Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

There is a joke I like that goes

A professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home leaked. He called a plumber. The plumber came the next day and sealed a few screws, and everything was working as before.

The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked.

"This is one-third of my monthly salary!" he yelled.

Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him, "I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don't like educated people."

So it happened. The professor got a job as a plumber and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly.

One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of a circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, and he filled the white board with integrals, differentials, and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result, he got "minus pi times r square."

He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He gave the class a frightened look and saw all the plumbers whisper: "Switch the limits of the integral!!"

I think CS PhD programs in particular can be a little strange. I decided to go back to school to pursue a CS PhD after chatting with a retired mathematician about his PhD. He was talking about how he took classes for two years to explore different areas of mathematics and to pass the general exams, then he decided on a branch of mathematics (topology) and approached a professor in that area to be his advisor. After working through a few textbooks together, this person posed a question to his advisor, spent a few more years working to answer the question, eventually answered it and published the result in his dissertation.

This seemed to be what a PhD was all about, but it's not what I've experienced. I've just completed the first year of grad school, and while the classes have been interesting, the expectation is that you already have an advisor when you arrive (or at the latest at the end of your first year) and you hit the ground running pumping out papers. There seems to be little opportunity to explore computer science as a whole or to work towards one singular result. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Peter Sarnak about CS graduate education. He said that CS is in a weird spot between traditional engineering disciplines and the liberal arts, and that the need for grant funding causes departments to encourage students to work on whatever projects the professors are leading. But even he seemed a little surprised when I told him that our department's general exam is basically a presentation on the research you've accomplished so far.

I think this is unfortunate. First, because it goes against what I wanted out of a PhD. But also because it makes the PhD not much different than working in industry. If in either case I have to write code for some boss and satisfy my curiosities on the nights and weekends, why would I choose to do it for much less money and worse career prospects? I imagine this is causing the best and brightest to avoid academia in computer science, which seems bad for research and technological progress in general.

A PhD is a degree in conducting research. Get one if you want a career in research. If you don't like research, don't do a PhD. Any decent program pays students about a $1.5-3K monthly stipend. Don't have being a professor as the only acceptable end-goal.

There are lots of careers that benefit from or require a PhD besides being a professor. People with STEM PhDs are found in great concentration in R&D settings. For example, when I worked at NASA JPL probably about 50%+ of the scientists had PhDs.

Outside of STEM activities, it can still be an enriching life experience. You don't incur significant debt. It does have a high opportunity cost, if one's undergraduate degree is lucrative. On the other hand, you get the privilege to spend your time trying to create new knowledge.

Real PhD Issues (and Cons):

1) Research is hard and it requires a massive time investment to create new knowledge, especially when just starting.

2) High levels of impostor syndrome. You will likely meet people much smarter than you, and those that can work 80+ hours per week for years. If you fall into the trap of comparing yourself to them, your mental health will suffer. You have to just work toward solving your problems. As one old friend put it, he felt like a genius when he worked as a software developer, but throughout his PhD he felt like an underachiever.

3) Jealousy of your friends "getting their lives started" (kids, buying a home, etc.). Very hard to have any work-life balance as a PhD student.

4) Don't expect to get rich after a PhD. Do it because you think a career in research will be satisfying.

5) If you want to be a tenure-track professor running a lab, you have to be very flexible with where you live. Being a professor is also very stressful.

6) If you want to teach in college, a PhD is required but the main thing a PhD teaches is research -- not teaching.

7) Clearly assess your ability to get a professorship if you choose to do a podstoc. There is little point in one unless a professorship is your end-goal. Many don't realistically assess their competitiveness for professorships. I wrote a blog post about this about 6 years ago (it needs updating): http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/

A few of my colleagues with bio PhD's have started microbreweries with various levels of success. They seem to be much happier than my colleagues and myself who have chosen the post-doc route.

This is a bit of a tangent but it seems to be a common trend now among labs to arrest trainees (particularly phd students and post-docs) in their positions as long as possible. For example, the institute I am at has recently extended the maximum assignment length for post-doctoral fellows to from 4 to 6 years. I can see the PI's reasoning for this but it is incredibly demoralizing and one of the contributing factors for a lot of people I know who have abandoned their careers for unconventional jobs.

