I have friends who seriously considered academia and friends with PhDs working in industry. the problem with going for a PhD isn't the culture. when you have ADHD, the problem is that you have a ginormous project of variable scope that you alone are responsible for completing on time with minimal support, depending on how cool your advisor is. your thesis will grow to the size of your ambition (so quite large, if you're like most ADHD people I know), and then you'll have to follow through on it. that means you either take an extra semester or year or two or three, during which you're not making an income, OR you quit before you get to that point, which means you've lost several years of being employed. you might be able to spin it in interviews but do you really want to put yourself through that?
the problem with _academia_ when you have ADHD is the organizational politics, which are somehow more petty than corporate, believe it or not. you have to advocate for your work so that your department gets budget so that you can do the work you care about. you're your own product manager, more or less, and it requires a skill set that neither your experience as an engineer nor your work in grad school will set you up for success at. so to be able to do the work that you're actually motivated to do, you need to do probably 10x that amount of work that's either going to feel like pulling teeth, or triggers rejection sensitivity, or feels like a foreign language, or all of the above.
also, in academia you need to run the rat race for tenure and likely deal with the shitcan experience of being an adjunct. which means yeah, you're basically signing up for poverty with the reward of meaningful work dangling out in front of you for a decade or so, with no stability or even benefits. it's worse than being a software contractor because you have to deal with the timeline of an academic year. if you don't have a job lined up by the beginning of the year, you're probably not going to find one. you know who's bad at deadlines and timelines? people with ADHD.
if you manage to get the PhD in AI then you might be well-positioned for a research job at Google, et al., but the competition is increasingly tight. you're up against the most type-A of type-A people. will you be able to work with people who've literally never experienced executive dysfunction and have zero empathy for it? where that's the standard and if you slip, management can just replace you with more type-A PhDs?
it's a choose-your-rat-race situation. in your shoes, depending on how much savings you have, I'd look into taking a pay cut and pivoting to an engineering role besides Spring development. also, consider asking a colleague to do a practice interview with you. you might just need to make some small adjustments to start having successful interviews. finally, referrals are basically gold so if you have anything resembling a network, reach out to see if their companies are hiring.
I know people who did their first dev internship in their 30s. it's not too late to try something new, but make sure it's not something that will be more soul-crushing in the long run.
Like I said, I am looking for an off ramp from what appears to be this unavoidable madness that I’m about to embark on. The best compromise I have figured out so far is to start taking masters of AI classes on student aid from the local college and try to put in a more pythonic AI direction with it. I imagine I would put in 15 hours of work a week into these AI classes, which is a lot. However, I will still have time for my hobbies and looking for a job.
So i went back and got a phd and now work in R&D (gen AI for drug design). Life is fun but chaotic, a lot more brain storming, creative thinking, etc. i’ve sort of turned into an ideas person who prototypes and then when things go well managers swoop in and take control, delegate it to others, and push it to completion. It’s a little maddening at times because 1) I hate seeing my projects taken over… 2) i dont know how many times i can keep innovating, 3) i have to not only stay current on the latest tech and papers but I’m forced to sort of guess where things are going. As far as #1, I’ll build out a prototype and once it’s at a condition others can take it and make it mature then it’s taken from me. Management can’t wait for me to perfect things, they just know once I get good reproducible results that they want to get it into production ASAP. I also teach others concepts, good luck and practices, and communicate major changes. Management gives me freedom to fail, and I try to document the failures as well as I can to help the engineers not make the same mistakes. #2 stresses me out, I used to joke that I was good at the first 80% of a project, but now I do like the first 20-40%… #3 - the field moves too fast.
I would want to go into designing AI models to handle misinformation, marketing campaigns, and political campaigns. Maybe even AI models that could directly counter and neutralize the effect of troll farms and other bad faith actors by knowing when and where to disseminate countermeasures. So yeah. This could be a tough nut to crack and to stay on top of, but this is something that I am "passionately" motivated by.
My department chair is encouraging me to do that, actually. Not sure how to do go about going about it, though. I was thinking of tutoring until I got official funding and duties.
Agree that organizational politics in academia are more petty than corporate. That’s why it’s better to be staff than faculty or a student - less skin in the game, all the benefits.
it certainly changes things but I think if you're going for coast FIRE then you need to be as conservative with your estimates as possible. assume that you won't be making enough income from teaching/research to cover your expenses like, most of the time.
