Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

You are discarding opportunity cost in your assessment.

Whats the ROI vs a Masters for people going directly to Industry? Did they even intend to do that or realized the Academic Door was closed for them and had no other choice?

This is an incredibly small slice of roles available to CS PHDs and sometimes adjacent fields. Not really indicative of the larger STEM market and basically irrelevant to non STEM programs.

Can't say for certain if they will be around 4-5 years down the line.

True, but how competitive are those jobs to get? If one goes to a lesser-known university that has a PhD program and does related research are they getting an interview, or are these research jobs intended for specific university pipelines (Harvard, MIT, the usuals, etc.)?

Why pay an American worker 100k + benefits out of college when you can pay an H1B worker 60k for the same level of education and also have a massive amount of leverage over them?

It's a luxury consumption good.

You can have a poorly paid bad time doing lots of things. A PhD isn’t the worst option by a long shot haha.

I agree that it can be fun. I also devised a retirement plan as a graduate student, figuring out what sum of money I would need to live the rest of my life living the graduate student lifestyle without the hassle of being enrolled. Less than a decade after finishing my PhD I was able to walk away from my career into that lifestyle. Certainly not for everyone, but if it floats your boat, it is certainly an achievable plan.

> my retirement plan will be to get into another PhD program for the stipend/insurance

Imagine being a young ambitious student not getting placed into a PhD program because some old dude doing it for the benefits and the lolz took the spot.

Sometimes what you need is less precision, much faster. Carmack's famous inverse square root falls into this category.

If anything it's a lesson that the definition of brilliance is being in the wrong place at the wrong time... ;-)

https://github.com/Duke-QCD/trento/blob/master/src/fast_exp....

Check it out for yourself! I’m not claiming this was some kind of prodigious programming move, just something memorable that stuck with me.

Honestly the whole story sounds like a tall tale to me.

> He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry

I doubt this. Really, really doubt this. Sure, geniuses exist, but I don't buy it.

The standard library implementations use Taylor approximations

> University of Bergen

Don't forget to bring your rain gear!

> This was weirdly exciting and depressing at the same time :)

And, depending on how far north you go, should be taken seriously. In Iceland, out of my exchange students cohort of ~10, once the winter hit, one had to escape home and two were hospitalised after too much drinking. It can be a really tough experience, especially when you don't have close friends/family to contact and lose track of time.

I think that there is some options at University of Oslo for example. I work in geophysics and ML, so I don't know so much. But at some point I entertained the idea of doing a PhD in science fiction which is an option at UiO. There is also a large linguistics department and social sciences faculty as well as two centers for education research.. I imagine there are many options, but I think it is hard for me to know since I don't do that kind of work.

I am more motivated to find jobs that let me think my thoughts than jobs that maximise my income. People often say well but if you make a lot then you can pay for this. I have found that those that make a lot never find the time to pay for it.

> In EU to get ANY money out of pension, you have to work like 30 years at the very same country (not EU).

Quite far from the truth.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/work/retire-abroad/sta...

Eligibility periods

In some EU countries, you must have worked for a minimum period of time to be entitled to a pension.

In such cases, the pension authority has to take into account all the periods you've worked in other EU countries, as if you'd been working in that country all along, to assess whether you're entitled to a pension (principle of aggregation of periods).

How your pension is calculated

Pension authorities in each EU country you've worked in will look at the contributions you've paid into their system, how much you've paid in other countries, and for how long you've worked in different countries.

You mean similar to social security in the US ? Where you only can get anything out of it if you have enough credits?

In fact it is similar in many countries (i.e. UK) where there is a minimum period required to get anything

The 50-55k range is for PhD students, not postdocs. PhDs in Europe often get a much higher pay than in America.

You've looked at postdoc salaries, not PhD salaries. very different. For example in the UK a PhD will get somewhere aroun £19-21k a year, whilst a postdoc will get anywhere from £37-45k a year......

My wife earned that as a postdoc at Stanford, but as a PhD in Oxford earned £14k per year. $55k as a PhD is really really good.

There are no language requirements to be a phd or postdoc at the university of oslo except in the cases where you may need to speak a scandinavian language to study it such as if you are working at the center for nordic linguistics. So no, you do not need to consider this an issue at all.

Norwegians love to speak English.

> What sort of benefits come from getting a Masters

Google will hire you to work on moving protobufs around as an L4, instead of an L3.

