[HN Gopher] As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls fo...
___________________________________________________________________
As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in
academia
Author : pseudolus
Score : 168 points
Date : 2022-06-15 10:08 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| titaniumrain wrote:
| 4,5 years as a PhD student, then 2,3 years as a postdoc then 5
| more years to get tenured... modern slavery isn't it?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| One can freely leave at any time, so I don't think this counts
| as slavery.
| fullshark wrote:
| Just a reflection of how desperate people are to get a shot at
| the final prize: tenured professor. You see this type of
| competition and desperation in a lot of fields with highly
| prized superstar occupations (successful musician, pro athlete,
| etc)
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| Professors struggling to recruit slaves in high cost of living
| areas who will willingly give away x years of lucrative salary
| elsewhere?
| lqr wrote:
| In CS right now, people with a very strong PhD can go straight to
| the tenure track.
|
| I took a postdoc because my PhD is solid but I jumped around
| topics a lot, so it's not quite coherent enough. My postdoc is
| also at a more prestigious institute.
|
| I'm rolling the dice that it might be enough to get that tenure
| track job. But I also have no dependents and don't care about
| material possessions very much. If my situation were a little bit
| different, it would be foolish to do what I'm doing.
| screye wrote:
| I have always seen Postdocs as a 'desperation' position. The
| struggle to recruit post-docs might indicate healthier
| alternatives for phds instead of living life as white-collar
| slaves.
|
| I am surprised that universities haven't created formal part-
| academia-part-industry partnerships with nearby companies just
| yet. Instead we are stuck with post-docs and adjunct roles, which
| get you the worst of both worlds.
|
| Good Riddance.
| quantum_magpie wrote:
| >I am surprised that universities haven't created formal part-
| academia-part-industry partnerships with nearby companies just
| yet.
|
| These do exist. I was offered to do a so-called 'Industrial
| PhD' at University of Copenhagen, where you get funded by a
| company, you do research split between university labs and the
| company labs, and work at the company at the same time. Should
| be noted that the time crunch is brutal, as you have the
| standard 3 years to complete it, but also have to work part
| time.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Does the "industry work" part of it produce publishable
| research that could be used towards a thesis?
| epvgwwqe wrote:
| I did a postdoc at a top 5 institution and found it to be an
| ideal transition point into the startup world. I was pretty sure
| a few months into it that I would leave academia, and spent as
| much time as possible beefing up my coding skills and doing a
| startup on the side/finding a cofounder. I even hedged my bets
| and applied for tenure track jobs in the meantime. This may not
| work for everyone but it was definitely better than doing a full
| time industry job during those years which would have made any
| substantial entrepreneurial activities much harder to do on the
| side, and not nearly as good for networking.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that most of what's said in this article
| doesn't apply to "top 5" universities. There will always be
| people willing to put up with a couple years of shitty pay in
| exchange for being able to work with a Nobel laureate and put
| "MIT" on their resume.
| seydor wrote:
| Academia is a despotic, anachronistic system. There needs to be a
| movement to break education and research out of academic
| institutions. There are enough online resources to provide free
| education to anyone who wishes it, and nobody should have to pay
| for a degree (instead; students should be paid; it's in the
| interest of society). Funding and licensing of science needs to
| open up to anyone who desires it, in order to become productive
| again. The current system is optimized to create busybodies who
| oversell their work for a few years before dumping it and moving
| on to their next scam. Postdocs are victims of their own delusion
| that working in academia is somehow superior to working in any
| other way.
| biophysboy wrote:
| The quote from a prof upset that they only received 28 applicants
| in about 6 months is pretty rich to read, as someone who is in
| currently a PhD student. They should be delighted so many people
| want a job with indefinite length, uncertain prospects, and very
| little pay.
|
| I just recently got a post doc offer from someone, which I will
| almost certainly turn down because I know the reality: academia
| sucks, science is great. For years, people have put up with the
| former to enjoy the latter, but I think we are hitting a
| threshold.
| derbOac wrote:
| Yes, the whole article is sort of tone deaf: it's like they see
| a problem but not the actual problem. It's very typical of the
| whole thing: complaints without actually doing the painful work
| of restructuring things, because that would cause too much
| inconvenience for the people who have benefited.
|
| So we have these discussions about pay and supply and demand,
| which is part of it, but not the nature of the positions
| themselves, the ponzi funding scheme underlying it, the status
| hierarchies, none of it. No one wants to cut or line-item
| justify indirect funds, or turn those postdocs into faculty
| positions.
|
| The last place I was at this issue came up about being able to
| have grad students without funding: the argument was if you
| can't fund them off of grants you shouldn't have them. On the
| surface, this sounds great, pretty reasonable, until you
| realize that now you're incentivizing taking grad students to
| support grants, rather than as an end in itself. Basically
| you're incentivizing a permanent student culture, because the
| expected lifecycle of the researcher is maybe 30 years, whereas
| the student is expected to only be there maybe 5 in theory.
|
| It's so hard for me to wrap my head around it it: the best
| analogy maybe really is a ponzi scheme. The desired product is
| the input. It's so broken in so many ways. It's like no one is
| actually paying for research, they're paying for attracting
| students, attracting the money to pay for the research, the
| trappings of research, etc. That actual useful research gets
| done is a convenient side effect.
| april_22 wrote:
| I think what really changed is that people who have a PhD
| nowadays certainly also have great coding skills and the latter
| is so much more attractive job wise
| [deleted]
| Master_Odin wrote:
| Fair number of the CS PhD students I knew while I was there
| were not good coders, with professors being even worse at it.
| There's no incentive to write good code, just that it
| "functions".
| photoelectric wrote:
| Here's another perspective from a physicist in one of the less
| popular sub-fields (IE not quantum computing, high energy, etc.).
|
| I am currently coming to the end of my PhD and want to end up in
| industry later. However, I am going to do a postdoc for at least
| a year for a few reasons.
|
| Firstly, it is with a scientist that I work well with and is
| doing work that I believe in. They are a great boss and I take
| time off when I need it and without guilt. Second, the location
| is right and in an area I want to live in and eventually find
| jobs in. Lastly, the postdoc pays like $80k with benefits; less
| than I could make in ad-tech, etc. However, it is a decent amount
| to live well in the location. I'm also doing work on problems I
| choose and without a need to justify them. It's amazing to me
| that I can earn money doing this type of work at all.
|
| Plus the postdoc is meant to be a job-hunting exercise. I
| basically am getting paid a salary to do interesting work and
| shop around for a job and live in the area I want a job in. It's
| a win-win. Even my most anti-academia friends in my PhD program
| are considering doing this for similar reasons.
|
| I guess I am posting this because going through PhD I only ever
| heard complaints come through about the system (a lot of them
| valid IMHO). However, now that I'm making the decision it seems
| like I have a lot of great opportunities. Not that my field
| doesn't have its problems, but I wonder if the severe ones are
| concentrated elsewhere. I suppose there's hope out there if
| you're in the right field.
| throwaway24124 wrote:
| I graduated college in 2018, and, even though I majored in
| Neuroscience and wanted to do computational neuroscience
| research, that there was just no way I could accept the working
| conditions + cost of grad school, PhD, and postdoc life. It
| seemed like a terrible deal then, even as a young student who
| ONLY wanted to do research. Learning software engineering and
| breaking into the industry was SO much easier than continuing my
| education, and while I don't regret it, I have to imagine the
| deal has only gotten worse. The only people I still know doing
| research are fully funded by their parents, and even then most of
| them have dropped out for easier jobs. Cannot imagine the brain-
| drain that is happening across the US right now.
| pkaye wrote:
| > For instance, academic administrators and policymakers may want
| to ask, "How can we make postdoc positions more attractive?
|
| They could start by firing a few administrators and spread the
| savings on better pay for the postdocs.
| clircle wrote:
| PhD students are just reacting to market conditions. This all
| sounds really good to me.
| option wrote:
| Postdocs don't make sense. Once you get PhD, you should be able
| to find faculty or industry job.
| balanoceous wrote:
| I am a post-doc in one of the ivory towers. I've been in the
| system a long time (technician, MD, PhD, residency, fellowship,
| now post doc). Jeez!
|
| I am a computational immunologist who studies cancer
| immunotherapy, if it matters. I am not independently wealthy or
| blah blah. I am a normal everyday person.
|
| I agree academia is nonsensical for the many reasons that are
| frequently discussed in HN.
|
| Mine is not a perspective I see represented here often: I
| absolutely love my job as a post doc. Everyone is different - I
| get a lot of joy from my work. Most of my friends in science at
| different stages feel more or less the same (albeit everyone
| complains).
|
| I could get paid 10x more or work half as much, maybe both at the
| same time. So to answer the question here, why do people do this?
| Cuz I like it. Don't make everything so complicated (as an
| academic, that is my job).
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| Good for you.
|
| Would the pay scales below for post-doc positions be about
| rightish or make you laugh hysterically?
|
| https://www.crick.ac.uk/careers-study/postdocs
|
| https://www.imperial.ac.uk/human-resources/pay-and-pensions/...
|
| Just to put a rough scale on things
| balanoceous wrote:
| Relative to my salary as a board certified physician in
| private practice, I take about a 10x pay cut.
|
| I guess since I sling code/data I take a pretty nice pay cut
| relative to that also.
|
| Whoops!
| mbaytas wrote:
| > "Ph.D.s are looking at the labor market, seeing opportunities
| out there, and taking them," she says. "Those skills that we
| teach our Ph.D. students are in demand."
|
| LoL.
|
| Among all the stereotypes in academia perhaps the truest one is
| profs taking credit for what their students achieve.
|
| Not even bothering to hide it anymore.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| PhD student looking forward to graduate and move on. I think one
| can make a decent living with a German salary, which is still 50%
| lower than an industry position, the reason why I want to leave
| is the insane competitiveness and inherent up-or-out structure of
| academia. If I could have a permanent position with the same
| salary I currently get I would seriously consider staying.
| kmmlng wrote:
| The lack of almost any permanent positions aside from full
| professorships in the German research landscape is truly
| ridiculous. What does that get you? A whole bunch of
| inexperienced PhD students with one professor at the top who
| cannot possibly find the time to adequately supervise them all
| / steer the research in useful directions.
| martopix wrote:
| Same in Switzerland. In the UK (where I did my PhD) it was
| quite a bit better imho.
