[HN Gopher] Working on the Weekends - An Academic Necessity?
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Working on the Weekends - An Academic Necessity?
Author : andreyk
Score : 38 points
Date : 2022-05-30 18:48 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thegradient.pub)
(TXT) w3m dump (thegradient.pub)
| jleyank wrote:
| If the works not novel, there's no PhD in it. So getting scooped
| can really suck.... And when doing wet work, access to the
| necessary machinery and getting enough time at the bench to make
| the desired white powder vs the undesired brown oil is critical.
| If you have to do x reactions to get good at doing reactions (ie
| you make what you set out to make), you can spent more time in a
| day or week running them and working them up. Or you can spend
| more months in the process.
| seibelj wrote:
| I have yet to find the highly successful person who did it
| without working long hours. Sure you might not have to work
| weekends but the weekdays are very busy. Eventually you can coast
| on your past accomplishments but the path to get there requires a
| lot of effort, regardless of the field.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| PhD students are like startup founders. You're working for
| yourself, building something, racing against competitors, trying
| to get a foothold so that you can have the lifestyle you want in
| the future. That's why I think both groups get tempted to work a
| lot.
| copperx wrote:
| Are PhD students really racing against competitors? I can
| imagine that in some instances they might, e.g., in the race to
| discover the structure of DNA, but I don't think it's true in
| most cases.
| sonzohan wrote:
| Yes, always. Consider when Pokemon Go came out, which for
| video game HCI researchers, was revolutionary from a social
| perspective. To give an idea: people standing on the street
| corner staring at their phone are now fellow trainers you can
| talk to.
|
| Colleagues and I started data collection. Submitted a paper
| and were rejected as another group beat us at a prior
| conference because they could move just a bit faster. Sucks
| when a reviewer says "Unoriginal. Already saw this last
| month."
| recursive wrote:
| Why not Ingress?
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Popularity.
|
| Ingress wasn't so popular that you could assume people in
| the same location as you were also playing.
|
| At the height of its popularity, you were the odd one out
| on the street corner if you _weren 't_ playing Pokemon
| Go.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| If most of science is normal science where you have a tough
| idea what you're doing yes. You may not know the solution to
| your problem but you know the problem you're trying to solve
| and mostly your trying to solve it with the same tools the
| rest of your discipline is using. Even when that's not true
| you're trying to finish a PhD faster than other PhD students
| or to publish more or better work so you can get a better
| postdoc. There's a lot of competition.
| antognini wrote:
| I don't know, a lot of major discoveries happened
| independently in a very short time span. The discovery of
| dark energy was made by two independent groups. Einstein was
| racing against Hilbert to formulate general relativity. The
| quark model was developed independently by Gell-Mann and
| Ne'eman. Haumea was discovered independently by Mike Brown's
| group and Luis Ortiz Moreno's group. The Higgs mechanism was
| developed by three independent groups in 1964.
|
| At a more prosaic level, during my own Ph.D. another group
| published a paper very similar to one I had been working on.
| (By a strange coincidence the lead author on that paper had a
| very similar name to my own.)
|
| There is something to the idea that it's a good thing if you
| have to worry about other groups scooping your work. It means
| that you're probably on the right track --- it means your
| work is relevant and that you have a reasonable path to
| solving an important problem.
| btrettel wrote:
| It varies a lot depending on the field. I was never
| particularly worried about being scooped during my PhD. I
| think that's because there were/are few people working on the
| same problem.
|
| To give an example: One idea I've been working on lately is
| in a very narrow field where almost no one has the background
| to do it. (I consider myself barely qualified.) Someone
| publishes something similar perhaps a few times each decade.
| I'm really not worried about being scooped on this. I've
| thought before that whatever paper I write on this is
| basically written for someone a decade or more in the future,
| as possibly no contemporary researchers will care.
| analog31 wrote:
| Yes. In some fields it is known that there are research
| groups that are dedicated to mining the conferences for ideas
| that can be quickly finished and published. The grad student
| who gets "scooped" is at a disadvantage because they have a
| variety of duties, including teaching, plus they are still
| getting up to speed on their technique.
|
| Students are advised to withhold their best ideas from
| conferences.
|
| My spouse is in a field like this, and "so-and-so got scooped
| today" is a not unfamiliar dinner table conversation.
