-immigrants who study or work in the US. According to AAUP statistics, there are ~200k full-time equivalent tenured or tenure-track faculty in what they consider doctoral institutions. Such positions are the typical but not the only option for a research career in the academia. The numbers are well within the parameters I used for my estimate.

It's important to understand that in this context, willingness to relocate means willingness to spend your life outside your home country. Even in a large country like the US, there are often structural reasons why universities are not interested in hiring someone like you when you are in the job market.

For example, maybe a field such as ML starts getting popular. Universities respond by hiring new faculty, who in turn hire new PhD students. Almost a decade later, when those students have graduated and are in the job market, the demand may have stablized. Universities already have a plenty of faculty in that field and have little interest in hiring more.

Which means that if you chose a popular field, your chances of getting hired may be below the average. If you want to stay in the academia, your best bet may be moving to a country that didn't experience a similar hiring frenzy and is now trying to catch up.

Yup. It's often much worse.

Although that person may be lumping in the research professorships and various ass. dean positions.

> From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising.

Lol! Are you new here? Y-combinator is literally about selling your soul to VC.

I'm slowly, very slowly, realizing this and that my objections to this are quite literally pissing into the wind to the wrong crowd. Begging and pleading for people to make tech that doesn't torture and depress the average user seems to just fall upon deaf ears, because all that ever mattered to them was the money.

> Begging and pleading for people to make tech that doesn't torture and depress the average user seems to just fall upon deaf ears, because all that ever mattered to them was the money.

I think there are some people on HN who care about other things than money.

I've seen a number of references here to encrapification and the rot economy, noting that chasing unlimited growth seems to lead to harmful, anti-social technology businesses.

Enshittification.

They often get flagged, though.

I hear you. I come here because there are often interesting articles about new tech coming out. But reading the comments around here really depresses me sometimes. This is the last bit of social media I consume these days, but it’s probably best for my mental health to stop HN too.

HN can be annoying at times, but there are still more informed "rebels" here than most places. And they're not outright censored so quickly.

Most corners of the internet are either nonstop corporate worship, or wanting everyone to abandon everything and live in a hut in the woods. It's not perfect here, but there are people who present well-reasoned opinions and will peacefully engage with opinions they disagree with. I'm personally for tech helping humans but against the hellscape of trillion dollar corps controlling the fate of humanity and monitoring our every movement, and I don't feel out of place saying that here. There's always someone willing to comment and slap down corporate BS and they're usually voted somewhat highly.

Ok, yeah, but PhD is super exploitative. You work a lot oftentimes with bonkers expectations of you doing nothing but working. You earn super little. You spend a lot of time doing simple work. And, it is pyramid where you are never sure you will be able to secure a postdoc, second one or position.

Aaand, you are forced to move and take position where it is - relocate to a place that has position open whether you like the place or not. That puts strain on the partner - who is expected to move where you go, while you don't have time for kids and while you don't even earn much.

Users expecting everything to be free is part of the story as well.

Online newspapers having to rely on ads is a good example of it.

PhD students are not paid a fair wage for their labor. Even if you like the subject and don't care about the money, you're putting yourself in an abusive position where you will be doing long hours for some of the worst part across "STEM".

> From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising.

Not surprising at all. It's a forum run by a VC firm populated with a decent number of people who are wannabe founders, trying to jump on the latest fad, hoping to win the startup jackpot.

And (way back when it was small), I think a big part of the appeal was you could rub shoulders with some VC people and founders who actually made it.

> It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research.

I think it does occur to people, but that's a choice for nepo babies and aspiring monks.

> It’s always talked about as if getting a PhD is just another rung in a long ladder towards… earning a lot of money? Not only that — it’s apparently such an obvious fact that it’s an unacknowledged (though implicitly present) assumption in almost every comment here.

I don't know about "earning a lot of money," but the whole PhD thing seems to have gotten super exploitative. Passion is one thing, but it's not a good thing to get taken advantage of. IMHO, long and difficult educational programs should be designed to guarantee a high chance of a reasonable stable and comfortable outcome.

I don't get it.

I was neither a nepo baby or aspiring monk. What I was, was a kid from a non academic family who wanted more than my small town education could provide. I wanted to push myself to learn at a deeper level and prove it by becoming one of a different crowd of technologists. Maybe these are misguided motivations but they were undeniable and not at all about asceticism or idle riches. It was absolutely worth it.

Ya but, based on the brief resume in your profile, you've also probably made out quite well, no? Is that a completely incidental thing, or do you think you'd feel even a little differently if what you earned throughout your intellectual journey ended up leaving you financially vulnerable, whatever that would mean in your geographic region?

To me it's a question of how much cost a person should reasonably incur in order to pursue one's interests, and I think the amount of people with absurd student loan debt and time spent, compared to their earning potential, is at meme status for millennials and zoomers.

To be clear, I do think the motivations aren't inherently misguided, but they could be, and my guess is that people are taking their potential outcomes more seriously.

In STEM, PhDs are probably not terrible financial outcomes in general (in that they probably mostly avoid a huge amount of student loan debt and may offer a leg-up for some commercial opportunities), but they also may be sub-optimal financially in many cases relative to just landing a job out of academia earlier.

Ya you may be right, at least in terms of expense, but I'm also considering the external cost vs reward even if debt is zero. A woman struck up a conversation with me yesterday at a cafe and we got to chatting. She had already had two careers, first in film, then teaching film, and now starting a PhD in philosophy, which I think is fantastic. But... she's a retired grey hair who owns her home, and the topic of whether her former students or myself would even continue to feasibly attend school or stay present in the community was unavoidable. There was no malice or particularly negative sentiments exchanged in our brief conversation, there didn't need to be, but there was more of an exasperated acknowledgement that there's no possible scenario wherein myself, her students, or her own adult children could secure a house remotely like hers in the broader municipal area by our own means, without winning a literal or figurative lottery with immense career success. Land is too expensive, prospects don't pay enough and they're too volatile.

She wouldn't have been able to either, it was just plausible, though still probably pretty expensive for her at a different time, likely with another income.

It's not impossible to make some pursuits work, but tbh some things are not worth pursuing if they ain't gunna pay. It's an existential crisis that people are well-aware of; why invest ones finite resources into something that won't even let you form a stable adulthood?

Getting a PhD in retirement is great if that's what floats your boat. (I know someone who basically did and another who did as sort of a mid-life crisis.) I don't think I'd have any interest because of all the BS associated with getting a credential. It does provide some structure around an activity. But I just can't personally imagine having that much structure unless I had a real objective in mind.

It is expected, at least where I'm from, that a PhD in an engineering discipline is going to go get a decent tech job. It is not by any means required, so it remains a personal choice and changed the nature or the jobs you'll be offered to a certain extent.

For me, my employability vastly improved when I graduated, and subsequently worked where I did (which was only unlocked because of my grad work).

Also I just love computer science. It's magic.

Well, that's where it's a viable investment, right? I'd presume that if the overall amount of PhDs severely drops, then the ones still pursuing them will be doing so because it's a clear win on the investment front after factoring in the personal expense of doing it. The same would clearly be true of MDs, some careers just have that requirement.

> learn at a deeper level and prove it by becoming one of a different crowd of technologists

The “prove you’re special” motivation is definitely a strong third reason that does not align with the nepotism baby or monk archetypes

Labor specialization is not a deeply suboptimal strategy. Is that a better way of putting it?

So you are in the group perusing money.

Money was not the motivation. One of my lab mates left to join the startup scene and now is crazy wealthy. I just loved the study and being outside with robots trying to do good work. I don't know why this is so hard to believe. Now I do ok as most senior software engineers do, but about 1/3 or 1/2 of a starting FAANG comp, let alone senior.

I think it's hard for some people to understand why other people would choose to be poor.

And so it must be that people who choose to get a PhD come from means.

When the choice is between being (perhaps, somewhat) money-poor and being intellectually poor, it's easy to understand. But not everyone is wired that way.

>I thnk it does occur to people, but that's a choice for nepo babies and aspiring monks.

Maybe you've only spent time around PhD candidates at Ivy League schools where people are more likely to have access to wealth, but if you've spent any time at all around PhD candidates you'll find this is generally not the case. As a PhD candidate from a lower SE class, I've found that the majority of my peers are from a similar class. However, I am not connected to a private university though I am in medicine.

Studies on this show great variation across doctoral fields. Economics doctoral students tend to come from more affluent backgrounds, while the majority of Social Sciences doctoral students are from a lower SE class. Overall there seems to be a trend that doctoral students in fields with more lucrative career prospects tend to come from a higher SE class.

From what I have read, your claim only applies to the majority of faculty members, which tend to come from backgrounds with an income that is higher than the national median income.

> while the majority of Social Sciences doctoral students are from a lower SE class

I am speaking solely from anecdotes, but Social Science grad students generally have a Rabbi from early on their career. That is, they are favorite students, close students to at least one powerful/influential figure in their field. A lot of favoritism and a different kind of nepotism play an important part Social Sciences academia.

And to be successful in Social Sciences academia, you need a "mentor"/"Rabbi", and also be a proponent of a certain kind of politics.

Do you mean that to succeed in social sciences academia you have to think Nazis are bad?

This is such a bizarre comment through and through.

Every PhD applicant needs letters of recommendation. You get those from faculty members who think that you are skilled. If you go look at the incoming class of CS PhDs at the top 20 schools, you'll find that basically every single one has a good relationship with at least one faculty member. Callouts of social sciences and the use of "rabbi" are baffling here.

LoRs are there in every field.

But when you are in the social sciences, your mentor takes responsibility for whole of your career.

They see to it that you are ultimately "placed" in life.

Also, what papers are deemed good or influential depend a lot on who you have good relations with, as there are no clear definitions of good/influential like there are in exact science fields.

I am just saying what I have seen.

If you are familiar with 90s-00s vocabulary, you will know what I mean by "Rabbi". It has nothing to do with Judaism or Jews.

> rabbi

> (noun) By metaphor from the Jewish religious role, an older, more powerful or higher-ranking person in the corporation where one works (but usually not in the chain of command) who can give good advice about office politics, and may be able to pull strings, remove heads, or otherwise provide protection from hostile forces.

You have a precise definition a good and influential paper in CS? Can I see it?