| jarenmf wrote:
| I'm currently a postdoc in Germany, to be honest, it seems that
| only people who can't find a job in the industry are staying in
| academia. I've never met a postdoc who was happy about what
| they are doing, everyone one is thinking of an escape plan.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >Postdoc salaries are frequently based on what the U.S. National
| Institutes of Health sets as its standard, "and that's pretty
| low," says Daniel Wolf Savin, a physicist and senior research
| scientist at Columbia University who is currently struggling to
| fill five postdoc positions. When hiring, he competes with
| national labs that offer up to $20,000 more per year in salary.
| "If we put in a research grant with a postdoc salary that they
| pay at a national lab, the program office is going to look at it
| and say, 'Look, I can't give you this much money. It's so out of
| line with what everyone else is asking for,'" he says.
|
| I never understood why there are salary guidelines in the first
| place. Why should a lab with $200k/year to spend on postdoc
| salaries be unable to hire a single postdoc at $200k/year?
| Current guidelines stipulate the lab must instead hire 4 postdocs
| at $50k/year.
|
| At the end of the day, research quality is what matters. The
| research output of a single excellent postdoc worth $200k/year
| could easily exceed the total output of four mediocre postdocs
| each worth $50k/year.
| throwawayarnty wrote:
| Sorry to sound elitist, but no reasonable phd graduate that wants
| to pursue academia would ever want to do their PhD at Clemson
| university. Only possible exception would be that PI has done
| Nobel prize level work or the candidate has personal reasons to
| be in South Carolina.
|
| For perspective postdocs, it's not about money, job security, or
| job environment . It's first and foremost potential to be a
| leader in their field.
|
| Plenty of phd graduates are willing to postdoc at MIT or work
| with a Nobel laureate for starvation wages and intense work
| environments.
|
| Clemson university just can't compete.
| [deleted]
| misterkrabs wrote:
| > Graduate students are also listening to postdocs, who in recent
| years have become increasingly vocal about the precarious nature
| of their positions and the challenges of getting by on a postdoc
| salary
|
| This is exactly what saved me. I was an undergraduate research
| assistant and our postdoc warned me.
| [deleted]
| gww wrote:
| In addition to terrible compensation, I think another common
| issue for a post-doc is that they are not afforded the same
| protections as a graduate student. In the places I have worked
| the grad students are usually protected by the university, their
| committees, etc.
|
| Post-docs on the other hand are usually contract workers and they
| can be fired without any recourse. Usually with two to four weeks
| compensation. It gives their bosses tremendous power. I know
| post-docs who have been fired for questioning a PI or a paper
| they are part of. This can be devastating for a post-doc and
| their future career. They may have toiled years on a project and
| can have it taken away on a dime.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Interesting. I know graduate students at my alma mater are now
| unionized, I wonder if that can cover post docs as well.
| gww wrote:
| I think some places do have post doc unions and it is
| sometimes combined with graduate student unions. However, in
| the places I have been it sadly does not exist.
| jarenmf wrote:
| Every post-doc I know is plotting an escape plan, some are
| learning web development, some are learning data science or
| system administration, heck, there is even special bootcamps now
| for postdocs evading academia
| physicsguy wrote:
| Oh yeah, I wonder why people aren't biting off the hand of
| academics for 6-12 month contracts with no control over what type
| of project you'd actually work on in many labs. And of course the
| salaries haven't kept up with the rest of the job market.
| slurpmaker wrote:
| Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not
| based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles,
| with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Why would someone,
| with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc for
| 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python
| developer role? Moreso, post doc'ing for the wrong professor can
| ruin your career, why risk that either?
|
| If the pay isn't good, the culture and work should be. In
| academia, that's almost never true. I couldn't support my family,
| nor ironically pay my families student loan payments as a post-
| doc, the decision was an easy one to make... But if I were really
| doing it for the love, the love isn't there.
|
| You might think "oh here's an industry person who doesn't like
| academia", wrong. I loved research, writing papers, teaching
| people stuff, forming collaborations, etc. Just can't make it
| survivable financially or psychologically.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| "There's a shortage of Lamborghinis!"
|
| "Oh? At which price point?"
|
| "At the $4000 price point! It's a travesty!"
| Spivak wrote:
| There's some nuance here because the reason this logic works
| is that labor is special (to me at least) because measures to
| forcibly reduce the cost of labor increase human suffering.
| But for basically every other good prices being driven well
| beyond the norm (during normalish market conditions) is
| basically the definition of a shortage. It doesn't really
| matter if it's a "luxary" good or not (since that category is
| ill-defined anyway grumble grumble tampons).
|
| If the price of milk shot up from $2/gal to $20/gal that's a
| shortage.
| bsder wrote:
| > If the price of milk shot up from $2/gal to $20/gal
| that's a shortage.
|
| Erm, exactly?
|
| If there were a real shortage, salaries would be going up.
| The fact that salaries aren't going up to counteract that
| "shortage" tells me that there really isn't one.
| plaguepilled wrote:
| That is a perverse misreading of the original comment.
|
| Calling a livable wage and fair working conditions a
| Lamborghini is not applicable.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| In this metaphor, the postdoc is the Lamborghini, the
| speaker is the employer bemoaning the difficulty of
| acquiring a postdoc/Lamborghini for an unreasonable price
| point, and the $4000 is the unreasonable price point.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Good CS researches are in some sense the Lamborghinis of
| developers.
| TheTacoMerchant wrote:
| I think the comment was comparing good post-doc researchers
| to Lamborghinis. Makes sense as the academic are not
| offering enough ($4000) for it to make sense.
| jboggan wrote:
| Absolutely true. I saw this play out in my lab where we had 1-2
| PhD students (including myself) and about 12-16 rotating
| postdocs. They worked insane hours for very little pay, no
| benefits, and produced 95% of the output of the lab. Our
| professor was definitely the "wrong" kind of professor, as
| about 50% of them left academia entirely and not by choice
| after being wrung dry of all productive output and then
| discarded. The professor also only hired visa applicants to
| have extra leverage over them. I know that isn't the case
| everywhere in American universities, but it was common enough
| that no one cared or thought it was extraordinary.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| I was an industry person who wanted to transition to academia.
| I just decided against it obviously. I liked all the aspects
| you pointed out above. The one thing that is missed is that
| most places are publishing sweatshops where the pay and work
| conditions are horrible. The "boss" or the PI has unlimited
| control and can destroy your career.
|
| The problems are also way out of the ordinary. I'd like to draw
| a parallel with medicine. Most researchers are doctors who
| interact and treat patients. In contrast - I think a lot of
| engineering post docs or phds may not be working on stuff the
| industry cares about.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I just decided against it obviously.
|
| Why is it obvious? There might be some groupthink on HN (and
| bias toward our career paths), but plenty of people go into
| academia.
|
| > pay and work conditions are horrible
|
| It's not like bosses and businesses in the private sector are
| Nirvana. You can see plenty of stories about them on HN.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Private sector pay is much better and working conditions
| are also on average much better. You have professional
| management and HR functions and one manager can't destroy
| your career. More importantly the exit options are better.
| The relative power imbalances lead to people being treated
| differently.
| travisporter wrote:
| Is the whole patent clerk discovering stuff in their free
| time still possible? I know people say do what you love etc
| but I've found something I kinda like as a day job but I'd
| rather be doing astronomy.
| [deleted]
| OccamsRazr wrote:
| yup. deeply regret my time as a postdoc. especially the last
| few years in the pandemic have been the absolute worst work
| experience in terms of culture and job satisfaction. it's
| killed the passion for research i had at the start.
|
| the worst part is that i think this experience has completely
| tanked my confidence.
|
| now id take a jr python dev job in a second.
| enriquto wrote:
| > a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and
| double the hours required as a junior python developer role
|
| Where do you get these numbers from? This is not _at all_ like
| that in Europe. A postdoc gets (say, in France) 30k per year,
| doing a calm, interesting job and paid travel to a couple of
| conferences per year, with almost total freedom to choose their
| daily schedule. This is not a high salary, but it is certainly
| livable and quite above the median of the country. A 150k
| salary is nearly out of reach for even quite senior developers,
| and nonsensical for "junior python developer roles".
| time_to_smile wrote:
| In the US (at least for now) it's fairly easy for a Senior
| Engineer to get 250k TC, and if income is your goal and you
| want put the energy towards a FAANG, not that hard to get up
| to 400-500k. In 2019 the median postdoc salary in the US was
| ~50k [0].
|
| The work/life balance part is a bit trickier to quantify.
| Anecdotally US postdocs work pretty hard, but my experience
| is that _highly_ paid engineers at FAANG-style companies also
| work pretty hard. If you don 't want work to be your life as
| a SWE $250k seems to be the easiest achievable comp while
| meeting those requirements.
|
| 0. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00587-y
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| My experience as a senior engineer at G was that most of my
| peers and I were working about 20-30 hours/week and
| collecting 300-500k TC. Some senior SWEs worked long hours,
| but they weren't rewarded for it, and many quickly adopt
| the ~30 hour/week lifestyle.
| bogeholm wrote:
| Well, that sounds OK ;)
| pfortuny wrote:
| Yep, for exactly two or three years tops.
| enriquto wrote:
| What do you mean? The university will be happy to have you
| around for such a cheap price as long as you want.
| borroka wrote:
| I did my last postdoc in another European country more or
| less 8 years ago and my salary was 1700 euros per month
| (after taxes). Very limited funds for traveling or going to
| conferences. That was barely livable, considering it is
| temporary money, you cannot ask for any mortgage, cannot plan
| any future and you are often starting to have gray hair (or a
| full head of gray hair).
| tetris11 wrote:
| Postdoc in Germany sees around 2400+- after tax per month
| pfortuny wrote:
| For how long? That is the question.
| tcpekin wrote:
| Is that correct? I am a postdoc at Humboldt Universitat
| zu Berlin and I'm at the TV-L 13 level, Stufe 3, which is
| ~3300 post tax.
| jawilson2 wrote:
| When I was a postdoc 10 years ago in the US I brought home
| about $2200/month. My health insurance deductible was
| $5000/year. I paid $1800/month in student loans. My family
| had to move into my parent's basement, and every credit card
| was maxed, every bank account overdrawn, major food anxiety,
| etc.
| musicale wrote:
| It is astonishing how poorly academia pays the people who
| actually do the research; extreme financial stress is a
| nightmare that can really wreck your life.