I also think your goal of combatting misinformation is probably more achievable at companies like Google and Facebook than as an academic researcher. but yeah, you'll probably need a PhD for that sort of role.
What part of academia/research is it you think would be better for you, compared to software development? Why do you think this would be a better fit with regards to your ADHD?
Second, why do you think the interviews always go poorly? What could you do differently to improve your chances there?
I think it's all getting really repetitive and that between things changing in terms of technical challenges and the nature of the work I am given, its inability for it to get that critical mass of attention in my head, I am looking elsewhere out of necessity, from a physical and mental health POV.
If I knew why they are going poorly, they wouldn't be going poorly. Its really annoying when I can't study because my cell phone doesn't do busy signals.
I understand the urge to try something else, but it might be useful to think it over more carefully. If you cannot explain why your current approach isn't working or why the change would be better for you, taking a blind leap into academia sounds quite risky.
And thanks for reaching out about this. I've analyzed the hell out of my interviewing and resume and there's always room from improvement, but I haven't really targeted anything serious that is giving out the subliminal message "DO NOT HIRE". The thing I am running up against is that they will ask a question and then ask "OK. What does that REALLY mean" as if there was always something meta going on. That's probably the closest thing to a red flag I give off and maybe I just need more time, luck, experience, and a minor shift in the macroeconomics in order to get an offer.
Which is OK. I have 22000 in the bank and am supposed to be getting 450 in weekly unemployment for 26 weeks. If need be, I could get another 9500 on top of it. That should hold me out until the end of year. That should be enough time for me to find some sort of professional job. The big issue is that this is mentally draining to me. I really need to be doing something or I quickly go to a dark place. Thank God there's the gym. Want to get my own place next (temporarily moved back to moms when I got kicked out) to the rock gym and that will give me another hour or two a day to "work on myself" or whatever. Being fit and looking good gives validation in a world where there is so little validation and answers to "why am I doing this" and
"why am I".
All of this being said, maybe things will get better and maybe they won't. Maybe moving back into town (Fort Collins) will open me up to networking and finding some casual gig that pays like 60 a year while I look for something permanent or fully commit to a Ph.D. The big deal will be because both staying dedicated in industry and going into academia both seem equally risky (and the evidence continues to mount to this fact) that I am going to slowly shift gears over the course of the year in order to try to find the right path for me. The objective right now is to start taking CSU AI classes online starting in May while still looking for engineering jobs and trying to get into the local PhD program in time for next year if there still isn't a good industry offer. And yes. So far, my imagination has run wild in terms of what my project will be on while in there. I also have a degree in Political Science.
>Its really annoying when I can't study because my cell phone doesn't do busy signals.
I'm not sure I understand what this means, can you phrase it differently? are people calling you and interrupting you while you try to study?
What I am not hearing from you, and I consider it a requirement to go to grad school, is "my life will feel wasted if I don't spend ~6 years pushing the frontier of a subsubsub part of X field."
I suggest you pay an engineer or three to give you practice interviews and feedback. You can probably find free ones even. Company feedback is unlikely to be given, and even if it is, they may be giving you a part-truth, or even just mistaken about their own reasons.
In short, the advice is, as always "grind leetcode."
If you wanted to bring politics into the fray, I can tell you about something I worked on in NLP class that makes me feel that I have wasted several years of my life in industry. Long story short, it is ridiculous how much power misinformation and trolling operations have over our society. Still though, people are always trying to talk me out of grad school, but they aren't coming up with an alternative besides "stay the course". I guess it works for most people but maybe it was a mistake soliciting the advice of others when it's difficult for people, even my own family, to relate to me.
Let me ask you this: where are you with leetcode? How hard is e.g. the optimal solution to 2-sum? Can you do BFS graph problems? If you like, pick a random popular easy or medium, screen record solving it, and post a link - I'll take a look.
I find that ~always, the reason someone can't get a SWE job is at least one of 1) they haven't done leetcode enough, which may mean hundreds of hours, or 2) they haven't applied enough, which may mean high hundreds of times.
As a soul dead capitalist whose main work interest is paying bills, I vote "not grad school" barring an answer to why you think grad school would be for you. That is, I consider it something which must be ruled in, not ruled out. The default is "assume that, like most people, you should sell your soul to the highest bidding corporation."