Just to offer a bit of a counter to much of the negative views here, I enjoyed my Ph.D very much. I went into it with my eyes open, and realizing that an academic career wasn't the only option that would work for me.

Through scholarships I was paid enough to be comfortable while spending my time on interesting things. The scholarship game is a bit winner-take-all though, and I know the minimum funding level in my department was less than 1/2 of what some of us were making, and that was in a STEM department - my understanding is humanities are a very different thing. You have to decide what is ok for you.

Afterwards I did a post-doc and then a research position. Through a national fellowship (post-doc) and funding guarantees (faculty) I knew I would be able to make something like the low end of what my industry salary would be - and easily chose the academic freedom at least for a few years.

When I was on the academic market, I didn't find a tenure track position I felt was the right fit. Rather than play the waiting game some of my colleagues were doing, and I realized that "any R1 that will take you" wasn't going to make me happy. So I chose to turn down the offers and go to industry. That's also had it's ups and downs.

I guess my point is there where many steps along that path I took a good look at my options and chose to stay. Sure, I could have made a bit more money in some industries, but there are other considerations. I've never worked with a more talented or motivated group of people than I did during graduate and post-doc work. I've never had the time since to just dig into an interesting problem or really swing for the fences. I'm sure it cost me a bit in terms of lifetime earnings, but it's a trade-off I'd make again in a heartbeat. I'm sure I would have been happy teaching somewhere if the parameters had been slightly different, but I'm ok with that too.

What I really don't understand is people who are somehow shocked to find themselves in the position, many years in, of making less than they think their time is worth and without the career prospects they had hoped for, and bitterly complain about it as if someone else made the decisions that put them there.

Graduate programs absolutely aren't for everyone. They are, however, a unique opportunity - if the good parts really appeal to you and the financials etc. make sense for you, by all means do it. Just don't expect it to be something it isn't.

I have a master's degree and I learned early that getting a PhD was not for me. The way things worked at the university made me not stand to be in that environment anymore. This thing that is ridiculous in my opinion is that the advisor would say: "there is this conference coming and we will send a manuscript. We can try this and that to see if it is publishable.". Why the hell should I research for publishing? One should get the results AND THEN publish it.

The experience with academia was very toxic, although I know people who have experienced worse than that, with addition to advisors' ego disputes affecting grad students.

Because most modern PhD factories are sweat shops that offer a rather dismal career prospect. (If you've been through the process --- I suspect there are a lot on HN --- you know what I mean.)

I'm positive the same thing happens in the US - grad students spend some time teaching courses and see up-close just what it's like for adjunct faculty (which is all a lot of them will ever be able to get to). In a lot of states they also hear about just how bad things are for public school system teachers. I suspect that they also understand that part of the private school system is management/investors that feel that those protesting public school teachers have it too good, so teaching is basically going to be what they do between their gig economy jobs shopping for groceries for delivery companies.

Also, https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/college-level-mathematics

Genuinely shocked that graduate programs remain stuffed to the gills.

You live off a meager stipend for about a decade and then, in your mid-30s, you go on the job market for the first time. Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field, you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you. Big dreams of teaching in the Pacific Northwest? Too bad, the only place that wants you is a state school in the middle-of-nowhere Arkansas. Once you start, you're now going to spend the next 4 years grinding and busting your ass to make sure you actually get tenure.

Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers, have families, making 2-3x as much as you.

But they don't get to be Dr. So-and-so, so there's that.

Not the same thing- I dropped out of because lack of money, because the work environment providing the funding let me go, because I called them out for doing things that broke the law and were morally very wrong.

I didn't even bother to claim the alternative diploma I had the credits for.

Now I work with finance and blockchain people, and it's a saner and more honest world. Crazy, I know!

The main subject in this story was pursuing a PhD in "Women's Studies". Not to disparage that field of study, but it's quite obvious that it is a pretty useless degree that limits you to a career as a Women's Studies professor. I don't think this is a good illustration of people who leave PhD programs

My best mate has a PhD in naval architecture. He now runs a small chandler business. Still boat related, but in no way mentally or academically challenging.