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| I think this is very much a uniquely American article and
| comment. I believe in many other nations the situation is
| different on both sides. Postdocs are treated different and
| get more pay, junior developers get paid less.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I agree with you. I don't know why but the most
| disfunctional labs I know about are all in the US (Prof
| putting meetings on sat morning so everyone comes in to
| work on weekends...), although I know of some pretty bad
| places in Switzerland as well. You're also correct postdoc
| salaries higher in Europe (and developer ones are lower).
| However, there is definitely a problem finding postdocs
| also here. I should say that this seems to be not just
| academia, all my industry colleagues are desperate for
| applicants.
| beisner wrote:
| In the US, a postdoc at a top CS school makes like $60-80k
| and works 60-80hrs a week, whereas a new grad of the same
| caliber with just a bachelors (think top 10% of graduating
| class) can reasonably expect to make >$200k working 40 hours
| a week at a FAANG. Meanwhile, Research Scientist roles (the
| common alternative to doing a postdoc in CS) recently cracked
| $400k starting. These are numbers I have personally
| experienced. (Verifiable on aipaygrad.es and levels.fyi).
|
| CS is certainly an outlier in terms of salaries, but ANY
| person capable of landing a postdoc in a STEM field at a
| competitive school in the US is capable of figuring out a way
| to get a job as a software engineer in Big Tech (the grind of
| leet code is nothing compared to the grind of doing a PhD,
| full stop). This is why >60% of PhD grads in CS across top
| schools are ending up in industry, and I knew a TON of PhDs
| from physics, math, chemistry, etc. who left research
| immediately after graduating and are now SWE.
| draw_down wrote:
| zenlf wrote:
| It's probably in the US. A friend of mine was physical
| chemist and was paid in the 20k range per year several years
| ago and it was barely livable. It's not surprising that a
| junior developer getting paid 5 times of that.
| mvh wrote:
| I'm a PhD student in CS in the USA. At my school in Boston,
| we are paid a ~40K USD/yr stipend. My friends in industry
| make a _minimum_ of 120k/yr, and some make considerably more
| than that (think 200k+), in junior / "entry-level" positions.
|
| When I complete the PhD, if I go to industry in the USA, my
| income will probably be similar to that of my friends who
| will have been in industry the entire time (and gotten steady
| wage increases throughout).
|
| It's important to note also cost of living. 40k/yr might
| sound like a lot, but in Boston, rent is >1k/month even with
| roommates, we don't have dental care, our health insurance is
| imperfect, groceries are expensive, etc. etc. Meanwhile in
| Tucson Arizona or Bloomington Indiana the stipend is
| something like 22-28K/yr, as cost of living is lower.
|
| Generally speaking it's reasonable to say that completing a
| PhD in computer science is not a financial investment, but
| rather, something I am doing because I want to do it. I am
| very unlikely to literally "profit" (compared to, if I had
| gone straight to industry instead).
|
| I hope this information is useful/interesting!
| m463 wrote:
| A friend of mine got a phd and he told me the main benefit
| was that he had lots more opportunities. He was always
| called back for job interviews and had lots more positions
| available. His wife, a nurse, basically supported him while
| he was getting the degree.
| lesuorac wrote:
| This is still an opportunity cost scenario. Would your
| friend get called back for job interviews if he had just
| spent that time in industry and had ~3yr experience on
| their resume (My experience is yes).
| vkou wrote:
| Getting hired as a PHD is usually a +1 in level compared to
| a junior.
| supernewton wrote:
| Yes, but in the time it takes to complete a PhD, the
| junior engineer can usually get promoted at least once.
| So you both end up in the same place, but the guy who
| went straight to industry was making 3x more than the PhD
| in the meantime.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| ... this sounds like you're in my exact department,
| actually.
| apohn wrote:
| >If the pay isn't good, the culture and work should be. In
| academia, that's almost never true
|
| When I think back to my thought process when I was applying for
| academic and research jobs after my PhD, there's one thing I
| remember that always keeps me from ever second guessing my
| decision to move to the private sector.
|
| At least in my field, so many people in academia and research
| had big egos and were a-holes. Some of them were brilliant,
| many of them just thought they were. It was so easy to end up
| in a toxic mess. You know that interviewer who makes you feel
| small because they knew some random minutiae that you didn't
| know? There are plenty of those in academia and you'll be
| answerable to them.
|
| I've worked for a bunch of big companies and there's less
| acceptance of a-holes. If nothing else, your colleagues will
| acknowledge they are a-holes and validate how you feel. Even if
| somebody is a brilliant 10X a-hole, a decent management layer
| will put walls around them to minimize their damage. And if you
| find yourself stuck working with or for an a-hole, you have
| more options to switch because there are more jobs.
| vecter wrote:
| My friend who is a professor at a university aiming for
| tenure put it succinctly: "Academic politics is the most
| vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are
| so low."
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
| pfortuny wrote:
| No: the will to power is greatest because you have
| (supposedly) power over the creme of the creme.
|
| As silly as that but Nietzsche had it right: the will to
| power is one of the primordial forces.
| LegitShady wrote:
| the creme of the creme are all working for big companies
| making big dollars. But I could imagine people in
| academia thinking they are the a big deal.
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| Ehh, I'm old enough now that I can LinkedIn/Facebook
| search my old classmates and see how the creme of my crop
| turned out. Everyone was smart but the genuine honest-to-
| god genius from our class is a research chemist at MIT.
| The richest is a former childrens' toy maker (STEM-
| education startup exit).
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What is that based on?
|
| AFIAK, the leaders in almost every field are in academia,
| where they have the independence to do research, not earn
| profits, and where their research has the greatest impact
| because their employer doesn't hide it from the world as
| long as possible.
| vecter wrote:
| That's not really fair either. There are plenty of
| brilliant people in academia who don't care for big
| paychecks from corporations.
| doliveira wrote:
| That's just for very, very specific fields.
|
| For instance, for something very practical, market-ready,
| basically Engineering I'd say you're correct. For basic
| research, not at all.
| oefrha wrote:
| The stakes are in fact very high for the academics
| themselves. There's night and day difference between
| getting tenure, and not.
| apohn wrote:
| As whymauri has illustrated, there's a ton of pettiness
| that goes on between tenured professors and outside of
| anything to do with the tenure process. It's nothing but
| people with big egos being a small fish in a small pond
| and then stomping around like toddlers to make sure
| everybody knows they are there.
|
| I still have memories of wanting to tell some of my
| tenured professors that they needed to grow up and find
| bigger things to cry about. I was in my 20s, they were
| all 40+.
|
| At least IME, the younger non-tenured professors were
| less likely to engage in this pettiness because they had,
| as you have pointed out, a lot more to lose.
| oefrha wrote:
| I mean the perceived viciousness mostly stems from power
| imbalance (when it's between tenured and untenured) and
| having a lot to lose. Two tenured assholes clashing is at
| best unpleasant.
| whymauri wrote:
| The closer I got to my PIs and their friends/enemies in
| various academic departments, the more I realized that
| university departmental politics are more stereotypically
| 'high school drama' than anything I actually experienced in
| high school! My god, professors can be so petty.
|
| Don't consult a self-perceived expert on a field on a project
| you're considering? Uninvited from their July 4th BBQ.
|
| Standing up for a junior tenure-track faculty who a senior
| person doesn't like? Have fun getting work done while
| scheduled to teach the 800 person remedial chemistry class,
| disparagingly called 'chemistry for artists.'
|
| Need some equipment but you forgot to wish me happy birthday?
| Sorry, unforeseen maintenance lol. Oh please.
| misterkrabs wrote:
| So true, lol. Stoner by John Williams does a good job of
| showing this.
| bigdict wrote:
| Great novel.
| bombcar wrote:
| As has been attributed to Sayre: "Academic politics is the
| most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the
| stakes are so low."
| wolverine876 wrote:
| A professor who had also worked in the private sector told
| me: In academia, everyone is smart and some of them are nice.
| In the private sector, everyone is nice and some of them are
| smart.
| dataflow wrote:
| > In the private sector, everyone is nice
|
| This doesn't really square with the horror stories I see
| from the private sector.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I don't think they meant it literally, but more in the
| sense of different places on the trade-off continuum:
| E.g., academia is willing to tolerate more bad behavior
| but less lack-of-smarts.
| doliveira wrote:
| Everyone in the informal hyperbolic sense. Like 90%.
|
| The remaining 10% are more than enough to account for the
| horror stories
| throwawayarnty wrote:
| Postdocs in Europe are pretty comfortable and labs often have
| more stable/core funding.
|
| Work can be pretty good postdocing in some labs in Europe.
|
| But the end of the road is still that after the postdoc you're
| expected to either be a rockstar or a nobody. So anxiety is
| always there.
| simonsaysso wrote:
| Both my parents went to graduate school. One of them loved the
| academic setting and went through with the postdoc and then
| found a tenure track job, the other decided it wasn't for them.
| I talked to them recently and the one still teaching said they
| would never choose that path if they were coming out of college
| now.
|
| It can take 5-10 years to find a tenure track job now because
| professors don't retire. I've seen 90+ year olds walking around
| departments, and 70 year olds are common. All the low hanging
| fruit is gone, so projects and problems take longer and longer.
| Together, it means that whatever semblance of academic
| integrity and honor is gone. There's too much pressure to
| produce something big that you'll hide data or even steal it.
| Even collaborations don't mean you'll see your name on a paper.
| My partner got their research scooped by former collaborators!!
| And your recourse for blatant plagiarism? Nothing! No
| institution will fight for you because your career doesn't
| matter to them. There's a huge pool of postdocs they can pick
| from if you give up. Most of the professors still pretend that
| they can talk things out and share data, or blame you for not
| anticipating the issues.
|
| The pay is secondary for most people who made it through grad
| school. They generally _want_ to do research. But when the pay
| is less for a more toxic environment, it's a no brainer. And
| somehow the professors are confused why no one wants to stay...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > All the low hanging fruit is gone, so projects and problems
| take longer and longer.
|
| That is survivorship bias. There are low-hanging fruit in
| newer fields, or fields with recent major shifts.
| mr_gibbins wrote:
| I've posted on this before but I make twice as much, more, as
| an industry pro than in my work as a non-tenured academic. I've
| been offered tenure and turned it down, because if I took it,
| my family would starve. It needs to change.
|
| But imagine the displacement of those ivory-tower academic
| greybeards who will suddenly have to compete with actual
| professionals? They're still teaching HTML/CSS in my
| university, for example; cloud is largely pooh-poohed; AI and
| ML are barely on the curriculum, and sub-par at that; more
| interesting subjects, like e.g. computational neuroscience, or
| any software engineering that isn't Python, simply doesn't
| feature. They'll be out on their ear.
| Calavar wrote:
| Just my personal observations:
|
| Plain HTML/CSS is still relevant today. Not everything needs
| to be an SPA. I also don't understand how one would write
| SPAs with React/Vue/whatever other framework without first
| having at least some understanding of HTML and CSS.
|
| Agree with the cloud being poo-pooed.