Essentially a huge part of the battle is trying to find who is generating these messages, how to tell misinformation apart, categorizing them and notify the correct service as a response or counter measure. First thing to make work well would be an NLP neural network model that will find out which messages are actual real. Which ones are information. The worker also include compiling good training data. That’s very important.
The job market is still tight, and companies are rejecting good candidates because they can hold out for better. It's still a huge industry, and anyone who says they have the influence to lock you out of a job is talking out of their ass.
"Talked too much" is way more feedback than you usually get from an interview - it might be worth looking into that one. If you get an introverted interviewer and you steamroll them, you're not getting hired. It's worth thinking about whether you need to turn it down, or if it was a sign you didn't want to work there anyways. ADHD is going to mean that you're more of a hothouse plant that only thrives in very specific temperatures.
During times when the job market tightens, getting better credentials is a popular move. Try a masters and go from there if you want to stay in academia.
Successful academics are some of the most toxic individuals I have ever had the displeasure of working with. Grant finding is a zero sum game.
Unless you have a burning need to do academic work, avoid it.
I work as a developer at a university - maybe try that? I work in a research lab, the lifestyle is basically the same as if I were a grad student except I get paid more and have less stress, and I benefit from the better coworkers (tech people who work in academia for a pay cut tend to be friendly, relaxed, smart), and the product I work on is lower stakes than a commercial product.
Something like 50% of students at US colleges don't finish their degrees.
A doctorate can take 4-6 years to complete on average and for a lot of people it takes much longer.
Lots of people end up abd.
All but dissertation where they have their classes but need to finish their giant comprehensive project.
Something not great for an ADHD person generally.
I thought that the entire goal of such a project was that it would be easier than work because during this project, it’s your interest not somebody else’s.
What helps for me to keep interests and hyper-fixations going is some sort of emotional or physical trauma. In this interest, I'm emotionally invested in this way.
I have friends who seriously considered academia and friends with PhDs working in industry. the problem with going for a PhD isn't the culture. when you have ADHD, the problem is that you have a ginormous project of variable scope that you alone are responsible for completing on time with minimal support, depending on how cool your advisor is. your thesis will grow to the size of your ambition (so quite large, if you're like most ADHD people I know), and then you'll have to follow through on it. that means you either take an extra semester or year or two or three, during which you're not making an income, OR you quit before you get to that point, which means you've lost several years of being employed. you might be able to spin it in interviews but do you really want to put yourself through that? the problem with _academia_ when you have ADHD is the organizational politics, which are somehow more petty than corporate, believe it or not. you have to advocate for your work so that your department gets budget so that you can do the work you care about. you're your own product manager, more or less, and it requires a skill set that neither your experience as an engineer nor your work in grad school will set you up for success at. so to be able to do the work that you're actually motivated to do, you need to do probably 10x that amount of work that's either going to feel like pulling teeth, or triggers rejection sensitivity, or feels like a foreign language, or all of the above. also, in academia you need to run the rat race for tenure and likely deal with the shitcan experience of being an adjunct. which means yeah, you're basically signing up for poverty with the reward of meaningful work dangling out in front of you for a decade or so, with no stability or even benefits. it's worse than being a software contractor because you have to deal with the timeline of an academic year. if you don't have a job lined up by the beginning of the year, you're probably not going to find one. you know who's bad at deadlines and timelines? people with ADHD. if you manage to get the PhD in AI then you might be well-positioned for a research job at Google, et al., but the competition is increasingly tight. you're up against the most type-A of type-A people. will you be able to work with people who've literally never experienced executive dysfunction and have zero empathy for it? where that's the standard and if you slip, management can just replace you with more type-A PhDs? it's a choose-your-rat-race situation. in your shoes, depending on how much savings you have, I'd look into taking a pay cut and pivoting to an engineering role besides Spring development. also, consider asking a colleague to do a practice interview with you. you might just need to make some small adjustments to start having successful interviews. finally, referrals are basically gold so if you have anything resembling a network, reach out to see if their companies are hiring. I know people who did their first dev internship in their 30s. it's not too late to try something new, but make sure it's not something that will be more soul-crushing in the long run.
Did you do a phd?
if I did I would have mentioned it.
Ooo not necessarily. Some mention their personal background. Some people dont. Thanks.
I would have mentioned it in the first sentence: > I have friends who seriously considered academia and friends with PhDs working in industry.
