The value in academia is not in the political benefits that it gives in getting a job or being recognized. If you are in it for fame and fortune, you are a fool.
I was in academia. Not just a grad student, but achieved the phd and did a post doc. I don't regret any of it. It taught me many invaluable lessons, all of which have been useful in industry starting a company.
My impression of industry so far: they don't get progress. They don't get innovation. They have problems, but they they don't understand them and are unable to commit resources to the procedures that are needed to solve them.
Only the very biggest of tech companies like Google, Palintir, Apple, Facebook, are able to tackle the really hard problem. These are the problems that you can not make an estimate for in terms of completion. The majority of industry will not even entertain this class of problem.
Academia, too, has a lot of problems. I left because of the publish or perish mentality. I liked to work on hard problems, and had some successes, but overall it is the numbers that matter not the difficulty. There are an equal number of politics in academia as in industry, though they are different in academia.
In industry, politics often involves a lot of incompetent people in high places following paper work procedures that do not support their supposed cause, while in academia it is more a lot of infighting over government grants and insultingly simple metrics like the number of papers published.
In short, the author of this post is full of ignorance, and I am only slightly less full of ignorance in that I haven't achieved tenure in academia, and only have several years in industry helping to run a company. None the less, what I learned in academia in terms of the science of computing, it was invaluable.
"Only the very biggest of tech companies like Google, Palintir, Apple, Facebook, are able to tackle the really hard problem."
Wrong and wrong. First, all of those companies made concrete progress on hard problems when their size was less than 10 people. Woz pretty much singlehandedly designed the first PC for normal people. Zuckerberg built a pile of code that would become one of the largest social networks.
Let's talk about the "really hard problem". Let's talk about John Carmack, friend.
Made the first realtime 3D fps games, the networked dialup realtime 3D games, the first networked shooters over the internet, the first true commercial 3D engine, and is basically responsible for the fact we have GPUs in consumer desktops now. Dude only had two (2) semesters of college under his belt, and he runs rings around the academic CS wanks, because he fucking ships code that works. No cutesy benchmarks. No government funding. No papers, barring perhaps some stuff in Graphics Programming Black Book, none of that. All of that stuff running on consumer hardware without graphics accelerators.
There are plenty of hard problems being tackled by small teams, even on shoestring budgets. To say otherwise is magical thinking.
~
If you want to publish a paper, you don't have to actually be in academia. If you want to do research, you don't have to be in grad school. In fact, and hopefully more people will get in on this, you will probably do better work in a healthier environment.
What does academia get you? It seems in the vast majority of times, it gets you...
...an "advisor" who is more concerned with finding funding and keeping lab space than making progress.
...an "advisor" whose last original contribution to the field was, almost by definition, probably a decade ago.
...a chance to talk with world experts in your field--the same chance available to any schmuck with an email account.
...a chance to submit papers whose only circulation will be behind paywalls.
...a chance to be woefully underpaid for the above, because they know you are stupid and naive enough to take it.
Fuck that. The author was smart to get out while they were only slightly behind.
Being affiliated with a university or large tech company also gives you access to the literature locked behind those paywalls. Lack of access makes it really hard to publish a paper. A paper should describe how the work fits into previous work in the field and what's new about it. For example, if you publish on X it might turn out that someone else published on that topic two years previous, but in a journal you can't access.
In one project I worked on, I developed a new algorithm. Or so I thought. Then I went to the chemistry library about an hour away to read the papers they have on the shelves, available at no cost. Turns out the basic approach was done in the 1970s! Luckily, further reading showed how what I did really was something new.
In another project, I managed to dig up another paper from the 1970s which solved a problem I had been working on for a couple of years.
I am self-employed, and don't have the $30/paper just to find out that it's worthless for what I'm doing.
It also gives you cheaper rates for conferences. As a "commercial" attendee, I pay a lot more than academics, even though I make less than most academics.