|
| For my PhD, I was lucky that my project required a huge pile
| of expensive and rather unique equipment, plus I really did
| have a skill advantage for the work I was doing. Two other
| labs replicated my work using the plans that I supplied to
| them, but I made sure that I got there first.
| troppl wrote:
| This is actually not such a good example I think. A better
| example would be that you have a small improvement to an
| existing algorithm, but you know that another group across
| the globe is also working on/with that algorithm and maybe
| they also found out the same improvement as you did. If that
| is the case, then it will be a race on who publishes a paper
| about that first.
|
| If you're not first, there's no reason to publish a paper
| anymore. And you just lost a good paper... (And paper count
| is really almost all there is in academia, at least that is
| what it seems to me sometimes)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Are PhD students really racing against competitors?
|
| Often the next things to explore in research are fairly
| obvious from what has just been tried.
| Biologist123 wrote:
| The following high-paying or high status (or both) careers seem
| to necessitate a very heavy workload: law, finance, academia,
| business or strategy consulting, VC-funded start-ups, medicine,
| certain media jobs, certain software development jobs. Although
| the author talks about competition, it's hard for me to escape
| the conclusion this is the major factor in the long hours work
| culture. If you want a high paying or high status job, it's not
| clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work.
| version_five wrote:
| Imo, having worked in academia and industry (and having worked
| with academics transitioning into industry), phd students and
| profs have it way easier. (Versus the other careers the parent
| mentions)
|
| Not only are the pace and pressure higher in industry, you're,
| to a large extent, doing what someone else wants you to do,
| which makes it much harder to push through. Academy is much
| more about doing the interesting stuff, even if you're working
| for a prof. Industry, someone has to do all the shitty,
| repetitive or uninteresting stuff, and that's mostly what the
| long hours are made of. Academics (including me) when they
| transition to industry often come in seeing all that stuff
| beneath them and think they are there because of their brain.
|
| Industry work can be more interesting because you're working on
| high value problems, but it's way more work.
| andreyk wrote:
| I think the variance wrt expected work load is way larger in
| industry though. Plenty of my friends working at FAANG
| companies have a really chill lifestyle, which is true of
| very few of my grad school friends. The notion that profs
| have way less work than industry in particular is crazy to
| me, their workloads are simply insane (at least for more
| junior faculty, but often also for senior ones).
| nradov wrote:
| Accounting is the same, at least at the big auditing and
| consulting firms for partners and employees on the partnership
| track. There are huge volumes of work to grind through, and
| partners don't want to dilute their profits by hiring more
| associates.
| onion2k wrote:
| _If you want a high paying or high status job, it's not clear
| to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work._
|
| Just tell people you work really hard but don't actually do it.
| You'd be surprised how many seemingly hard-working and
| successful people use this strategy. Some of them even believe
| themselves.
| analog31 wrote:
| The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is
| constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay.
|
| Decay can take the form of materials and equipment (often
| homemade) deteriorating, forgetting what you've read or done
| (your lab notes are never good enough). Also, you're paying
| an opportunity cost for taking more time to finish, and you
| face a constant risk of getting scooped, your professor
| dying, getting knocked off your horse by personal / health
| issues, etc.
|
| Klausewitz wrote that the only rational strategy in war is to
| make the maximum possible use of force. Your graduate
| research project is like that. Of course you also have to be
| cognizant of wearing out your mental equipment.
| jltsiren wrote:
| There are many kinds of research. Sometimes you need long
| hours of mindless grinding to get the job done. Sometimes
| taking a long walk and letting your mind wander is a more
| productive use for your time. And sometimes you need to
| return to the work for 10-15 minutes at random hours when
| the computer finishes whatever it was doing.
|
| If your work is cognitively demanding, there are maybe
| 20-30 productive hours in a week. If you try working
| harder, the chances are the marginal value of the extra
| hours becomes negative in the long term. You can get more
| productive hours by also doing less demanding work, but
| then there is a risk that the low-value work will take
| priority and reduce the time you can spend on demanding
| tasks. Especially when there are external deadlines
| involved.
|
| Getting scooped is something many people are afraid of but
| which rarely happens in practice. Except maybe if you are
| working on some ultra-fashionable topics. I can't remember
| a single instance of it happening to anyone in my 15 years
| of string algorithms, space-efficient data structures, and
| their applications in bioinformatics. If someone manages to
| solve a problem another person was working on using the
| same approach as that person, it's typically years after
| the original person gave up.
