Here is a possibly unpopular opinion. I have a Phd (got it when I was young). In some areas of computing (e.g. OS, Systems) work gets obsolete fairly quickly. I suspect my PhD topic was useless about 4-10 years after I finished the thesis. Of course, I got a few hundred citations, and this suggests that perhaps more enduring work was done based on mine, but in any case, I don't buy the dent in the universe argument for some fast changing fields (e.g. Deep Learning today). My wife was reading the life story of Louis Pasteur to our 6 year old, and it was remarkable what a dent his contribution made. Most people I knew who finished Phds did not do much of note (and this is fairly elite tier). One person has an algorithm named after them but it is also a bit obsolete (e.g. happened to a lot of classical CV and NLU algorithms post DL).
I was talking to a theoretical Physics PhD at a conference recently, and even he was quite jaded (he switched to CS post PhD). It was obvious that this person was wicked smart and had quant knowledge. So if you want a PhD for transferable skills, go for it! A masters might be faster though.
Do what makes you happy at the end.. it is sort of nice I can drop in the fact I have a PhD and it was probably good for me on the whole .. but if you are thinking of getting a PhD in CS, consider attending top conferences in your field before committing (e.g. SOSP for OS/Systems, CVPR for vision, CHI for HCI,...). I just had no clue what I was getting into and I actively wish someone had given me this sort of info before I got into it. A PhD has a huge opportunity cost.
Whenever anyone asks about pursuing a PhD, I usually tell them it only makes sense if one of more of these hold true: (1) You want to pursue a career in academia or research where the credentialing will matter; (2) You want access to equipment or material that is otherwise difficult to obtain; (3) You want the freedom & flexibility to pursue random interests for another couple years; or (4) You have a deep affinity for a specific topic at the frontiers of human knowledge.
The PhD definitely isn't required if your goal is to maximize learning & earning, apply research to commercialization, or to make a huge dent on the world -- the latter is just exceedingly rare statistically speaking.
Unless you’re a super genius or are super lucky, you’re likely not going to make a dent in any field especially at a PhD level. Not in these days at least.
But the product of a PhD, according to me and many mentors I respect, is you. It’s your mind and experience (not even necessarily the knowledge). A good phd fundamentally transforms who you are as a person. I’d wager a PhD is probably the most reliable way to effect real change in your mind as an adult. I probably realistically lost millions I could have earned in my twenties because I spent 9 years on my higher education (which has nothing to do with what I do now). But I’d not have done most anything different about it!
Caveat being that it needs to be a good PhD with a good mentor - which is harder to find than a good job or even a good partner lol.
> In some areas of computing (e.g. OS, Systems) work gets obsolete fairly quickly
That's a very surprising statement. The number of advances in systems in the 21st century is.. embarrassingly low. It feels like a stale dead field. People keep pumping money into what is basically a dead body at this point.
> consider attending top conferences in your field before committing (e.g. SOSP for OS/Systems, CVPR for vision, CHI for HCI,...). I
I don't think that this is good advice. Certainly I would never suggest it to my own students. It's hard to see what they would gain.
So you go to CVPR or NeurIPS, you see hundreds of posters per session and talk after talk. Maybe you stick around for workshops to interact with people. So what? This gives you zero information about what you will be doing as a PhD student or how useful your PhD will be.
The way to figure out if you want to do a PhD is simple: do research first. Spend a summer in a research lab related to some topic you like and figure out if you like it.
> I was talking to a theoretical Physics PhD at a conference recently, and even he was quite jaded (he switched to CS post PhD).
Speaking of dead fields... I know many postdocs who come from physics into ML because many areas of theoretical physics just don't seem to be going anywhere anymore. Not a good sign!
I think your idea about how this dent is supposed to work is a misconception.
If you made some nontrivial insights that were only temporarily useful but other people used it to make their own insights without having to go through the manyears of doing your work, and then the process repeats, there is something permanent there that would not have happened without your work.
Of course someone else might have done your work in your stead, but the same is true for literally all the other scientific greats we can think off, it's extremely unlikely that we would just end up at a standstill with nobody figuring out what's going on if certain people never existed.
Counterpoint: I wrote my Master Thesis on Value Networks in 2004. While I got a perfect grade on it it was largely unnoticed. Now with Social+ and Crypto getting together, it becomes really useful for my work almost two decades later. So I am saying, give it time.
Louis Pasteur is one of my most favorite scientists. That being said, he won't have been able to do it all on his own. Variolation was practised in Africa, India and China long back[1].
The record shows that [...] Edward Jenner heard a dairymaid say, “I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox.[...]” It fact, it was a common belief that dairymaids were in some way protected from smallpox[1].