In many cases it also gives you physical access to those world experts, who may visit your institution because of your advisor.
To be fair, I doubt most people are in it for "fame and fortune." That being said, most of us interested in such matters need to balance the need to eat and lead a reasonably normal material life with our interests in ideas, research, and teaching. Desiring a reasonably normal material life is not unreasonable.
If you go into contemporary academia with the expectation that you will not get a TT job, or a TT job in a desirable place to live, at the end, then perhaps you are doing it right.
Right now there are simply far more PhDs than TT jobs. That means a large number of PhDs cannot get the jobs for which they are being trained. People entering should know that. Knowing that is not equivalent to pursuing academia for "fame and fortune."
>People entering should know that. Knowing that is not equivalent to pursuing academia for "fame and fortune."
A lot of the PhD's in pure sciences in the US are from foreign countries, especially India and China. Actually, foreign students dominate in most engineering/natural science departments of US universities. So, I guess most American kids do realize that its not a valuable decision to pursue a PhD.
Desiring a reasonably normal material life is not unreasonable.
Amen. It's kind of amazing what academics put up with.
Take relocation. I'm 31 and while I'm at the top in terms of talent, I've made some mistakes and I'm probably only upper-middle in terms of tech career success, and I would simply not take a job, with a cross-country move, that didn't offer a full relocation package. Yet academics who are at much higher quantiles of success in their industry (just to have a TT job is 85th or higher, these days) are happy just to have a salary, because their low self-confidence ("impostor syndrome") is used against them to the point where they think it's egregious just to ask for basically decent treatment.
The author of this piece didn't ignore this point, though. He commented on how even if you're in it for the intellectual gratification you're still very limited:
> If I'm not going to grad school because of job opportunities, what other reasons are there? Pursuing my interests? As a PhD student you get to choose some interesting problem and work on that, right? That's what I naively imagined before I started at the institute. Some day at lunch I told my supervisor about this idea I had. We could take his fluid simulation method from computer graphics and apply it to a problem related to molten polymers. There was this experiment by a group of applied physicists that would fit nicely. He asked me how many people would be interested in the problem. Maybe a handful, I said. And then I realized that there was no way I could work on that problem. Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives. What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience? To be successful you need to target a large audience, and not just pursue whatever obscure problem takes your fancy.
If you aren't paid well, and you're not well respected, and there is no great job waiting for you at the end of the tunnel, and you can't even work on what you're most interested in, I can't really blame anybody for leaving.
I wouldn’t call anybody a fool, but I think you’re right about the temperament of people who leave. I think it's attributable to a number of parallel factors: 20-something unemployment in the United States, popularization of science (e.g. a Cosmos reboot produced by Seth MacFarlane), longstanding belief that attributes more education to more success, et al.
There is nothing wrong with presenting science in a format with populist appeal. It helps raise the general level of knowledge in society, counteracting the types that want to believe people walked with dinosaurs 10000 years ago. The problem is lying to young people that they have any real opportunity to work in fields with such limited employment prospects.
To be sure, mostly none of the popular science ever proposes that pursuing science will make you gainfully employed. When choosing major in College, I had to choose between Physics, which I absolutely loved and had got the highest grades in first year of college, and computer science, which I knew absolutely nothing about. However, I did know 2 things: 1) There were a lot more jobs in CS than Physics and 2) Since I knew absolutely nothing about computers (I never owned a personal computer), studying them in college would be possibly the best way to genuinely understand them. Coming from a lower middle-class family, 1) was extremely important. I chose CS, and have never regretted it.
I hope more kids in College and high school realize that a) working physics professionally is very different from what is portrayed in popular science and b) you really have to spend a lot of time thinking about the future in these kind of things.
That said, I still love popular science: interstellar made me want to study Relativity again :).
Academia and industry seem to have different problems but they're actually the same root illness.
My impression of industry so far: they don't get progress. They don't get innovation. They have problems, but they they don't understand them and are unable to commit resources to the procedures that are needed to solve them.
