The peer review paper requirement puts you in a situation where if your topic of research happen to not be interesting for the reviewers (that you have no control over), you can be a talented student that worked very hard and still fail due to being out of time after multiple successive rejections.

Your supervisor may not understand this until it’s too late, and you may not have the ability to judge your adviser's ability to do so until you are committed.

The main problem is that you were raised in a school system where if you show up, study and do your assignments you are pretty much guaranteed to succeed sooner or later. A PhD is not like that.

Your point is valid in many ways. The picture can be a little brighter. The PhD path does not have to be an all or nothing.

1. You can hedge your bets by submitting your work to various conferences of various qualities (without going 3rd-tier, you can bet across 1st-tier and 2nd-tier)

2. You can spend time choosing the professor and the topic before going all in

3. You can seek advice and social interactions within your research group, departement and school

None of this is a silver bullet, but it compounds in the right direction.

PhD programs are very different. The environment Karpathy describes is fairly similar to what I saw as a math PhD in a good school, but not an ivy. My theoretical physics PhD friends had the same setup as I had, but experimentals lived in a different world, long hours in the lab every day, including weekends.

My advisor was well established, tenured prof with a number of students. I had to teach, but the effort was light. We taught large, basic courses that are boring for tenured profs. We usually requested the same 1-2 classes to teach and after the first round had all the materials (homework, quizzes, etc.) and could teach on autopilot. University gave us undergrad graders to grade assignments but I never used them since I wanted to see what my students wrote. Which is a testament that the load was light; if I was drowning I would use all free help I could.

But there was a cult of academia. "Get an academic job or you are a loser" mentality was prevalent. My advisor was disappointed, but OK when I decided to go into industry after PhD, but a friend's (Physics PhD from Harvard, CEO of a profitable startup now) advisor does not talk to him anymore because he did not stay in academia.

And I only realized long after finishing my PhD how incredibly lonely PhD path is. You live in your bubble for years, with minimal interactions outside a few other folks at the same grad school. Stipend was enough for basic living, but not much else. No good vacations, ski trips with friends, etc. And a few somewhat creepy characters that grow in this lifestyle. This is all surmountable, but the mental toughness required is certainly something to keep in mind. I did not have that mental toughness, but was an introvert, which helped a lot. But looking back I see that I also could have gone off the rails. My 2c.

> it is a career-ending failure

It depends highly on the field. In history, sure. The point of getting a history PhD is to become a history professor, and you can't do that if you don't get the PhD, and meanwhile history PhDs don't meaningfully open up any other job prospects, so attempting and failing to get a PhD provides negative value.

In CS and many engineering disciplines, there is a long history of people dropping out of PhDs and landing in industry. The industry is therefore much more accustomed to, and therefore accommodating to, people taking this path. Whether it's a maximally efficient use of time is another question, but it's certainly not wasted effort.

But I do agree that it's stressful nonetheless because it still feels like a failure even if it is not actually in reality. I wrote about this when I put down my own PhD journey here [1]. In particular after the control replication (2017) paper, I very nearly quit out of academia entirely despite it being my biggest contribution to the field by far.

[1]: https://elliottslaughter.com/2024/02/legion-paper-history (written without any use of LLMs, for anyone who is wondering)

Eh. It's different, but framing it as uniquely challenging seems silly. There are very few other jobs where you don't need to deliver any specific, measurable results for months or years. And your "career-ending" outcome is that you go and get a cozy industry job in the same field because you already have a degree. Now, you might have a difficulty adjusting to that because they will want you to get stuff done.

I have never been more depressed than grad school working for a complete sociopath. Even people working for “normal” PIs suffered. You are so right