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…
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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)
> 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.
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".
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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."
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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…