Hmmm. This is an interesting spin the Brown Professor has taken on the PhD application process.
For those interested in a career in research and development, a PhD is almost a must. Getting on to a prestigious PhD programme is incredibly competitive, and as someone who has gone through the whole process and seen it from both sides, I can say that I've seen individuals who'd make great computer science researchers not being given an opportunity because they don't tick the right "boxes".
Sure it's not perfect, but worth a shot if you're interested.
For those interested in a career in development, a PhD is rarely helpful. For the PhD candidate, it can even be counterproductive, as any gains in initial salary will be more than offset by the lost salary during the 5-6 years of the PhD.
i will vehemently argue that a Ph.D. in CS is one of the best ways that a young hacker can spend his/her 20s, regardless of which career they end up pursuing in the future. pursuing a Ph.D. + interning at several companies during summertimes = amazing combo for a wide variety of future careers.
the ONLY enduring downside (which you mentioned) is the lost income.
> i will vehemently argue that a Ph.D. in CS is one of the best ways that a young hacker can spend his/her 20s
No need to argue that point, because I'm not arguing against it. Look at the comment that I was replying to:
> For those interested in a career in research and development, a PhD is almost a must.
A PhD is a must for a career in research. It is not a must for a career in development. We use the term "R&D," but those are quite different things. There's a lot less "R" around, and a lot more "D."
When I say that the PhD is "rarely helpful," I do not mean that it is totally useless. I mean that the person who would otherwise have done the PhD is probably a self-starter who would've done other equally-valuable things in the meantime. Different things, certainly. But unlikely to be worse than what you would've done in the PhD. Thus, it is not helpful compared to what else you could've done in the meantime.
For a career in the "D" side of computer science "R&D," it's about your technical skills and experiences. Doesn't matter if you acquired them while doing a PhD, or in a company, or working on open source. This is very different from a career in research, where it is much more important to have a piece of paper with "PhD" written on it.
"I mean that the person who would otherwise have done the PhD is probably a self-starter who would've done other equally-valuable things in the meantime." -good point! i agree with that a lot. i see what you mean now.
> In my experience, the people who can do the D are better at the R.
Agreed. But less so, the other way around.
Which is why development jobs don't reward the PhD enough to pay for the opportunity cost. It counts as 6 years of industry experience -- which you could've gotten in 6 years of working in industry.
Do you have any thoughts on how to get started on this road? I feel like I missed the boat sometimes, though I'm using doing interesting-ish work professionally and in open source. I'm not interested in chasing the framework-of-the-week, I want to work on tools that advance how we think about software.
This may be something I do later in life, but I feel very wired for R&D + tooling, and a bit locked out of these types of jobs without a PhD.
Its never too late to get started down the PhD road. At least in my department, most PhD canidates aren't fresh out of school, they've usually taken at least a year or two and worked in industry of some sort and then applied.
My own experience: I had had no research experience in school and worked in industry for a bit before decided that it bored me to death, but I felt shut out from PhDs at the time. I started looking into research that might be interesting and sent out a bunch of emails to professors at universities explaining who I was, my goals and asking if they were looking for a research tech or anything. I probably sent out like 30 letters, got a handful or responses. I took a bit of a pay cut, but I got a fantastic job that I loved as a research programmer for a professor. I worked there for a while, worked on some interesting research, read a ton of papers, got a handful of co-authors on papers, and then was able to apply to grad programs with a strong application.
Pick a specific area, read lots of papers, find out what the bleeding edge statements 'we can do X' and 'Y would be nice and seems within reach but we're not doing it now' are there.
Do something interesting and novel based on that - not neccessarily a detailed implementation, but at least a quick&dirty proof of concept; and then also describe and publish it as a formal paper, it's not particularly much work compared to actually doing the stuff. For example, if you "want to work on tools that advance how we think about software" then picking some specific narrow area of how, say, Bret Victor's concepts could/should be implemented in real practice would be an interesting topic.
All of this can be done w/o a PhD as a hobby/side-project, and such a project+publication would also be a ticket to a decent PhD spot.
mattgreenrocks it's never too late! But, I agree without a PhD R&D jobs are difficult to come by.
It sounds like you know what you want to work on. My advise would be to do some more reading in the area and find research papers in your field. Soon you'll know how to extend or improve on prior work. At this point it's a good idea to identify schools and supervisors you want to work with, especially those whose papers you've read or reach you are interested in extending. You might even propose a research collaboration with them based on the papers you read. This is a good way to open channel of communication and get your foot in the door.
There's a great deal that can be said on how to get into a PhD programme. Let me know if you want to continue this discussion offline.
For those interested in a career in research and development, a PhD is almost a must. Getting on to a prestigious PhD programme is incredibly competitive, and as someone who has gone through the whole process and seen it from both sides, I can say that I've seen individuals who'd make great computer science researchers not being given an opportunity because they don't tick the right "boxes".
Sure it's not perfect, but worth a shot if you're interested.