Very nice post! As a late-stage CS PhD student, I agree with pretty much everything. I wish more people would read this before deciding whether to get a PhD or not.
One extremely minor thing: >From what I have heard, these are some problems you might have: >[...] your supervisor wants to be co-author even if they did nothing to help. In computer science (at least in AI at top institutions in the US), it is the norm for PhD supervisors to be a co-author on most or all papers that their students write, even if they contribute very little. One can debate whether this is reasonable. (I think there are various reasons why it is more reasonable than it may appear on first sight. For example, it’s good for the supervisor’s incentives to be aligned with the students publishing papers. Supervisors should get credit for causing their students to do well, regardless of whether they do so by contributing object-level results or not. Since the main way to get credit in academia is to be a co-author on papers, the simplest way to do this is for the supervisor to be a co-author on everything.) In any case, because this is norm, these co-authorship listings are, I believe, inconsequential for the student. People will typically expect that if the authors listed are a PhD student and their PhD advisor, the PhD student will have done the vast majority of the work. This is definitely different in other disciplines. For example, in economics papers that require a lot of grunt work, the PhD student author often does the grunt work and the PhD advisor does the more high-level thinking.
Very nice post! As a late-stage CS PhD student, I agree with pretty much everything. I wish more people would read this before deciding whether to get a PhD or not.
One extremely minor thing:
>From what I have heard, these are some problems you might have:
>[...] your supervisor wants to be co-author even if they did nothing to help.
In computer science (at least in AI at top institutions in the US), it is the norm for PhD supervisors to be a co-author on most or all papers that their students write, even if they contribute very little. One can debate whether this is reasonable. (I think there are various reasons why it is more reasonable than it may appear on first sight. For example, it’s good for the supervisor’s incentives to be aligned with the students publishing papers. Supervisors should get credit for causing their students to do well, regardless of whether they do so by contributing object-level results or not. Since the main way to get credit in academia is to be a co-author on papers, the simplest way to do this is for the supervisor to be a co-author on everything.) In any case, because this is norm, these co-authorship listings are, I believe, inconsequential for the student. People will typically expect that if the authors listed are a PhD student and their PhD advisor, the PhD student will have done the vast majority of the work. This is definitely different in other disciplines. For example, in economics papers that require a lot of grunt work, the PhD student author often does the grunt work and the PhD advisor does the more high-level thinking.