Anyone who has watched The Wire will recognize the use of the term here. (Minor spoilers ahead)

In season 3 (I think) Herc caught the mayor doing something inappropriate in his office and his silence was rewarded with promotions. Later on, someone told him "[The mayor] is your rabbi. If he loses the election, your career will go no further."

Pure chat

> I think it does occur to people, but that's a choice for nepo babies and aspiring monks.

This is my experience. Or in another way of saying it: either they persue the money, or they have already the money, or yes, want to be "monks" but that must be like 0.01%. Most of the people I know come from rich families, or want to be the next rich familiy.

> IMHO, long and difficult educational programs should be designed to guarantee a high chance of a reasonable stable and comfortable outcome.

You've hit the nail on the head. Education is now regarded transactionally. A PhD simply isn't about that; if you ever thought so, you've been lied to.

I'm a PhD student and I'm certainly not being 'taken advantage of' or anything of the sort. Please broaden your perspective and stop basing your entire view of a topic on a few sob stories from people who either couldn't hack it or made terrible, self-sabotaging decisions and now regret it.

There's a huge crowd out there for whom this was not their experience, and hence have no reason to moan about it online.

> It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research

Why is it surprising? The market is saying most people don’t have that privilege and academia is still in denial about that and completely out of touch, your surprise suggests you are… in touch? if this was a standardized test question, which you’re probably good at, you would not choose that answer

Both the private and public sector have co-opted university credentials as prerequisites for employment, leading a different audience to demand and feel entitled to being accepted at universities

I will give you something though: I agree this is all a mistake and the universities will outlive this 100 year folly of the plebs wanting to be there for employment, and revert to being half millennium old networking and refinement clubs for upper class children

Thats a depressing outlook. I feel the lower levels of uni have been co-opted as you say, but once you're passed the undergrad level I think it would become more about interest in the subject and less about a job, don't you think? (Sadly I may be wrong)

Lots of jobs require (or at least prefer) candidates with a masters degree at least for more senior positions. Not sure that interest is the reason why people would be going for these degrees.

This is interesting. How do you support yourself if it’s not about the money? Are you in the US? If you are have you noticed you will be paying $10 for a dozen of eggs?

In what world does getting a PhD for curiosity make sense in 2025? It’s not even about money, it’s about literal survival.

The people here in this thread talking about getting a PhD to satisfy an interest in a subject must have never gone to bed for dinner because if they had they’d understand why this position they’re taking doesn’t make a lick of sense.

I think if you have to deal with financial survival issues then study is going to be the last thing on your mind. Where are you going to study? Is it too hot? too cold? too noisy? Are you distracted by hunger? Psychological problems? Family issues? Neighbours doing dumb things? etc. Assuming none of those things are your problems, then what do you do? Do you study to get a job? or because you like the subject matter? Here in Australia, if you want money, you're much better off learning a trade. Plumbers charge upwards of $100 p/h where the minimum wage is about $20 p/h. No way is a software dev going to earn $100 p/h. Oh and we dont have a startup culture like over in America. We're a failed banana republic. So I study because I like the subject matter. I'm certainly not going to be adequately financially rewarded for my knowledge and effort so I'd rather do it for personal satisfaction. Gosh, now I've gone and made myself depressed.

> The people here in this thread talking about getting a PhD to satisfy an interest in a subject

I'm sorry, but you seem to be unaware that in many subjects this is the sole reason anyone does a PhD.

> How do you support yourself if it’s not about the money?

Funding, which is readily available.

>It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research.

That's why I did a PhD, but of course, I'd still like some job security at the end of the pipeline. Currently a postdoc.

> it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place

Counter - I recently asked a faculty candidate how he would recruit curious, talented graduate students, and he said “I develop connections from interesting online communities like Hacker News.” I loved this answer because it’s consistent with my observations. HN may seem cynical but the average level of potential PhD students is higher than many alternatives!

Cost of living and income inequality are soaring. Huge swaths of the population are living in crippling debt because they believed that it was worth it to spend tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars to go to school and learn about what interested them, only to find out it didn’t lead anywhere and they have hamstrung themselves financially for the rest of their lives.

It shouldn’t be surprising that people are putting a premium on financial stability these days.

HN has been like this forever, it's not a recent thing.

When the tech job market and startup ecosystem is weak, HN will say you shouldn't do a PhD because of the cost of living and the worrying job market once you get out.

When the tech job market and startup ecosystem is strong, HN will say you shouldn't do a PhD because of the opportunity cost and the attractive job market that'll pay six figures to anyone with a pulse.

Obviously, this is because computer science offers many interesting jobs. But in other regions, these jobs are hidden after Phd.

And neither is a controversial take, especially for most technologists. Even those who love learning for its own sake will probably find it fulfilling to learn on the job provided they can get a job in a research-oriented company in the niche that interests them, and earning six figures a year instead of paying nearly as much for the privilege of doing menial labor in a doctoral program is certainly attractive.

I have no hate for PhDs or aspiring ones, but I can't relate to someone who would brush past either of those two arguments you cited without some very strong counterarguments on how they will work out supporting themselves and paying back those enormous loans.

> Even those who love learning for its own sake will probably find it fulfilling to learn on the job provided they can get a job in a research-oriented company in the niche that interests them

The assumption that you'll be able to find such a job is exactly the big question mark.

> it didn’t lead anywhere

It didn't lead to a job, you mean? There's a lot out there to be gained from education other than getting a job afterwards.

It's a bit like being a teacher. You get paid terrible money which is not an abstract thing, that has a real life impact. And you have to deal with the politics of academia, which is like the politics of industry but with less leverage to you.

It's just not a great win in any way unless your main thing in life is your job being your main intellectual stimulant.

"It doesn’t even seem to occur to people that one might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research. "

Frankly, no. Because as beautiful as that concept is, it's 6 years in your younger decades, where the magic of compound interest makes every dollar you save or spend count a lot more than any money you make later in life.

Add tuition and loans, also with compound interest, and well, I have no resentment against people from wealthy enough backgrounds that they can just do this. If that's how want to use your privileged background, nothing but respect from me.

But 99% of us have to consider the money.

> Add tuition and loans

There are no tutions and loans for a PhD. It's free. Additionaly, you earn a small salary that can be bumped up to the median wage with internships.

Imagine spending your twenties without financial obligations, working on one problem you love without it having to make a business sense.

In some fields, possibly.

I will absolutely not argue that you should do whatever will make you the most money.

But just as absolutely, a PhD isn't the right answer for a lot of people. I thought about it at various points and it wouldn't have been the right choice for me even taking money out of the equation.

I would have loved it. NO doubt.

You could say the same about doing a startup. They pay is shit, grueling hours and 90% of them don't amount to anything meaningful.

Doesn't mean that it's not worth it for most. Some people just want to do science. Or startups.

> HN turns out to be a very money-centric place

In defense of being money centric, we are not talking about yachts and drugs level money. To me, money means buying a house, starting a family, taking care of my parents, looking after my own health, and overall stability. These are the hallmarks of what used to be a middle class lifestyle in America.

If people are getting PhDs to earn more money long term, these are also not people who intend to live lavishly. It only seems exceptional because almost every other avenue to previously “normal” life has been closed off.

There’s nothing wrong with studying something because you’re interested in it. But for me, it would’ve likely meant foregoing the above.

Exactly this. Wanting financial stability isn't the same as being "money-centric" in some greedy or extravagant way. A PhD used to be a reasonable path to a stable career, but for many, it no longer is.

So insightful. The cost of education skyrocketing, alone, has changed the equation, to where it's a huge risk to take on enough debt to complete an advanced degree. A lot of Millenials and Gen-Z didn't get this memo, and still got overeducated - this could mean any degree in a field that doesn't pay well or doesn't generate many jobs. To the extent the degree wasn't financed it's not that big a deal. At least they got to learn something! Now they'll just have to try to work their way up slowly.

But take a person who can't find a job that pays much more than retail, and put them $150,000 in debt... that person is not going to be happy.

I would argue it’s not about making money, it’s about adding value. A PhD for the sake of a PhD is more like a vacation, and so most people won’t want to take a 5-year vacation

> From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money centric place.

It’s not HN. It’s the fact that doing PHD is only a reasonable choice if you either want to get into academia long term or you come from wealth. (Historically science and research was a rich people thing, and only became accessible once student loans were more accessible)

I genuinely considered doing PhD after my Masters degree. No matter what I couldn’t justify spending 5 more years, borrowing more money on top of my tens of thousands of student loans just to stay afloat. I would still be living roommates well into my 30s, have no prospects when it came to dating, rely on student loans and my parents to support me, while literally any job I did would put me in a better position. Like I could bartend full time and I’d be making more money than the stipend. All of this in the hopes of what? That I’d have a dissertation in super specialized field, not necessarily the one I want in because I won’t have the advisor I need and the one I have only wants me to do very specific things they want. And that dissertation may or may not be relevant to the industry or even academia in a year or two.

And if you decide after your PhD, that you’ll join the industry, you’ve lost out on 5 years of compounded growth financially and personally. It’s not like a PhD gets you more money in 95% of the jobs.

Realistically, the only people with me who ended up committing to doing this were people who had no other prospects or were looking for a full time role in academia.

> And if you decide after your PhD, that you’ll join the industry, you’ve lost out on 5 years of compounded growth financially and personally. It’s not like a PhD gets you more money in 95% of the jobs.

5 years of professional experience beat a phd title in 98-99% of IT job searches, no question there.

I would even more deeply probe such a candidate for good personality match with rest of the team and company overall, ie sometimes one has to suck it up and do non-ideal solution instead of having endless discussions about ideal one. And IMHO folks form academia are sometimes tad too idealistic and need additional 'baby-sitting', pushing them even further into junior less-ideal box. Smart alone is mostly meaningless when not harnessed efficiently.

So you want coworkers who don't care much for the quality of their coding work?

That's a much better scenario than having coworkers who are difficult to work with.

That is NOT what he wrote! Is about finding an optimum of all the variables. Also "the best technical solution" is not always the best solution for a company, which at the end, cares only about making money.

No project I ever delivered in my 20 years of work was ever perfect, shortcuts and even 'hacks' were needed. We don't live in ideal world, budgets are constrained, changes come at last minute that sometimes require massive refactoring, you get unexpected delays on weird bugs or processes taking too long or other teams facing issues or their processes taking too long, and so on and on.

