> You haven't really developed any skills that are useful

That's practically all I did. Doing a PhD gave me both the time and the excuse to pick up both technical skills and soft skills that prove useful to myself and my colleagues on a regular basis. I'm a dramatically better coder for it.

> This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about

I work 37 hour weeks doing stuff that I find really interesting. I made a conscious decision near the start of my PhD that I had no desire to work in academia but that doing a PhD was fantastically interesting, so I'd keep doing it.

> instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia

That might have been the cause of your dropout.

Very interesting perspective

(Disclaimer: I dropped out, with a little help from my advisor)

I guess it all depends on a lot of things. If you enjoy what you are doing, and have a nice environment, go for it.

But dropping out was something I'm very glad I did. And I learned a lot outside of Academia. (and the money is good as well)

I think it probably helps (for people like me) that the UK PhD system is rather lighter weight than that in NA - I spent about 3 years and 4 months on mine, which I considered a very acceptable tradeoff for the learning (and ability to work on a project I was really interested in). My lifetime earnings will probably be a little lower, but the flipside is I'm now equipped to take on much more interesting jobs than I was beforehand. If the timescale had been closer to 6 years I would be more inclined to think twice about it.

edit: I don't mean to imply that a PhD is for everyone - I have friends who dropped out who made absolutely the right decision: they didn't want to become academics and had lost interest in their subject. If anyone is in that position they absolutely should drop out. The uninformed supposition that skills gained during a PhD are useless is frustrating to me, though - I really honed skills like the ability (and motivation) to investigate a topic area, present my work clearly, and learned a whole load of new technologies along the way. These have all been invaluable to me - far more so than a little extra time in industry would have been. I was certainly at a disadvantage at 0 years in industry compared to someone else with 3 and a bit. A few years later, though, and I feel at an advantage.

I guess I'm also quite defensive about PhDs because mine holds a special place for me - it was during that time that I discovered how much I love to learn. As a result I'm far more motivated to improve my knowledge than I ever was before.

Your "summary" is bullshit and has completely distorted the article. You're not just biased, you're also completely misinformed.

> You haven't really developed any skills that are useful, and now you are going to be paired up with some 25 year old that has 3 years of experience more than you do at 30.

More likely, you've spent 3-6 years coding, learning to communicate, and work well in a team.

> This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about, instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia.

Most recently hired academics on a tenure track work 80 hour weeks. You've got to teach course, mentor research students, write grant proposals, and produce research. If you don't, you're out the door.

Imagine I were to suggest that because you're a dropout, all you're good for is saying "do you want fries with that?" That's about the level of what you've done with your comment.

Tenure track profs work 80 hours per week? Really? They work from 8AM to 8PM, 7 days per week (taking only a 15 minute break each day to eat)???

This doesn't seem likely, since they would be completely burned out after only a few months, and you would have diminishing returns after the first week. If you are really working 80 hour weeks then you are being incredibly foolish and wasting a lot of time being completely unproductive due to exhaustion.

But, of course, you don't really mean 80 hours, you were just exaggerating a bit to make your point. Fair enough, lets say profs are putting in (I'm assuming a proper research university where tenure track professors teach 3-4 classes at most) 12 hours lecturing each week, for 30 weeks per year. That's (at most) 360 hours of teaching, per year.

Lets say you spend 2 hours per week preparing for lectures (you should know this stuff already, but lets say you just need time to get organized). That's 60 hours, yearly.

Now, lets say you spend 4 hours every day working on research. Everybody probably would like to spend more, but some days you have to see friends or your wife/husband or kids or get your car fixed or whatever. That's 4 * 365, which is probably a huge overestimate for most people, but that's 1460 hours per year.

Now, as for writing grant proposals, or mentoring students, or whatever else, nobody believes you are spending any serious time (more than 5 hours a week) on that. I don't know how long you really spend on it, but I'm going to assume that you aren't writing more than 1 grant proposal per month, so I'm going to just say that I gave very optimistic and too-high estimates for everything else, so this will get rolled in as overhead.

So you're doing (drumroll) 360 + 60 + 1460 = 1880 hours of work per year, all but 420 of which is just thinking about the problems that interest you most.

If you work in industry, you are spending 220 * 9 = 1980 hours per year working on stuff that are not the things that most interest you, and almost none of it is blue-sky thinking of any kind.

Want fries with that?

Edit: With my really crazy overestimates on how tenure track profs spend time, averaged over a regular work schedule it is 42.72 hours per week, of which 9.5 is anything at all besides pure 'research'. Odd that, it's within .5 hours per week of my original guess, and I swear I didn't cook the numbers to come to that.

