TQ, don't go worrying about offending me. I got your joke and it's nothing my own family haven't told me in the past :-D
Unless there's personal abuse in there, you can be assured that I won't be offended.

BTW, I was fascinated to read that you view the award itself as only being worth 1% and that what you are considering at the moment proves you actually mean it. Do you know how rare your mindset is? That is precisely my attitude as well. I don't generally celebrate any achievement. For me, the joy is almost exclusively about the process of getting there. The upside of this is that I get to spend more time being content rather than my entire happiness hinging on getting a particular grade. We might be closer in our thought processes than you think. I consider maths and science as an art form to be mastered. My PhD was the same. Only the final paper was really meaningful to me. Without it, I would have felt a fraud for accepting the PhD. During my undergrad degree I was always motivated by fully understanding and mastering a topic rather than managing to get an A in the exam. Unfortunately there isnt time to do this during the course which is why I am filling in the gaps now in my own time.

There are very VERY few people out there who genuinely think like this. I think that this is the core reason behind why my views are so different from those of others. I am normally looking at things from a completely different place. I think artists are probably most likely to understand exactly where I am coming from. I have very little in common with those who see their jobs as just work, those who switch off at home time, those who are happy just to pass exams, those are happy to get away with mediocre work with minimum effort and those who see life as a massive checklist of things to do before they die.

A couple of things are worth bearing in mind.

1) If you downgrade to MPhil you will spend your career justifying it and competing with people who don't have that red flag on their CV.

2) In your best scenario, you end up getting a second PhD position. How do you guarantee that the second PhD will go any better than the first? It could be even worse. You could spend a few years of wandering around just to end up where you are now.

My advice would be to finish up. Stop thinking so much about how meaningful it all is. You are too far down the line now. The PhD should really be considered as a means to gain a vast range of secondary and soft skills. A door opener if you like. The technical stuff is much less important because by definition nobody else is working in your immediate area.

You have plenty of time to get your academic freedom. Virtually nobody gets this during the PhD phase.

What you are suggesting in your original post is, in my opinion, potentially ruinous to your career.

There is no age limit for things like programming jobs and 30 is a very young age indeed.
From personal experience I can tell you that you are mistaken about the quality of computer science graduates. Most programmers are not computer science graduates anyway. They come from a wide range of disciplines and most of them are crap to start out with.
What matters most in software is experience. You have some. What you now need is to spend a month or two systematically learning your chosen language or languages from the ground up. Almost nobody bothers to do this and so they end up severely limited in what they can do. Don't be that person: do it properly, buy some books, work ALL the problems. From that you should find sitting tests at interview fairly easy. Also make sure you start creating a batch of cool programs to show what you can do.
This is almost exactly what I did more than 20 years ago and I was only a couple of years younger than you when I started.

Yes I think that is the best approach. When everyone has written their part it will look like a dogs breakfast at first. Once a single person then takes on the for al editing process it will start to take shape,

TQ, are you talking about yourself???
Surely not?

I have worked on papers with more than one contributor.
They were science papers so I don't know how different it is for you but here was my experience.
Each contributor was allocated a specific piece of work and it was down to each contributor to fully analyse their own data including the provision of tables or graphs unless the main author decided to use his own preferred graphing app.
The main author then ties it all together.

I would have found it very odd to be expected to take someone else's data and fully analyse it for them. My response to that sort of request would have been concise and blunt whether it had come from a colleague, my supervisor or another academic at a remote institution :-D
There is a reason why I am better left to work alone :-D

If however you want to go ahead with this, I would write it in whatever style you want. Once you are handed the raw data, all responsibility is passed to you. I wouldn't get wound up trying to second guess what the other person wants. If there are key problems for you in terms of the story of the entire work, you should talk to them. Good and regular communication is essential for successful collaborative work. You don't want to have a patchy story or spend 18 months trying to get the thing accepted for publication. Sketch the story out and get all participants in the same room to agree. This shouldn't be a problem if the participants are truly collaborative as a group of equals.

kikothedog is right that it can be difficult but it is a very common thing to do. People change their research focus all the time.

The more I read your response TQ, the more I am convinced that we are in exact agreement.
We are both talking about taking as much personal responsibility for fixing the problem as possible rather than blaming others and waiting around for others to change. It doesnt matter really what the problem is providing it is you who drives the change. That is precisely what you did in your situation.
So, taking that into account, I see both the original poster here and stargazer on the other thread trying to "blame" others for their mindset which to me suggested they have not transitioned to the proactive mindset necessary to change their situation. It is that attitude i am trying to warn against on both threads because it is potentially very damaging.

I think we are just describing ithe same thing in different ways but the solution is the same I think.
Do you agree?

tru, I dont see anything offensive or particularly aggressive in the opinion Kamali has offered here. We are all adults and we shouldnt be treading on eggshells on behalf of other adults who are pefectly capable of fighting their own battles. In my opinion, we should allow people to be free to say what they want unless they are making an unwarranted personal attack on another poster.

That is not to say I agree with Kamalis advice. I dont. Telling someone they have made a bad mistake after they have formally quit is less than helpful.

On a serious note, if someone is so mentally fragile that a response like Kamalis causes them issues, they should consider quitting online forums and seek help from a trained professional.

Following mattfab's advice would have made life a bit easier for myself.

Wow. That is a top quality rant right there :-D

The problem is that the only person worse than what you have described is the person with a chip on their shoulder. You might want to avoid being that person first and foremost before launching any sort of attack on "serious people" rewt.

Leave us serious folks alone. Just because we like work over interactions with other people, it doesnt make us incapable of collaboration, reciprocation or any other word ending in "ation". :-D

Yeah I think we are coming at it from different perspectives. From my personal experience, I always start by assuming the problem is with the person and working backwards. There are almost always problems with the self in every situation. That is not to say that I intend to be accusatory or apportioning blame but I find it is a better place to start fighting your battles from. That is for two reasons. Firstly it immediately focusses the attention on things the person can control easily and immediately rather than having to change how the university or a supervisor or a group of other people works. Secondly, when working through a solution, it empowers the person rather than them having to face the crushing battle of deposing or changing a supervisor or university etc. Once your mental state is crushed, it is nearly impossible to fix it in situ. I discovered this approach when trying to fix my early career problems. For me, this approach was genuinely life changing and liberating.

I know your personal experience leads you to take the exact opposite approach but I think you need to pick your battles wisely. Fix the self first and only then start to tackle the other problems. I use the following all the time - "Never mind anyone else right now. Am I personally doing enough? Can I do something to help my situation?". When you try to fix other people you inevitably end up having to press the nuclear button. In your case that worked an absolute treat but the risk is huge.

If you have another approach i would be very interested in hearing it.

If any of that reads like mansplaining then let me know :-D