A lot of job requirements that I see ask for Masters or PhD, so you’re hitting the minimum requirement plus giving yourself a shot of having applicable work experience (read: doesn’t write spaghetti code). That said, there’s probably a huge selection bias due to my background.

I believe a masters has helped me stand out as a candidate at least. Plus, I learned a great deal about computer engineering! The fundamentals have come in handy.

As someone who hires, my opinion is the exact opposite. A masters is good, but a PhD is at least a yellow flag.

It helped me get a visa for Italy (I took part in a startup accelerator program).

Other than that not much else... I mean you learn things, but you could also learn things from watching YouTube, doing courses and reading books!

I've also seen people do PhD's and from the outside it seems like a lot of them did it just for the title - one of my friends though seems to love Academia and is now a professor.

Machine learning could be hardware as well. I'm in integrated circuit design and there are lots of custom hardware AI accelerators in development. Almost all of the new grads we hire have a masters degree in electrical or computer engineering (not computer science)

A Masters can help with work visas and gaining residencies in some countries

It’s not like interpretability research is immune. You could’ve been in year 4 of your degree when Anthropic released their sparse autoencoder research. It’s just less busy because as you correctly note, industry mostly cares about getting the black box to print money.

> Plus it would be fascinating

You can do research on the weekend even if you’re not in a PhD. I’ve done it. And no one was breathing down my neck to publish it.

yup, if i went to do a PhD interpretability is the only interesting subject for academia IMO right now

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.

> 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.

I agree. If I had a ton of family wealth, I would have pursued a PhD instead of working 9 to 5.

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 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.

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.

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.

> it didn’t lead anywhere

It didn't lead to a job, you mean? There's a lot out there to be gained from education other than getting a job afterwards.

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.

I believe RenTech only hires from highly numerical fields. E.g. math, physics, compsci.

They also employ <100 PhDs. The entire company is small. Might not be worth mentioning as an employed because the chance of getting in is miniscule.

Correlation does not imply causation (but it does stare at it from across the room and suggestively waggle its eyebrows)

> they just spent a period of about 10 years making sure they were involved in every major financial scandal due to poor judgment.

Hard to imagine any relationship between that outcome and a policy of exclusively hiring a demographic that's notorious for having high intellectual skills but low life experience. Wait, no, not hard. Easy.

It was "acquired" at the demand of the Swiss regulator because it was bankrupt.

This is more accurate. The productive fraction of professors still follow the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule. And even then, these professors aggregate into the elite institutions making it even more skewed.

To get an academic position, you need to have a star advisor either for your degree or postdoc.

> The academic pyramid was never sustainable

Theoretically it wasn't, or every human on Earth would be a PhD candidate within the century.

However there was a period after WW2 where a lot of empty professor chairs needed to be filled and so I believe that people came to expect the growth. So for example you would have the post-war generation push their kids into it, saying "but of course you can be a professor like me, they will be beating down your door to get you hired!" But of course that seems to have stopped around the end of the century.

Most academics teach in departments that don’t grant phds. They’re at liberal arts Colleges or regional state universities. True that statistically only a small percentage of grad students will go on to have their own PhD students, but that doesn’t mean there are no jobs for the rest.

even the company making King's Hawaiian bread probably has a food science PhD, and a materials science PhD, maybe a chemistry PhD, the grain is produced probably with products developed by another chemistry PhD, with a biotech PhD developing the seed, and a crop science PhD running the trials on these altered seeds, treated with pesticides developed by another chemistry PhD working with an entomology PhD sprayed with a machine using programs developed by a CS PhD, on a field monitored by a soil science PhD, then milled on machinery overseen by a mechanical engineering PhD, later using yeast developed by a fermentation science PhD... and maybe there are some math and statistics and economics and marketing PhDs involved somewhere in this. lol

Not that every job in the supply chain requires a PhD, but look at any big company, and it's not like having a PhD in a STEM field is going to hurt your job opportunities for private industry. You just may end up competing for fewer, but better paying jobs.

The situation with humanities PhDs, where you only have an academic position to hope for if you want to use your philosophy PhD or medieval studies PhD or art PhD is a very different situation from someone studying a hard science at the PhD level. Kind of confuses people who only know the infamous situation with humanities PhDs when they realize a STEM PhD can actually lead to a well-paying private industry job.

Yes, for engineering and science a PhD is a path to stable employment, especially if you need to get past international gate keepersz

(Microsoft research is top tier researchers though. PhD is just getting started)

This strikes me as a really strange take on acquiring expertise and experience in one's field?