That knowledge (regardless of the accuracy of the specific story of the dairymaid) helped Jenner to develop the smallpox vaccine, and that in turn helped Pasteur in coming up with his array of vaccines and other innovations.
So, I would argue that every person who contributes to research is making a dent in the universe. Your published paper may have been the impetus for someone else to make a "visible dent". Publishng papers of failures would have been ideal, but until that happens, every person who contributes to research is contributing to the progress of humanity in the long run.
I started my PhD in software engineering at 51 after decades of work in IT.
The point is that if you value money over knowledge and unique experiences, then by all means keep doing what you love the most.
Some of use are prepared to build up our savings and then live frugally on less than ramen noodles stipend whist pursuing making a tiny dent in the universe of knowledge in a specialized field.
At my university there were dozens of mature age PhD students doing research in a broad spectrum of fields. None of whom I met were rich in materialistic terms.
After hiring many industry researchers at MSc and PhD level, I think the ones with PhDs are better researchers. The knowledge they gained of their niche subject is not that important but their ability to do research is very important.
If you need to do complex multi year research projects (e.g. developing new machine learning algorithms), a PhD is useful. It teaches you how to plan research, break through research blockages and communicate with others to a degree very difficult to gain in any other way.
Very odd to me to see these two stories (late PhD and 'ed') next to each other in HN. Last night I discovered my great aunt's old notebook from her schooldays and posted it on Insta.
She was, to my knowledge, the oldest person to get a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (starting in her retirement and getting it in her '70s). In the late 1990s she explained to me how she would go in to the University computer labs and write her thesis using 'ed'. Even then I was impressed :)
It’s never too late if it’s something you want to do :)
Hell, I have a friend who’s 20 years into his DPhil taking it at a snails pace, but gives him accommodation when he’s in town for the pub.
People talking about how much of a dent you’ll make within your PhDs field… almost definitely zero! Your thesis will probably be read by you, your supervisor, and viva board. You’re still a student and it’s a course on how to do research. It could be fun to dig deep into a subject and that’s a totally awesome reason to do one, making a significant change to your field is very very very unlikely.
The funny thing is that while it is possible to get a PhD at an advanced age, it is probably impossible to land a scientific job at that age.
Sometimes I think when the kids are grown up and I've saved enough for retirement, I'd like to go into science again. Just for fun. I would probably be happy to move to some crazy place and get an intern's salary if the project was interesting and meaningful. Alas, that doesn't seem possible in the academic system.
This bizare notion that university exists for the purpose of getting jobs is fairly recent throughout most of the world, and should be stomped.
Outside of a few specialised fields (medicine, law, etc), the purpose of university was to learn, challenge and grow. This crazy concept that everyone should go there to get a degree for their career is just degrading the institutions and fleecing students of their money.
Actually it gets harder and harder to pursue an academic 'career' if you actually obtain your PhD inside the traditional system later than the age of 30 (e.g. in Germany), if you are not willing to change the academic system to circumvent recent rules of 'academic age' associated with a lot of newly created tenure positions. Funnily it will actually be quite easy to get a professorship at one of our universities of applied sciences if you come from industry with a track record and have a PhD (even obtained at 60). At the same time salary of a professor (at least for his work at the uni) will be more comparable to junior staff in other parts of the industry/world. The academic job market is very strange. General recommendation: don't do your PhD if you care mostly about this part and do not want to take a huge risk.
If your goal is actually “pursue scientific advances” rather than “put food on the table”, “make sure I get a job when I graduate” or “make my PI look good”, then doing it at 61 makes perfect sense.
My aunt did her PhD after she retired. Through working for decades in her field she had developed a hunch and a personal theory about the best way to do a thing, and she basically just wanted to see if she was right.
As much as PhD students are often "funded" by their university, they're only really surviving at best. I'd like to do a PhD more than almost anything. However, at 41 and well into a career with each job paying higher than the last, the opportunity cost is becoming more and more prohibitive. Stepping back from earning (and saving!) for five years seems like a kiss of death to me and a virtual guarantee that I won't be able to retire comfortably. These kinds of articles, while well meaning, really irk me. They come across as completely tone death and inadvertently cast a fair bit of light on the author's personal financial situation (or perhaps their lack of awareness of it).
Doing a PhD later in my life is also my bucket list and I suspect I probably won’t be able to cross it off unless I really prioritise it or get lucky. That being said I think you are being a bit unfair to the author. They do acknowledge that you need to have an opportunity.