Academia, too, has a lot of problems. I left because of the publish or perish mentality. I liked to work on hard problems, and had some successes, but overall it is the numbers that matter not the difficulty. There are an equal number of politics in academia as in industry, though they are different in academia.
In industry, politics often involves a lot of incompetent people in high places following paper work procedures that do not support their supposed cause, while in academia it is more a lot of infighting over government grants and insultingly simple metrics like the number of papers published.
Academia and industry both have the same root problem and it's this: Those Who Can, Do; Those Who Can't, Evaluate. We see them as different cultures with separate sets of values, but the fact is that people who are good at office politics tend not to be good at anything else, so Decisions get made by incompetents. I don't think there's a scalable organizational antidote, because people who are politically adept and competent are incredibly rare.
I think that the power players in academia are even more egregiously incompetent. They often lack basic social and leadership skills. Academia has been dying for 35+ years because its leadership is completely inept at fighting for its people against the cost-cutting mediocrities. Say what you will about MBAs, but I'd rather have one fighting against HR for my budget than an ex-academic. However, the professors are high-IQ incompetents-- though often not that smart, even still-- which makes the cerebral narcissist in all of us a little bit more sympathetic to them.
> its leadership is completely inept at fighting for its people against the cost-cutting mediocrities
The worst thing about the "cost-cutting mediocrities" is the cost-cutting doesn't extend to themselves:
"Forty years ago, America’s colleges employed more professors than administrators. The efforts of 446,830 professors were supported by 268,952 administrators and staffers. Over the past four decades, though, the number of full-time professors or “full-time equivalents”—that is, slots filled by two or more part-time faculty members whose combined hours equal those of a full-timer—increased slightly more than 50 percent. That percentage is comparable to the growth in student enrollments during the same time period. But the number of administrators and administrative staffers employed by those schools increased by an astonishing 85 percent and 240 percent, respectively."[1]
Isn't part of the problem that we place this artificial wall between academia and industry? I often found myself confused in this respect. I attained my PhD a number of years ago, and found this an invaluable experience, which has no doubt helped me to excel in industry, however I still meet people (developers and senior level executives especially) who think academia is about locking yourself in a room and writing stuff without building anything useful. Ironically, these are the same people who build products and code without surveying the field, understanding what is already out there and building on top of existing solutions. Their naivity and ignorance is such that they believe they are building something truly unique, and will get it right first time, every time.
It seems to me that we should stop standing on each side of the fence and looking down on each other, and start working together. We might actually achieve something great it if we do that.
Regards the OP, if it was the right time for him/her to leave, that's great. Nobody should continue on a path that they do not find fulfilling. It says nothing about academia, or industry though. It only reveals the feelings of the author.
The true travesty here, is that he/she will find it extremely difficult to pick up that work again and find a place in a university if they change their mind in the future. Our system in the UK is broken, since you only get a single shot at academia -- unless of course you are independently wealthy.
Perhaps this is the cause of the divide. You are either in, or you are out -- and once you make your choice there is no going back.
>Maybe a handful, I said. And then I realized that there was no way I could work on that problem. Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives. What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience?
I wanted to say at first that if he was in it for the sake of being a successful, high-impact researcher, he was in science for the wrong reasons. But really, unless you are one of those high-impact people, you aren't getting tenure. I don't feel like tenure is asking for much if you're a hard worker who's produced some novel results. I get that science is supposed to be about passion, but you can't support a family on passion alone.
> A career in academia would just require even more proving my worthiness...I'd constantly be evaluated. That's not what I was looking for.
He's in for a rude awakening. You're only as good as your last envelope.
A much more accurate statement is you might not get tenure if you're not high-impact, but you certainly won't if you aren't.