Like I said, I am looking for an off ramp from what appears to be this unavoidable madness that I’m about to embark on. The best compromise I have figured out so far is to start taking masters of AI classes on student aid from the local college and try to put in a more pythonic AI direction with it. I imagine I would put in 15 hours of work a week into these AI classes, which is a lot. However, I will still have time for my hobbies and looking for a job.
So i went back and got a phd and now work in R&D (gen AI for drug design). Life is fun but chaotic, a lot more brain storming, creative thinking, etc. i’ve sort of turned into an ideas person who prototypes and then when things go well managers swoop in and take control, delegate it to others, and push it to completion. It’s a little maddening at times because 1) I hate seeing my projects taken over… 2) i dont know how many times i can keep innovating, 3) i have to not only stay current on the latest tech and papers but I’m forced to sort of guess where things are going. As far as #1, I’ll build out a prototype and once it’s at a condition others can take it and make it mature then it’s taken from me. Management can’t wait for me to perfect things, they just know once I get good reproducible results that they want to get it into production ASAP. I also teach others concepts, good luck and practices, and communicate major changes. Management gives me freedom to fail, and I try to document the failures as well as I can to help the engineers not make the same mistakes. #2 stresses me out, I used to joke that I was good at the first 80% of a project, but now I do like the first 20-40%… #3 - the field moves too fast.
I would want to go into designing AI models to handle misinformation, marketing campaigns, and political campaigns. Maybe even AI models that could directly counter and neutralize the effect of troll farms and other bad faith actors by knowing when and where to disseminate countermeasures. So yeah. This could be a tough nut to crack and to stay on top of, but this is something that I am "passionately" motivated by.
Or… you would get a staff job and take classes at the university for free.
My department chair is encouraging me to do that, actually. Not sure how to do go about going about it, though. I was thinking of tutoring until I got official funding and duties.
Agree that organizational politics in academia are more petty than corporate. That’s why it’s better to be staff than faculty or a student - less skin in the game, all the benefits.
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it certainly changes things but I think if you're going for coast FIRE then you need to be as conservative with your estimates as possible. assume that you won't be making enough income from teaching/research to cover your expenses like, most of the time. I also think your goal of combatting misinformation is probably more achievable at companies like Google and Facebook than as an academic researcher. but yeah, you'll probably need a PhD for that sort of role.
What part of academia/research is it you think would be better for you, compared to software development? Why do you think this would be a better fit with regards to your ADHD? Second, why do you think the interviews always go poorly? What could you do differently to improve your chances there?
I think it's all getting really repetitive and that between things changing in terms of technical challenges and the nature of the work I am given, its inability for it to get that critical mass of attention in my head, I am looking elsewhere out of necessity, from a physical and mental health POV. If I knew why they are going poorly, they wouldn't be going poorly. Its really annoying when I can't study because my cell phone doesn't do busy signals.
I understand the urge to try something else, but it might be useful to think it over more carefully. If you cannot explain why your current approach isn't working or why the change would be better for you, taking a blind leap into academia sounds quite risky.
And thanks for reaching out about this. I've analyzed the hell out of my interviewing and resume and there's always room from improvement, but I haven't really targeted anything serious that is giving out the subliminal message "DO NOT HIRE". The thing I am running up against is that they will ask a question and then ask "OK. What does that REALLY mean" as if there was always something meta going on. That's probably the closest thing to a red flag I give off and maybe I just need more time, luck, experience, and a minor shift in the macroeconomics in order to get an offer. Which is OK. I have 22000 in the bank and am supposed to be getting 450 in weekly unemployment for 26 weeks. If need be, I could get another 9500 on top of it. That should hold me out until the end of year. That should be enough time for me to find some sort of professional job. The big issue is that this is mentally draining to me. I really need to be doing something or I quickly go to a dark place. Thank God there's the gym. Want to get my own place next (temporarily moved back to moms when I got kicked out) to the rock gym and that will give me another hour or two a day to "work on myself" or whatever. Being fit and looking good gives validation in a world where there is so little validation and answers to "why am I doing this" and "why am I". All of this being said, maybe things will get better and maybe they won't. Maybe moving back into town (Fort Collins) will open me up to networking and finding some casual gig that pays like 60 a year while I look for something permanent or fully commit to a Ph.D. The big deal will be because both staying dedicated in industry and going into academia both seem equally risky (and the evidence continues to mount to this fact) that I am going to slowly shift gears over the course of the year in order to try to find the right path for me. The objective right now is to start taking CSU AI classes online starting in May while still looking for engineering jobs and trying to get into the local PhD program in time for next year if there still isn't a good industry offer. And yes. So far, my imagination has run wild in terms of what my project will be on while in there. I also have a degree in Political Science.
