Here is Freeman Dyson; the Physicist without a PhD ( https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freem... );
Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything.
- B.S. = bull shit
- M.S. = more shit
- PhD = piled higher & deeper
She's a happy software tester now :-)
Unfortunately there was a huge gap in what was expected of these people and what they could actually do. Save but a few they were pretty awful employees for the job. Not necessarily their fault, but it's one example of the gamification of the system.
It might be different in Process Chemistry, which is where the best lab work is work. Perhaps those who have the magic in scaling up a reaction into production are like those who can debug anything? I've never worked with those groups or with the Analytical chemists in Development.
Disclaimer: I have a PhD, but never wished to go into academia due to the politics. And yeah, it's a union card.
I don't know which country GGP (or his wife) is from, and you might well be correct about your assessment, but there are some countries where master's degrees are viewed differently than in the U.S.
Where I live and did my degree (Northern Europe), it's commonplace to do a master's rather than just a bachelor's degree. In fact, in many fields the master's used to be considered the basic "undergrad" degree here. A bachelor's degree existed, but in many fields you'd have been considered to have dropped out of completing a master's if you only had bachelor's. That might be slowly changing, with a higher emphasis given to bachelor's level degrees, but the sentiment probably still remains.
And if you think an oversaturated job market pushing people into doing PhD's they don't need for the actual job isn't a problem for "the PhD system" then I call you short sighted.
Having one in CS myself U can assure you are right for the IT field. Getting this PhD was about personal aspiration rather than career success.
> (waste years and years of their lives) sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited
Suggesting that incentives to do research that follows academic tradition do not aligign with the best possible outcomes of independent investigation.
Which is what we both point out.
According to the article, as a young researcher, he was
* A "programmer" (something like a research assistant, perhaps?) at the Mathematisch Centrum (Mathematical Centre) in Amsterdam.
* Professor in the mathematics department of the Eindhoven University of Technology from 1962-1973. (As I understand, the "external funding" thing is less of a problem in mathematics. Also, I have no idea how tenure works there.)
* Finally, research fellow at the Burroughs Corporation.
It's true, he didn't have many direct PhD students (two?!), but his collaborations were many. (I don't know if the Tuesday Morning Group at UT is still active,[1] but it was rather well known and its members produced a great deal of what is now "theoretical computer science".)
If you're trying to compare Dijkstra to J. Random Young Researcher, J's gonna have a hard time any way you look at it.
[1] UT no longer requires automata theory or formal logic for CS undergraduates. They're dead to me.
Back then, i think full professors were appointed by the Queen. (Certainly so for Beatrix, but he became a prof before her inauguration)
Being appointed by the Queen made it really difficult to fire you - one of the reasons (I was told) they stopped this practice.
Moreover, back then research funding worked very different from how it works now in .nl. Actually, I have some idea of how finding worked from the mid-90s on... but I've read that prior to early 80s, in .nl, most PhD students were part-time and not employed by the university.
Not sure how accurate that is. Irrespective of its accuracy, it's clear that academic life had changed drastically since then. (In .nl at least)
Monarchies today being at that awkward stage where they wield enough protection to prevent somebody from being fired but no longer enough power to get them beheaded…
*Tuesday Afternoon Club [0].
[0] https://www.cwi.nl/about/history/e-w-dijkstra-brilliant-colo...
It says something about me that I get them confused.
He wouldn't even get in an university to get the chance to be fired. And that's not specific to the US, it applies to nearly all developed or developing countries.
That person wouldn't be able to get much past a PhD, even as a student.
Also, by some miracle you manage to graduate by minimal publishing or no publications you will find all doors to getting research funding shut. This means that you are basically unemployable as a tenure track professor (universities prefer their newly minted assistant professors to come with funding).
http://www.netlib.org/bibnet/authors/d/dijkstra-edsger-w.htm...
(The ones marked "circulated privately" are the EWD series.)
There was a feel on campus that the people who were really going to 'make it' were only putting in B- or C+ work and spending the rest of their time working on side projects. There were very few days in a given year when more than half of the computer labs were full at the same time, and with Unix boxes you can always remote in to the flavor of machine you need.
You don't need much research budget if you already have access to time on equipment. I'd be curious to know if Dijkstra had access to a similar embarrassment of riches.
Dijkstra spent a good chunk of the latter part of his career at the University of Texas in Austin. There was plenty of access to facilities there, but that wasn't really what his research was about. He wrote longhand (scans here: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/) and didn't really use much technology directly in his work.