Business doesn't care nor understand any of this, they want their features, without visible bugs, on time, the rest is mostly irrelevant academic discussions for them. I don't say its ideal but this is world I live in and worked in, all big companies are same in this regard. They just don't view IT stuff as something unique and super fragile and treat it and expect form it cca same level as from other parts of their businesses. I've never worked for FAANG type of company as you can see, IT is always just a cost center.

I give stakeholders honest feedback with taking into account their view and expectations, and never ever over-engineer things since from what I've witnessed its mostly selfish endeavor of bored brilliant people or CV chasers, not something business would want to see since risk exposure is a big '?'. KISS is really above it all and business loves it, especially long term. Can't sell a lot of BS with it but thats not my style. I call it being a dependable professional.

You don’t need a PhD to be better at or care about quality of coding.

Strongly agreed. The reality of doing a PhD is that you serve the interests of your advisor while living like a pauper. Hardly surprising people are finally realising that it’s usually not worth it. Just part of the needless proliferation of education.

Based on what?

Do you have PhD? Have you any insight at all into what it might be like, or is this all just based on recycled tropes?

> needless proliferation of education.

Almost sounds Trumpian, except the word 'proliferation' is probably several syllables too long.

I was more or less enrolled in two and got cold feet each time for the same reasons the grandparent post says, it didn’t make financial sense, and my experience of research to date had not been stellar.

Ironically, the first was ML back before ML was hot, so if I had done it I’d probably be in a very different position today. However the reasoning still stands.

“Almost sounds Trumpian”

lol

If part of your criteria for evaluating whether or not a PhD is a good idea is ‘making financial sense’, then you’re doing it for the wrong reasons.

I agree. If I had a ton of family wealth, I would have pursued a PhD instead of working 9 to 5.

Even if my background is different, I did not have debt, and would not directly have incurred in debt by doing a PhD, there was no way I could justify it. At some point I would have to start earning serious money for me and my family. No way I could delay all 5 years, to have a title that would help me in no measurable amount to earn more money later. The ROI of a PhD (if you see merely as a financial decision) makes just no sense.

> PHD is only a reasonable choice if you either want to get into academia long term or you come from wealth.

‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’

- George Bernard Shaw

I was going to say something in my own words, but I don't think I can do better.

You don't need to pursue a PhD to do research, which I think underlies some of the pushback. If you don't care about the credentials or being an career academic, a doctoral program can add a lot of friction for little benefit if the only motivator is passion for the subject.

> You don't need to pursue a PhD to do research

...in some subjects (particularly those that are popular here on HN). Not in general. Be careful with such sweeping statements.

What is one subject you need to be doing a PhD in order to research the subject?

Pure mathematics. There's virtually no one who does (genuinely important) research who doesn't have a PhD. And those who do manage to tend to contribute to relatively more accessible fields like combinatorics or things that can be filed under 'recreational mathematics'.

Lot of weasel words in there. "Virtually no one" and "genuinely important" stick out. You also say that these people have a PhD, not that they did the genuinely important research when they were getting their PhD.

The people doing research having PhDs does not mean you need one to do the research, and you are helping to demonstrate that. Even for the specific field you chose, you needed to add a bunch of caveats in order for your stance to be at all accurate. This shouldn't even need to be said, but many (most?) of the greatest mathematicians in history did not have PhDs.

I actually don’t need those caveats; I added them because I knew if I didn’t someone would come and argue, even though their counterexample probably won’t stand.

> not that they did the genuinely important research when they were getting their PhD.

Correct. I didn’t say that, and nor did I mean it.

So-called ‘weasel words’ are not as much of a thing as some make them out to be. There’s a reason scientifically-minded people overuse them — because we try to avoid premature generalisation.

Your last point about history’s greatest mathematicians isn’t correct as far as I can see. Who are you thinking of? Euler, Gauss, whoever else you name… they all had PhDs. The system has been in place (and has been necessary) for a long time now.

Anyway… if you want to prove me wrong, just give an example. It’s as simple as that. But you won’t be able to. Personally, I can think of one non-maths PhD guy who solved an open problem in graph theory, but that fits into the collection of more accessible subjects I mentioned above and he’s not a active researcher.

It’s quite surprising to me the misconceptions that otherwise well-educated people have about mathematics and the mathematical community. It’s quite different to other parts of academia in many respects — the teaching is different, the style of research is different, the style of communication is different, the level of specialisation and sheer volume of prerequisites required to carry out or even understand current research is different. There isn’t really a good analogue. The things you’re saying work for every subject I can think of — apart from mathematics. You may think that sounds like bullshit (and I wouldn’t blame you), but it’s true! And for that reason it’s odd that you’re so confident in your assertions. Go to a university and ask the mathematicians there if you need a PhD (in the everyday sense of ‘need’ — of course you don’t literally, logically need one) to understand/be involved in the research they do. Try reading one of their papers. See how far you get. Now try the same with another subject: computer science, for example. Some of it will be unfollowable, but much of it won’t be.

All of this to say that, yes, there are indeed subjects where without the time taken to do a PhD you’re not going to be able to meaningfully contribute. And by ‘meaningfully’ I mean in the form of actual research papers or new ideas. I get that this is not the case outside of mathematics, but that doesn’t mean it’s true everywhere.

I love doing research on subjects that excite me, but I found that joining a PhD program would mean I would only get to work on what my advisor found exciting.

If you get lucky and find a PI that is interested in exactly the same thing, you're good. You might get lucky enough to find someone who is interested in something near what you want. Most likely, you will be assigned the thing you do for your PhD.

> joining a PhD program would mean I would only get to work on what my advisor found exciting.

No, it wouldn't.

> Most likely, you will be assigned the thing you do for your PhD.

Sometimes. Often not.

Life is expensive. I feel like you have to nail it financially to simply have a good life. It is not about the Ferraris.

Forget money and being rich.

What about a decent stable life where you are not struggling, and actually can start a family before turning, say, 35?

I don't think it can be supported by academia anymore.

I just don't want to go through 5-10 years of PhD, then two postdocs, and then start a job that is by no means tenured.

And PhD isn't really a place for satiating your unfettered, unhinged curiosity. You have to do research along your advisor's line of inquiry, look at funding prospects, churn out papers at a cutthroat pace, and then deal with politics. Also, you can somewhat easily change a job, but cannot switch advisors that easily. Switching institutions is considerably harder.

If you want a FAANG job, you can get that without a PhD. And earn much more by the time your PhD were to be finished if you didn't go for it.

EE and CS are fields where you can do your research on your own if you are genuinely curious. Maybe, you won't have a career as a researcher. But you also won't be with a thinning hairline, single, and far from financial indepence at 33.

> What about a decent stable life where you are not struggling, and actually can start a family before turning, say, 35?

I suspect you are an American who doesn't know much about the outside world. Here in the UK, for example, you can finish a PhD in three years (so you could be around 25!).

> And PhD isn't really a place for satiating your unfettered, unhinged curiosity.

Try stopping me! Seriously.

> You have to do research along your advisor's line of inquiry, look at funding prospects, churn out papers at a cutthroat pace, and then deal with politics.

This is simply not true in general. Perhaps it's true in the more woolly, fashion and politics-driven disciplines.

> If you want a FAANG job, you can get that without a PhD.

I mean, no shit...

> at 33.

Again — I don't know where this idea that a PhD takes '5-10 years' comes from. It's nonsense.

You can do a PhD for fun and interest. But if you’re trying to get an academic career m, you better leave the idealism at the door. You are playing a serious game as any corporate politics.

Interest in research and intellectual curiosity are great motivators, but they don't pay rent. The problem isn't that people expect a PhD to be a path to riches. It's that in many places, it barely provides a livable income at all

> because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research

Then you need a stable situation first. Not everyone can choose to spend years badly paid while accruing debt from tuition and renting in a high cost area.

You read like a privileged person who comes from money or won the lottery.

I agree with the sentiment, but on the other hand, as someone who made some dubious career choices in his life I'll tell you that I really regret that no one told me to treat my life as a video game and plan out how to spend my points on the skill tree.

I always thought I was lucky because I was into computers and was able to do what I actually enjoyed, but when I look back I don't think working for Wikia for $850 a month was the best choice I could have made.

These here are hackers who sold out, or would like to. If you figure out where the principled hackers hang out, do let me know.

> From the discussion here, it seems that HN turns out to be a very money-centric place. Somewhat surprising.

It has always been heavy on Silicon Valley (legal) hustler types? Even more earlier. Concerning startups most seems disillusioned about the prospects nowadays.

A lot of people pursue PhDs because they are good at school and are highly trained to “jump through the next hoop.”

Not to be dismissive, because career academics are important. But there is an unnecessary anxiety for many about leaving school and entering the workforce.

I think one attraction is also: “wow, I can get paid to continue my education?”

Academia is like universal basic income for the highly intelligent. It’s a good system, overall and I think it will have a strong future. But it is not a good way to build wealth.

That said, the freedom it provides can make a PhD a great place to start a business, start a family, etc. But, it requires bravery and self direction, because it certainly won’t steer you there.

My experience with college was that it was a very "money centric place", with the high rates of tuition, over paid bureaucrats, yet course instruction outsourced to grad students "working" for low hourly wages.

Further, there was an "unacknowledged (though implicitly present) assumption" that faculty were in the business of bringing in grant money, and he who didn't wouldn't last long.

Then in the last few years we came to learn that much of the "academics" that gets published today is completely bogus. What subject are those "researchers" interested in?

Given the cost of taking 4+ years of your life to train under someone learning a skill, yes, there's a huge financial risk in doing this.

If you're able to ignore that fantastic, great for you and I hope you're happy, but even fully funded positions have just enough money to cover the minimum length of a PhD. To get the most from it chances are you will either end up with minor debt or wipe out some savings. Unfortunately such is life.

IMO the goal of the PhD shouldn't be to think of a city job as a high frequency trader at the end, but that's my worldview that why spend X years studying in a field of you don't intend to follow it...

Chances are if you say that during an interview for a place, unless it's in studying high frequency trading you won't get a call back.

" might pursue a doctoral degree because one is interested in the subject and wants to do research"

Dude, you got-a eat.

Yes. That's why funding exists.

The parent was making the argument that the 'drive to find truth', or 'knowledge' should out way petty material concerns. Implying that paying PhD's less is a-ok because they work for a higher purpose.