> My advice is: if you have the opportunity to dive into a new field, take it
Also, you are 41 and I would definitely agree that doing one when you are in your 40s would be almost impossible due to things like career, kids and mortgages etc. But the author around 60! I don’t think it’s “tone deaf” to suggest that one may be able to find some freedom to squeeze in a phd while working part time after working till 60.
Edit: I will acknowledge that having a good job and being able to comfortably retire or cut income around 60 is a privilege that many people unfortunately won’t have. But I don’t think its unachievable though.
At least here in Sweden it is not uncommon for employers to help sponsor employees getting their PhD. The basic deal is you split your time 50/50 between work and study and your research has to be something directly relevant and useful to to company and what you do there. Often you will be directly applying the research you do at the university to a project you have at work, and your work project will be the 'platform' on which your research is tested and evaluated.
In exchange the company will pay you 50% of your salary plus a stipend so that your total take home salary doesn't drop off too much. Does such a thing exist where you live?
I'm wondering if you would define a higher than median US salary to be "surviving at best", as most CS PhD programs are at that amount plus health insurance. But certainly far from a FAANG salary, and I agree that there are disciplines usually with smaller programs that are "surviving at best."
> Still, being a part-time graduate student while running a business wasn’t easy. I forgot the meaning of ‘spare time’ for a while, and my company took a financial hit because I could not work as much as I had before, and had to turn down clients.
It's somewhat different if you can get a PhD part-time and have the income of a business to support you. By all means, get a PhD on the side if you can make it work.
I got my phd in communication. Some times when I feel restless at my current job I think about a career change but I would never get another phd. Go to school and take some classes? Sure. I've thought about that a lot. But go through the pressure of preparing a dissertation and defending it again? No thanks.
This is so awesome! I like to think it’s our life experiences that really bring a lot to science. So much of it is interdisciplinary these days and there’s so much opportunity to explore and be creative.
I think there are actually many advantages to doing a PhD at an older age. Especially after having a fairly long work experience and if you can bring that to another field say Biology.
I am going to go back to school and get either a chemical or electrical engineering b.s., and then maybe go on to phd, at 51. then we will see about graduate level.
I know lots of people still working at 75, so 20 - 30 year for my final career is longer than I spent at any previous career so far.
Reading articles like this makes me wish I'd pursued a degree. Simply because without a degree, there is no path to a PhD or any postgrad research. Not that those are currently on my radar, but maybe when I'm in my 50s I'll regret not having the option.
you can always start now by doing an undergrad. :)
I've had students aged above 50 years old in my undergrad degree, and I plan on going back to school myself for another undergrad in an unrelated field in my 30s.
It's about the journey, not the destination. The inspirational thing with this story is the combination of insight, skill, and hard work. The degree is the reward for that.
Because the "why" is always going to be personal. A PhD in CS is never going to be a sane financial choice, and it has heavy risks if you find yourself with a bad advisor. Anyone who has thought about doing a PhD critically knows that there is no reason to tell someone else to do one, and that their reasons for doing one likely only apply to them.
I learned a lot in my PhD that I wouldn't have learned in my subsequent engineering job: Public speaking with confidence, how to be proactive in your job, how to apply for public funding, teaching experience. How to present results, and how to write. I had exposure to what (at that time) were rare computing resources, which is useful now with in the cloud era. And I learned a ton about my specific field of course - which is probably not monetarily useful, but was a lot of fun and you can't learn it in such depth anywhere else.
As someone with a CS PhD and 7 years in industry, I can tell you that they will teach you different stuff. Unsurprisingly. Hard to compare the "amount of knowledge" though. Even if your only goal is becoming a good engineer it is not obvious to me what the best path is. Yes, you learn a lot in industry the first couple of years, but those things you will also learn when you enter industry after the PhD. So 4 years after a master you are definitely a better engineer if you went straight into industry. But 10 years after a master, comparing 10 years in industry vs 4 year PhD vs 6 year industry it's not as clear cut anymore.
Okay, do it. Indeed I've seen it happen, but... it requires a "certain kind of person" to pull it off. And I certainly wouldn't bet on it as a probability.
It's very easy for newly minted engineers to get sucked into the grind. Most entry level engineering work consists of organizing and arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting, bureaucracy, and attending meetings. It's easy to become so busy with those things that you forget your math & theory (or whatever fundamentals you learned in your field). Many engineers are happy to operate the machines (CAD, IDE, etc.) all day long, and get paid a lot.
To learn more in those 3 years requires some combination of potential, motivation, and luck. You might be someone who refused to join the grind, and were strong enough to get away with, or found a great mentor. You might be capable of grinding for 8 hours, then going home and immersing yourself in a fructifying side project.