This makes sense, because after all, Dijkstra is responsible for this famous quote: "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes".
https://www.quora.com/What-did-Dijkstra-mean-when-he-said-Co...
And the vast majority of people who graduate with a CS degree are going to work as software engineers, not as computer scientists. They are therefore being mis-educated to the degree that their CS program agrees with Dijkstra's philosophy. (Which doesn't mean that Dijkstra is wrong about CS. It just means that a CS degree shouldn't be the passport to a career in software engineering, or even a job as a grunt programmer.)
Second, I suspect (but cannot prove) that this problem is why computer science grads need a couple of years of close supervision on the job before you can trust them with anything.
There's more to it than that, a lot of which has more to do with learning how companies are structured and how people communicate in the corporate world. Among other things, college students have been trained to tackle any assignment with the assumption that the information they have been given is accurate and comprehensive, and the professor would prefer to hear nothing from them until the assignment is turned in as complete as possible right before the deadline.
If you want to educate people to be immediately productive in a corporate environment, that's not what college is for anyway.
It is and it isn't. Most degree programs don't require it, and some don't integrate it as a for-credit option, but most (including in the sciences) do open opportunities for them, and lots of students take advantage of that opportunity and are more employable because of it.
Not sure what they're doing today.
But it is my position that a graduate of a proper software engineering degree would take less initial supervision than a graduate of a CS degree.
Why? Because they would have already seen ambiguous requirements, and would have an idea of what to do. They would have already seen a multi-hundred-thousand-line code base, and would be more likely to have some idea how to navigate in one. They would have some idea of what production-level code looks like, and how to go about achieving that level of completeness. And so on.
UTCS 1997 here. I've been employed in software-related industries continually since graduation, and I can honestly say my UTCS degree has been nothing but helpful in that regard.
BTW, the personal website listed in your profile is down. You might want to look into that.
Furthermore, there really is two kinds of CS departments: the ones that were spun out of a Math department and those that emerged out of an Electrical Engineering one.
Eventually, he got a Macintosh (IIRC, Cynthia Matuszek (https://www.csee.umbc.edu/~cmat/) was the one who set it up for him. (Hi!))
I remember some of my classmates were turned off by how theoretical some of the core courses were. A lot of people saw it as less practical. Also the height of Java's OO take over of CS programs, it was definitely a mix of classes. Although the theory courses tended to either care less about language choice or focused on Haskell.
Moishe Lettvin - What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews at Google. It is on Etsy Eng channel Youtube url with the relevant time frame https://youtu.be/r8RxkpUvxK0?t=532
That said, I don't know about self-mockery. A good line from the linked lecture transcript:
> The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.
He seems to be addressing the issue of inflated egos influencing people to be "real programmers". For example, do you use a simple GUI interface? -- HA! I can type an arcane string into a command line with my TOES! Clearly, I art teh superior to thou. Which is stupid, because a proper GUI that shows the full scope of the API is awesome, while memorizing arcane strings is a silly practice. But, some folks let feelings of intellectual superiority cloud their judgement and beliefs, which Dijkstra was speaking out against.
He repeats this theme several times, with the overall lecture being a tad repetitive and redundant as it states the same thing over and over in a repetitive series of repetitions, but for a specific example:
> Finally, although the subject is not a pleasant one, I must mention PL/1, a programming language for which the defining documentation is of a frightening size and complexity. Using PL/1 must be like flying a plane with 7000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the cockpit. I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language —our basic tool, mind you!— already escapes our intellectual control. And if I have to describe the influence PL/1 can have on its users, the closest metaphor that comes to my mind is that of a drug.
In short, Dijkstra strongly advocates intellectual minimalism. The "humility" he advocates is fortitude against ego-driven peacockery in decision-making; taking the simplest possible approach, that's the easiest to do, even when doing so doesn't show off one's intellect.
A simple solution does not look like much because it is so simple, but it can take a genius to come up with it. Whereas complicated solutions are easier to come by and do demonstrate your intellectual skills.
Just because a person can write code that only they can understand does not mean they are more intelligent than others, nor that the quality of such code would be "good". :-)
The problem with category theory, as I see it, happens due to a mismatch with our mode of creating. We tend to converge in our solutions from chaos to order. Formal systems don’t provide space to be chaotic in. We need to be right the first time.
We need languages and IDEs that will help us find abstractions. Static analysis saying: “this thing here is like all those other things if only you see it like so. Perhaps you want to structure it like those other things as well?”
Definitely not! It is a philosophical paper.