PhD is a really big investment. You are spending 4-6 years of your prime earning years chasing a dream or in the hope of making a dent in your domain’s problems.

All that while your age mates from school/college/town are progressing in their life and career.

Also if you get into non-academic job then those early years foregone usually have disproportionately bigger impact on your career progression and your accumulated wealth.

The decision is really big one and it’s only natural to consider money angle. I’ve known quite a few get into it because of interest and then getting disillusioned as they watch the world pass them by.

It's why I wouldn't want to pursue PhD. (besides simply knowing I'm not cut out for research).

I don't want to spend even more years in education. I want to still use my youth while I can; going into PhD would make me unable to.

Most of us do need to work for a living. Researching for the sake of research, and learning purely because one is interested in the subject is nice and all, but it is a luxury few can afford.

I think it is beneficial for everyone that the money angle for PhD is openly discussed and made public. This way, the correct audience (those who don't need to work for a living, i.e. born rich) might be attracted instead of burning out middle/lower class youth with dreams.

...Or steps can be taken to change PhD programs. Which does not seem likely.

It feels like YC population these days is mostly employees of mid-to-large tech companies trying to get rich out of RSUs. It used to be more about founders and wannabe founders, but the attitude shifted through the years to a mix of cynical money-grabbing attitude, so it's unsurprising that anything that doesn't mean "higher TC" is unpopular (except for side projects involving hardware, for some reason)

It's supposed to be populated by hackers (in the general sense). But it certainly isn't now — if it ever was.

I wanted to do exactly this, and was told many many times to rethink it.

And you listened? Stop listening.

They made good points and I made a call. I still think I made the right one.

You can never really know. I'd rather take a chance and know I got it wrong than never take the chance and never know I got it right.

Conclusion: sorry, but you all seem to be a gang of miserable, jaded, nihilistic, incurious, what's-in-it-for-me bastards. I hope aspiring PhD students don't take any of this nonsense too seriously.

I don't think I read a single first-hand account in this whole thread; just a lot of whining, hearsay, entirely made up bollocks, and a hell of a lot of chips on shoulders.

There's something to say here about getting the paid opportunity to spend several years thinking deeply about a problem without distraction. You'll make more money working at a startup or big tech churning out features each sprint, but usually you'd be very lucky to get a day or two to explore tangential ideas before the next project deadline in comparison.

Some people aren't optimizing for money so it's not best to compare on those terms.

There were tons and tons of distractions during mine. Pressure to publish doesn't just start at postdoc.

This is exactly why I decided to go do a PhD from industry.

Credit Suisse here in Switzerland used to only hire PhDs for programming positions. It didn’t matter what the PhD was in - they’d train you how to program.

Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.

> Credit Suisse here in Switzerland used to only hire PhDs for programming positions. It didn’t matter what the PhD was in - they’d train you how to program.

> Note: credit Suisse collapsed a few years ago and now no longer exists.

So you're saying that was a sound strategy on their part

Correlation does not imply causation (but it does stare at it from across the room and suggestively waggle its eyebrows)

Renaissance Technologies is a very successful hedge fund that almost exclusively hires PhD's to do the coding, no matter what field.

I believe RenTech only hires from highly numerical fields. E.g. math, physics, compsci.

They also employ <100 PhDs. The entire company is small. Might not be worth mentioning as an employed because the chance of getting in is miniscule.

their collapse didn't have anything to do with computer systems failing though.

they just spent a period of about 10 years making sure they were involved in every major financial scandal due to poor judgment.

> they just spent a period of about 10 years making sure they were involved in every major financial scandal due to poor judgment.

Hard to imagine any relationship between that outcome and a policy of exclusively hiring a demographic that's notorious for having high intellectual skills but low life experience. Wait, no, not hard. Easy.

What do you mean Credit Suisse no longer exists? It is still there, just as a subsidiary of UBS.

“Collapsed” It was acquired by UBS in 2023.

It was "acquired" at the demand of the Swiss regulator because it was bankrupt.

From my experience, 40 years ago PhD used to be hard to do and meant that the person who had it was smart. These days the only thing it indicates is that the person spent many years at university.

Good. Academia is done growing. We're in a steady state, which means if you're in grad school, look at your advisor. Look at the other grad students who have him. Look at the work of the grad students who came before you, with this advisor. Think about the ones that will come after.

Only ONE of you will take your advisor's place, statistically speaking.

If you an afford to pursue a PHD for the sake of doing the work and getting the education, go for it. If you have to make the PhD pencil out financially, think long and hard before enrolling. And if your ambition is to be a full professor, reread the first paragraph.

Instructors ⊂ Academia

> Only ONE of you will take your advisor's place, statistically speaking

The academic pyramid was never sustainable.

However, for some fields (science and engineering being good examples) there are decent jobs outside of academia.

Most academics teach in departments that don’t grant phds. They’re at liberal arts Colleges or regional state universities. True that statistically only a small percentage of grad students will go on to have their own PhD students, but that doesn’t mean there are no jobs for the rest.

That may have been true in the past, but at this point even the smaller colleges are flooded with applicants for faculty jobs.

A billion applicants for 2 full-time faculty jobs, but they’ve always got a billion adjunct openings that pay shit, offer no benefits, and have no job security.

There can even be competition for those lousy adjunct positions.

Indeed, and those positions have had semi-legitimate purposes in the past but have now become a treadmill. For instance, they often served as "academic spouse" jobs. I have a friend who had an English degree, and his wife was a high level science professor. Teaching classes wasn't hopelessly taxing, and they kept re-upping his contract year after year. The flexible schedule allowed him to manage their kids.

I used an adjunct job as a stopgap when I was an "academic spouse" too. It was in the EE department at a Big Ten university. I spent my time networking, and one of the other teachers helped me get a permanent job in local industry.

I worked for a household-name-prestigious school (not as an academic) and they essentially used adjuncts for their cash-cow open enrollment classes knowing that people that were passionate and/or wanted to get the big name on their resume would essentially work for free compared to what even full-time non-tenured faculty got. They made a lot of noise about the university “community” and wellness but I guess that didn’t include adjuncts. It wasn’t UPenn, but the conditions are similar:

https://www.openculture.com/2013/09/death-of-an-adjunct-a-so...

> The academic pyramid was never sustainable

Theoretically it wasn't, or every human on Earth would be a PhD candidate within the century.

However there was a period after WW2 where a lot of empty professor chairs needed to be filled and so I believe that people came to expect the growth. So for example you would have the post-war generation push their kids into it, saying "but of course you can be a professor like me, they will be beating down your door to get you hired!" But of course that seems to have stopped around the end of the century.

My dad got a chemistry PhD in the mid 1950s. He said that by that point, it was already widely known that most PhDs would have no chance of landing an academic position. He went into industry and had a good career.

I got my PhD in physics, in the mid 90s. Same story.

The period after WW2 wasn’t empty seats to be filled, it was the government funding science, engineering, and some social science. That changed the shape of universities forever.

It was both. The universities needed help recovering from WW2, and they got that plus more thanks to Vannevar Bush.

First there was the expansion to recover from WW2. Then there was expansion in science to prepare for the Cold War. There was also expansion from the Great Society's education efforts. And the influx of women and minorities into college. And expansion from other countries sending students to the US to kickstart their own universities.

It kept the academic sector growing for decades, gradually, and people just forgot the mindset you have to have for the day the growth stops. And that day came.

If your advisor is one of the stars of their field, then probably more than one of their grad students will be professors. If not, then probably none of them will.

Otherwise this point is indeed correct.

This is more accurate. The productive fraction of professors still follow the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule. And even then, these professors aggregate into the elite institutions making it even more skewed.

To get an academic position, you need to have a star advisor either for your degree or postdoc.

I think it was The Atlantic a few years back that ran the numbers on professors and their PhD alma maters. But I can't find the article, so please accept my bad recollection.

Essentially, in nearly all of the humanities, if you did not go to a top 10 PhD program, you had a 0% chance of getting tenure. Not 'like' a 0% chance, an actual 0%. There are no professors at all, anywhere in the US, in nearly all the humanities departments that did not go to a top 10 school. The distribution followed a power law, of course.

However, most universities have PhD programs that will accept students.

The hubris (?) is just amazing to me. Both on the students and the advisors sides. Like, guys, what are we doing here? This isn't STEM, there's like no difference in the job market between a humanities PhD and a BA.

I've known some English PhDs. They were more focused on self-education rather than external rewards. Many of them were training to become high school teachers eventually, and they knew it. They saw no hurry to begin that career.

Isn't one of the requirements to work for Microsoft Research that you have a PhD?

PhDs might not be working in schools, but there's plenty doing meaningful research outside of academia.

I'm sure 3M hires plenty of PhDs; and venture-capital-backed health device companies; and oil companies looking for new ways to capture oil; and so on.

Yes, for engineering and science a PhD is a path to stable employment, especially if you need to get past international gate keepersz

(Microsoft research is top tier researchers though. PhD is just getting started)

even the company making King's Hawaiian bread probably has a food science PhD, and a materials science PhD, maybe a chemistry PhD, the grain is produced probably with products developed by another chemistry PhD, with a biotech PhD developing the seed, and a crop science PhD running the trials on these altered seeds, treated with pesticides developed by another chemistry PhD working with an entomology PhD sprayed with a machine using programs developed by a CS PhD, on a field monitored by a soil science PhD, then milled on machinery overseen by a mechanical engineering PhD, later using yeast developed by a fermentation science PhD... and maybe there are some math and statistics and economics and marketing PhDs involved somewhere in this. lol

Not that every job in the supply chain requires a PhD, but look at any big company, and it's not like having a PhD in a STEM field is going to hurt your job opportunities for private industry. You just may end up competing for fewer, but better paying jobs.

The situation with humanities PhDs, where you only have an academic position to hope for if you want to use your philosophy PhD or medieval studies PhD or art PhD is a very different situation from someone studying a hard science at the PhD level. Kind of confuses people who only know the infamous situation with humanities PhDs when they realize a STEM PhD can actually lead to a well-paying private industry job.

Education? The PhD path commits you to learn more and more about less and less.

The opportunity cost isn’t just in life-time earnings, it’s also the time you sunk hyper focused on one very specific topic.

