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Comment by BruceIV | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to hear the other side of this. I'm a PhD student in Computer Science right now, and a lot of the appeal of the job is the ability to get paid for working on projects that interest me. That said, I have a nice government fellowship for my PhD and a generous funding package from my university - if I was missing one or both, things would be harder.

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This is one of my main worries about my impending graduation. Right now, I work on what I find interesting, publish when I have what I think are good results, and have not found that anyone has tried to dictate what I should be working on. Once I graduate though, I'll lose that luxury. Unfortunately I don't know of any "real-world" job that provides such freedom; perhaps grad students are only afforded it because we're so affordable.

Right. It is rather easy for someone with a CS eduction to earn ~$40k a year and spend most of the year in freedom. Just get a contracting/freelance gig. The hard person is getting $100k or $200k or more and still having freedom.

Do you mind me asking where you're doing your PhD?

University of Waterloo. They've got some great research groups, the funding's good, and you get to keep any IP you develop over the course of your studies.

What are you working on for your PhD?

Well, it's early days yet (I'm just finishing up my coursework, and haven't gotten far into my research yet), but my proposal is to build generic collections data structures for general-purpose GPU programming (and related architectures). Single-threaded performance is hitting some pretty serious walls so parallel execution seems to be the best way forward, but memory layout can make orders-of-magnitude difference in performance and is hard to get right. My goal is to build something analogous to the STL to make it easier for the average programmer to program for GPU.

Do you know about the 'thrust' library?

http://thrust.github.io

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