|
| Don't agree with barely any classes in ML. Grant money in ML
| has been hot, which means academic hiring in ML has been hot,
| and a good number of those hires are teaching classes.
| Basically every major CS department has a broad selection of
| ML courses or even ML concentrations and minors. Most smaller
| departments seem to have at least one or two courses to
| choose from.
|
| I've never seen Python used to teach software engineering.
| Java is the classic language for that, even today. Although I
| suspect that we may have different definitions of software
| engineering.
| bsder wrote:
| Careful. Not every PhD is STEM. There are lots of humanities
| PhDs.
|
| In addition, most of my EE professors were from industry and
| would _smoke_ their contemporaries. They knew their shit cold
| and then some.
| tiahura wrote:
| _Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the
| earth" post doc_
|
| Access to coeds.
| borroka wrote:
| Very understandable. I worked as a post doc for 8 years, with a
| paltry salary, I must say I had excellent advisors, so the
| experience was professionally enjoyable and I had the
| opportunity to sharpen my skills, travel the world for work,
| and have fun in general.
|
| But in spite of an excellent CV, with the caveat that I had no
| affiliations with top schools and was not part of any in-group
| --I did not know how important both would be for an academic
| career, I though my many well-cited publications and clear and
| long-term research plans would have been enough.
|
| Over the years, I applied for at least 70 tenure-track
| positions for which I felt I had a good chance of making at
| least the shortlist of 20 viable candidates. I was called for
| just one preliminary phone interview.
|
| I started applying for industrial positions in Machine Learning
| and, after receiving a few offers, took a job that paid 5 times
| my last postdoc salary (my last contract was 6 months, so it
| would have been 10 times). It has been a fulfilling, very well
| paid, and fun career so far.
|
| I always recommend that not-too-promising postdocs consider a
| career in the private sector early on, especially in technology
| or related fields. They rarely listen, think or led to believe
| they are different. They aren't.
| [deleted]
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| > But in spite of an excellent CV, with the caveat that I had
| no affiliations with top schools and was not part of any in-
| group--I did not know how important both would be for an
| academic career, I though my many well-cited publications and
| clear and long-term research plans would have been enough.
|
| Even those are not enough. I had all of those (great
| undergrad and grad school pedigree, postdoc with a novel
| laureate, publications...) You need to have a final boss who
| will go to bat for you, unfortunately the Nobel laureate was
| 84 and more into playing slots at the Indian casino/fucking
| around in the lab than he was in advocating for my career.
| apohn wrote:
| >You need to have a final boss who will go to bat for you,
| unfortunately the Nobel laureate was 84 and more into
| playing slots at the Indian casino/fucking around in the
| lab than he was in advocating for my career.
|
| This is one of the things I like about industry jobs. Your
| career at a company might grow or be derailed by one
| person, but it's just that particular company. If it's a
| big company, it's just that particular org. In academia a
| single person can derail your entire career. As you've
| pointed out, sometimes it's not even malice. They just
| aren't interested in doing what they need to support you.
|
| At one point my skip-level was a VP at a software company
| who loved to push people into doing things by saying "Think
| about your career. If you do things right you will be set
| for life." Outside of his tiny universe at that company,
| nobody even knew he existed. I burned some bridges with
| that person and some of his sycophants, but I just moved on
| to a different company with zero ramifications.
|
| It's liberating to be able to just say F-it and move on.
| borroka wrote:
| That's alluring.
|
| It is true that you can change companies and rapidly
| leave behind all the problems and conflicts and issues
| you had in your previous jobs.
|
| In academia, first, it is very challenging to move to
| another institution after you start your tenure track
| position (few jobs available, students need to be taken
| care of, it is at least a 2-year move), second if you
| have "issues" with other people in the field, and
| especially when they are more powerful than you (better
| known, better network, better financing), you have a
| miserable professional life in front of you. I see many
| an academic living on the verge of psychological
| collapse.
|
| Freedom has no price, for all the rest there is money in
| the bank account.
| [deleted]
| toddm wrote:
| My experience through 2 postdoctoral appointments was quite
| pleasant. The pay was low and I lived in high COL places, but I
| knew that going into it.
|
| In return, I met and worked with and for some brilliant people
| and was exposed to interesting research.
| alfor wrote:
| Academia is mostly a bureaucratic scam at this point.
|
| So many research lab have zero impact on the real world.
|
| I think most of the useful research happen in corporation now.
| gtsnexp wrote:
| "I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination." - Freeman Dyson
|
| https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/95;jsessioni...
| baka367 wrote:
| I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for
| anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was
| (obviously) very high.
|
| Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary
| as a junior developer and had a successful career since.
|
| Is casual coding more interesting than research/teaching - no,
| but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could
| find in me.
|
| I also still find how to get some of the joys of academia in
| industry, namely, mentoring/holding workshops/writing design
| specs/turning the cluttered documentation into a nicely flowing
| coherent one~
| kmmlng wrote:
| A PhD can mean a lot of different things. Personally, I'm
| employed as a research associate while doing a PhD, which in
| theory means I should do the PhD as part of my job. In
| practice, I do not get to do any actual research during the job
| and the PhD is relegated to weekends.
|
| What I find curious: I get paid to do lots of things which are
| clearly complete nonsense, but the funding comes with the
| requirement that these specific nonsensical things must be
| done. I could do lots of useful things, but I do not get paid
| for those.
|
| I'm far enough into the process that I've decided to just
| collect the stupid credential before I move on. Which is funny
| because I did not get into this for the credentials, but
| dropping out at this point would just look weird on my CV.
| EEBio wrote:
| What are the nonsensical activities you get paid to do?
| kmmlng wrote:
| For example solving specific problems in a data-driven way
| when there is no data and there never will be any data.
|
| Developing all sorts of platforms that will theoretically
| benefit the public / researchers / whoever, but in
| actuality will never be used by anyone and in fact will be
| shut down as soon as the corresponding project ends.
|
| Those are the two generic examples I can think of, for
| everything else I'd have to give too much context.
| [deleted]
| doliveira wrote:
| Yeah, I quit after my Masters. I do miss the challenge, the
| feeling of achievement when you crack something, just the whole
| feeling of being close to the edge of human knowledge, it's all
| so much more exciting than development where you know your
| answer is basically already out there.
|
| But yeah, you gotta do what pays the bills. I'm not making
| triple figures in dollars, but in my country it's six times
| what I would get during a PhD program.
| april_22 wrote:
| Doing a PhD and getting a job as a software developer
| afterwards seems to be a pretty common route nowadays
| arethuza wrote:
| I stopped doing a PhD after about 5 years - I was a Research
| Associate in a UK university so I actually got a salary which
| wasn't too bad but quite a bit below the going rate (I had a
| few job offers during that time).
|
| I left to co-found a start-up - never regretted it as I was
| "hyper cynical" (a direct quote from a colleague) about the
| whole academic world and how easy it was to play the "publish
| or perish" game.
|
| I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that
| mostly went unread.
| tonguez wrote:
| coldpie wrote:
| > I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers
| that mostly went unread.
|
| Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my
| professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was
| trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since
| he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn't very
| interested, since I wanted to make things people will
| actually use. His response was there was a team in Utah that
| helped make part of the USB spec the decade previous. I was
| attending the University of Minnesota.
|
| Yeah, no thanks.
| feet wrote:
| I think this is a short sighted perspective. Basic research
| is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD
| web app. Just because you don't see immediate impact
| doesn't mean it isn't there
| [deleted]
| randomsearch wrote:
| This is definitely false in many cases.
|
| Source: I've worked on both.
| arethuza wrote:
| I'm not saying that people shouldn't do basic research,
| far from it, more that I learned that given the way basic
| research _actually_ works then I had relatively little
| interest in actually doing it myself.
| coldpie wrote:
| Sure, I'm glad people do that work. But it's not for me.
| criddell wrote:
| > Basic research is important and has farther reaching
| impacts than a CRUD web app.
|
| Those aren't the only two options and even they were, it
| isn't always true.
| ISL wrote:
| That particular argument also falls flat, at least with the
| given information, since there have been plenty of industry
| partners in defining the USB specs.
|
| My guess is that if you want to be paid full-time to work
| on USB, you'll probably find more (and better-paid)
| positions in industry.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Yeah, but outside a borderline prodigy or no lifing to
| get the knowlegde and experience or a lucky recruitment
| at some university event, I doubt the industry was
| letting fresh new grads work on something like the USB
| spec.
| ghaff wrote:
| There may have been junior people on the teams at the
| various companies like Intel that developed and
| implemented the spec. No, those junior people probably
| weren't really developing the spec. (The person at Intel
| who is most credited for the spec with his team was
| already pretty senior and later became an Intel Fellow.)
| I also sort of doubt a university group in Utah was a
| major contributor--although I could be wrong.
| coldpie wrote:
| I admit I might've got the details wrong. The gist of the
| anecdote is the best response he had to me wanting to do
| impactful work was, "some people who didn't even go to
| this school were a part of something you've heard of ten
| years ago," which I didn't find terribly compelling.
| ImageXav wrote:
| Arethuza, I'm a bit confused by this comment. PhDs in the UK
| don't last over 4 years. Would you mind clarifying?
|
| From a personal perspective I don't regret my PhD, though it
| was charity funded so it was topped up to be around PS20 000
| instead of the usual PS14000ish per year. It was an
| opportunity to engage with a small group of experts in
| research that was engaging and of use to the wider world, and
| present it internationally. I also tried to start a start-up
| during this time, but the underlying idea failed to pass
| preliminary trials (I work in healthcare). So the two are not
| mutually exclusive.
|
| People's experience tends to vary. I think a lot depends on
| how much you research the group and supervisors you will be
| working with beforehand, and how much you engage them in the
| research you do.
| arethuza wrote:
| Technically the PhD was part time although most people in
| my position took 4 to 5 years. This was also the early 90s
| so times may have changed..
|
| I was lucky enough to get involved in the web very early
| (1992) and present papers at the first few web conferences
| - though that wasn't my day job.
|
| Edit: I worked on a couple of EU Esprit 2 projects.
| ImageXav wrote:
| Ah that makes sense. The rules have changed since, though
| a part time PhD would still take 6-7 years.
|
| I imagine that must have been quite interesting!
| mizzao wrote:
| > I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers
| that mostly went unread.
|
| I had the same feeling!
|
| And as it turns out, many of the skills are transferable:
| https://twitter.com/mizzao/status/1505529213612609536
| chrisseaton wrote:
| If you did a full PhD in what sense did you 'scrap' it? You
| just didn't do the defence?
| cs137 wrote:
| It sounds like he went ABD.