Also, of course you are evaluated in anything in life, from the desk to the friendly get-together. The issue with academia has always been its ROI. You invest a lot into the academic life, your time, your youth, your energy, your mental state, all to graduate close to 30 make a salary some of the people you tutor make fresh out of college? All while working 50-60 hour weeks...it isn't quite the life.
Perhaps being in a start-up requires such dedication too, but that can be seen a risk that can yield a great reward. For academe, there is no reward, save the "academic points."
This [1] says it well. At least if you work hard and stress and have no life in the "real world", you'd have the chance of monetary compensation. Really, in academia, unless you are lucky enough to become a tenure prof, all you have is your pride that you understand something no else cares to. That, and the occasional free pizza and beer.
> For academe, there is no reward, save the "academic points."
I disagree. First of all, there is a rather high place in the societal ladder. A university professor is still somebody who induces awe, plus the job has this "uncorrupted by money" vibe which you cannot get as a manager/entrepreneur. Furthermore, you have an extremely high position in the local society, i.e. at the university.
But I think the real reward is not vain or materialistic -- the reward is doing something you adore, and something you find a lot of meaning in. Both teaching and research are extremely fulfilling for me (as a PhD student). Personally, I can think of other jobs in compsci/programming that would be fulfilling, but they are likely as unavailable as the university position.
I say in the second sentence in that paragraph that it is unless you become a tenured professor that you have nothing but your pride. I recall a study once that indentified a university, tenured professor as the lowest stress to pay ratio job in existence. Of course, few in the academy can reach tenure-ship given the over-supply, so you most likely will toil as a post-doc for a long time in academia.
And no, the jobs you are thinking of are certainly not just as unavailable. For fuck's sake man, the number of university positions in the US for my field, physics, is in the single thousands...universities themselves have 3000 jobs in total[0]. That's total number...and this is with 1700 PhD's awarded per year[1]. It looks a little better for you in compsci [2],[3], so may be you have a right to be more optimistic than me.
Perhaps an important thing here is the area of study. Physics, IMO, is pretty bleak, especially for theorists.
> And no, the jobs you are thinking of are certainly not just as unavailable.
It really depends on what you can see yourself doing. My closest compsci friends are all employed by either big companies working on their backend or by "young hip" companies doing web solutions for the local tobacco companies and the like.
Anything that I would like to do would have to (subjectively) help humanity as much as research/teaching; and getting jobs like these either requires a whole lot of dedication (leaving your family behind, moving to Asia/Africa) or a lot of connections (governmental public good jobs are rare for compsci people).
But really, unless you are one of those high-impact people, you aren't getting tenure.
This really depends on where you are looking for tenure. If you're at, say, a top-30 research-focused institution, then yes, that's what they angle for: big grants and "high-impact research". But if you enjoy and/or are good at teaching (obviously not all researchers do or are), there are a lot of places where getting tenure is more a matter of doing some interesting research, combined with teaching at least fairly well, and being perceived as an asset to your department/university's community (ideally excelling in one of those three areas, but not necessarily all three). To pick some examples: tenure at, say, UT-Dallas, Cal Poly, or Occidental College is totally different from tenure at Stanford, UIUC, or MIT.
I find myself in the exact opposite situation. Been working for industry since I was 18 and am 28 now. Never got a degree. I'm tired of working in a consumer setting where everything has to be faster, better, more pleasing for the client. I've now moved to academia because I want to work on things that are foundation for other work and not always things that are immediately useful to people. However I see how he had enough of that always being examined environment, but in Industry you'll also get examined, this time by a cranky costumer that wants a button a little more to the left, and who doesn't have the professional skills to examine your work.
I think it's because OP never had the xp of working in industry and think grass is greener on the other side. I also made the switch from consumer web to academia.
However I understand from his perspective which is from someone who wants stay on research, go from PhD to post-doc to to fellow to principal investigator to whatever. Competition is intense and everyone along the way is selected for people who are so interested in their work that they might be very unbalanced in other area's.