Granted, a PhD doesn't guarantee any of those things either. It also requires potential, motivation, and luck. There's massive attrition in PhD programs, and they will let you render yourself unemployable. There's no filter at the start of the PhD program that weeds out people who will struggle with the soft skills required for success in higher level jobs.
Depends pretty much if the company is doing real engineering, the one accepted by the Engineering Order, and not putting an "engineer" label on coders out of boot camps.
They teach entirely different things. My first 3 years working taught me a lot about the real world practicalities of writing useful software, as a team, that you can charge money for. It taught me very little about doing research or the cutting edge of my field. I suspect a PhD would be the exact opposite.
[+] [-] brutus1213|4 years ago|reply
I was talking to a theoretical Physics PhD at a conference recently, and even he was quite jaded (he switched to CS post PhD). It was obvious that this person was wicked smart and had quant knowledge. So if you want a PhD for transferable skills, go for it! A masters might be faster though.
Do what makes you happy at the end.. it is sort of nice I can drop in the fact I have a PhD and it was probably good for me on the whole .. but if you are thinking of getting a PhD in CS, consider attending top conferences in your field before committing (e.g. SOSP for OS/Systems, CVPR for vision, CHI for HCI,...). I just had no clue what I was getting into and I actively wish someone had given me this sort of info before I got into it. A PhD has a huge opportunity cost.
[+] [-] beambot|4 years ago|reply
The PhD definitely isn't required if your goal is to maximize learning & earning, apply research to commercialization, or to make a huge dent on the world -- the latter is just exceedingly rare statistically speaking.
[+] [-] ramraj07|4 years ago|reply
But the product of a PhD, according to me and many mentors I respect, is you. It’s your mind and experience (not even necessarily the knowledge). A good phd fundamentally transforms who you are as a person. I’d wager a PhD is probably the most reliable way to effect real change in your mind as an adult. I probably realistically lost millions I could have earned in my twenties because I spent 9 years on my higher education (which has nothing to do with what I do now). But I’d not have done most anything different about it!
Caveat being that it needs to be a good PhD with a good mentor - which is harder to find than a good job or even a good partner lol.
[+] [-] light_hue_1|4 years ago|reply
That's a very surprising statement. The number of advances in systems in the 21st century is.. embarrassingly low. It feels like a stale dead field. People keep pumping money into what is basically a dead body at this point.
> consider attending top conferences in your field before committing (e.g. SOSP for OS/Systems, CVPR for vision, CHI for HCI,...). I
I don't think that this is good advice. Certainly I would never suggest it to my own students. It's hard to see what they would gain.
So you go to CVPR or NeurIPS, you see hundreds of posters per session and talk after talk. Maybe you stick around for workshops to interact with people. So what? This gives you zero information about what you will be doing as a PhD student or how useful your PhD will be.
The way to figure out if you want to do a PhD is simple: do research first. Spend a summer in a research lab related to some topic you like and figure out if you like it.
> I was talking to a theoretical Physics PhD at a conference recently, and even he was quite jaded (he switched to CS post PhD).
Speaking of dead fields... I know many postdocs who come from physics into ML because many areas of theoretical physics just don't seem to be going anywhere anymore. Not a good sign!
[+] [-] rnd420_69|4 years ago|reply
If you made some nontrivial insights that were only temporarily useful but other people used it to make their own insights without having to go through the manyears of doing your work, and then the process repeats, there is something permanent there that would not have happened without your work.
Of course someone else might have done your work in your stead, but the same is true for literally all the other scientific greats we can think off, it's extremely unlikely that we would just end up at a standstill with nobody figuring out what's going on if certain people never existed.
[+] [-] jsemrau|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdevr|4 years ago|reply
The record shows that [...] Edward Jenner heard a dairymaid say, “I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox.[...]” It fact, it was a common belief that dairymaids were in some way protected from smallpox[1].
That knowledge (regardless of the accuracy of the specific story of the dairymaid) helped Jenner to develop the smallpox vaccine, and that in turn helped Pasteur in coming up with his array of vaccines and other innovations.
So, I would argue that every person who contributes to research is making a dent in the universe. Your published paper may have been the impetus for someone else to make a "visible dent". Publishng papers of failures would have been ideal, but until that happens, every person who contributes to research is contributing to the progress of humanity in the long run.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
A saying in my circles is that the less likely someone credentialed can operate on a human heart, the more likely they’ll tell you they’re a doctor
[+] [-] GianFabien|4 years ago|reply
The point is that if you value money over knowledge and unique experiences, then by all means keep doing what you love the most.