He spent seven years getting his PhD at a Russell group UK university. He did the work in two, but because he was being used by his university as a cheap lecturer/researcher/marker/invigilator it meant his work was stretched out much longer than it should have been. On one occasion the university's IT systems automatically locked him out of everything - his email, network logins, swipe cards etc because it was a assumed a PhD student would be all finished up after four years. Getting the PhD burned him out, so he took a year off considering his options. He was found by a company in the US that did research for the US Coastguard and Navy. They promised him an easy research job in Norfolk, VA. When he got there he found a company on its death bed and they completely failed to appreciate the complicated citizenship requirements to work on government research projects. So after three months he was out of a job and getting ready to head back to the UK, but he met someone, and they dated for a bit. She had a bit of money put aside and basically set him up with a chandlery business with him as an employee to satisfy visa requirements.

He's in a much happier place now, and earning more than he would as an actual naval architect.

Basically the PhD did him more harm than good.

I am one of those who chose a "conventional" job (which I guess means industry) after getting a PhD in math. IMO there is usually nothing tragic with leaving academia for either "conventional" or "unconventional" jobs. There are pros and cons to each choice. People's interests change. I loved (most of) my time in grad school but do not regret choosing a non-academic career.

IMO the bad part is that when you are on a research track leaving academia is seen as a non-redeemable loser move by most professors and is a one-way street. This leads to folks staying on academia path for years after their heart is no longer in it for fear of making an irreversible change. Just a data point.

The idea, assumed throughout this story, that PhDs are wasted if they don't go into teaching is a very strange idea. It made sense in monasteries, whence schools took many ideas, but it shouldn't be the goal of modern universities.

Rather, you should consider PhDs that end up teaching as the overhead of the educational system, and the ones that go into industry or research labs as the valuable output.

I feel like PhDs in Computer Science should have better job prospects outside of Academia. Some jobs, like "research scientist", require PhDs. Look at companies like Lyft that are currently hiring "Research Scientist" (e.g. https://www.lyft.com/jobs/4014499002) where they require a M.S.or PhD.

I find articles such as this one to be absolutely fascinating. It seems that people like those in this article appear to be trying to gentrify what is mostly unskilled labour, adding some sort of intellectual doublethink that they pulled off from the chip on their shoulder which comes from not fulfilling their path to become a certified academic intellectual. Based on the title of 'owner' of these ventures I am quite curious how they financed these businesses.

Ultimately I think articles like these fail to highlight the strange mindset required to turn what was a defeat, and even possibly a likely scam based on the way most universities operate, into some sort positive outcome where they reclassify what was once a boring menial job into one injected with some supposed millennial intellectualism.

I gotmy PhD because grad school was more fun than a real job, and I made about 40,000 a year because I can program. The prospect of being a junior professor at a middling university gives me nightmares (think about the faculty meetings...), so now I am analyst / programmer in government.

In England, particularly the south-east, the gulf between a post-doc salary and starting a City/Wall Street job can easily be a factor of 3 or 4.

I quit a phd in philosophy to be a lousy full-stack web-magician. Dunno which was better, but at least I can afford a nice meal these days.

Interesting to see people picking up on this trend. Just saw on linkedin a former PhD classmate of mine who is now a wine harvester.

As a PhD dropout myself, I understand entirely the decision of these students to distance themselves from what were obviously negative experiences for them.

Unlike those listed in this article, I actually ended up staying in my field of study for work, but psychologically it has been very difficult. When I'm confronted with situations that reminded of what could have been if I had finished my degree, I sincerely wish I could find a new career like these people, so different from my current one that I could finally leave behind those feelings of failure and inadequacy that grad school left me with.

Just as a PSA for anyone considering quitting academia who happens to be on this thread, here are some good posts about how to do that:

http://www.paullitvak.com/2013/05/16/why-social-science-grad...

http://www.paullitvak.com/faq-for-academic-social-scientists...