It's all about trade-off's. I personally would rather trade for working on things that I find interesting and technical than A/B testing. But I can understand someone who is tired of academia and wants to live in the "real world" for a change. I can also understand people who are very happy doing things that they think are very engaging/fun/important in consumer web and respect that.
So interested in their work? Nah, it is luck and politics. Sadly, most of the selections are not for hard-core research chops.
The whole grant and annual weighing scales approach nowadays strongly dis-incentivizes risk-taking. Without risk-taking with great big brass genitalia, research results are pretty pedestrian.
"As a PhD student you get to choose some interesting problem and work on that, right? That's what I naively imagined before I started at the institute. Some day at lunch I told my supervisor about this idea I had. We could take his fluid simulation method from computer graphics and apply it to a problem related to molten polymers. There was this experiment by a group of applied physicists that would fit nicely. He asked me how many people would be interested in the problem. Maybe a handful, I said. And then I realized that there was no way I could work on that problem. Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives. What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience? To be successful you need to target a large audience, and not just pursue whatever obscure problem takes your fancy."
As a society, don't we want our young academics to be able to pursue their intellectual passions, no matter how obscure? A lot of original research is produced in areas that others have overlooked or considered unimportant. Do we really want a "citation market" to determine whether researchers can pursue their passions?
For a number of reasons, no, we don't want PhD students to research whatever random topics pop into their head.
For a start, PhD students don't know how to do research. That's one reason one does a PhD: to learn how to do research. That means listening to your supervisor and working on problems they suggest, at least in the early part of your PhD. I have seen many PhD students, including myself, arrive with half-baked ideas that go nowhere. Learning to formulate a useful research problem is a part of what you are taught.
The second reason is that resources are finite. You don't get to piss around with other people's money anymore than other adults do.
But at the same time, if the supervisor thinks your idea is good in all ways except for likely citation count, then why should you be prevented from researching that?
> I have seen many PhD students, including myself, arrive with half-baked ideas that go nowhere.
Another way to look at it is that failure is a part of learning, and chasing those half-baked ideas can build experience (by finding out what doesn't work).
Influence matters. And academia attributes influence to merit. But the shape of influence is different from field to field and specialization to specialization. Moreover, it’s difficult to pinpoint a field and specialization where citation impact isn’t limited to “a handful of people.”
This is probably a very naive question, but could somebody explain how education is becoming so expensive in the United States and yet there seem to be so few tenure-track positions available? I understand that the number of Ph.D.s has grown quite significantly in the last few decades, but so has the cost of attendance of almost all colleges. The number of tenure-track positions, meanwhile, hasn't caught up at all.
I'm still amazed to consider that the college I attended, had I not received scholarships, would have cost me $50,000/year to attend in total. Yet I can't actually think of a single faculty member in the department I majored in who attained tenure while I was there. I do remember somebody joining with a Ph.D. from Harvard, having studied under a renowned mentor, for a non-tenure-track and low-paying "lecturer" post. This greatly talented person, naturally, is now gone, presumably at some other transient and low-paying post elsewhere. I just looked up one of my professors, who was a brilliant topologist and knot theorist doing a postdoc, and was surprised to find she's abandoned academia and is working as an analyst in oil & gas now.
The title "Leaving Academia" made me expect the author to have been in academia for some time, and not as a student, and to have decided to move on to something else. The article is not about leaving academia, but about not joining academia.
The writer did join academia, just not for very long.
If I were to get a job at Google, work there for a week, and quit, I think it would just fine to write an essay about "Leaving Google".
How long do you think you need to be working at X before you can write that you are leaving X? Or rather, when do you think you actually join academia? Is a 6th year graduate student, pre-defense, still not yet part of academia?
I agree with you, and I see that you agree with me in that it's inappropriate to conclude that "Leaving X" implies that a person was at X 'for some time.'
This attitude is exactly what made me leave. I've spent more than seven years at university, three of them paid to do research, and then I get told 'you're not really part of the club yet, you're just a student'.