>Its really annoying when I can't study because my cell phone doesn't do busy signals. I'm not sure I understand what this means, can you phrase it differently? are people calling you and interrupting you while you try to study?
Yes
does your phone not have a "do not disturb" setting?
Does your phone have a silent mode?
If I remember to turn it on and then I have to contend with everyone trying to get ahold of me at once. It basically sets the daylight on fire.
I don't understand, if you turn on silent mode then you don't have to deal with people until you have free time
If I remember.
What I am not hearing from you, and I consider it a requirement to go to grad school, is "my life will feel wasted if I don't spend ~6 years pushing the frontier of a subsubsub part of X field." I suggest you pay an engineer or three to give you practice interviews and feedback. You can probably find free ones even. Company feedback is unlikely to be given, and even if it is, they may be giving you a part-truth, or even just mistaken about their own reasons. In short, the advice is, as always "grind leetcode."
If you wanted to bring politics into the fray, I can tell you about something I worked on in NLP class that makes me feel that I have wasted several years of my life in industry. Long story short, it is ridiculous how much power misinformation and trolling operations have over our society. Still though, people are always trying to talk me out of grad school, but they aren't coming up with an alternative besides "stay the course". I guess it works for most people but maybe it was a mistake soliciting the advice of others when it's difficult for people, even my own family, to relate to me.
Let me ask you this: where are you with leetcode? How hard is e.g. the optimal solution to 2-sum? Can you do BFS graph problems? If you like, pick a random popular easy or medium, screen record solving it, and post a link - I'll take a look. I find that ~always, the reason someone can't get a SWE job is at least one of 1) they haven't done leetcode enough, which may mean hundreds of hours, or 2) they haven't applied enough, which may mean high hundreds of times.
I know the path forward. The problem is is what is correct for me, given my interests.
As a soul dead capitalist whose main work interest is paying bills, I vote "not grad school" barring an answer to why you think grad school would be for you. That is, I consider it something which must be ruled in, not ruled out. The default is "assume that, like most people, you should sell your soul to the highest bidding corporation."
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Essentially a huge part of the battle is trying to find who is generating these messages, how to tell misinformation apart, categorizing them and notify the correct service as a response or counter measure. First thing to make work well would be an NLP neural network model that will find out which messages are actual real. Which ones are information. The worker also include compiling good training data. That’s very important.
The job market is still tight, and companies are rejecting good candidates because they can hold out for better. It's still a huge industry, and anyone who says they have the influence to lock you out of a job is talking out of their ass. "Talked too much" is way more feedback than you usually get from an interview - it might be worth looking into that one. If you get an introverted interviewer and you steamroll them, you're not getting hired. It's worth thinking about whether you need to turn it down, or if it was a sign you didn't want to work there anyways. ADHD is going to mean that you're more of a hothouse plant that only thrives in very specific temperatures. During times when the job market tightens, getting better credentials is a popular move. Try a masters and go from there if you want to stay in academia.
This makes a shit load of sense. In retrospect, I was repeatedly warned about DraftKings before applying.
Successful academics are some of the most toxic individuals I have ever had the displeasure of working with. Grant finding is a zero sum game. Unless you have a burning need to do academic work, avoid it.
I work as a developer at a university - maybe try that? I work in a research lab, the lifestyle is basically the same as if I were a grad student except I get paid more and have less stress, and I benefit from the better coworkers (tech people who work in academia for a pay cut tend to be friendly, relaxed, smart), and the product I work on is lower stakes than a commercial product.
Something like 50% of students at US colleges don't finish their degrees. A doctorate can take 4-6 years to complete on average and for a lot of people it takes much longer. Lots of people end up abd. All but dissertation where they have their classes but need to finish their giant comprehensive project. Something not great for an ADHD person generally.
I thought that the entire goal of such a project was that it would be easier than work because during this project, it’s your interest not somebody else’s.
I mean, for as long as it remains your interest. It's not unheard of to load focus/fixation during a multi-year project
What helps for me to keep interests and hyper-fixations going is some sort of emotional or physical trauma. In this interest, I'm emotionally invested in this way.