<story><title>At Tech’s Leading Edge, Worry About a Concentration of Power</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/technology/ai-computer-expense.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Donald</author><text>&amp;gt;The thing that I just cannot stop wondering is, why, knowing the perks of industry, advisers still treated us like this.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s cultural. Their PhD advisors treated them the same way. A PhD is effectively a hazing ritual required to break into academia.</text></item><item><author>high_derivative</author><text>So I am a machine learning researcher who moved to a FAANG as a research scientist after graduation. My salary is 10x against the grad student stipend. That does not even account for the free food, the healthcare, and other perks. However, I have not adjusted my lifestyle so it does not feel real.&lt;p&gt;The thing is, even though having 1000x the resources compared to university, that does not really make me happier about the work specifically. It makes some things easier and other things harder.&lt;p&gt;No, what I really feel is that at work I am not actually treated like a servant any more but like a person. I don&amp;#x27;t have to work weekends and nights any more. I can take vacations and won&amp;#x27;t be flooded with emails every.single.day during holidays. I don&amp;#x27;t have extra unpaid responsibilities that I have zero recourse against.&lt;p&gt;The thing that I just cannot stop wondering is, why, knowing the perks of industry, advisers still treated us like this. Even though ostensibly trying to keep us, it felt more like squeezing out as much as they could.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WhompingWindows</author><text>I entered an MS program, where my two advisors told me I could get a PhD in just 3 years, vs 2 years for the MS. I naively thought that sounded good. I didn&amp;#x27;t realize that my advisor took over 4 years to do it herself. Nor did I realize that she was drastically over-committing herself on time, and she dropped me as a student just 1 year later because she didn&amp;#x27;t have time. Just a blatantly misleading and false advising process, I wasted 2 years due to that.&lt;p&gt;The power your advisors wield over you is terrifying in graduate school. You are severely underpaid AND they have you over a barrel.</text></comment>
<story><title>At Tech’s Leading Edge, Worry About a Concentration of Power</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/technology/ai-computer-expense.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Donald</author><text>&amp;gt;The thing that I just cannot stop wondering is, why, knowing the perks of industry, advisers still treated us like this.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s cultural. Their PhD advisors treated them the same way. A PhD is effectively a hazing ritual required to break into academia.</text></item><item><author>high_derivative</author><text>So I am a machine learning researcher who moved to a FAANG as a research scientist after graduation. My salary is 10x against the grad student stipend. That does not even account for the free food, the healthcare, and other perks. However, I have not adjusted my lifestyle so it does not feel real.&lt;p&gt;The thing is, even though having 1000x the resources compared to university, that does not really make me happier about the work specifically. It makes some things easier and other things harder.&lt;p&gt;No, what I really feel is that at work I am not actually treated like a servant any more but like a person. I don&amp;#x27;t have to work weekends and nights any more. I can take vacations and won&amp;#x27;t be flooded with emails every.single.day during holidays. I don&amp;#x27;t have extra unpaid responsibilities that I have zero recourse against.&lt;p&gt;The thing that I just cannot stop wondering is, why, knowing the perks of industry, advisers still treated us like this. Even though ostensibly trying to keep us, it felt more like squeezing out as much as they could.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DataWorker</author><text>The reason this behavior occurs is because people compromise themselves by jumping through hoops to get degrees. Meanwhile, universities have become fixated on producing credentials and nurturing their endowments rather than producing knowledge. Ponzi schemes fail when they run out of suckers. With the federal government giving hundreds of thousands in free money to round up new suckers it seems unlikely to fail anytime soon. Perhaps corporations will fill the void. I’m not hopeful.</text></comment>