User: Myrmidon

Grad school? Think again!

On: Ask Slashdot: Comp-Sci Graduate Schools

Beware. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

Here's something I wrote late one night after a few years of grad school:

Not everything about grad school is bad. You can work any 70 hours per week that you want. If you just want to waste time and never graduate, and you find the right adviser, you don't even have to work at all. And the people you meet are generally smart, unusual, and fun. But for me grad school is fun just like playing Tetris all night is fun. In the morning you realize that it was sort of enjoyable, but it didn't get you anywhere and it left you very very tired.

Keep in mind that I'm not a CS grad student. I'm a semiconductor engineer in EE, where IMHO a Ph.D. makes a lot more sense than it does in CS.

To get a Comp Sci perspective one might ask Philip Greenspun, MIT Ph.D. [emphasis mine]:

A lot depends on how much you value being surrounded by interesting people thinking about interesting things. You can make more money selling tires but you have to think about tires all day. Tires are arguably much less interesting than reading Shakespeare. This explains why people go to English Lit. grad school. The difficulty I think a lot of folks have these days is that many companies are working on problems that are at least as interesting as those in academic engineering departments.

It is tough to talk about academic CS in general when you're at one of the top three schools (MIT, Stanford, or CMU). We have lots of people who are more creative and interesting than those in even the best companies. However, because academic CS is sort of a moribund field, as soon as you get down to the second-tier schools you're mostly dealing with people who lack the intelligence and creativity to get a good job in industry. This is death.

So the bottom line for me is that if you can get into an absolutely first-rank school in a field that fascinates you, go for it. Otherwise, look at it as training for a bureaucracy that would make the Prussian civil service look imaginative.

-- Philip Greenspun, October 28, 1998

If you do go to grad school in CS, stop with the M.S.. There are only two good reasons to get a Ph.D.:

1. You want to become a professor, and are willing to sacrifice a decade of your life in the attempt, despite the fact that the odds of finding an academic position are terrible.
   
   
2. You are already in industry, and have found a specific job or salary that you want, but the hiring managers demand a Ph.D.
   In my field, there are many jobs like this. In CS, I'm not so sure. Bill Gates does just fine with his high school diploma.

I went to grad school because I had fuzzy dreams of being a professor, and because I was intrigued by "the challenge". I was nuts. Now I can only wonder what I might have done if I had gotten some hard-edged advice in time.

-- Mike

P.S. Cornell has a great CS school. Look me up if you come here. With my luck, I'll probably still be writing my thesis.

The Truth must Dazzle Gradually

On: Linux/UNIX Usability Research

The problem is not necessarily the number of programs and options. The problem is that the users aren't given reasonable and obvious defaults.

I should be able to run a Linux installer, answer very simple questions that require no knowledge of Unix, and be presented with a system that can immediately be used to browse the Web, write a simple word processing document and print it, start up, shut down, and other basic tasks. Everything else should be tastefully hidden, perhaps not even installed. Later on, I can customize whatever I want, but I don't want to have to deal with every feature at once.

My Red Hat installer (for LinuxPPC) automatically installs and activates all the network daemons and servers. My local sysadmins are not pleased when random users install unsecured Linux boxes on the academic network, so I have to prowl around after every installation, exorcising daemons. I don't want to run a server; I just want a nice safe little client. Why am I being forced to deal with all these damned daemons, many of which I don't understand, and most of which I probably don't even want?

Best Buy is aboard the clue train!

On: Anti-DIVX article

Reading this article reminded me of something else I saw on the Web the other day: the cluetrain manifesto.

Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.

Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.

In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business--the sound of mission statements and brochures--will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

No, it uses the phone in the dead of night

On: Anti-DIVX article

A Divx player remembers the serial numbers of the disks you've played, using internal memory. Then the player dials up Divx Central Headquarters at 3 AM every two weeks, or something like that, and syncs its information with them.

So you don't have to have the phone free when you fire up the Divx player.