I got a Ph.D. in computer science a long time ago, and I think it was the worst mistake of my life. 6 years wasted, for no obvious benefit. I don't know why I did it, other than wanting to learn more computer science stuff. And I think I could have learned a lot more by just working in the industry.
> I got a Ph.D. in computer science a long time ago, and I think it was the worst mistake of my life
I can't tell you how many PhD's I know the resemble your remarks. Quite a few of them (most?) are not doing anything related to their field of study. For example, one with a PhD in Physics owns a small vocational school teaching nursing and some IT courses.
The following is going to sound horrible. Over the years, having worked with thousands of people over a career spanning about five decades and across a range of disciplines, I developed this strong belief that if you need to get things done you should not hire PhD's.
In fact, speaking of technology, some of the most creative and talented people I have worked with were university dropouts who, for the most part, got tired of the slow pace and wasted efforts (i.e., having a year of general education coursework for an EE or CS degree) and went off on their own. I am talking about people who had a direct hand in delivering millions of dollars of revenue for the companies who employed them and doing so at breakneck speed. The going joke at one place where I used to work was something like: If you need it done right and in 6 to 12 months, get a college dropout with enough schooling to be able to do the job. If you have four years and don't are about making a prouct, hire a PhD.
I know, harsh. I did warn it would be.
That said, I have met many brilliant PhD's. I just don't know how the skills, capabilities, creativity and productivity metrics distribute in that population. No clue at all.
You missed the point of hiring PhDs. You don't usually need them unless you are on the literal bleeding edge of a very minute subfield-of-a-subfield.
You hire PhDs as a value signal. "We have 6 PhDs from ivies working on solving X, Y, and Z". It doesn't even matter what X, Y, and Z are. People will THROW, THROW money at you.
The only PhDs who, by my estimation, enjoy themselves are in their late 60s to mid 70s, have had tenure for 25+ years, and just do whatever they want in the fields they enjoy. It's equivalent to earning something like an Engineer in Research position. The utility you bring to industry as a PhD is almost nothing - except those 3 letters. Who would've thought 3 letters could net you so much damn money from stupid investors.
> You don't usually need them unless you are on the literal bleeding edge of a very minute subfield-of-a-subfield.
Not necessarily true. I have been there many times. We did not need PhD's to solve the problems.
One thing people might fail to understand is that there are professionals who not only invest the proverbial 10,000 hours to become experts in a field but go way beyond that and live and breathe the stuff for decades.
I don't want to sound like I am hating on PhD's. I am not. Just saying that they might just lack the marketing value some assign to the degree, that's all. You don't need N years of torture at a university to become an expert on something at the bleeding edge. In fact, in some cases this is almost impossible because the resources and "rules of engagement" in a university research context are very different from that of a business environment where your competitors are trying to eat your lunch every day and you have to perform or die.
You are absolutely correct in saying that certain industries favor having PhD's on the roster.
Here's what's interesting about that. We have done a range of aerospace projects for DARPA-related work. What happens more often than not is that the PhD's go get the funding and then discover they can't build it. That's when they shovel money our way to actually make it happen. I don't have a single PhD on staff. We get shit done. No matter how complex. From industrial products to sending hardware to the Space Station and (hopefully soon) the moon, 'been there, done that.
This discussion reminds me of a book called Range. The author’s premise is that most high achieving inventors, creatives etc are not successful because of high level of specialisation, rather it’s a their broad sampling across unrelated domains and their ability to essentially cross pollinate from their experiences that is their key to coming up with novel ideas. The kinds of people who rapidly sample and acquire range I’d say are also likely to be college dropouts.
> The author’s premise is that most high achieving inventors, creatives etc are not successful because of high level of specialisation
This makes sense to me from a range of perspectives. A simple example of this --too simple, yes-- is when I hired an EE out of Intel. I was looking for someone to take on a range of responsibilities. He claimed he could do what I needed. After hiring him I started to realize he had been "creative" in the profile he painted for me. It turns out he had only worked on power supplies at Intel. And by that I don't mean full product cycle. He designed them. On paper. Never even ordered a single part. Never laid out a PCB, etc. It was bad. I ended-up having to be "Professor Martin" and teaching him a bunch of stuff. Not a good outcome. Great guy, just didn't work out in the end.
In sharp contrast to this, I worked with people in the motion picture industry who were nothing less than amazing. One guy had a degree in music, he had studied to be an opera singer. He self-taught software and hardware development, mechanics and all kinds of other things. He ended-up building and owning on of the most well-known visual and special effects companies in Hollywood. The people he hired had similar eclectic backgrounds.
It was very interesting and revealing. This experience definitely opened my eyes and mind and, honestly, made me less of an elitist dick when hiring people. I could not care less what degrees someone brings through the door. I have learned this has no relationship whatsoever with creativity and raw job performance. What you are looking for is the ability to learn and what they have done in the last n years. That's it. A non-asshole who is driven to learn difficult things can run circles around almost any degree. Frankly, part of it might be that they have to in order to survive.
Of course, there are regulated industries where you have to hire degrees due to liability exposure. Medical is an simple example of this. Self driving cars might be another. If you sued and the lawyers discover critical staff doesn't have university degrees it could be a royal mess (or, at the very least, cost a ton more money to defend technical decisions).
In other words, there's an industry-dependent bias that might favor one or the other.
I mean, this is the premise of interdisciplinary practices at pretty much every university. Interdisciplinary research is one of the big buzzwords you hear in grants and interviews. Interdisciplinary PhD programs are big for this reason.
Personally I struggled, had tons of stress, no time for relationships, and all that. But it was also an intense time of personal development. I learned a lot about myself and a lot about how to work hard and get stuff done.