I had not read your article properly, and I got the impression that you were still considering whether to join the PhD programme. Now I have reread it and you said you had already started the programme, so you are right, apologies.
But then why do you imply, in the conclusion, that leaving academia is like stopping educating yourself? If what you were doing was mainly educating yourself (which was not the case), then you would have been exactly "just a student".
> A career in academia would just require even more proving my worthiness.
I do not think the industry will accept you without you regularly proving your worthiness. Of course, a PhD is something special so I understand anybody would not want that, but not for the reasons given in the article. Same for crazy ideas and being educated. I believe someone could have given roughly the same reasons for "Leaving X" because she's tired of doing the things that X requires. At least we learn about what doing a PhD entitles you to do, but as others have pointed out, this is quite a rude awakening.
>I do not think the industry will accept you without you regularly proving your worthiness.
Exactly. I left a physics PhD program after my first year because I couldn't stand the environment anymore, and went into software development for an established company. I'm still given "homework" and "exams", still judged on merit of my work, still proving my worthiness of my paycheck everyday. Luckily I had to work throughout undergrad and grad school to afford it, so I already had that knowledge going into my career, but it really sounds like the author of this article did not.
I also left my PhD program shortly after passing quals. I think it's a great time to bail. There are too many great classes you'll have to pass on if you're only long enough to get a masters, and you haven't yet burned a ton of dissertation hours. (Assuming you do it right - I remember my advisor being quite miffed that I wouldn't stop signing up for a full load each semester.) Grad classes really are the best learning bang for the buck/hour I've ever experienced. Just make sure you fill out the paperwork so you do get that MS along the way...
Doing PhD has crossed my mind as well. From reading quite a slew of articles (most of them talking about abandoning academia, few of them happen to be positive), I would cynically summarize: Do a PhD if you are either a) doing it for the prestigious degree or b) because the subject really interests you. Don't do a PhD if a) you are hoping for a tenure or b) expect to earn more. I don't think there's anything inherently "noble" in doing a PhD, so I think the outcome of the decision should entirely depend on how realistic your expectations are.
This is decent advice for many endeavours. To summarize: when choosing what to spend most of your waking hours on, don't just do it for the money, make sure it's something that interests you. Or, at least, that you can get in to.
I remember this article the first time it was posted here. I remember I was not impressed. My opinion in in the interim has not improved. For a start, this should really be titled "Why I dropped out" as you cannot leave an institution to which you do not yet belong. Moreover, the article, then as now, seems as vapid as the comments it inspires; i.e. tall poppy bullshit.
Many people, and I am one, regard grad school as a professional position. Nominally you are there to do your own research and make your own decisions, under advisement of a professor. (I can see some exceptions for a new graduate student who is still doing coursework, but in this case the student had passed the qualifying examination.)
As such, grad students don't really "drop out", just like employees don't really "drop out" of a job when they quit, nor unpaid elected officials don't "drop out" of office when they resign, nor volunteers drop out when they stop doing volunteer work.
Personally I think there was a mistake in the logic. Success as an academic may by related to the number of citations one gets, but it's not a factor which affects one's graduate career. Only the handful of people in your graduation committee needs to be convinced about the work, and once you have the PhD there's no continue on that topic, or stay in academia.
A conclusion I am starting to see at the horizon for myself. Especially as a CS major the academic reality hits you hard - realizing this is probably not the direction you should bet your best years on. Taking the risk can be more fulfilling.
I would by quit interested in your next steps and way down the road.
Autodesk is a massive part of entertainment industry software depending on the products. The deadlines and stress aren't much different either. However if you are into CG there is a lot of opportunity implementing cutting edge research and some room for publishing still in the right role.
One (might) pay off and benefit the world, or it may flop and you have to move onto your next one.
One (might) be influential, or it may be relegated to the annals of some obscure journal, never to read or cared about.