This strikes me as a really strange take on acquiring expertise and experience in one's field?

I would do a PhD if they paid me enough. I don't mind if I cannot find a job that pays well with a PhD (I actually don't need a PhD for that); I would do the PhD because I like doing research. What would bother me is to spent ~4-5 years without a decent income. The scholarships here in western europe are just too low, and I cannot justify not working for private companies in favor or pursuing a PhD during ~4-5 years

Prior to the new administration I would have pointed out that US CS and engineering Ph.D.s are generally paid with a stipend that's "just enough to live on".

There's even a website: https://csstipendrankings.org/

I disagree a little with their cost of living calculations - they're off in both directions for areas I know reasonably well. Most Ph.D. students can live for something under the MIT living wage calculations if they choose -- transportation costs are overstated for most places (e.g., CMU students get a free regional bus pass; MIT students get subsidized transit passes, etc.). Often the medical costs are subsidized as well -- we cover the full cost of (individual) health insurance for Ph.D. students.

You're not going to be banking much, but in CS, it's OK at many institutions, particularly when you factor in summer internship income.

I get what you're saying, but "in some places, in some disciplines, you could be at a livable level of poverty" is not a very persuasive point

Grad school is a money loser in CS for people from the US. There's no argument. But I did end up having my net worth increase over the course of it, and it was a fantastic experience. In Boston, even - a pretty HCOL area. And in the end, being "rich but less rich than my FAANG friends" isn't the worst outcome. :)

The MIT "living wage" figures are, to put it lightly, utterly deranged; more a statement of the purveyors's ideal of a first-world standard of living than a reflection of reality. If they are to be believed, then evidently grad students—or really like, half the population??—must not be alive.

As maligned as the poverty lines are—and they do have plenty of shortcomings—they are still a far closer approximation of "the true cost of living in a modern economy" than this drivel.

†No, really, go compare the "living wage" figures (https://livingwage.mit.edu/) with AMI stats (https://ami-lookup-tool.fanniemae.com/).

generally "living wage" in these contexts also covers like, a house and being able to take care of dependents + maybe a partner?

Which is generally above poverty levels right

It's broken down by number of working adults and children.

You may not have understood the concept of a living wage. For a start, a living wage is expected to support saving for retirement and future expenses like a new car, or eventually buying a house. "People can live on $100/week for six weeks!!!" is not a relevant counter point to "$100/week is not a living wage."

I love doing research. I published a minor unimportant paper in undergrad and had a blast doing it.

Then at graduation I was offered a well paid job in the industry. Decided to pursue it as opposed to spending 5-6 more years in academia looking for grants.

Would love to go back and get a PhD, but the economics just don't make sense for me. For now, it's a retirement plan.

Aren't grad school students just another form of visa-indentured labor by now?

consider Switzerland. PhD salary is around the range of 80k CHF. It's not bad at all.

Where? Last time I checked the salary table of the ETH they seem to only pay around 52k, unless I misunderstood something?

The PhD is has become the de facto replacement for the advanced workforce training programs (apprenticeship, guilds, corporate talent development programs) that many civilizations used to use. For some fields, you really do need to bang your head against a small number of problems without anyone holding your hand before you become proficient.

Not all PhD graduates get there; many just skate by because no one wants to fail them. They are an essential part of the modern labor force, though.

That may not be entirely true. Just look at all these people working in semiconductor fabs that China is trying to copy. A lot of that knowledge is institutional knowledge gathered from decades of specializing in one tiny area of the chain. That knowledge may be in a PHD program somewhere but more likely it is only on the job training.

That’s an interesting counter example. I agree to an extent, but I also point out that only in semiconductor work is it normal to have factory shifts of technicians who have PhDs.

From my experience, there has been a noticeable decline in PhD positions available within academia, likely due to tenure and career longevity, and reduced retirement benefits. As a result, many PhDs are forced into the private sector. However, many organizations have removed middle management layers, making merit based advancement less likely, and instead time becomes the dominating factor.

So given the choice between longer tenure or further education, where education is only marginally effective and time is dominant, the clear choice is to start a career as soon as possible. Which is something i wish i would have understood during my studies.

As a software engineer, a PhD doesn't seem worth it.

It's a lot of work and time, and most companies don't particularly need PhDs. Maybe a PhD gets a boost in pay starting out, but 5 years of experience cancels out most of the benefit. I suppose PhDs can get a shortcut into Prinicple or Senior roles, so there's some tangible benefit.

On the other hand, if a company is hiring PhDs and doing research, I feel those jobs are most likely to get cut if business is going poorly.

> I suppose PhDs can get a shortcut into Prinicple or Senior roles, so there's some tangible benefit.

I don't think that's a thing. Some government job will use a pay scale that varies based on your education level, but fast-tracking someone in software engineering because they got a PhD seems questionable seeing as the skillset does not really overlap.

It's a different thing for corporate research labs, where usually you need a masters for entry-level and PhD for the level above.

> Maybe a PhD gets a boost in pay starting out

My sense is you might get paid when you start what an undergraduate makes after one year and a pay raise.

Your career will probably develop faster than the person who started working after undergrad. Your ceiling is likely hire.

I don't have a PhD, but this is what I've observed.

A PhD isn't like a MBA which is meant mostly for the credential and associated pay bump. It's a research degree that you get if you want to work in academia or in a private research lab. If you're evaluating it purely by its economic value, of course it's not going to make sense, but that assessment misses why people pursue these degrees in the first place.

It also dismisses the effect it has on society entirely. In a sane world, we would enable anyone who wants to pursue a PhD in hopes in advancing things like medical science or our understanding of the world. The fact that people really can only care about the economic value education can bring, and the fact we all act like that's normal, is very radicalizing to me.

I disagree. More people have a desire to advance our understanding than have the ability to advance our understanding.

True, but like the VC model with companies, it's very difficult to consistently identify those people in advance. Invest in a load of qualified, promising individuals and hope more than a few "hit".

The desire to do something and understand something is the root of everything, and who are to preemptively decide who has that capability? What a pompous thing to say. On top of that you are operating on the assumption that it matters. If someone wants to learn, they should be able to learn. I guarantee you that we as a society have stifled people who would be this generations Einstein so to speak.

Insufficient patent office jobs?

The money stifles. There's not enough money for everyone who wants a Very Large Array of their own. People don't have money to sit around thinking all day. There needs to be some system of deciding priority. The profit incentive is the only reason any science dependent on HPC and GPUs is possible. If you want more science, you need more economic growth.

My observation is PhDs make mostly great salesmen in normal tech companies that aren't doing anything crazy. It's a pretty good strategy to have a team of theoretically competent, titled, well spoken and well dressed employees to send/show to clients to get work and then outsource that work to cheap labour.

My younger brother has his phd in engineering from a top tier university and I often worry about what it will mean for his career long term. He’s at a consulting firm now, but I’m not really sure where he’ll go next. He’s incredibly intelligent and hard working, but I’m unsure what firms are looking for engineers that have the phd price tag.

I also have many friends with humanities phds that I really hope figure something out. They are all extremely intelligent. But one is literally getting a phd in Shakespeare. Cool. I love it. But there’s like 3 openings a year and they aren’t even at a top tier school. It’s all a mess.

People seem to be getting stuck on the PhD opportunity cost piece for STEM. The matter of fact is that Americans don't do PhDs in STEM: if you look at the top schools and top departments, they are 70-90% international students. The PhD then is a phenomenal deal: by and large people are coming from places where FAANG jobs don't just fall on your lap at SF salaries. You get a free education in the US, and can jump straight into the job market as top-educated talent.

Also I think from NSF stats STEM PhDs are on a slow and upward trend, unlike the countries mentioned in the article.

Your numbers are way off…number of American citizen or permanent resident divided by number of doctorates awarded:

35,566 / 57862 = 61.5% (overall)

26,622 / 45,533 = 58.5% (stem PhDs)

Survey of earned doctorates, national center for educational statistics, 2023 data…very useful, as are many of the data products the federal government collects, for however long this is up

https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023#data

I'd say it's not that off: for computer science the numbers are 686/1150, so only about 40% are US citizens or PRs. This is even more scewed at top schools in my experience.

Also thanks for finding this data, didn't know it existed!

Please if you do get a PhD, don't feel bitter if you don't get paid much more than people without one after you graduate. This is a toxic mentality that (anecdotally) I find quite common in the computational sciences specifically.

In the likely event you won't use your specialized knowledge much either, how could one not feel bitter?

By realizing that life is not fair and you aren't that special

I was this close to picking up the PhD route in applied mathematics for science and engineering. I took up a job in a map company, "just for the time being" and not commit to the "Finite Element Method" or something around "Port Hamiltonian Systems" for 4-5 years straight, without knowing if it will find any applications in the real world.

8 years on, I'm still in the same map company along with 3-4 others who have joined after or mid-way their PhDs (and some more who didn't bother) and we do routing for hundreds of customers and basically have everything a PhD group has, including Seasonal Seminars on Routing Algorithms.

Finite element Method is not as exciting as AI (I used to think at some point that it would) and Port Hamiltonian Systems is something not a lot of people talk about, except maybe Dr. Volker Mehrmann and his group :)

Academia is not for the faint hearted and a PhD isn't just about research anymore. It's just a low paying job now, sadly. I still say things like "if I ever happen to go back to academia", as if I did a lot there. But I am an academic at heart, just that pursuing a PhD didn't certify it any better or seem to provide more freedom for exploring my passion for studies or a particular topic.

A lot of people will point out the utility of a doctoral degree is low, but there's another angle.

Men, specifically, are becoming less likely to enroll in Medical or Law school also. Women pick up the slack here but not in STEM doctoral degrees.

I don't think men are less competitive. See how many are in tech and finance still. I think they just see academia as a place that isn't for them and are less likely to opt for more years in it than they need

Anecdotally, a prestigious consulting firm (one of McKinsey/Bain/BCG) essentially stopped hiring MBAs and instead hired several friends from my PhD cohort despite the B-School ranking hire than most of our graduate programs.

I've always wondered what signal they were acting on. Perhaps the value of the MBA has been watered down, or it was just too easy to game the admissions.

In Elbonia people have to play a game to stay in academia.