I used to tell people that if you don’t regret starting your PhD when you’re halfway through, then you’re not doing it right. I’ve since moderated that stance - a lot - but there’s still something to be said for so-called “character building experiences” even though they suck at the time.
Sure, for sufficiently advanced definitions of “growing up”.
Opportunities to push yourself all the way to the limit don’t come around every day. Nor do a bunch of smart, experienced people who are willing to give you brutally honest feedback.
I think the experiences of a PHD program versus working in industry are sufficiently different enough to say that they are not as easily comparable as you are making it out to be.
Hes not broadly comparing them. Hes correctly pointing out that "learning about oneself" and about "how to work hard and get stuff done" isnt unique to getting a PhD.
If anything, its shocking that someone does not realize that's just a part of growing up.
You definitely can get that in industry. Or the military. Or lots of places.
However I think where you go in industry matters a lot. Doing a PhD at a serious program is more like starting a startup than like writing CRUD apps at a megacorp. More like going to the SEAL teams than being a supply clerk.
It's not en entire benefit, that six years could have been spent making a salary, saving up retirement, starting a family, etc. It's pretty disheartening watching your peers while in graduate school
I think every high schooler should be taught how to project cash flow and figure out quality of life based on various scenarios. There is so much pay and expense data available now, there is little reason these kinds of opportunity costs should be a surprise.
But I just mean making a spreadsheet calculating income/expense/savings by year until you are age 100. Of course, assumptions have to be made about inflation, investment earnings, payrates, and benefits.
Thinking about what huge sweeping world events happened from 1922 to 2022 and how it affected people around the world… for an ordinary person there’s really no point in making such a spreadsheet. (Well, unless you’re born in one of those filthy-rich elite families like the Rothschilds, who have all the power they need to plan ahead…) I mean, maybe it’s a good idea to plan a few years ahead to survive in a ruthless capitalist society, but other than that I really don’t see the point. Only a few of us are going to buy an actual damn house at this rate nowadays.
I think it’s best to think that (for the majority) our very moment of our life is contingent on the historical forces of the world, and there is no stable-enough historical tendency that we can exploit to calculate out our whole life trajectories.
>I mean, maybe it’s a good idea to plan a few years ahead to survive in a ruthless capitalist society, but other than that I really don’t see the point
The purpose is not to pinpoint whole life trajectories. Obviously predictions decades into the future are a crapshoot. But it does not cost anything to copy paste the formula down that many rows.
The purpose is to establish upper and lower bounds and adjust expectations properly. In the context of this thread, it does seem reasonable for a high schooler to be able to predict some spectrum of their quality of life if they were to pursue a PhD in <x> field.
Finding a partner, buying a home, having children, etc all happens within 10 to 20 years of high school. They can take their student loans, amortize them, and calculate if $70k/$100k/$120k/$250k per year will buy them the future they want. And they may decide that a PhD in whatever has too low of a probability of allowing them to achieve other goals they have, such as having kids or living in a certain region or owning a certain type of home.
And it goes beyond money. Kids should be taught to research or ask people what their day to day, month to month, year to year is like. A 16 year that wants to research medicine should get data from a 25/30/35 year old about what to expect, such as hours worked per week, vacation time, where the jobs are, job security, etc.
You know all kinds of things can happen during a PhD right? Many don't even make it to the end, some get burnt out and leave without a degree (along with their career prospects), some meet abusive professors, some find themselves in illness (bonus points if you are in America, don't know wtf is happening with their healthcare system), some find their advisor suddenly leave academia and their lab fucking disappears (which I have experienced), etc.
Anyways, I think planning decades into the future to get what you want with a spreadsheet is only possible from a petit-bourgeois "middle-class" standpoint. From David Graeber's paper "Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class" [0], he talks about what that mentality is:
> What being middle class means, first and foremost, is a feeling that the fundamental social institutions that surround one—whether police, schools, social service offices, or financial institutions—ultimately exist for your benefit. That the rules exist for people like yourself, and if you play by them correctly, you should be able to reasonably predict the results. This is what allows middle-class people to plot careers, even for their children, to feel they can project themselves forward in time, with the assumption that the rules will always remain the same, that there is a social ground under their feet. (This is obviously much less true either for the upper classes, who see themselves as existing in history, which is always changing, or the poor, who rarely have much control over their life situation.)
And guess what, that middle class is shrinking (since the things that welfare capitalism has promised are starting to not be true anymore, like if you work hard enough you can buy a house and start a family...) Many people in first-world countries have already been woken out from that fantasy.
I think we are talking past each other. I agree that life is volatile. And it is very lucky to be able to even plan a few years into the future.
But I do not think Graeber's quote is applicable here. The exercise of planning future cash flow can help you increase the quality of the bets you place (and/or adjust your expectations). Singular choices have no guaranteed results, but the sum total of choices can be influenced by gathering information about the world and keeping your models updated, allowing you to make choices where the odds are more favorable to you.
and with that mil he could retire early and spend time studying cool stuff, exactly as he was doing in graduate school. To some, phd is skipping the line to doing stuff they want to do.
its a waste of time if you are not the elite landlords whose children academia was made for
out of several hundred or really thousands of years, its only been several short decades where everyone else was unobjectively convinced that academia was relevant for them, and now we are reverting to the mean
no, was there intended to be a moment of introspection introduced by that strawman?
it is coincidence that jobs failed to find a way to sort job seekers except by gatekeeping with higher education. higher education did not adapt to this purpose, and doesn't need to and never will need to. the utility of the working class needing higher education will have more diminishing returns, whereas literacy will have less diminishing returns.