| lumost wrote:
| This makes sense if you are working on a problem in
| relative isolation, that's relatively well known, and who's
| research has low optionality to other work. However, there
| are many problems that are either utterly unknown,
| impractical to work on outside of a major collaboration, or
| option well into multiple papers.
|
| It would seem that in academia, focusing on the latter will
| yield better long term career results. If you're a PhD
| student in a large collaboration, then you can't get
| scooped. If you are working on a problem no one knows/cares
| about, then getting scooped is a low risk, if you're
| working in an area where scooping is common - but you have
| good equipment/infrastructure - then you can re-use the
| work for something else.
|
| In hindsight, almost all of my professors work was either
| part of a collaboration or focused on "high option"
| research. The few theoreticians and others working on areas
| which could be scooped seemed to either pick up more
| teaching/administrative work - or focus on "conservative"
| research.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > I started my master's degree in 2018 and my PhD in 2020, and
| one of the most important things I learned during my master's was
| how NOT to work on weekends. I learned how to structure my time,
| deadlines and classwork in such a way that everything actually
| fits in an eight hour workday. I was also quite proud of this
| achievement, and barring my master's thesis and other major
| deadlines, I was moderately successful in defending my freedom.
| Not working on weekends seemed like a graduation from the messy
| life of an undergrad into the more structured life of an adult.
|
| The rest of the article talks about the various pressures leading
| the author away from the disciplined 5-day work week. Competition
| and a desire to get ahead is the obvious one. The competitive
| pressure is especially prescient for academic jobs, where
| universities are busy churning out huge numbers of grad students
| but the number of open academic positions can never accommodate
| more than a small percentage of them.
|
| Anecdotally, I've noticed two types of weekend workers: The first
| type simply works all the time. Instead of going idle, they
| gravitate toward their task list and start working on the next
| thing. For whatever reason (drive, anxiety, perceived pressures,
| boredom) they are wired to return to work by default and the 40
| hour work week doesn't contain them.
|
| The second type of weekend worker is not actually producing or
| even "working" more than 40 hours per week, but they struggle to
| contain their work into the Monday-Friday bounds. Their weekend
| work isn't to get ahead or go the extra mile. They work weekends
| because they spent half of their weekdays doing fun things
| (meeting up with friends, exploring hobbies, exercising, messing
| around online) and the only way to accomplish their work is to
| repeat this half-focused schedule 7 days per week.
|
| Much like the author, they _could_ contain their work neatly
| within a M-F, 9-5 schedule if they made an effort, but at every
| juncture they choose to follow spontaneous whims or to relax or
| procrastinate instead. Some of them may even _like_ the eclectic
| and flexible work schedule that allows them to do the things they
| want when they want and to get their work done in the boring gaps
| in between.
|
| There's also a 3rd type of person who doesn't _really_ work much
| on weekends, but will wait until Saturday or Sunday to send out
| important e-mails and type up a storm in Slack so that it _looks_
| like they 're working hard on the weekend. Frankly, this is the
| type I see most frequently at tech companies in the past few
| years: Try to engage with their messages on a Saturday and you
| won't get a response until Monday, but they'll go to great
| lengths to _look_ like they were working hard all weekend or
| _tell_ you that they worked all weekend on something.
| andreyk wrote:
| Nicely said, I think this is a mostly accurate assessment. A
| lot of grad students are type A, a lot are type B, and plenty
| are both. Still, I do think a fourth kind exists (or a sub type
| of B) which is people who struggle to balance all the things in
| their lives and despite their best efforts end up with work on
| the weekends. Not everyone "choose[s] to follow spontaneous
| whims or to relax or procrastinate instead.", many people do
| their best to not procrastinate or to plan things out well, but
| particularly when there are deadlines it's simply hard to do.
|
| I can also tell you from experience, although this is not
| regularly the case, when it comes time to try to submit a paper
| to a conference it's definitely possible that there is so much
| work that there is no way to contain the work to M-F. Which is
| of course how people get burned out, depressed, etc. And it's
| all too common in academia, with grads students having to
| balance teaching, research, classes, and more.
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