Wow, your hours on preparing lectures, grant proposal writing, dealing with students, etc. are all way underestimated. A solid grant proposal that is likely to get funded (often in a super competitive field with maybe 8% acceptance rate) can take well over 2 months of solid preparation. Of course we don't actually get 2 months of solid preparation time, what with all the other stuff we have to do. My workload as an early career academic is roughly 10% on a funded project, 20% "research", i.e. grant/paper writing, 5% on a couple of committees I am on, and the rest teaching, with roughly half of that supervisions of PhD/Masters students.

For my masters students that equates to about 6 hours of meetings and reviewing their stuff over 3 months of their project. Most of my colleagues and I burn through that in the first month. So what do we do for the other 2 months? Well it's not like we can shut up shop and say "welp, sorry, but you've used all your allotted time" because that'd be terrible. So we continue to give whatever amount of time we feel is necessary (within reason).

Anyway it's not as simple as you've broken it down to be. Things ebb and flow over the year too, students need more mentoring at certain times of the year than others. Grant proposals, conferences, special issues journals all have deadlines and calls. My week is extremely varied and I'm still working on juggling all the different hats and priorities I have. I have a full load right now over summer even without teaching; when teaching starts up again I'll have to do all the stuff I'm doing now (bar masters student supervision) while doing roughly 25% of my allotted time teaching undergraduates.

Anyway, just another perspective.

Your numbers are in line with what I see from my advisor.

The original also failed to break down paper writing. For a top-tier conference, you're going to spend several weeks worth of full days working on a paper, and you're probably going to do it twice per paper because, as they say, even Simon Peyton-Jones has papers rejected occasionally. This time is on top of work you already did to get your system working! (well, unless the paper is the result, as in some areas of theory)

You really, really have to want to live it. I enjoy it, and as a PhD student I don't mind spending all my waking hours that aren't devoted to my wife or a little bit of exercise doing research. But just to be competitive, that's sort of the baseline. I'm not sure, though, whether it's truly a demand of the job or just the default because academic research attracts people who work like that (I also worked like that when I was a developer at MSFT).

The thing is you can kinda coast if you want to. But in the UK at least you have to churn out at least 4 high quality papers every 6 years to be included in the "Research Excellence Framework", the assessment of the research quality of the university. Although you don't have to be included in the REF, it was used as a weeding point for redundancies at one of my previous universities (i.e. those who had been in the previous REF were exempt from being included in the redundancy pool; everyone else had to reapply for their jobs). So it does tend to hang over you, even if it's not a direct reason you might get fired.

My university is an ex-polytechnic, so it focuses a lot on teaching as well. You can quite easily get by just teaching - we have a few "just teachers", though they tend to be the older employees. New fulltime employees are expected to do a bit of everything, which is actually a lot better, IMO. If teachers are doing research and contributing to their field, they're reading current stuff and can incorporate that into their teaching. etc. etc. Lots of good reasons for it to happen.

Interdisciplinarians are also rewarded - one of the reasons I got my job in a tough environment (I do computer ethics) was because I had a strong background in computer science vs. most comp ethicists who come from philosophy. So it helps to be able to cover a few different things rather than just one very niche specialty subject as well.

Ultimately though I love my job. It's highly flexible, stimulating, varied work, I have great benefits, especially holidays, and the university is very supportive of family life.

I don't know you, and I am not an expert in how you spend your time. I know it's not 80 hours of work per week, because that is completely absurd. If you have a better hourly breakdown it doesn't seem like you are sharing it. Your percentages are very different than what I would have guessed, and honestly I think your priorities are off.

If you nail down a single big result you could ride that for years. Maybe that isn't realistic for everyone, but if I didn't think I was going to be a major player and drive the state of the art, I think I would find something else to do. I really don't understand the concept of the 'hard working' professor, teaching is easy (show up, explain stuff), advising students should not take much time (pick smarter students, point them in the right direction, expect them to take it from there), conferences are a complete waste of time, trying to publish a bunch of little crap results is just generation of worthless volume and nobody is fooled by it. All this might sneak a person in at a 3rd rung school, but for what? What are all the grants for in CS, presumably you already have more than enough computers? Is that what people compete for when doing something important in the field is not realistic?

I'm sorry, but if you aren't concentrating on research, meaning real research not writing grants or typing up results that nobody cares about, then you are either at a really crappy school or you have the wrong priorities. Expanding the state of the art, or moving the needle on a difficult problem is going to get you attention, respect among your peers, and publication in real journals. The situation you describe seems more like a backup plan.

Wow, sorry, you really have no idea. It's not 80 hrs per week, sure, but it's certainly more than you're giving us credit for.