Every year you have to accumulate enough points. The main source of points are publications. But they're not valued based on the gravitas of your writing, rather than which publisher is willing to publish. And these valuation seems to be random. Senior people will often offer to open doors to younger reserchers in exchange for their name to be put in their papers. Stealing someones ideas is not even the goal as is getting more points.

I have no idea how this translates to other countries, but as someone who - with one or two different choices in my youth - could easily end up as a sociology scholar, and who has a lot of friends who chose that path, I'm deeply flabbergasted.

A young naive version of me seen academia as polar opposite of working for evil bigco, but the reality that the amount of politics and backroom scheming is just mind boggling.

Its as if one can't escape human nature when environment has wrong goals set for rewards. The fact that 'more noble' goals may be pursued doesn't matter that much in long run.

The article cites a trend without providing any real facts or information for understanding the topic. I.E. which field are seeing growth and which are seeing contraction. It's a bunch of vague guesses at the cause like 'cost of living' without ever to find and present any facts that could validate whether such hypotheses are actually true. Consider the most common phd is in education, we could easily see a decline in doctors of education and not realize that chemistry phds rose 4%. The effect of the change are very different in this scenario than 4% reduction in fundamental research.

> Financial insecurity is also one of the chief concerns for doctoral students in Japan

I question the premise that low pay caused this drop. PhD research was never about financial security , instead it pays in prestige and expertise of notoriously ramen-eating overworking geniuses. Prestige has certainly gone down since they became so commodified, and expertise can end with a Master's. Most PhDs are not even computer science and related fields (where the most interesting research roles are in companies).

We should rethink the duration and archaic formulation of the doctoral programs. Our times are faster

> PhD research was never about financial security

You're looking at this wrong. PhD was always about financial security for the vast majority of PhDs. You think all those Chinese and Korean etc. students are coming to study engineering to get invited to the good parties back home? No, they're doing it because it provides financial security. Same for places all over the world. Europe, everywhere.

It's basically upper and upper middle class white Americans who pursue PhDs for the social prestige, because they already have actual capital, so they're pursuing social capital. Everyone else does it for a combination of money and love for the subject matter.

i believe you re talking about financial secutiry after the Phd, not during

Yes, I was.

I suspect most PhD candidates who are considering a future career in academia are thinking about financial security after, not during. So if we're talking about why are there fewer PhD candidates...

Universities have been offering doctoral degrees for at least 800 years. It’s unclear to me that they have ever been linked to powerful/ultra-wealth careers. I think that completely discounting the “prestige” factor would fail to capture a large number of academics. Especially in fields like Philosophy (from whence the Ph gets it’s abbreviation).

Up until like 1700 most of the population was illiterate

Mostly only the nobility, and later, the merchant/professional class, even sent their kids to school. Born out in the country like 90% of the population ? Well your helping with the harvest, keep watch over the herd, etc. sux2bu I guess

Universities have ALWAYS been practically accessible to at best the middle class, which barely even existed until around 1500. Before then, you’re mostly talking about nobles

One of the extra problems in the UK is that PhDs in STEM were massively centralised into “Doctoral Training Centers”. It used to be whenever I applied for a grant I would add funding for a PhD. Now that’s forbidden, and instead most universities have little PhD funding, and a few have far too much.

This means most students don’t get to be integrated into a research group, and many supervisors get very little funding for students as their university doesn’t have the funding.

If you are high skill enough to do a PhD in anything meaningful, why enter into an open-ended low-paid work contract with a professor with no definite end-date on when the PhD is granted? An american has even less incentive, as the reward of a work permit is not on the other side.

Only reason should be that you want to be a professor, research can be done in private companies without this license. 95% of a PhD is worth as much as 0%.

Often private companies list a PhD as a requirement for research roles

There are very few of such roles. Of course PhD is often an advantage when it comes to job application and promotion, but outside very specific roles (think about OpenAI looking for a PhD in LLMs, or Intel looking for a PhD in certain engineering fields), it's more often a nice-to-have.

maybe in CS, but if you have a PhD in a STEM field, you're not going to be looking at a wasteland in private industry for jobs that demand a PhD. Good luck getting a job running a big firm's private research lab without a PhD, and tens of thousands of companies demand that PhD. Chemistry PhD? what company doesn't need one of them, if not dozens. Materials science? yeah, you are going to be finding lots of companies that want their product development team run by someone holding a PhD at least. BioTech and Pharma aren't being run by people who just have a bachelor's, and there are over 10,000 private pharmaceutical research labs. Even your Wonder Bread has more than one food science PhD behind the scenes working on it. Any random big agribusiness alone is going to expect you have a PhD in crop science to conduct trials for pesticide development, and they're going to want a chemistry PhD to help develop the formulation, and an entomology PhD to investigate the effect their product has on insect biology, a soil science PhD to study the effect on soil, biochem PhD, biotech PhD, all sorts of engineering PhDs, probably some statistics/math PhDs...

Now, if your PhD is in the humanities, you're not looking at the same situation. It's almost bizarre they call the degree the same name, since a PhD in the humanities takes you on a completely different path. I don't think many companies are demanding a History or English or German literature PhD. Sometimes this can make you a competitive candidate for a job in a completely unrelated field, but those jobs have no need for a PhD, it's just something that makes you stand out when 100 overqualified people are applying for the same job. So will a candidate working in the Peace Corps. Or volunteering hundreds of hours a year. Those getting a history PhD are competing for the...what, 60? 90? jobs in the entire nation that require a history PhD, which is being a professor that gives other people history PhDs. So of course, you will only get such a job if you go to a top 10 school, and the chances of this are basically less than becoming a professional athlete. So the vast disparity between a humanities PhD which has no sustainable aspirational track, vs. a STEM PhD where you become a qualified candidate for both academia/the government which hires many PhDs, and industry, which also has a demand for PhD-trained candidates. Probably 3/4 of STEM PhDs don't work for a school or the government.

Tenured teaching positions are also in freefall right now.

> why enter into an open-ended low-paid work contract with a professor with no definite end-date on when the PhD is granted?

This is less of a problem than you might imagine. While no school will guarantee to give you a degree regardless of your performance, it's pretty close. They don't offer the limited funded spots to anyone they don't think can make it.

The real compromises are that people go into their PhD thinking they're going to cure cancer and become a professor at Harvard, and come out of it having made a 5% improvement to a model for predicting the risk of one particular complication following treatment for one particular type of cancer, knowing that becoming a professor at Podunk College would take another decade of work. Or the decide to quit once they discover the reality of it.

The under-paid indefinite purgatory period is called the postdoc.

In my rather limited experience, private research was way more productive and enjoyable and I was able to do it and get things working without a PhD. In fact, during my short stay a iRobot I was quite surprised to find that none of the PhD's there could help me with what I was doing or provide guidance.

Later I worked with PhDs and PhD candidates in a university setting. What shocked me the most was the narrowness of their knowledge and their lack of consideration for practical matters.

I'd rather let the market judge my work than an academic committee.

I got a PhD in Organic Chemistry in 1994. I was a researcher for a few years and converted to software in 2000.

The degree turned out to have a lot of transferable skills - especially in researching and solving problems.

Just 25 years later I am a Principal Engineer in the Oz Telco industry writing Rust!

I don't regret the degree for a moment - although when I went through the degree was free, even at a top tier Australian university.

I’m not sure this pathway exists now at least in the US.

Not surprising at all. The PhD pipeline has been broken for years: low stipends, ridiculous workloads, a shrinking number of stable academic jobs. Who wants to spend 5-7 years in a grueling program only to end up in postdoc purgatory or fighting for adjunct gigs? And the irony is that academia needs PhDs...

I was going to do a mathematics PhD years ago but I’ll be honest and I’m not bashing the process or the outcome here.

I literally just couldn’t be bothered to put the effort in. It’s not an insurmountable task but there were easier things that made me feel better. One of which inadvertently lead to a family.

Anyone considered doing a PhD after retiring early from their primary career? Seems like it would be a good option if you were financially set for retirement and had “a few years to kill” before accessing your savings/investments. It would reduce the stress of doing it (no great fear of failure, more perspective), cover living expenses, and give you a socially respectable occupation. On the other hand, maybe it would be kind of awkward being a grad student at like 45+ years old?

You can't just wander into a PhD program, it's pretty competitive to get into a funded position. You're going to be up against a lot of fresh-faced undergraduates who may already have a publication under their belt. They also have a 3.8+ GPA, are in leadership positions in numerous clubs, have done study abroad and worked 3-4 different research jobs each summer of their undergraduate degree, and probably during the school year too. Thus, they know all the other lab heads (PIs) who could be their advisor, and when funding is available, they're the first ones to know to apply, and they're the most interesting for the advisor because they can be vouched for by other labs as being strong workers, or easy to train, or whatever. If you are just cold applying to labs you have no relationship with, that's harder. If you are just cold applying to a school, and just hoping to get placed in whatever lab has funding, that's even harder, and chances are you can end up working for a tyrant of a PI, which is why they have no students. Some advisors are so bad that people quit their degree, and it ruins them. This, aside from the expectation you work 40+ hours a week, you only get paid for 20 of those hours, usually around $30k/year, and you are bound to research whatever the lab you were lucky enough to get a position in is currently researching. So the next 4 years of your life could be spent on nematode gene editing or formulating lipid nanoparticles or whatever the lab is doing. You're basically never going to be able to just randomly pick a project because it interests you. Though maybe if you're doing a history PhD or something, you do exactly that. But that type of PhD is a deadend where you are competing for like the 75 jobs in the country that expect a history PhD.

All-in-all, it's not really a retirement hobby. If you're really rich and can self-fund your graduate studies, then you can probably go to all types of schools and work in all sorts of labs. A self-funded rich student would be great for most labs. Many schools will accept all types of people, but if you're not getting an acceptance letter with an offer of funding, it's basically like a rejection letter.

I've heard of people in retirement becoming a student for the healthcare benefits some schools offer though. They maintain enough credits to have the right status so they aren't paying a boatload, but can still be on a student healthcare plan that gives great benefits.

Honestly, from the stories I hear... Obviously,the money is one factor, but even if people got a little bit more money, they would still go for a PhD (at least in europe, where you don't need to go under debt so much, if you need to). The problem is that a lot of people don't even receive more money than people with Msc or even less. That's just too bad (even if in some countries this is not only illegal, but people actually follow the law - which is not something you should take for granted).

