“Grad school” is a collaboration anti-pattern

To quote Wikipedia: an anti-pattern is:

pattern used in social or business operations or software engineering that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice. [emphasis mine]

I’ve been exploring patterns for actually working on software — not for designing it — and I realized that I myself spent a lot of time living inside one particular pattern, which we might call the Grad School collaboration anti-pattern.

Grad school — especially the process of writing a PhD — values three things, no matter your department or specialty:

  • novelty – what you create must be different from what everybody else until now has done
  • individual effort – what you create must be your own work, not something produced by a team
  • completion over sustainability – sometimes called “PhinisheD”, or “the point of a PhD is to finish a PhD”.

Each of these targets is critical to the idea that a PhD is a work of heroic individual effort to expand the boundaries of science. This idea is a fiction, and — like so many useful fictions — is a useful fiction, though it’s rarely true in practice (my PhD, for example, was a product of my labmates and fellowship [ETA: and of course my own effort!]).

But each of these is actually a collaboration anti-pattern of its own:

  • novelty can spiral off into Not Invented Here — and frequently does
  • individual effort fosters “Colleague, pronounced as “competitor”
    — many, many escape grad school (or not) with absolutely vicious attitudes towards others working on related projects
  • completion over sustainability encourages the Just Ship It antipattern — most research code is so heavily grown into the bench that it cannot be run outside of the lab — often even the implementer him- or herself can no longer run it, by the time dissertation defense rolls around.

It sometimes astounds me that so many brilliant researchers survive PhD land — and it worries me: so many good software designers and implementers must be turned off by the dysfunction implied by each of these three.


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12 responses to ““Grad school” is a collaboration anti-pattern”

  1. Bill McNeill Avatar

    Seeing as how pursuing a PhD was the worst mistake I ever made in my life there’s no end of contributions I could make on this subject, but here’s a specific problem that comes to mind after reading your post. Graduate school works on an apprenticeship model. Some aspects of this–i.e. learn by doing–are good, others–i.e. don’t get paid–are not. But this model is at odds with the romantic myth of individual novelty. No one expects a journeyman plumber to come up with a new kind of pipe. A better pattern would be to take the apprenticeship model seriously and decide that the goal of graduate school is to train craftsmen, not heroic artists.

  2. Chris Avatar

    I went ABD in a less-than-top-15 linguistics program and frankly, it was the smart choice. Unlike CS, linguistic PhDs have few career options. It’s basically a tenure-track position (competing against the 125 graduates from the top 15 schools who haven’t gotten jobs yet) or unemployment. When I think back to the 4 or 5 smartest people I went to school with, only one actually finished the PhD. The dysfunction in this case was smart students realizing they would never get a job, no matter how heroic their diss was. The kind of person who actually finishes is very much dedicated to “PhinisheD”. Many a crappy dissertation was stamped with the department’s approval because those were the only ones that were actually finishing. The smart students saw which way the wind was blowing, and left.

    1. Jeremy Avatar
      Jeremy

      My linguistics program had similarly dismal statistics, and I “left” by getting myself adopted by an electrical engineering lab (and senior professor) focused on speech recognition and machine translation.

      Most of the other graduates from my era found similar exceptional support outside the Linguistics department: in psychology, in neuroscience, and (occasionally) in grants for fieldwork from language communities that were trying to self-rescue.

      Very few purely “theoretical” PhDs graduated.

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