My experience was quite different from that of OP, and I suspect most people who walk that path. I'm 56 in a few days, and got my PhD in computer science in 1983. I was lucky enough to go to a high school that had a real computer, a PDP-8M, and I was hooked five minutes after I sat down at the DecWriter.
At college, I was theoretically pre-med. A month into my freshman year (1974), I went to a party at the house of a revered EE professor, who happened to be a friend of the family. I was talking with someone, another professor, about my interest in computers, and he told me in no uncertain terms that there was no future in that. I was crushed. I was seriously bummed out for weeks. But it was what I loved to do, so I kept doing it, taking whatever courses were available, and hacking on my own projects.
I cleverly sabotaged all my medical school interviews. My interviewers were able to detect my lack of interest in medicine and my great enthusiasm about computers, and wisely rejected me.
I graduated, and wanting to do nothing but play with computers, I got a job in NYC, writing software, and because that wasn't enough, I also went to grad school at night. I decided to do a PhD because that seemed like the best way to keep playing with computers. My thought process was really that shallow. I wasn't thinking about industry vs. academe, future earning potential, or any other practical matters. I saw that I wouldn't finish my PhD while working, so I decided to do grad school full time.
I was lucky enough to choose McGill for grad school, after leaving New York. I sort of just fell into it, because I had gone there undergrad, I liked it, and my girlfriend was going there for medical school. I was lucky in the sense that it was perfectly suited to my personality. It wasn't a funding powerhouse, but between teaching and research funds, a student could support himself easily. My PhD adviser was a wonderful man, low-key, with some fun things he was investigating, but he wasn't building an empire, built on the backs of enslaved grad students. We were just looking at interesting problems together.
I graduated, and taught at UMass/Amherst for two years. And then it hit me. What a grad student was supposed to do, and what a faculty member was supposed to do. A faculty member starts building his empire, with insane focus on getting tenure. He or she gets tenure and builds a bigger empire, and spends an inordinate amount of time chasing funding. Grad students do the fun work, working very hard, for a very long time. I had no idea how to play this game, and no interest.
I left, and a few years later found myself at my first startup. It was similar to UMass. Instead of professors, there are entrepreneurs, insanely focused, and whose main job it is to get money to fund the work. Instead of grad students are the early employees, who make the vision real. I was much happier as an early employee, being a low-key introvert, who loves technical problems more than business problems. My PhD caused some large degree of distrust -- if I have that background, I'm obviously interested in writing academic papers more than writing software. But I still loved playing with computers, and startups are a great place to do that. I wrote a lot of software.
Epilogue: At my current startup, a number of our customers have a problem that happened to be exactly in the area of my PhD research. I spent a very enjoyable few weeks implementing my PhD thesis for these customers. 30 years later, my PhD ideas finally shipped.
tl;dr: I did a PhD to keep doing what I was drawn to. My career has been incredibly rewarding, and even charmed, and it is so atypical (I think) that I can't advise anyone to pursue a PhD based on my experience.
Another data point: My wife is a relatively recent PhD (6 years out). Her experience has been nothing but amazing.
When it comes to academia your field of study matters. Alot. My wife is a behavioral accounting researcher, which is a high-demand field with incredibly low supply. Her experience, compared to other disciplines, just couldn't be any more different. She's highly paid and does exactly what she loves.
It helps that she's really good at it I suppose. She received early tenure and will likely be promoted to full professor early as well. She publishes routinely and is active in service even though, given her discipline, she really doesn't need to be.
tldr; If your passion is accounting I'd highly recommend pursuing that PhD.
Umm, so what is behavioral accounting? I did google it, and it suggests that Steve Jobs (when he was alive) was a major asset of Apple and should be priced into the company's stock value.
It's like behavioral economics (Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational, etc..) but focused purely on how people are influenced by information, specifically accounting information.
> My PhD adviser was a wonderful man, low-key, with some fun things he was investigating, but he wasn't building an empire, built on the backs of enslaved grad students. We were just looking at interesting problems together.
That sounds like so much fun.
Hey, what was your PhD on? Can you talk about the product you shipped?
My research was on spatial query processing -- z-order-based techniques. The idea is to map spatial objects to one dimension by noting how a space-filling curve (z-order) passes in and out of the object. Overlapping objects can then be found by simple operations on 1-d data structures supporting random and sequential access, (e.g. sorted array, btree). I believe that the same transformation is used in geohashes.
The product is Akiban Server, a database system. I implemented nearest neighbor and point containment queries, and integrated it with our query optimizer. (You can download it from akiban.com and try it out.)
It probably won't actually matter but it could for some who do something similar to you, but are you sure you actually own your research and that the IP doesn't belong to the university? That's another reason not to do a PhD that was relevant for me: the ability to have more control over the value I was creating rather than giving it to the university to dispose of.
I don't think anyone "owns" it. The research was published, and anyone can read the papers and then perhaps build something with it. That is true of the vast majority of academic research. There is no IP in the form of something that could be patented, because a published idea would count as prior art.
Commercial efforts started by people employed by the university are a completely different matter, and universities have rules about how much time can be spent on such efforts (including consulting), and about ownership of companies established by faculty.
I've read your statement about five times now. I still only have the loosest idea of what your dissertation would be about. Which makes me kind of curious!