My percentages are base for what an early career should expect in their first couple of years with a permanent position (you'd call it "tenure track" in the US I believe). If I get a big grant, my teaching time would get bought out, so more of that time would go to research. It is possible to buy out of all teaching, though you would still be expected to supervise PhD students, so you'd still have some %age of teaching on your load.

Teaching isn't "easy", there's a lot more to it than "show up, explain stuff". Lecturing is easy. Preparing lectures, exams, dealing with students, marking, administration isn't "easy". If I could just lecture I'd be more than happy. It's the rest of it that's a complete drag of time.

Also, I had to laugh at your "real research" paragraph. You obviously have no idea how it works.

I'm friends with several lecturers, and while they don't work 80 hours a week, it's fair to say they work substantially longer hours than I do. That's fine, they generally enjoy their jobs and get to do interesting things (as well as deal with a lot more bullshit than I do). You're utterly crazy if you think they spend only 10 hours a week on non-research activities.

As an outsider, your estimates are finger in the air at best. How can you possibly know you've covered all their activies?

I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of work we need to do...

you can't really account for academic time on a hours-per-week basis. there's too much variety. as others have noted, it's a modal way of working. one week it's this, next month it's this, then maybe there's a paper deadline so you have to crunch down and get on a particular project. maybe it didn't fly so you have to try something else. it also depends where your university is.

being a professor is like running a company but with fewer support staff.

running your lab takes time most weeks, it's almost a constant: whole-lab meetings are easily 2-3hours per week, meeting each individual member of your lab is another hour or so each. then there's the admin for your lab (some of which you delegate). then there's organizing new grants: this involves collaborating with other people which means... yup, more meetings, often over skype or similar. then working out ideas, then writing, re-writing, and re-writing the draft and doing a lot of preliminary work. many grants need a lot of preliminary work to be shown before they get funding.

teaching is a lot more than just lecturing, you forgot: time spent talking to students one-on-one, running labs, designing interesting homeworks and exercises, preparing exams, marking homework and exams (marking easily consumes a week or two per course here). also, "knowing stuff already" doesn't mean you can teach it. it's enough to teach yourself, not others. developing a new course or just keeping and old course up to date and interesting takes an awful lot of time. what content will you include? what exercises? what text books? what's examinable? what's useful? what's the structure? what can students handle? all of these apply to courses old and new, but are faster for older courses, especially ones that do not change much (i.e., not active research areas).

then there's your research. what you do here depends upon the stage of you career. in the very least, you need to read. a lot. in CS-disciplines, this is easily a weekly activity. then you can spend some time thinking. then trying some things out. maybe. then going to conferences, talking to more people. presenting your own work: writing papers, arguing about their acceptance, visiting labs, workshops and conferences to give talks, preparing talks, etc.. believe it or not, you have to advertise and advocate your research, even once it's published and done. how else will people notice? so advertising is another thing you must spend your time on. now multiply all this work by the number of projects you have: potentially one per lab member.

interestingly you miss out one of the most important parts of being an academic--reviewing other people's work for conferences and journals. this takes a lot of time. firstly because reviewing a paper thoroughly takes considerable time, secondly because the discussion afterwards takes considerable time, and thirdly because often you will do this many, many times a year. as you become more senior, you take on a more senior role here: managing reviewers, journal and proceedings, conferences and workshops, etc.

i'm sure this isn't the same everywhere, but this is a small glimpse at academia in the places i'm aware of. it's busy busy busy.

As a fellow academic I totally agree - people outside really don't know what it takes to run a successful course - it's not just wandering in and rambling for an hour about stuff you like, it's highly structured, requires a lot of preparation and thought, not to mention having to deal with exams, marking, organisation, and students' pastoral care. Sometimes I think our own universities don't know how long marking takes - my current workload says I should be able to mark a Masters dissertation in an hour! Hahahahaha yeah right.

I think justin_vanw wanted to show that the article was not really informative. I agree with that, I haven't learnt much by reading it.

Oh, if that's the case I overreacted. Sorry justin_vanw!

It turns out I did not overreact. Apology rescinded, you do not know what you're talking about.

My understanding is that academia is very competitive, so I don't understand how you are only going to work 9 hours a week. Further, you'll probably have classes to teach which surely take up more than 9 hours a week. Also, since tenure is largely tied to the quality of your output, you can't always work on what interests you--you have to work on what you can publish.

Miaow, bitchy. You are right, however, about it being a bit depressing competing with 25 year olds that have 3 years experience. My first post-doc job started as borderline data-entry (but then in three months I became chief developer on the entire system :)).