|
| In the US, PhDs can take 6-8+ years. There are some shitty
| advisors who delay their students' graduations to get
| additional low-wage labor. Also, the academic job market is
| terrible and has been for 30+ years, so it takes a full year
| just to do the search.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Expanding the acronym for non-academia, ABD is "all but
| dissertation". After the first 2-3 years of a PhD program,
| the coursework is finished, you're into mostly independent
| research, and so you've completed "all but dissertation".
| This is a nebulous time that could be as short as 1-2
| years, and could be as long as 5-10 years. The shorter
| durations tend to be in the sciences, and the longer
| durations in the humanities.
|
| Because the duration is so dependent on the program, and
| the only end is when the advisor agrees that sufficient
| work has been done to merit a PhD, it can stretch on
| without much hope in sight.
| graycat wrote:
| > Because the duration is so dependent on the program,
| and the only end is when the advisor agrees that
| sufficient work has been done to merit a PhD, it can
| stretch on without much hope in sight.
|
| At least one world famous research university has a fix
| for this problem of "... when the advisor agrees":
|
| The official statement of the university is that the
| Ph.D. student must submit "an original contribution to
| knowledge worthy of publication".
|
| So, if a student believes that they have done such work,
| then they are free to, and maybe should, submit it for
| publication. When the work is accepted for publication,
| the student can then so announce to the professor,
| department school, and university.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > The official statement of the university is that the
| Ph.D. student must submit "an original contribution to
| knowledge worthy of publication".
|
| > So, if a student believes that they have done such
| work, then they are free to, and maybe should, submit it
| for publication. When the work is accepted for
| publication, the student can then so announce to the
| professor, department school, and university.
|
| For many fields, this would not work. My advisor required
| a journal publication to get the Master's degree, and
| several to get the PhD. He (and many others) would have
| failed any candidate's defense if they had just one paper
| if they were in their committee.
|
| (Yes, it's crappy).
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Huh. My department requires one paper just to attain PhD
| candidate status.
| RhysU wrote:
| Isn't ABD status the time from successfully proposing a
| dissertation to a specific committee until successfully
| defending that dissertation in front of that committee?
|
| The former step is intended to clearly define what is
| sufficient work. In effect, it is the contract that
| eliminates some of the risk of the advisor's whim.
| BeetleB wrote:
| In my university the first part ("successfully proposing
| a dissertation to a specific committee") was called the
| preliminary exam ("prelim"). In principle, you should do
| this decently early in your thesis. In practice, many
| advisors would tell their students "Go do 90% of the
| research and when you're close to defending, do the
| prelim". They didn't want to commit to a project and
| later fail to achieve it.
|
| So with those advisors, it was normal for people to
| graduate six months after the prelim (because the
| department required a minimum of 6 months between the
| prelim and the defense).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Some people say ABD is 'all but defended' as in you wrote
| your thesis you just didn't do a defence, some people say
| ABD is 'all but dissertation' in that you didn't get the
| point of writing the thesis. That's a pretty big
| difference. The former is you basically did your entire
| PhD, the latter is you didn't really start it.
| dagw wrote:
| _the latter is you didn 't really start it._
|
| That seems unfair. By the time many people get started on
| their dissertation they have often done years of research
| and have gotten several papers published. Starting your
| dissertation basically means that you're 'done' with your
| PhD and ready to summerize what you've discovered.
| MereInterest wrote:
| There's also a difference in US and Europe conventions.
| In Europe, there's typically a 2-year MS followed by a
| 3-6 year PhD. In the US, these are typically combined
| into a single 5-8 year PhD program. So an "all but
| dissertation" phase in Europe is the entirety of the
| program, it's only the second (and most important) part
| in a US program.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Yeah, and so if you skip the masters then day one of your
| PhD is the start of your dissertation.
| dagw wrote:
| I though dissertation referred to the final written
| document you had to produce to get your PhD. Most people
| I know with PhDs stared writing that during the last year
| of the PhD program.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| When you're writing papers during your PhD you're
| basically writing chapters of your dissertation.
| sky-kedge0749 wrote:
| In practice in the U.S. the early part of a PhD program
| can be very similar to a master's. It's relatively common
| for people who leave PhD programs to walk away with a
| master's degree they didn't intend to get. It's called
| "mastering out."
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Yes you can also leave with an MPhil in the UK if it goes
| wrong.
| bachmeier wrote:
| My impression (from the inside of the university) is that
| academia is simply not a great employment option these days.
| There's an attitude on the inside that those who have academic
| jobs have won the lottery. No doubt, in a few fields that's still
| the case, but academic jobs are mostly bad working conditions and
| low pay combined with limited job security.
|
| It was trending in that direction for many years, but the
| pandemic was a major structural change. You should consider any
| kind of academic job as a backup rather than a destination.
| danieldk wrote:
| If you pay much lower than the industry and only give people
| temporary positions, it's not surprising people go elsewhere when
| they can. The solution is also quite obvious...
| sseagull wrote:
| I hate the trivialization of this. The solution is not obvious.
| Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money
| come from?
|
| At least in my areas of science (chemistry), most of this money
| comes from grants, which comes from the NIH, DOE, or NSF
| depending on the project. Ultimately it comes from taxpayers,
| and portioned out by Congress.
|
| So the solution is either to get Congress to really care about
| this (ha!) or re-architecture funding of all of higher
| education.
|
| Neither of these is simple.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| The obvious solution is to have fewer graduate students. Why
| should one professor train N replacements, if the field isn't
| expanding?
| MrPatan wrote:
| > Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that
| money come from?
|
| From defunding shit research. And don't give me that crap,
| you know exactly what kind of research you could cut without
| anything of value being lost. Start there.
| danieldk wrote:
| Academia is a pyramid, for every PhD position, there are
| fewer post-doc positions, far fewer permanent staff
| positions, and even fewer professorships.
|
| For most people, an academic career is a dead end. So, reduce
| the number of PhD and post-doc positions and increase the
| wages.
|
| Universities have been doing the opposite. E.g. some Dutch
| universities stopped offering relatively well-compensated
| employee PhD positions and replaced them by bursary positions
| with far lower compensations. The primary motivation was that
| they could hire more PhDs for the same money. That maybe
| works when there is a recession, but when there is an ample
| supply of jobs, many good candidates will just choose an
| industry position instead.
|
| Besides that, universities have gained a lot of
| administrative staff over the past decades. Plus some
| universities spend hundreds of millions of Euros on fancy
| buildings. Sure, it looks nice in PR material, but they
| could've also built something functional and use the
| remaining money for better salaries.
| throwawayarnty wrote:
| Which Dutch universities? Just curious.
|
| My perception was that phd students in Netherlands live
| quite comfortably.
| mattwest wrote:
| The money comes from the same place they use to pay
| administrative folk who often earn more than post docs. It's
| an allocation issue
| InefficientRed wrote:
| I hate the helplessness of this. You have agency. You also
| have responsibility.
|
| You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career
| on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a
| job where you can pay people well or find a job where you
| don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed.
|
| I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to
| fund and would love to work on if I had the moral stomach
| requires to convince highly educated broke 30 year olds to
| give me hundreds of thousands of dollars in free labor. But I
| don't.
|
| So instead I turned down TT offers and went to industry where
| I spend a lot of time convincing people with the money to
| actually pay living wages with good benefits to people who
| can work on slightly different things. I don't have a lab
| with my name on it. I don't have an office. I will never have
| tenure. No on calls me Professor or even Doctor. But I'm also
| not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. My post-docs
| are paid $100k-$200k.
|
| Stop relying on broke kids to fund your dreams. Leave
| academia and find a company who will fund your work. Or stay
| in academia and don't hire people to help you unless you can
| pay them even close to what they're worth.
| cs137 wrote:
| You know, I agree with 90 percent of what you're saying,
| but on this...
|
| > I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds.
|
| ... I've got to say, you probably work for someone who is.
| It sounds like you're a decent human being and that's great
| --we need more of those--but the entire point of corporate
| capitalism (although this behavior exists in ostensibly
| noncapitalist organizations, too) is exploitation. Do you
| think CEOs care about whether they destroy the careers of
| people under them?
|
| There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and
| there's no ethical production either, but ultimately, we
| have to survive.
| InefficientRed wrote:
| _> you probably work for someone who is._
|
| This is actually a very fair point, so I'm not sure why
| you are downvoted (perhaps the last sentence comes across
| as inviting trolling). But I take my responsibility for
| not doing so to people under me seriously.
| katz_ wrote:
| abdel_nasser wrote:
| sseagull wrote:
| > Leave academia and find a company who will fund your
| work.
|
| This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science
| is interesting to the private sector.
|
| I worked for a large company once that in the past had
| large labs for researching charge transfer and other
| fundamental physics. When I toured those labs, they were
| all empty, with broken and unused machines.
|
| I know this site focuses on computers and tech. But there
| is a large world of scientific disciplines out there that
| just aren't useful to business. But useful to society as a
| whole.
|
| Lastly, postdocs typically make ~50-55kk in my neck of the
| woods. Underpaid, maybe depending on the field. But far
| from "broke". Thats around the starting salary of school
| teachers and many other professions.
| InefficientRed wrote:
| _> Not all of science is interesting to the private
| sector._
|
| More helplessness.
|
| My research area is _famously_ hard to fund even within
| academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame
| my research and the type of work I was proposing. I still
| do the most important bits of pushing advances in my
| field, but there 's a lot of auxiliary work that has
| immediate value as well.
|
| It's less fun, it's CERTAINLY more humbling, and it's a
| lot more labor. But it provides both short-term and long-
| term value.
|
| BTW: if you want to do work no one will fund, that's
| fine. Just at least acknowledge that your largest funding
| source is the massively under-paid labor of 20-35 year
| olds.
|
| _> Thats around the starting salary of school teachers
| and many other professions. _
|
| Your post-docs are >= 28, have graduate degrees, and have
| several years of research experience. Also, "teachers and
| many other professions" almost NEVER sign fixed term
| contracts that require them to move all over the
| country/world.
|
| BTW, what is your university's pension plan like? Many
| teachers have great pension plans (that actually make
| sense to use since they have jobs that last more than 2-3
| years). If comparing to industry, what's your 401K match
| and stock purchase program?
|
| You can't even beat the working conditions and wages that
| mediocre 22 year olds can get right out of college in a
| famously under-compensated field. "My PhD employees would
| be substantially better off as secondary school teachers"
| isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
| sseagull wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, we are mostly on the same page w.r.t.
| salaries and what not.
|
| > BTW, what is your university's pension plan like?
