News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why Not To Do A Startup by tim2 on Wednesday March 19, 2008 @04:28AM (#140658)
My perception was that it's much harder to fail at grad school.
Re:Why Not To Do A Startup by rms on Wednesday March 19, 2008 @05:01AM (#140679)
It depends on your major... it's really tough to make it as a Biology PhD. There are just so many of them.
Re:Why Not To Do A Startup by pfedor on Wednesday March 19, 2008 @09:33PM (#141308)
It depends on what you mean by "fail". If it means "drop out before getting a PhD", then you are surely right. But that's not how most people who enter PhD programs in sciences define success. They want a tenure track position afterwards (possibly with a few years of posdoc positions in between), and eventually they want to become tenured professors. And I suspect--I can't back it with any numbers though--the failure rate for them is of the same order of magnitude as for startups.
Re:Why Not To Do A Startup by nostrademons on Wednesday March 19, 2008 @06:33PM (#141208)
Mine is that it's spectacularly easy to fail at grad school...tons of my classmates left college figuring they'd get a Ph.D and are now dropping out after (or sometimes just before) getting their masters.
Re:Why Not To Do A Startup by jedberg on Wednesday March 19, 2008 @04:08PM (#141097)
You don't so much fail at grad school as fail at finding lucrative work afterwards.