I am a little late to reply, but I wanted to anyway from my experience as a Harvard physics PhD that is choosing to leave academia:

Many PhD programs are their own bubble, and many students don't seriously consider outside opportunities because of it. I honestly do not believe many of the students would be there if they had more exposure to basically anything outside of research, and more students would also consider other opportunities earlier if there was more exposure or a better connection. I really wish internships were better embraced by physics PhD's, but the current competitive culture combined with disagreeable professors makes it not encouraged. (Not to mention the fact that a 3 month internship is a drop in a bucket for a 6+ year PhD)

Otherwise, it is great to hear this person decided to leave their PhD program and found happiness (regardless of what she is doing). One thing I tell people who aren't sure about what they want to do post-graduation (e.g. most physics PhD's), or even if they aren't a good fit for the group they are in: if you took an entire month off from your PhD to make that decision would you regret it? I personally believe in almost all cases you wouldn't.

Strangely, many students seem to either default to a postdoc or put a half-assed effort towards finding an industry job.

For most people, getting a PhD is a bad idea. The odds that all that time and effort will pay back is small in most fields. Of course, it depends on the field and what you plan to do with it. I have a PhD in computing, and I'm glad I do. But it is definitely not for everyone.

Just want to share my friend's experience as someone who dropped out of a MIT graduate program to be a SWE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYX9MuWy4cE

My company has a tuition assistance program that allowed me to complete an MS and PhD, while working full-time. Took 10 years. Loved it!

And, it wasn't just the money that helped, it was also that they supported continuing education.

I miss grad school... I was terrible at it in the traditional sense but I enjoy thinking about research problems. I'm not very good at academia though. All sorts of PTSD and the like. I think it was due to an ever encompassing fear of failure and going back to trying to solve word math problems... But I enjoyed the creativity of thinking about questions that could potentially be solved with the combo of certain tools already available. Even now I can see a whole host of interesting things to research and pursue.

I worked for a world-class geneticist who had spent 25 years in academia who left for the private sector.

Word of warning though, his first venture/partner tried to screw him royally which ended up in a long and expensive court battle, which was a hard lesson to learn before he split and started it by himself. I helped him get off the ground infrastructure wise and last I heard they were doing great business.

I love working for smart people. If you pay attention you learn so much, to the point that I would readily join another PhD led team.

I have a masters in Mechanical Engineering and I always wanted to get a PhD. But it's unfortunate that it makes no financial sense. I make a meager (relative compared to full wage) 25K to 30K for about 5 years (and this is on the high side!). When I finish school and decide not to go the academic route, I make maybe a little more than my counter parts that have been working for 5 years...Also, I find anecdotally that people with a MSc has a higher probability of management roles compared to PhD.

This sounds very obvious, but everyone I know who dropped out of their PhD wasn't cut out for doing one. If you are feeling guilty about reading more papers, you shouldn't be doing a doctoral degree.

On the other hand, when you're a post-doc I totally agree that there is more to life than the 'big fish in a small pond' world of academia. There is something particularly annoying about the academic environment - some combination of ego and insecurity.

Also, the pay is shit.

A friend was working on his PhD in Artificial Intelligent, and had already published a paper about some interesting properties of genetic algorithms, when he was diagnosed with pretty severe RSI.

For a while he tried to work with speech recognition, but eventually he dropped out and become a security guard in shops. The walking around was good exercise, and he liked meeting people.

After about 7 years as a security guard, he got back into programming.

There are more people who want to get PhDs than there are academic positions in universities.

Obligatory link to phd comics http://phdcomics.com

For those who don't know, he started this comic to warn people off from PhDs. The irony, is he gets a lot of emails thanking him because the comic encouraged them to get theirs...

I wish we’d move to a 3 year PhD program now that you have 5-10 year postdocs if you even have a career in you’re field at all.

Most PhD students do not end up being professors. Not everybody who works at a firm is expected to rise to be CEO or partner.

Just do a word search in this topic for the word "money".

Why?

Because they're trust-fund babies?

Where does a post-grad get enough cash to start a cafe?

The first thing I thought of when I saw that photo of Cory Jansson was Peter Gibbons at his first worksite, glad to be in the sunshine and out of the rat race. Fuckin' A, man.