|
| Postdocs get the same pension plan/401k plan as any other
| faculty (postdocs are indeed research faculty). You are
| also an employee of the state government, with reasonably
| good health insurance and other benefits. It can't
| compare to private sector (especially tech sector), but
| compared to a lot of other businesses, it's fairly good.
| (Also a downside - lots of bureaucracy from the state
| legislature).
|
| EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5% match
| by the university.
|
| My comment about school teachers was mostly about the
| salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just fine
| on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median
| earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is
| an anomaly.
|
| Now, again, don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of
| postdocs, academia is a mess, and I want it change. But I
| really just wanted to point out that the "simple"
| solutions are not "simple". They require coordinated
| action among many stakeholders, and lots of dealing with
| squishy humans and their emotions.
| InefficientRed wrote:
| _> Don 't get me wrong, we are mostly on the same page
| w.r.t. salaries and what not._
|
| That's fair. I do think managers have responsibility to
| their direct reports. The postdoc situation in th US
| isn't going to change as long as faculty and post-docs
| continue producing. So, quite seriously, the solution is
| for faculty and post-docs to collectively say "we can't
| get work done under these conditions". Otherwise things
| will just get worse.
|
| _> EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5%
| match by the university._
|
| This is generous (but also fairly uncommon for post-
| docs). Good to hear that your uni provides retirement
| benefits.
|
| _> My comment about school teachers was mostly about the
| salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just
| fine on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median
| earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is
| an anomaly._
|
| The huge difference is that post-docs are transitory and
| require uprooting one's life. $50K with the knowledge
| that you can buy a starter home is very different from
| $50K and knowing that you cannot buy anything because you
| will likely move in 2 years. This also has real human
| cost. See articles like this:
| https://www.timeshighereducation.com/postdocs-dilemma-
| when-g...
| cozzyd wrote:
| Retirement plan sounds basically exactly the same as mine
| was as a postdoc (and it's probably actually a 403b, not
| that there's any real difference), though it only took
| effect after the first year and required you to stay long
| enough.
| valarauko wrote:
| As a postdoc I also have the option of contributing to a
| 403B plan - but my school does NOT match our
| contributions (specifically for postdocs). For 'regular'
| employees they match upto 7.5%.
| kaffee wrote:
| >> Not all of science is interesting to the private
| sector.
|
| > My research area is famously hard to fund even within
| academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame
| my research and the type of work I was proposing.
|
| I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology,
| philosophy, ecology, social history, ...
| InefficientRed wrote:
| _> I don 't see the private sector funding
| ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...
| _
|
| sseagull mentioned NSF, NIH and DOE. None of those funds
| ethnomusicology, philosophy, or social history.
| sseagull wrote:
| You left out ecology (again, which wouldn't be funded by
| business and I would consider important for society).
|
| The NSF also gets somewhat close to the others via
| Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, which
| includes anthropology/archaeology and linguistics.
| InefficientRed wrote:
| I am highly suspicious of the need for post-doctoral
| training in philosophy, ecology, or social history and
| even more skeptical of the ethics of using tax payer's
| money to fund those positions.
|
| Ecology is a probably a field where the world would be
| better off if we re-appropriated post-doc funding to USFS
| and hired people with bs or even no degrees to do
| important work on the ground.
| paviva wrote:
| I'm very interested about your research area. Can you
| divulge anything publicly here, or maybe shoot me an
| email (just put in my profile).
|
| Thanks.
| WkndTriathlete wrote:
| > This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of
| science is interesting to the private sector.
|
| That's actually a really bad analysis and entirely misses
| the point.
|
| Fundamentally (in the US) too many postdocs are being
| funded from a fixed grant pool NIH/NSF/etc. has to offer.
| Too many professors think their research is so much more
| important than anything else they hire postdocs for
| peanuts. Too few postdocs have a career path because so
| few faculty positions are available after completing
| their postdoc.
|
| Yes, not all science is interesting to the private
| sector. But that doesn't mean that publicly-funded
| science has to proceed at its current rate with its
| unsustainable model of employing postdoctoral slaves.
| InefficientRed wrote:
| _> Too many professors think their research is so much
| more important than anything else they hire postdocs for
| peanuts._
|
| Thanks. This is my point. If you want to manage a team of
| PhDs, especially in STEM, figure out a research agenda
| that allows you to do that in a fair and reasonable way.
|
| If you want to do things that are uninteresting to anyone
| outside of one tiny (likely incestual) sphere of grant-
| committee-political-influence, then do those things with
| your own time. Don't drag others into it.
|
| BTW: if no one wants to fund this work then what jobs are
| the post-docs being trained to do?! And if post-docs
| aren't being trained for useful jobs then why are we
| taxpayers funding these ostensibly trainee positions?
| katz_ wrote:
| katz_ wrote:
| katz_ wrote:
| Geonode wrote:
| We could reduce the population of college admin which has
| exponentially increased in the past 40 years.
| cs137 wrote:
| You're correct. On the other hand, college tuitions are
| ridiculous, and the modern university is literally a billion-
| dollar corporation.
|
| There's no excuse for the academic job market being this
| lousy when universities have so much money coming in from so
| many different sources.
|
| The problem is that they spend it all on administration.
| Paying a "Dean of Multiple-Choice Quantum Intersectionality"
| $600,000/year is a way for rich white elitists to pretend
| they care about things they actually don't.
| sseagull wrote:
| Oh you have absolutely zero argument from me. One problem
| is the "professionalization" of universities, who are now
| run by admin "professionals", which removes power from the
| faculty.
|
| Although one part of this is regulatory burden by the
| state. This adds lots of overhead which the university
| would probably rather not have.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| Higher education gets an absurd amount of funding. Entire
| generations are being saddled with lifelong, insurmountable
| debt because of how much universities are charging to get an
| education. The costs of tuition have skyrocketed at rates far
| above inflation. Many universities are sitting on massive
| piles of cash reserves. The problem is that most of that
| money is getting sucked up by non-academic sinks like
| administration.
| pmyteh wrote:
| "longer" is comparatively easy: More staff scientists (moving
| from grant to grant within an institution but on open-ended
| contracts) and fewer postdocs. "Paying more" is harder,
| though one or more of reducing marginal grants and lowering
| the ceiling on institutional overhead on grants would seem a
| reasonable start.
|
| I've recently finished four years as a postdoc (and now have
| a permanent academic job and am applying for grants). It's
| the precarity of it which is a bigger killer than just the
| crappy salary. Fighting huge numbers of applicants for the
| chance to uproot your life (again) and move around the
| country for a contract that may be as short as 9 months, with
| every move having a good chance of being the end of your
| career (which you've invested years in training for). It's a
| grim position to put people into.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that
| money come from?
|
| Cut the number of postdoc positions in half, double the
| salaries of the remaining positions, and make it much more
| competitive to get a postdoc. The purpose of a postdoc is a
| final training step for someone to become faculty. Only
| people who are clearly faculty material after finishing their
| PhD should even attempt a postdoc. Unfortunately, many
| professors take on postdocs who have no shot of becoming
| faculty because their lab runs on the cheap, experienced
| labor they bring.
|
| Remember, the replacement rate for academia is exactly 1
| postdoc with faculty aspirations per lifetime of each
| professor. Anything >1 and academia must grow exponentially
| to accommodate every single postdoc who desires a faculty
| position. Most professors have >>1 postdoc over the course of
| their careers, which means there are way too many postdoc
| positions in the world.
| amathres_info wrote:
| Most professors do not have >>1 postdoc in their careers,
| because most of us teach at less research-intensive (or
| entirely teaching-focused) schools that have no postdocs at
| all. The way things work now, even to get a liberal arts
| school job requires you to do a postdoc first (at least in
| my corner of STEM). Anyway, professors at research-heavy
| postdoc-having schools could get away with more than one.
| But certainly the status quo is insane, you will hear no
| argument from me.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >even to get a liberal arts school job requires you to do
| a postdoc first
|
| That's a great point that I neglected to consider.
| Regardless, the overall point still holds--the production
| rate of postdocs is much greater than the replacement
| rate of professors (at all institutions).
| the_only_law wrote:
| The research fields that seem require people to do many
| years of postdoc education also seem to be among the
| worst paying in industry.
| analog31 wrote:
| Or train people to do research while in grad school. There
| are plenty of fields where people don't do post-docs before
| applying for faculty positions, e.g., all of the fields
| where there's no money for post-docs, and "hot" fields
| where people have better job prospects. I know two CS
| professors at a major research university, who went
| straight to faculty positions from their PhDs.
|
| The current structure is a holding pattern for absorbing
| the large population of PhDs who can't get jobs.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >The current structure is a holding pattern for absorbing
| the large population of PhDs who can't get jobs.
|
| Indeed. When I originally wrote my parent comment [0], it
| was about overproduction of PhDs.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25082474
| akomtu wrote:
| Administration. They've absorbed a big chunk of the
| academia's money. A simple law could fix it: expenses on
| admins can't exceed 5% of the budget, the chief admin's pay
| can't exceed 75%-tile of postdocs pay. Admins will scream,
| they will break walls and tables in fury, and they will quit,
| but it won't be a big loss for academia.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The fact that stakeholders don't like the solution doesn't
| make it complicated.
| dagw wrote:
| They could also make job more attractive. I certainly know
| people who have the skills and passion to be attracted to the
| idea of a postdoc, many would even accept the pay they're
| currently offering. What they won't accept is being worked to
| death on bullshit tasks irrelevant to their research and being
| treated as free labor by their superiors.
|
| Treat postdocs with respect, give them plenty of autonomy and
| freedom to focus on their research, don't make them work long
| hours or use them as servants, and you'll no doubt find many
| people willing to take the job without raising the pay.
| Moggie100 wrote:
| Current UK CompSci PostDoc here - and yeah, pretty much what
| everyone says here is correct. My contract is 'contingent on
| funding' (so casual/short-term by any other name, but 'perminant'
| so HR can fudge their short-term employment numbers down) and my
| pay is well below what I could get in the wider industry.
|
| I stay because I'd like to think I can improve things (I'm very
| active in management talks, where I can be) but as we're now at 6
| (? Maybe 7) years of below-inflation pay adjustments, and with no
| progression possible at my grade unless I make the leap to
| lecturer or equivalent I'm just stuck here and its getting
| tiresome, and every year I look at my bank and go 'why am I doing
| this?'.
|
| One day I'll stop asking why and leave, but I like what I do -
| its just not economical.
|
| ... and for the curious, I've made the case for promotion and
| applied for it a number of times, but as no-one ever retires in
| the industry (profs forever?) the next grade up is stupidly over-
| subscribed, so my chances are extremely low.