Some of use are prepared to build up our savings and then live frugally on less than ramen noodles stipend whist pursuing making a tiny dent in the universe of knowledge in a specialized field.
At my university there were dozens of mature age PhD students doing research in a broad spectrum of fields. None of whom I met were rich in materialistic terms.
[+] [-] NonEUCitizen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martingoodson|4 years ago|reply
If you need to do complex multi year research projects (e.g. developing new machine learning algorithms), a PhD is useful. It teaches you how to plan research, break through research blockages and communicate with others to a degree very difficult to gain in any other way.
[+] [-] limbicsystem|4 years ago|reply
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb3Y6M1sYW-/?utm_medium=copy_lin...
She was, to my knowledge, the oldest person to get a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (starting in her retirement and getting it in her '70s). In the late 1990s she explained to me how she would go in to the University computer labs and write her thesis using 'ed'. Even then I was impressed :)
[+] [-] exdsq|4 years ago|reply
Hell, I have a friend who’s 20 years into his DPhil taking it at a snails pace, but gives him accommodation when he’s in town for the pub.
People talking about how much of a dent you’ll make within your PhDs field… almost definitely zero! Your thesis will probably be read by you, your supervisor, and viva board. You’re still a student and it’s a course on how to do research. It could be fun to dig deep into a subject and that’s a totally awesome reason to do one, making a significant change to your field is very very very unlikely.
[+] [-] captainmuon|4 years ago|reply
Sometimes I think when the kids are grown up and I've saved enough for retirement, I'd like to go into science again. Just for fun. I would probably be happy to move to some crazy place and get an intern's salary if the project was interesting and meaningful. Alas, that doesn't seem possible in the academic system.
[+] [-] Handytinge|3 years ago|reply
Outside of a few specialised fields (medicine, law, etc), the purpose of university was to learn, challenge and grow. This crazy concept that everyone should go there to get a degree for their career is just degrading the institutions and fleecing students of their money.
[+] [-] riedel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yrgulation|4 years ago|reply
Edit: or as soon as i have enough money in the bank to not care about work.
[+] [-] refurb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dagw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davesque|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creakingstairs|4 years ago|reply
> My advice is: if you have the opportunity to dive into a new field, take it
Also, you are 41 and I would definitely agree that doing one when you are in your 40s would be almost impossible due to things like career, kids and mortgages etc. But the author around 60! I don’t think it’s “tone deaf” to suggest that one may be able to find some freedom to squeeze in a phd while working part time after working till 60.
Edit: I will acknowledge that having a good job and being able to comfortably retire or cut income around 60 is a privilege that many people unfortunately won’t have. But I don’t think its unachievable though.
[+] [-] dagw|4 years ago|reply
In exchange the company will pay you 50% of your salary plus a stipend so that your total take home salary doesn't drop off too much. Does such a thing exist where you live?
[+] [-] whathappenedto|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|4 years ago|reply
Getting a PhD at 60 might not help society as getting it at 30, but it certainly will keep your mind flexible at old age.
[+] [-] bachmeier|4 years ago|reply
It's somewhat different if you can get a PhD part-time and have the income of a business to support you. By all means, get a PhD on the side if you can make it work.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarenmf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TedShiller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrMan|4 years ago|reply
I know lots of people still working at 75, so 20 - 30 year for my final career is longer than I spent at any previous career so far.
[+] [-] elric|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] achenet|4 years ago|reply
I've had students aged above 50 years old in my undergrad degree, and I plan on going back to school myself for another undergrad in an unrelated field in my 30s.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bo1024|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voxl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mgaunard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captainmuon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Epa095|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
It's very easy for newly minted engineers to get sucked into the grind. Most entry level engineering work consists of organizing and arranging things, fitting things together, troubleshooting, bureaucracy, and attending meetings. It's easy to become so busy with those things that you forget your math & theory (or whatever fundamentals you learned in your field). Many engineers are happy to operate the machines (CAD, IDE, etc.) all day long, and get paid a lot.
To learn more in those 3 years requires some combination of potential, motivation, and luck. You might be someone who refused to join the grind, and were strong enough to get away with, or found a great mentor. You might be capable of grinding for 8 hours, then going home and immersing yourself in a fructifying side project.
Granted, a PhD doesn't guarantee any of those things either. It also requires potential, motivation, and luck. There's massive attrition in PhD programs, and they will let you render yourself unemployable. There's no filter at the start of the PhD program that weeds out people who will struggle with the soft skills required for success in higher level jobs.
[+] [-] nikanj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dagw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] physicsguy|4 years ago|reply