Still, there might be a pay off for one (monetary). The other buys your "academia points". The pay-off is a little more suspect on the academic's side, I think.
"Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives."
Which is why the quality of papers (among other reasons) has gone downhill. I knew a particularly brilliant scientist who would do basic work at a reduced rate in a corporate setting as long as the people actually writing the paper included him in the author list. He shows up on over 1000 papers, many of which are of dubious scientific merit, but because of those kinds of numbers, more and more people flock to him for similar work, without realizing it.
I'm now an independent software developer. I already had a side project that was doing pretty well (Mac App), and I started to work on a second Mac app that I released last summer. I wrote a bit about it on https://eggerapps.at/blog/
Another reason for leaving that I didn't mention in the text was the birth of my first son. I saw how colleagues had little time to spend with their newborns. Now that I'm on my own I can choose myself how much time to spend with my kids.
> I'm now an independent software developer. I already had a side project that was doing pretty well
Is it bringing enough money for you to pay half of your family's bills?
Forgive me for being so direct, but "independent software developer" is a very broad label, and it contains both the successful and the struggling programmers.
Not that being dependent on a family is a bad thing; the only downside is that it is not something that everyone can do.
We did move in with my parents for a year after I quit grad school, which lowered our cost of living significantly. But we no longer rely on family now.
I'll share numbers too: My revenue this year is around 50000€. (mostly sofware sales + some consulting) My take-home salary (after expenses, social security, taxes) will probably be around 30000€, which is significantly above the median income in Austria. It's also more than what I'd make as a junior software developer.
My research involved a lot of programming, and I enjoyed making pretty GUIs for the code I wrote. So I already knew how to make Mac Apps.
I made database apps because I saw an opportunity. I had been thinking about doing something more related to my area of study (physics & computer graphics). However, all I came up with were some vague ideas for games, and games seemed too risky for me.
I do miss some parts of my research (especially maths), but for the most part I'm happy with what I do now.
PhDs in IT do not pay off, at least salary-wise. The time is takes to complete them is much better invested in a regular job, gaining practical experience.
Indeed. I moved academia -> short industry adventure -> academia.
I like both. Industry is more pleasing because you work on products that are directly used and you are judged (at least in a small company) on tangible results. The downside is that work is mostly driven by the most urgent needs or cash flow, so there is far less time to explore certain things deeper.
In academia on the other times, you are judged on getting grants (which is definitely process that is to a large extend out of your hands, and tends to favor people who were already successful in getting grants). On the other hand, you have far more time to explore, try, fail, and try again (as long as you are not a professor).
One should also realize that graduate studies highly differ per country. E.g. I did my PhD in The Netherlands, and there are no tests, or anything alike. I basically got funding for four years to do research, a small amount of teaching and to write my thesis. There was only one serious sanity check after the first year to filter out PhD candidates who were very unlikely to complete a thesis in four years.
I think this is a point that deserves more emphasis. It's easy to forget the degree to which US education is uncommonly expensive, among other things that skew its ROI.
Makes me wonder if I could afford a CS education abroad (being self-taught), without taking loans.
You usually don't have to pay tuition for a phd, especially in the sciences. The USA also tends to have decent stipends, more than or competitive with Europe.
The U.S. stipend is competitive with a lot of European countries, but less so the rich northern European countries (excepting the UK, which is very US-like in its educational system). A typical CS PhD-student salary in the Netherlands is around $35-40k plus pension contribution, and in Denmark it's around $50k plus pension contribution. Partly because these two countries consider PhD students to be salaried MSc-qualified researchers on 3- or 4-year contracts, vaguely like a junior form of postdoc. US stipends are more often in the range of $20-25k with no pension contribution. Although you can also go directly to a PhD from a BSc in the US, whereas you need an MSc first in most of Europe, which complicates the comparison.