| titanomachy wrote:
| cycomanic wrote:
| Ironically when I was a postdoc in Australia, where you get paid
| on the same (good) payscale as other academics (you could even be
| promoted to professor level on a non permanent "postdoc"
| position), industry managers (from collaborators) always
| complained about the high salaries, which made it less attractive
| for people to move to industry.
|
| Since I moved to Sweden I see much more issues trying to recruit
| postdocs. We still get reasonable number of applicants, but they
| are very low quality. We have been hiring PhD instead, who are
| much better generally (most of the postdoc applicants for
| positions where we looked for both, wouldn't have made the cut
| amongst the PhDs).
|
| I blame that on several factors,
|
| 1. We are in a research area where our PhDs can go to industry
| earning 6 figures (at least in the US) so many opportunities for
| them if they look around
|
| 2. An increasing percentage of funding comes from competitive
| grants, so there are lots of postdoc positions. So even if
| applicants want to stay in academia if they are good they can be
| very picky.
|
| 3. A more general frustration with funding processes and
| universities continuously increasing academic workload, which
| academics are more open about. So PhDs see the downsides of
| sticking around more clearly.
|
| I should say that I agree with the article that all this is good
| because it might be the only way things will change
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| Where do they find these professors to give these statements? At
| the very least, ask when the professors were postdocs, were they
| happy with their salary and benefits?
| rr888 wrote:
| This is always a problem when the economy is strong. Just wait
| for a recession next year and there will be long lines of people
| wanting to get into grad school.
| jzer0cool wrote:
| I think there are certain "fundings" that could be higher or
| lower depending on the project commensurate with hiring with high
| pay. Post-docs should be paid well in my opinion. They are our
| future leaders, educators, innovators, and to me, the ones who
| teach "how" to fish. The same goes for salary in certain fields
| in teaching.
|
| Something seems backwards.
| zmachinaz wrote:
| Article misses the point.
|
| By now, the good students and post-docs know what is going on:
| The system is already so broken that there is a high chance that
| you end up with a PI who got his job because he/she/* is good in
| making friends with some VIPs. For the actual research, that is
| what you are hired for. Have fun turning the "great vision" of
| these PIs into something that makes at least a bit of sense. And
| only if you are as well the type to make friends with VIPs, you
| will have a chance to tenure-track.
| PlasmonOwl wrote:
| I'm in the UK and am a PDRA in polymer chemistry. Desperate to
| get out. Would like to transfer to some type of coding. Pay and
| job security is far better. Just trying to work if I can manage
| with pay cut to a more junior role. It's not that I'm
| unsuccessful, I published plenty and work at a top institute.
| It's just that the jump from PDRA to permanent is impossible and
| I'm not interested in industrial chemistry
| notjustanymike wrote:
| I've worked with a few chemists turned engineers, for some
| reason you lot always take to coding fantastically well. I
| suspect any pay cut you take would be quite temporary.
| alangibson wrote:
| Interesting observation. I wonder if it's because chemical
| reactions read a lot like function calls. Complex reactions
| look a lot like programs written in some arcane language
| musicale wrote:
| This really seems like a variant of "there is a huge labor
| shortage of highly qualified candidates willing to work for low
| pay in an awful environment with poor advancement opportunities."
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Now would be a good time to donate all of the money spent on the
| administration instead on to paying postdocs well?
| trashtester wrote:
| Agree. I would also prefer if universities focused their funds
| into subjects that leads to long term benefits, whether that is
| economic growth, better social cohesion (less polarization),
| etc.
|
| In other words:
|
| - More funding to STEM, at least the profitable parts.
|
| - More funding to the parts of humanities, socal science and
| law schools, who's work help bring the nation together, find
| common ground and reduce conflict.
|
| - Partly cut funding to institutions that do not provide such
| benefits, and to institutions with too much administrative
| overhead.
|
| - Completely cut funding to institutions that actively promote
| social conflicts.
|
| To make it easier to reach these goals, without interpreting
| each goal in a politcal light, change the funding process as
| follows:
|
| - Add an x% corporate tax, earmarked for science & education.
|
| - Set up a board, where representatives chosen by those
| companies that pay the above tax (proportionally to the tax
| paid) make up 60%, former highly trusted academics 20% and
| representatives chosen by the sitting government 20%.
|
| - Have this board govern the expenditure in the ways that
| maximize the benefits defined in the charter above, while
| having some checks and balances to prevent corruption.
|
| - Encourage grants to be given in larger chunks than today.
| Direct grants to students should be the exception, and not
| something a student would apply for. Rather such grants should
| be awarded in a similar way to how the military grants medals
| for exceptional performance. When a research leader identifies
| a particularly deserving candidate, he/she can recommend that
| this candidate is granted a special individual scholarship, due
| to exceptional performance and ability. Leaders who repeatedly
| send spurious recommendations should be discouraged from doing
| so.
|
| - Instead, institutions or high profile reasearch leaders
| should be given grants based on historical performance, and be
| trusted to be able to find the right students themselves.
| (Within some framework to prevent corruption.)
|
| - Once granted, funds should only be revoked in the case of
| breech of confidence. Renewal should happen early enough to
| allow continuity.
|
| The goal of the above proposals, would be:
|
| - Prevent public money from being wasted on wasteful or
| destructive activities
|
| - Reduce time spent on research grant applications, so that
| students and employees can focus on the actual science.
|
| - Encourage academic freedom and promote integrity.
|
| - Make sure institutions educate the kinds of students that are
| in demand in the job market, and the scientific results needed
| to promote economic growth as well as a more robust state.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| The end of Chinese immigration will force change on this issue,
| it will be great for science and humanity.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Design your letter in the most aseptic and unfunny way possible.
|
| Extra points if is in a foreign language to show that you are
| cool people. The problem to solve is less important than all this
| marvelous crispy sounds when is spelled
|
| Use a lot of trendy terms and fancy words. Your project to
| improve the texture of the mayonaise must sound like Bruce Willis
| in Armageddon. The more confusing, holistic and superfood, the
| better.
|
| Stress that you want really motivated candidates. The job is
| boring as hell so they need to came yet motivated from home. They
| will not grow professionally here.
|
| Assure that the job is available only in a narrow interval of
| time. Much better if is in the time when everybody is posting job
| offers and competing for your attention. Biology shows us that
| fishes in a school are safer from being noticed individually.
|
| Reject people that stopped for three years working on science.
| They could need to spend an entire afternoon to read and
| understand everything that happened in their field in the last
| three years. Yup, the whole nine articles. You don't want to use
| their previous decades of experience and university classes.
|
| For a better measure go to the corridor and run screaming "a
| gap!, a curriculum gap!" in terror
|
| Use deadlines in your profit. Assure to email your job offer two
| or three days after the closing time has expired.
|
| Don't be concise, your candidates love to spend ten minutes
| reading about vanity issues, the history of your building and why
| the bricks are violet.
|
| Ask they to write an essay about how your project was their dream
| since school.
|
| Put the salary hidden in a link. Better if this leads to twenty
| pages of bureaucracy before.
|
| Use several categories for your job offer to reduce the
| probability of a match. Use fancy names like "Ramon y Cajal"
| position or "Juan de la Cierva" offer to made it seem more
| relevant. Then put your job only in one of them. Example: We look
| for a biochemist for a Sara Borrel thing, requisites: having less
| than 30 years, visited the Tibet in the last year and be a
| natural blonde more than 6 feet tall. Their field of research
| does not matter. "Oh, you studied exactly the same thing but you
| look more like a `Juan de la Cierva' to me. Maybe the next year".
|
| Your job application must be a turning point in their life.
| Assure to ask the lab rats to spend all the day filling a job
| application so complex that would made Kafka proud. A real
| example: Looking for somebody to work in city X. Requisites.
| Can't live currently in city X (that would be so easy, and yes,
| is a real example from a real job offer).
|
| Assure that your selection process to hire scientists has a 70%
| of questions related with laws, 10% about ideology, and the rest
| about the real work to do.
| JOnAgain wrote:
| "Money is just sitting there that isn't being used ... and
| there's these projects that aren't moving anywhere as a result,"
|
| What money?!? Lol. Headline should read, "People with 10 years
| post-secondary education not applying to jobs paying less than
| corporate entry level jobs."
| bmitc wrote:
| Honestly, there are just too many PhDs and too much glorification
| of PhDs. Academia is just far too inefficient as well. I have no
| idea where all the money that's being moved around is going.
|
| My other thought is that maybe companies that pay little taxes
| but hire a lot of PhDs should maybe be looked at. Corporations
| have been extremely successful in outsourcing training to higher
| education, online learning, and other learning avenues, all off
| of their books and timesheets.
| feet wrote:
| There's a bunch of glorification of physicians too, who are
| essentially repair techs for people
| qayxc wrote:
| Sure, but there's something about saving one's life that's
| not quite the same as saving one's device or car...
| bmitc wrote:
| I don't think that's the same thing at all, and I disagree.
| Physicians are directly useful to society.
| jleyank wrote:
| Why would anybody postdoc in cs or anything software related if
| they weren't interested in being a professor? It's a field where
| people can literally come from nowhere and make a big impact.
| It's not like chemistry or physics where labs are involved or
| have steep learning curves to be able to function.
|
| Is this just being unwilling to engage? Why would people remain
| in a training role in todays environment?
| bjourne wrote:
| I think Western academia is mostly reliant on immigration. Few
| natives would accept the low pay/high workload combination that
| is a postdoc, but for an immigrant from a third world country it
| might be an amazing opportunity. Same reason most fruit and berry
| pickers also are immigrants.
| persedes wrote:
| Don't even know where to begin...but according to this [1] less
| than 5% of students in the US are international students.
|
| 1 - https://www.fwd.us/news/international-students/
| bjourne wrote:
| "The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM
| fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines
| for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft:
| About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent
| in master's programs last year were international students,
| according to an annual survey of American and Canadian
| universities by the Computing Research Association. In
| comparison, only about 9 percent of undergraduates in
| computer science were international students (perhaps, deans
| posit, because families are nervous about sending offspring
| who are barely adults across the ocean to study)."