But even after the money consideration... you still have all the "lost credibility" in the system, because the institutions are not properly funded, and also because science is very dependent on grants,politics, and stupid criteria + nepotism and corruption inside the institutions, etc. That goes beyond PhD applications to even "who can sell the coffee in campus". On PhD apps, I will never forget when one of my housemate just said to me that he would leave the country because one teacher said to him in advance that he would not enter on PhD, because everything was bought out.

I think this is only the ""beginning"" of at least 10+ years of colleges having a hard time/ losing credibility year after year (sometimes because they are failing, and other times because they dare to have opinions different than people like Musk, which is not fair for academia). Either way, should I feel sorry for them? For the institutions, sure. But for the people who rule the institutions right now? My only fear is that they will be substituted by even worse individuals.

What's the point in advancing thinking-based skills, when thinking has been successfully outsourced? What's the point of colleges, universities and research?

I feel like the only places a doctorate is useful is in the research field or academics and generally neither actually pay that well for the doctorate to be worth it.

Am I out of loop.

This is supply / demand.

There were just a bunch of articles about 'not enough' positions for PhD's.

So, now there are fewer enrolled.

Doesn't this happen in every field. There are two many people for the jobs, so people stop perusing those fields. Then the cycle kind of moves around, to, now we don't have enough people.

As a software engineer, PhD is worth it if you know what you are getting into. Especially now that job market is saturated, it definitely helps your career. It's a long journey but it's worth it if you know what you are doing.

> Especially now that job market is saturated, it definitely helps your career.

While we all can agree to that, reducing the PhD to just the new MSc comments is a bit worrisome.

But then take a look at so many ML PhD theses and one can truly see this is the case. So much unregulated garbage on ICML, NeurIPS as well.

The article mentions Australia, Japan, Brazil and the United Kingdom. Were there any counter-examples where the cost of living was supported and PhDs were doing well? I did not register to continue the article.

My supervisor once told me that if you want maximize your career earnings, only a masters is worth it. Of course he said this in regards to engineering, but I found it interesting at the time.

The choice is simple: work for next Nvidia or pursue academia?

The former if you have a crystal ball to predict the future. In which case you might not have to work anyway.

The later if you love working in a particular field and want a reasonably straightforward path to success.

Odd that, based on the comments, so many HN'ers are fixated on the opportunity cost of doing a PhD, as if the reason for doing a PhD was to earn more money.

Maybe a correction is needed. Academia has become so gamified. It's supposed to be about ideas, truth, beauty. Too many are in it for the prestige, which has ironically made it less prestigious.

Very few true eccentrics left.

I can't speak for other fields, but this does seem true of computer science. I worked in a university lab for a couple years and knew many PhD students, and most of them were most interested in leveraging the PhD to make more money in industry.

I think the issue, should that be an issue, is in industry setting unrealistic requirements for education. There certainly are some jobs where the work is true research and a PhD can be a good indication of experience in that, but a great many PhD-locked careers are not really so research oriented. Requiring a PhD to demonstrate expertise in something that makes up 10% of a job is excessive and creates this system where people do 4-5 year PhD programs just to check off a box for the resume filter.

> industry setting unrealistic requirements for education

This sounds like a market dynamic to me. If it were difficult to find qualified candidates, requirements would be lowered.

Just leaving this here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

Fantastic thought. Though I think economic signaling theory shows the bottoms-up motivator.

Certainly in the US, the GI Bill lead to a decreased value for high school diplomas for the median graduate. This doesn't mean it wasn't the right idea for the time, just that it's caused a lot of crowding out. I feel like the Elite Overproduction is a good post hoc descriptive theory but missing the why.

Overproduction is relative to the system under consideration. If you set up a system in a certain way, almost all labor can be overproduced.

To take an extreme rhetorical example: if slavery is allowed, human capitol becomes ridiculously cheap and you can say labor is overproduced.

Academia is not about truth or beauty and never was.

You’re wrong. It is for a good chunk of the academics I know, and they are the most delightful people to hang out with.

> Academia is not about truth or beauty and never was.

I feel this idea is tired--like a 1978 Ford Pinto banged up and running on worn out re-treads. Will it go somewhere? Maybe, but not too far, not comfortably, and unlikely to end up where you want it.

Academia started as medicine, math, theology, and philosophy, if memory serves, and has given us so much of the basic research that leads to the applied technologies we have today.

The incentive structures get weird, certainly, like resources on the Serengeti.

Oh please, when has Academia not been about prestige?

Academia is about whatever the academics want it to be.

Personally, I think it’s a system for “experiments”: projects that mostly produce negligible real-world impact, but occasionally lead to major advances (“breakthroughs”). Whereas industry focuses on projects that are likely to succeed, and industry research focuses on projects that are less likely but not as risky as academia permits.

In that respect, I agree there’s an issue with prestige. I think it’s largely because of “publish or perish”: academics aren’t risky because they have to publish ‘quality’ papers, and papers on rejected hypothesis aren’t published and/or considered ‘quality’; and those who still take risks, don’t end up as powerful or get as many students, as those who “play the game”. Some people also say it's because academics naturally have high egos, but I disagree, because if anything, a high ego would make someone more likely to take risks (and focus on "ideas, truth, beauty" which 'only a genius can understand', vs boring practical results that anyone can produce).

Ironically, industry has somewhat recently created breakthroughs via venture capitalists (like YC), who fund many risky projects expecting only a couple to succeed (because they also expect the returns from the couple successful projects to recoup the losses from all the failed ones). But nowadays, it seems even VCs are avoiding experiments, focusing mainly on AI (which is arguably an experiment, but even if so, a single one; "couple successes recoup many failures" doesn't work if most of the projects will all succeed or fail together).

I think the problematic current software development industry is the result of too many safe and short-term projects and not enough risky and long-term experiments, which isn't an uncommon view. But, I guess a more uncommon view, I think that means we need more academics.

I don't disagree with you really, although the reasons for that are complicated.

Everyone wants the benefits of research but no one wants to pay for it, and slowly over the last three or four decades administrations have pushed researchers into these Faustian bargains that have led to the system have today. A lot of what we have is a pyramid scheme, but that pyramid scheme exists in part because people somewhere along the legislator-funder-administrative chain decided that is what would be rewarded. Once it started and was encouraged it snowballed.

All of it is made worse by governments that don't seem to understand the problems or implications of their decisions. Anti-immigration laws (not talking about the US here actually necessarily) hurts enrollment, which has downstream effects even though that immigration is bringing in net income. Yes, indirect costs are gamified sometimes, and there should be some accountability system put in place with researcher protections (the original point of tenure), but no, that doesn't mean just cutting indirect costs down to some unsustainable level that doesn't reflect real costs.

Also to be fair there's a lot of this gamification and false prestige that happens all over the US and world economy, we just don't like to admit it. I think it's one of the defining problems of our time probably.

As is typical on HN, most comments are about how PhDs are of little value or how academia is not what it once was, whereas the article is about how the challenges of getting a degree (rising living costs, slumping stipends) are causing fewer enrollments.

> how PhDs are of little value

I see this as being the same as

> the article is about how the challenges of getting a degree (rising living costs, slumping stipends) are causing fewer enrollments.

Also, as far as I know, this dynamic was true at least 20 years ago, when I graduated. You either did a hard science PhD and hoped to get in at a top finance/pharmaceutical/tech firm, or you toiled away as an adjunct professor for low wages with the hope of achieving a unicorn tenured position.

Which is why most doctoral candidates were hopeful immigrants on student visas, and people who had work authorization mostly opted for joining the workforce.

Even if we define "value" strictly in monetary terms (which is a deeply bleak outlook, but nevertheless) PhDs can be at once of great value and also out of reach for those without the access to the debt instruments required to pay for it.

Of course, much like life has value outside of the monetary, PhDs are a great way to enrich your life if you don't have to financially bury yourself in debt. Notably, this is the case for people who have the good fortune of being born in places with low tuition, like much of Europe and Canada. I pay $4K in tuition and make, after tax, not much less than I was making as a junior machine learning dev.

I meant value as in not being able to achieve other life goals due to the pursuit of a PhD, of which many could be due to insufficient funds due to prospects of low pay and high volatility.

If the PhD had more value, people would be more willing to go further into debt for it. Like the rest of higher education.

If the PhD had _increasing_ value it would offset its _increasing_ cost. Furthermore, not everything is linear over every range. There's only so much debt you can put yourself into and there's only so much ROI education can promise.

Almost nobody pays for a PhD. I didn't pay for mine. This isn't like student debt for undergraduate degrees, though I think the argument about the "opportunity cost" of getting a PhD has merit.

My Professor dreams died years ago. I’m just trying to survive this hell.

Yup. Forget college or post-graduate degrees. This is no longer a meritocracy. We are in a grinding and grifting mindset. This is a jokers/jesters economy.

Forget pricey degrees. Just start streaming, become controversial af, gain an audience of young followers, sell them on quasi-legal gambling platforms, rake in that cheddar.

Or become a “political talking head” that doesn’t contribute to the conversation but instead provokes audiences with click baity material.

Or if you are traditionally attractive, start teasing the waters with “Just Chatting” streams and potentially switch up to selling OF subs. Nothing wrong with it, got to make that cheddar. Right?

I’m calling it now. The alignment with neoliberal economic policy is the downfall of not just the United States but the end of capitalism itself.

Conversely, if you are doing a PhD, network with other scientists. Organize conferences and workshops, try again and again until you publish in a high impact journal, do minor contributions and insist on adding yourself to other people's papers, post on twitter and linkedin, talk to local newspapers, make yourself known. Apply for grants early , and add them to your CV so you get more grants later. It doesn't matter if your science is trivial or useless, you will have made it, get more grants, get invited to give talks, get to join committees and publish even more of the same. Bonus points if you belong in a protected minority. Academia has been gamified

Despite the typical tech-bro anti-intellectual comments on this thread. As the article states. It's the money. People need to be able to support themselves.

PhDs are important because they train specialists by giving them the time and space needed to develop that expertise (something not usually available at corporate gigs). The work you do during a PhD has value, much more value than the stipend is worth. Taxpayer dollars spent on these stipends have a huge ROI because they are investing in future expertise. These PhD students are trading their cheap labor for agency over their work. However, the deal has been stagnating and stipends are not keeping up with inflation. Stipends can be low, but they need to support the students living needs.