Indeed. And there are additional advantages to being an employee as opposed to getting a stipend. E.g. I now work in Germany as a researcher (roughly the equivalent of assistant professor) and my four years as a PhD are counted towards my working experience. My wife and some colleagues who were on a stipend did not get any PhD years counted towards working experience, since to the system 'stipend' means 'student' means 'no real working experience'.
So, income-wise it also gives you an advantage of four years.
Ah, I see. I don't even have an ungrad CS degree, so I haven't looked that closely at the grad numbers. It sounds like the financial part may have been a bad example, with things like life quality and workload being better ones. I'm eager for more cross-comparison data, though.
To put this more bluntly: You should not do a phd in the sciences (in the US) if you are not getting paid. Its indicative that either A) the department has insufficient resources (bad situation) or B) they really don't want you as a graduate student (another bad situation).
I'm currently in graduate school. I'm constantly asking myself why I'm there. It's certainly not for my future job prospects (though in my particular field, they do get better with a Master's degree), and it's not because I want to go into academia (Academia, at least for the social sciences, is slowly dying in my view).
But I do know why I'm there. I'm there to continue to learn new things, to interact with others who are like minded, and to work on problems that I may not get to explore in a paid position for a private company who seeks profits above all.
I could probably write an entire book on what is wrong with academia (the short answer: a lot). But at the same time, I have a freedom to explore that I wouldn't have at even the most liberal companies (unless it was as a pure researcher, which quite frankly are rare positions, especially for a non-PhD).
All this being said, it seems obvious to me that the author made the right decision in his case, however, I think he misunderstood the reasons for going into academia. That might sound naive from my point of view (and to some degree, it absolutely is, but I won't get into that now.), but I also think that it was naive in the author's case to think that the only reason to go into academia is to further his career prospects.
Jumping through all the hoops of academia sucks. I was supposed to graduate in two weeks. Let's just say I won't be. It was quite the punch to the gut when I finally came to realize that I was going to miss the deadline to turn in my thesis. I made the comment to my advisor just two days ago: "I hate this system, as if officially turning in what we've talked about for the past two years means that I will have learned any more than I already do, but if I don't do it, I don't have a piece of paper that certifies me as somewhat knowledgeable in a specific field." Which is pretty normal for almost anyone to note about this academic system. But I know that for many jobs, I need that piece of paper. So it goes. But I didn't go back to school for a job, I went for an education, which I have received.
Academia isn't for everyone of course, but if you go into it just for a better career, I feel many people will be sorely disappointed. If you go into it trying to see how much you can learn and realize that you get out of it, what you put in, you'll still have a lot to complain about, but hopefully it won't be a waste of time.
You will never stop qualifying yourself to other humans for as long as you live, never. It's true that you can choose whether to seek certain of those qualifications, as is shown here. But it never really stops.
I was in academia. Not just a grad student, but achieved the phd and did a post doc. I don't regret any of it. It taught me many invaluable lessons, all of which have been useful in industry starting a company.
My impression of industry so far: they don't get progress. They don't get innovation. They have problems, but they they don't understand them and are unable to commit resources to the procedures that are needed to solve them.
Only the very biggest of tech companies like Google, Palintir, Apple, Facebook, are able to tackle the really hard problem. These are the problems that you can not make an estimate for in terms of completion. The majority of industry will not even entertain this class of problem.
Academia, too, has a lot of problems. I left because of the publish or perish mentality. I liked to work on hard problems, and had some successes, but overall it is the numbers that matter not the difficulty. There are an equal number of politics in academia as in industry, though they are different in academia.
In industry, politics often involves a lot of incompetent people in high places following paper work procedures that do not support their supposed cause, while in academia it is more a lot of infighting over government grants and insultingly simple metrics like the number of papers published.
In short, the author of this post is full of ignorance, and I am only slightly less full of ignorance in that I haven't achieved tenure in academia, and only have several years in industry helping to run a company. None the less, what I learned in academia in terms of the science of computing, it was invaluable.