So go find his academic webpage and check if he actually did receive a research award from Stanford's CS department as a PhD student.

All his external awards point to someone who very probably can do any tech job the industry could throw at him, in contrast to the usual developer who just has a self-generated github profile and "Ruby ninja rockstar" on his resume.

Well not everyone wants to "start something". Starting a business is risky and requires tremendous dedication. Some people work better in technical/supporting roles. Perhaps after years getting paid peanuts in grad school, he wants something more stable?

Indeed, and who says this guy has the management and commercial skills to be able to pull it off? As I think many people here know, starting a business is way more than just the concept & application.

How do you "stumble" through the PhD system?

Very few programs will throw you out on the street. I've heard of a few people that got their PhD's eventually for passing go enough times. It happens.

They don't throw you out on the street - they just cut your funding or string you along.

One story I heard about a physics PhD candidate at UCSB (this isn't me, I wasn't in the physics department). A MechE prof he worked with stole his research and got a tenure track offer at another school, leaving him behind. He was living in his car for a while and was a paintball aficionado. One day he happened to pull up outside KITP just when some of the more senior professors were walking by. He, in a disheveled state, opened the car door and mounds of paintball ammo spilled out. Looks were exchanged, emails were sent and phone calls were made, and he was PNGed from the campus soon after.

A telltale sign of these PhDs is their lack of publications. Another bad sign is no publications at top-tier venues.

This happens frequently enough, in all disciplines, including the "hard" ones like math, physics, etc.

Academia doesn't teach you how to fight for yourself in the world. The eventual injustices (observed on the scale of many years) are brutal, but the feedback cycle is so delayed that the judgment-of-character skills that most of us learn in their 20s (through humiliating, frustrating trial-and-error amid entry-level grunt work that, now that the corporate-ladder system is antiquated, serves no point) they never get.

In the corporate world, if adversity comes after you and you don't defeat it, you'll be out of work in a few days. You start to learn the signs. In the academic world, your career just stalls out one day leaving you with no idea why, and the causes were probably decisions you made years ago.

So it's quite possible, if not common, for very talented people to have no idea what the fuck to do for themselves out on the battlefield. That's how they end up aimless and clueless at ~27-30 despite strong technical talent.

Once again, your comments are on the mark. I'm a systems PhD and wow ... it seems messed up. I don't feel satisfied writing yet another paper that no one will read. At the same time, I feel a CS undergrad with 3-4 years of industry experience is better at writing professional software than me. It feels like a kind of purgatory. I have my gripes with academia but I worked very hard to earn my PhD. I'm very surprised that the PhD ended up being worth a lot less than what I thought it would be worth. I'm not even talking about financial compensation - I'm talking about lack of opportunities. I thought a systems PhD would mean I could always get a job in industry ... so not true :(

As a (perhaps permanent) refugee from academia, my $0.02.

You get out of academia what you put into it. If you go in with no plan of action or just wanting to be like your mentor/advisor, or solely dependent on his funding or the department's TAship still thinking this is like undergrad, but only you get paid for it, you will be in for a rude awakening.

The signs do take longer, maybe one or two years, but they are there. Your prospective advisor has no pull in the department, or can't twist elbows and get a RAship for you. Or he puts you on a project to reproduce someone else's experiment with unreplicable results. You start to notice his papers with foreign colleagues have serious mistakes that get through peer review. You wonder why he hasn't been properly funded in years.

I managed to get out alive, with a degree and a good publication on the way (with people at another institution), despite one adviser leaving the university nine months after I joined and everyone else being broke. How did I do this? I came in with a overarching research goal (learn how new techniques in quantum information could be used to solve chemical problems), one that encompassed more just my advisor's research area. I executed on the overall goal and when things got harder, I doubled down even more. I didn't let departmental barriers stop me from learning what I knew I needed (quantum field theory for condensed matter) to solve problems, even if those courses weren't in my department and even if the connection wasn't immediately apparent. I sought out conferences on my own, paid for them myself, networked my way into summer visiting positions and invited talks, because nobody was sitting there and spoon-feeding me little bite sized research topics. In fact, I lived in my office for three months when I couldn't afford rent anymore and no one gave a shit. I am reasonably sure people would probably have taken 3-4 months to wonder where I had gone to had I jumped off a bridge.

My central point here is that many people in grad school don't recognize that your adviser's interests and incentives are not necessarily your own (just like your boss's). Unlike your boss, your adviser will never be held responsible for bad management. If your _department's_ incentives and interests become unmoored from your own -- well, then in the words of Mr. Garrison it's a "big lowercase t for time to leave"

The sooner you recognize that and find a happy medium between your needs and theirs, the sooner you can be productive for all concerned. Every contingency measure I took in terms of classes, planning, networking in terms of the overall goal, all were leveraged and all were necessary to bring things to a reasonable close.

I know this was posted here a while back, but this really is the best description I've read (he finished, while I left with a Master's and may go back elsewhere but the hustle necessary was much the same.) http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm

I agree with you about feedback in the academia but what common kind of adversity in the corporate world puts you out of work in a few days as opposed to the next layoff at least months down the line?