The job market is always a bit tougher on specialists, because of that focused expertise. However, an excess of PhDs is a net benefit for society. Most won't become professors, they will filter back into the workplace and bring cutting-edge knowledge either directly to their expertise in industrial settings, or laterally to new fields.

Is a glut of English and Comparative Literature PhDs really that big of a benefit? Those skills are not transferable to anything. I think it’s a crime the way liberal arts departments admit way more students than could ever hope to find a job in Academia. I say this as someone who loves literature and is sad to see these departments shrink. But it isn’t fair to the students to put them through so much pain when you know there is nothing for them at the end of the tunnel.

>According to data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), around 1,600 English and Literature PhDs are awarded annually in the United States. Total PhDs awarded annually in all categories : 57,862

It is a very small field that is being used as a straw-man for all PhDs. I don't know what benefit those 1,600 may produce, but I'd rather them have that expertise and use it for our country than have them leave the US for better opportunities elsewhere. Because they will leave.

The benefit is intangible and honestly if they didn't have the opportunity to pursue a PhD they wouldn't leave the country. They would do what the 99% of people like them who are unable to pursue a PhD in their chosen topic do, work another job and publish a smaller body of work in a less prestigious setting. The fact of the matter is that those are not the 1,600 people who have the ability to earn a PhD in English or Literature, it's the ones who's interests and personal profile afforded them the opportunity.

Now to be clear, I'm not saying that this work is unimportant. Intangible benefits are (despite the name) very real and do benefit the nation. It's just a much more complicated than engineering PhDs making stronger forms of concrete or whatever.

>if they didn't have the opportunity to pursue a PhD they wouldn't leave the country

How do you think the US got so many international students?

Incentive structures, mostly.

The glut is primarily a function of the fact that universities have decided that it's fine to have most of their courses taught by poorly-paid adjuncts. That is, actually, a bad thing. If we returned to having tenure-track faculty do a substantial majority of teaching, most people who get humanities degrees would get jobs in the end.

In the early 2000s those liberal arts departments went as far as Southeast Asia to recruit international students who paid a lot more than domestic students, especially at the time. One of their outreach programs in Myanmar is called the Pre-Collegiate Program, whose website claims to promote critical reasoning among young people.

Except I actually spoke to several of them who said that they were heavily groomed into joining the liberal arts departments. Not one of them went into engineering or the sciences. One student said during the program she was told she "must" choose the liberal arts. Another described how he was sweet talked by a philosophy professor into becoming a philosophy major, despite having followed a science-based curriculum in high school and little-to-no education in the arts (back then they had to specialize in either but not both in high school).

So when you said "crime" I thought "funny you should say that". It might not be criminal but there was definitely some creepy stuff going on.

Not quite sure what you're talking about. The majority of PhDs awarded in the US were science and engineering (S&E) degrees. The number of non S&E PhDs has held steady since about 1973 [1].

It's also never been a 1:1 ratio of PhD recipients ending up in academia. I will agree that many universities overinflate job prospects post-graduation, but students should also be doing their own market research before entering into such a long process.

[1] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25300/report/u-s-doctorate-awa...

Academia doesn't have a monopoly on intellectualism, and in fact "tech bros" tend to emphasize the reason and rationalism that typically defines intellectualism.

This is Dunning-Kruger in sentence form.

Oh sorry I'm a tech bro and don't know what that means, can you please tell me oh exalted professor?

Dunning-Kruger is itself kind of a tech bro-ey catchphrase though…

Isn't calling someone a tech-bro itself just anti-intellectualism blended with sexism?

because higher education is too expensive to consider it

I mean £21k student stipend and job prospects of £26k-£42k (assuming not finance or AI) can you blame them.

Blaming "High living costs" is like blaming the victim of a theft for carrying something of value in the first place.

Come on use the words that are actually plaguing PhD programs, exploitation of cheap labor and minimum pay for working endless hours

"entering into a work contract is theft"

what's plaguing phd programs is the lack of value for attaining a phd. the labor is cheap because it isn't valuable. the hours are endless because the output is low. victim mentality infects everything

> it isn't valuable

Science is the quintessential example of high-value work with poor value-capture characteristics, and is often used in econ classes as an example of where the "captured value = value" approximation breaks down.

I got caught cheating in my very last college course so can never get my PhD. I use to be atrocious at school bc I had adhd and was about to drop but did a complete 180 and finally learned how to learn which changed everything. I discovered my love for Math and my immediate and only goal from that point forward was to get my PhD.

My temple became the library and would go there immediately after class and every weekend at 8am. I graduated at the brink of COVID so could no longer go to my favorite and on my very last final of my college career couldn’t take the noise of my roommates cheering me on and also just wanted to be done to used chegg on a small part of my test and got caught.

Do I deserve to get my PhD? No. Why? I showed my academic integrity can’t be trusted. Do I still want my PhD? 1000% Yes. Do I regret my decision? No.

My school told me I could either not be awarded my degree or receive it with the exception that “cheater” be branded everywhere on it. I originally wanted to go with no degree at all but figured I’d own up to my mistake and use the label to rebrand myself as someone who learned their lesson and won’t make the same mistake again.

During COVID I obviously couldn’t find work so utilized my spare time to pick up a new hobby and landed on tinkering. That lead into my discovery of software and the rest is history. I fell in love with software engineering and have been doing it for the past 4+ years.

I’m extremely proud of myself and all that I’ve accomplished because with absolutely no incentive or motivations or even help I managed to learn a new subject completely on my own. A cheater can post code that isn’t theirs’ to their GitHub over the course of 4 years however a cheater can’t show you 4 years worth of work. Also if you think a tech job might’ve been my motivation, I did try to obviously get a job but failed at yet another goal and quit several months ago. I’m working construction but still learning and coding each and every day.

A PhD is becoming an expert in a specified subject and then thinking up an idea no one has ever had before and backing up your ideas with proof. In a PhD program you are given unlimited resources to make that happen. I think (big emphasis on think) I can do that completely on my own. If I’m being honest I’ve actually already begun and don’t know if it’ll work out, come to fruition, or even be read but at least I tried. If I try the only cost is my time but if you’re in a program it costs time and money.

>In a PhD program you are given unlimited resources to make that happen.

Did you ignore almost every other comment in this thread when you wrote this?

The resources a PhD student has vs. a guy who works construction has significantly more tools at their disposal than I do. I have zero so any more than that from my perspective is seen as unlimited.

Also, my mom was a secretary assistant for a professor at UCLA so I’ve seen the labs and students throughout the years and will say their lack of resources is part of the reason they become experts in their field.

Phds are a scheme for immigration

and stealing secrets for their home country

Is nobody going to entertain this? Immigration opportunity is a major motivator for foreign students to get PhDs. And the university likes the cheap and captive labor.

What I really don’t like is that there are essentially rings of foreign professors within the US that only bring in foreign students, only write papers with them, review each others papers, etc. So you can end up with an American degree without doing any work with Americans, essentially having a parallel academic experience that mirrors culture of back home. And then use that experience to argue for US employment.

it's a huge waste of life time, family life and money; but it can be fun if you are a no-life, or a Billy no-mates

on the other side, you see the world, you travel payed by the taxpayers and you meet curious people. and, of course, it might be intellectually fulfilling.

The simple answer is they have low market value and aren’t a good investment for anyone - the student or the nation. Yes we need some researchers but not as many as we train.

They have a high market value outside of academia. Inside academia though they are all underpaid and overworked, and the modern version of “tenure” might carry prestige but it doesn’t carry the privilege it once did.

I think it is valuable to the nation, some subjects are arguably more or less valuable, but its about talent at a macro level. If a nation doesn't invest in talent through PhD funding, talented people can and do go elsewhere, work in a diferent economy, contribute to a different society.

Obviously, that's only one avenue for talent. Some talented people never do a PhD, they may create start-ups etc instead. But its about fostering an ecosystem to develop and retain talent.

I think there is some inherent value to PhDs in general. Even the ones commonly looked down upon as frivolous here, even the ones with little to no economic benefit.

The value is that obtaining a PhD involves deep research into something beyond what anyone else has done. Even if it's a topic that you don't think is important, even if it's a topic that no one thinks is important, I think there is still value to exploring that boundary of what we know and testing the limits of our understanding.

So many people spend their lives consuming rather than creating, doing the same things over and over again every day, maybe producing lots of economic value but not doing anything novel or interesting to anyone. A PhD forces you to do something different.

Of course you can do novel things and do deep research without doing a PhD, a PhD is just a certificate to prove you did it. I value the process equally regardless of the result of the research or the setting it's done in. And I don't discredit the value of work that isn't novel either - there's also a lot of value to the routines that make the world function day to day. I just think that in a world where most of us will never get a chance to spend years becoming a true expert on something obscure and novel, that encouraging more people to take that opportunity and explore that niche is worthwhile.

Distinctions only hold esteem over time if they are worthy of it. The last two PhD’s that crossed my feed had dissertations on “The Architecture of Whiteness” https://x.com/garrett_rhianna/status/1889609612367700377

And “The Politics of Smell” https://x.com/drallylouks/status/1868782615324770561

If the PhD is losing its lustre, it’s because the Universities took the shine off.

> If the PhD is losing its lustre, it’s because the Universities took the shine off

Also, circulating particularly weird dissertations for the express purpose of angering people has gotten a lot more rewarding

“Pay no attention to that canary, this coal mine is perfectly fine”

The canaries you posted are thriving

That Politics of Smell thesis is actually pretty great, I'm sorry you couldn't get past the title. Frankly, dragging Dr. Louks, who's already explained her thesis and how it was written after it blew up in certain online circles, tells me you didn't actually think that deeply on what she was trying to say. Probably means that the Architecture of Whiteness paper is worth a look, though, so thanks for the unintentional recommendation.

What did you learn from the Politics of Smell thesis?

That some people in this comments thread lack curiosity or the ability to engage with the world around them beyond the surface level.

The fact that you don't understand something is not evidence that it's not valuable.

What didn't I understand? What of value is contained in those theses?

You're the one claiming no value - what about those theses makes you think they have no value?

What rebuttal to the works do you have?

Many seemingly useless theses turn out to be prescient and valuable decades or even centuries later. What evidence exists to suggest these won't have long term value?

I’m really confused at how you don’t see value in such theses

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