If you have a link to the dissertation or would like to chat about it, my email is in my profile, and I'm interested in learning more.
You're 18 years older than me, but our paths are certainly similar. I also did a PhD because I liked the university lifestyle, didn't want a job, and wanted to keep messing around with my honours project for a few more years. I think did a 20 month post-doc before working out that to get promotion I had to game the system in the same cynical way as everyone else was trying to do, so I quit and quickly failed at running my own startup.
Now I'm writing software for someone else's startup. It's not what I'll do forever, but it's helping replace the academic programmer in me with a real software engineer, and keeping me interested as I learn new techniques.
I don’t think saying PhD is good or bad in general makes sense. It depends on what alternatives you have on your hands. If you are from a third world country and PhD is the only chance to take you a batter place, it makes sense. For the ones who already live in a decent country, it only makes sense if you are very very passionate about being an academician and you should carefully question the arguments making you passionate about that. I think doing PhD is much tougher now than 1983. There is a huge literature you gotta scan and there will be so many other people from both academia and industry working on similar topics so it is very difficult to make an original contribution that is satisfactory enough for the most. Especially in engineering, hot topics having an application area are already studied by the high tech firms. One can work in one of those companies and still can do research, which can be more satisfactory since you can see it applied to the real life. Plus, you will have strict deadlines, much better salary and the time you spend there will be considered as a work experience when you make a new job application. So, in the end of the PhD, there is a risk of finding yourself where you started and asking yourself where you did wrong, especially if you didn’t consider the after-PhD phase during the PhD (wrong topic and wrong supervisor choice, not building connections, not doing an intern in a related company etc.) However, having a supportive supervisor with good connections can hack the game and put you some levels up.
I have the sense that a PhD in computer science is harder to obtain now because the field is more mature, there are many more people working in it, and it just takes more time and effort to get to the point that you're doing original work.
Also, my impression is that, in the USA at least, the economy is fundamentally much more fragile, with the disappearance of the middle class. Someone starting out now does not really have the luxury of doing something purely out of passion. The penalty for needing to change course is much higher now. I think.
I disagree with you on the role of industry in computer science research. In the 80s, there were many companies in which research was happening: Xerox PARC, IBM, Digital, and to a lesser extent at other computer companies. I worked at Computer Corporation of America, a mid-sized software company, in the mid 80s (after UMass, before startups), and they did some amazing, DARPA-funded research in databases. Now it's Microsoft and IBM. Oracle, Apple and others are obviously doing leading-edge work, but I think those efforts are more closely aligned with products. I think there was far more pure research done by software/compute companies 30 years ago.
At college, I was theoretically pre-med. A month into my freshman year (1974), I went to a party at the house of a revered EE professor, who happened to be a friend of the family. I was talking with someone, another professor, about my interest in computers, and he told me in no uncertain terms that there was no future in that. I was crushed. I was seriously bummed out for weeks. But it was what I loved to do, so I kept doing it, taking whatever courses were available, and hacking on my own projects.
I cleverly sabotaged all my medical school interviews. My interviewers were able to detect my lack of interest in medicine and my great enthusiasm about computers, and wisely rejected me.
I graduated, and wanting to do nothing but play with computers, I got a job in NYC, writing software, and because that wasn't enough, I also went to grad school at night. I decided to do a PhD because that seemed like the best way to keep playing with computers. My thought process was really that shallow. I wasn't thinking about industry vs. academe, future earning potential, or any other practical matters. I saw that I wouldn't finish my PhD while working, so I decided to do grad school full time.
I was lucky enough to choose McGill for grad school, after leaving New York. I sort of just fell into it, because I had gone there undergrad, I liked it, and my girlfriend was going there for medical school. I was lucky in the sense that it was perfectly suited to my personality. It wasn't a funding powerhouse, but between teaching and research funds, a student could support himself easily. My PhD adviser was a wonderful man, low-key, with some fun things he was investigating, but he wasn't building an empire, built on the backs of enslaved grad students. We were just looking at interesting problems together.
I graduated, and taught at UMass/Amherst for two years. And then it hit me. What a grad student was supposed to do, and what a faculty member was supposed to do. A faculty member starts building his empire, with insane focus on getting tenure. He or she gets tenure and builds a bigger empire, and spends an inordinate amount of time chasing funding. Grad students do the fun work, working very hard, for a very long time. I had no idea how to play this game, and no interest.
I left, and a few years later found myself at my first startup. It was similar to UMass. Instead of professors, there are entrepreneurs, insanely focused, and whose main job it is to get money to fund the work. Instead of grad students are the early employees, who make the vision real. I was much happier as an early employee, being a low-key introvert, who loves technical problems more than business problems. My PhD caused some large degree of distrust -- if I have that background, I'm obviously interested in writing academic papers more than writing software. But I still loved playing with computers, and startups are a great place to do that. I wrote a lot of software.
Epilogue: At my current startup, a number of our customers have a problem that happened to be exactly in the area of my PhD research. I spent a very enjoyable few weeks implementing my PhD thesis for these customers. 30 years later, my PhD ideas finally shipped.
tl;dr: I did a PhD to keep doing what I was drawn to. My career has been incredibly rewarding, and even charmed, and it is so atypical (I think) that I can't advise anyone to pursue a PhD based on my experience.