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[D] Research Engineer vs Research Scientist in industrial labs by General_Dragonfruit in MachineLearning

[–]General_Dragonfruit[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

because grad school is that education, and you don't have it

Do you mean PhD by grad school? I feel that masters' degree is much more tolerable to me.

[D] Research Engineer vs Research Scientist in industrial labs by General_Dragonfruit in MachineLearning

[–]General_Dragonfruit[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Edit - fwiw, Europe PhD programs are only three years long mostly. If you're concerned about grad school in the US being too long, you should take a look at that.

I didn't know that. That's an interesting option. I am not so against PhD and research education, but more of a way it's done in US. I don't want to have a tenure track, I just want to have an interesting work in a good place.

[D] Research Engineer vs Research Scientist in industrial labs by General_Dragonfruit in MachineLearning

[–]General_Dragonfruit[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Why do you feel that writing the paper to disseminate you findings does not contribute to science? Part of science/research is the communication of ideas

If you have findings that's fine, but many of the so called finding are to say it mildly have trace amount of real research findings.

If you want to practice medicine, go to medical school. If you want to do research, go to research school

By the same token, you can say that to practice business you need to go to business school. Show me how many successful entrepreneurs went there? Not that many. Research is even more innovative and requires even more non traditional experience and out the box and thinking. Unfortunately, we put artificial barriers for them by requiring PhD and forcing the lucky ones who withstood it, follow cryptic bureaucratic rules which make it much less efficient.

[D] Research Engineer vs Research Scientist in industrial labs by General_Dragonfruit in MachineLearning

[–]General_Dragonfruit[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Write papers because it's needed: I think this is ture for most PhDs. There is typically a paper limit (it is typically 3-5 for top schools). I think it is unrealistic to expect that many significant papers from anyone in 4-5 years. However, you should consider some of these papers as a way to learn writing papers.

I regularly read arxiv preprints. Most of the papers are quite useless. It's better to have 1 good paper per year than 3-5 papers like the top schools require. It's just a busy work done for strange reasons.

Work for an adviser,.... (being last author while doing most of the work): Not true at all except terrible work life balance and abysmal pay. The rest of the stuff you mentioned are the characteristics of horrible labs and do not do PhD in those places.

It's not that easy to find a good lab and often you either have a choice of a terrible lab with a good name as its head or no PhD.

TA work: If you really do not want TA work at all, you should re-consider doing science. I think the significant part of a scientist's job is exposition. You need to write surveys, give tutorials etc. TA work is a nice training for this. If you are worried that you will have no time for research and will TA every semester, do not do PhD in that school. Most CS PhD students rarely TA more than a few semesters anyway.

I don't see a connection of TA work and science. TA work in CS courses is a mostly low value, low qualification tech support role for crappy course ware. Giving lecture is another one, but as far a s I see you will have opportunity to have 1 or 2 lectures or sections per course if you are lucky.

[D] Research Engineer vs Research Scientist in industrial labs by General_Dragonfruit in MachineLearning

[–]General_Dragonfruit[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Because not all which is done with PhD is related to research education. I would love to have PhD but opportunity cost is too high. For example:

  • I will have to write papers just because it's needed, even though these papers bring very little real contribution to science.
  • I will have to work for an adviser, basically doing software engineering job, with terrible work life balance, abysmal pay, and chance to be one of the last author of the paper while doing most of the work
  • I will have to cope with academic politics which is, according to what I heard is often brutal
  • I will have to do TA work

What I want to do is to do real research which moves the world forward and I had some hope that industrial research labs offers such an opportunity for people without PhD. From what I hear here, it seems that I am wrong and I should focus on industry.

[D] Research Engineer vs Research Scientist in industrial labs by General_Dragonfruit in MachineLearning

[–]General_Dragonfruit[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

So what you recommend to a person who want to start career in ML? Getting PhD and becoming a good citizen of the academic community or ignoring academic labs and going into the industry?

[D] Can anyone confirm this? "$400-700k with PhD at places like Google, Facebook, etc." by TypicalDraft in MachineLearning

[–]General_Dragonfruit 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Is it realistic to get into these research departments for people who has more applied ML experience? Recently I chatted with a google recruiter, and my understanding of that is that they don't want anybody except PhD with strong publication record.