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american.
| ..
|
| Note that the definition of "international student" excludes
| those with permanent visas. The number of foreign born PhD
| students is therefore significantly higher than 64%. Don't
| know if there are any stats for citizen/non-citizen share of
| PhDs though.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Your statistic must be for undergrads, where the situation is
| very different.
|
| In STEM grad school, no more than half the people are from
| the US, and it could easily be as low as 25%, depending where
| you are.
|
| Actually, the very source you cited agrees, roughly:
|
| > international students earned nearly half of all Master's
| and Doctor's STEM degrees awarded in 2019
|
| I suspect that the number "5%" is also too low even at the
| undergrad level, if you restrict attention to, say, the top
| 20 universities.
| vpb wrote:
| "And even though they make up only 5% of the total student
| population, international students earned nearly half of all
| Master's and Doctor's STEM degrees awarded in 2019, a total
| of 117,000 degrees."
|
| That's an interesting stat which might be the source of the
| parent post assertion.
| bmitc wrote:
| That is either for undergraduates or total enrollment. The
| percentages for international students in graduate schools
| basically range from 50% upwards, depending on the field.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2021/08/19/inter.
| ..
| snakeboy wrote:
| We're talking about postdocs though, which is a completely
| different population than college students. I found this [1]
| which estimates that 51% of US postdocs are foreign-born as
| of 2018.
|
| [1] https://elifesciences.org/articles/40189
| labcomputer wrote:
| > but for an immigrant from a third world country it might be
| an amazing opportunity.
|
| In part, because academia is exempt from H1b quotas.
| __jambo wrote:
| I never know what to think about reports on labour demand
| anymore, I have heard "there are no jobs", "there are lots of
| jobs", "noone is working", simultaneously all year.
|
| I guess it all comes down to who is saying it. I guess most of
| the time it's the fact that the jobs are crap, but employers
| don't want to shift the social contract that creates the apparent
| contradiction, but who knows.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Job openings vs labor supply tells you most of what you need to
| know.
|
| Job openings exceed job seekers by a record amount.
| Unemployment is close to a record low.
| ellopoppit wrote:
| Labor force participation is also at a record low
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Because population is aging. E.g. the Japan problem, a few
| decades later
| [deleted]
| cs137 wrote:
| In other words, the dysfunction (unemployment) on which
| capitalists rely, because it scares people into taking shitty
| deals, is a bit less of a problem... but it's also causing
| other dysfunctions, because it turns out that this is a
| shitty system.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Well, if you want uncontrolled inflation, keep advocating
| for policies that push unemployment below the rate of
| sustainable full employment. It seems to be making people
| happy, after all.
|
| Not like there are hundreds of years of economic history to
| learn from...
| xphilter wrote:
| Ah yes, people getting jobs is what caused inflation. Not
| the trillions printed and given to scammy upper classes
| through fraudulent PPP loans and artificially low
| interest rates.
| vkou wrote:
| People getting jobs (and raises in those jobs) is
| absolutely what's causing main street, non-asset
| inflation.
|
| Wages growing results in prices growing. This is still
| beneficial for the people whose wages are growing.
| (Which, in the past year, have mostly been lower class
| workers. Gas going up in price sucks, but an extra two
| dollars an hour more than offsets it.)
| adam_arthur wrote:
| It's both.
|
| Do you think nominal wage gains coupled with real wage
| declines makes people happy? Check consumer sentiment
| polling which just hit an all time low, why don't you?
|
| It's funny to see society broadly reject the impact of
| covid era policy, yet some advocate to do more and more
| of it.
|
| Fed kept rates low in pursuit of unsustainably low
| unemployment, by the way, motivated by pressure from
| progressives
| plaguepilled wrote:
| Wait, but consumer polling proves the point though?
| People are miserable BECAUSE their dollar buys less. The
| benefactors of such a policy are those with diversified
| assets.
|
| Wages should increase in response, not decrease.
| Inflation hits different sectors differently, and I'm OK
| with a PS5 inflating 300% if it means that a person on a
| minimum wage can have food security.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Advocating for higher wages to fight inflation is non-
| sensical. It just exacerbates inflation and requires even
| further wage gains to keep even.
|
| There is a wealth of economic history that shows this.
|
| The stimulus checks and co were the primary driver of
| inflation. Handing people more money is not the answer
| sky-kedge0749 wrote:
| > Advocating for higher wages to fight inflation is non-
| sensical. It just exacerbates inflation and requires even
| further wage gains to keep even.
|
| By exacerbate I suppose you're imagining a cycle where
| higher wages result in higher prices which result in
| higher wages and so on. However wages are just another
| price in the market and it's not clear why the cycle
| needs to be broken after all prices have gone up except
| wages. We don't need to let workers end up holding the
| bag yet again.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Why should labor eat the real losses from inflation
| rather than capital or rentiers?
| adam_arthur wrote:
| They shouldn't but the mistake of handing out tons of
| helicopter money has already been made
| cs137 wrote:
| The jobs are crap, and the pay is low.
|
| Postdocs used to be an exception, something prestigious you did
| before settling into a permanent role that might be a lower-
| ranked university. If you were really good, you might do 2
| years at IAS or MIT before taking the position at a place like
| UCLA or Michigan (which are still excellent, just not as highly
| ranked). Then it became something you had to do, before getting
| any job--mandatory low-wage labor, another rung on the ladder.
| Now, it seems to be going out of fashion, as the prize loses
| its appeal.
|
| I'm surprised this didn't happen 10 years ago. The academic job
| market has been a toilet for 30+ years--and this change is a
| good thing, by the way--and I had expected bimodalization to
| come much quicker.
|
| You're absolutely right on the "labor shortage" bullshit. There
| isn't one. The working class has been fully depleted and there
| isn't any more give. People are shutting down. Workers who
| can't afford gas are forced to live off other people (either
| through illegitimate labor or by dependency.) This is the
| turtle at the bottom burping. About fucking time.
| jltsiren wrote:
| I'm not surprised this didn't happen earlier. The pandemic
| disrupted everything and gave people a good reason to rethink
| their life choices. Industry salaries grew faster than
| academic salaries. Teaching became more stressful and less
| rewarding. Instead of being in the same place with other
| people with similar interests, you had to do research
| remotely from your tiny apartment. And because you were
| probably far away from home, travel restrictions often
| prevented you from seeing your friends and family. The
| academia started looking much worse, and getting a job where
| you can choose where you live became even more attractive.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| It's academia chicken/extended dare- who is willing to grit
| n+1 postdocs out to show that they're committed
| scythe wrote:
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/longevity-2
| pdimitar wrote:
| Made me giggle, thanks. :)
| atrettel wrote:
| My take is that statements like "there are no jobs available"
| and "employers cannot find enough workers" can be both true at
| the same time. My best guess right now is that employers want
| to hire a lot of low-skill workers in general (warehouses,
| retail, hospitality, etc.) but only want to hire high-skilled
| workers with a decade or more of experience, so workers "in the
| middle" (junior developers, engineers, and scientists) are left
| out to dry.
|
| I see a similar dynamic for postdocs, but with a slight
| difference. I believe the PIs in the article when they say that
| they are having trouble hiring postdocs. As a former postdoc
| myself, it pays poorly and has no job security. You take those
| jobs mostly because you like the work, and right now many
| people have better options available. That is part of the
| reason I left my postdoc, but the other part is that there are
| just so few research jobs in my field (postdoc or otherwise) at
| the moment. Some fields seem to be flush with money right now
| and unable to hire enough people to meet demand, while others
| are barely hiring at all. My field appears to be barely hiring
| at all. And that is why I think that statements like "there are
| no jobs available" and "employers cannot find enough workers"
| can be both true at the same time, since it really depends on
| the field and what kind of work is being funded at the moment.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Postdocs in general aren't paid well
|
| Sounds like everyone understands the issue... so why don't they
| respond by meeting the market price?
|
| If you want to buy something like a tissue sample for an
| experiment in a lab then you pay the market price. You wouldn't
| think to offer 20% of the market price and then be puzzled when
| nobody will sell it to you - you just pay the going price, and
| it's part of the cost of doing research.
|
| Why don't people apply that logic when it comes to costs for
| hiring people? Why is it such a barrier to see that that's just
| how much a person costs?
| dagw wrote:
| _If you want to buy something like a tissue sample for an
| experiment in a lab then you pay the market price_
|
| Academic researchers often pay either zero or get a massive
| discount on all kinds of stuff (hardware, software, data,
| samples etc.) for their research that people in private sector
| pay a huge premium for.
| pacbard wrote:
| > Academic researchers often pay either zero...
|
| Not completely accurate. Every time you get a grant, your
| institution get a percentage of it to pay for indirect costs.
| These costs include office space, office personnel, and other
| expenses that the grant doesn't pay for directly. So, if you
| are getting "free" stuff from the department closest, it is
| very likely that your (or some else's) indirect expenses are
| paying for it.
|
| Overhead percentages are set by each institution. My current
| one is set at 54%, meaning that for each $1 of award, I get
| to keep 64 cents and the university takes 36 cents (more or
| less).
| dagw wrote:
| I was more referring to how Academic licensing is often
| cheap or free. For example a certain data set I'm working
| with right now is made available to us for free as
| researchers, but costs on the order of $200k to access if
| you're a commercial entity.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Typically there's a pipeline between academia and industry. A
| pharmaceutical company doesn't want to train chemists.
|
| Whatever the current problems are, they are likely the
| predictable outcome of policy changes made 5-10 years ago. The
| 20 years of war is largely over, immigration policies
| discourage some folks, and the educational sector as a whole is
| very sick.
|
| Society is different too. I was giving talks at high schools as
| part of an outreach/mentorship program, and science was rarely
| mentioned by anyone as what they wanted to be when they grew
| up. A shocking number of kids wanted to be investment bankers.
| vaylian wrote:
| Postdocs outside of academia can be paid well. But inside
| academia: You are dealing with the public sector which has
| different market dynamics.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > Sounds like everyone understands the issue... so why don't
| they respond by meeting the market price?
|
| it's not just the postdoc, it's the whole thing. I make a bit
| more as a 29 years old very occasional freelance than the
| highest possible grade for university professor reachable only
| after 30 years or so of work and something like 6 years in
| "difficult conditions" in my country.
| quantum_magpie wrote:
| The ones in control of money and the ones in charge of running
| their lab and hiring postdocs are not the same people. If you
| can't hire a postdoc for shitty salary, then that shitty salary
| can be repurposed for something else. The former won't ever
| budge for the latter until the whole system collapses. And even
| then, I dread that they will just leave it in ruins.
| pacbard wrote:
| I don't think that is accurate.
|
| Most post-doc are funded through soft money (i.e., grant
| money or other non-earmarked department money) to a principal
| investigator. The PI wrote the grant and budgeted for post
| docs. Meaning that they set the salary for the postdoc in
| advance at the time that they wrote the grant (most grant
| applications I was part of required approval from the
| University's finance office before submission). They can
| increase the postdoc salary if they want.
|
| The problem is that if they pay more for a postdoc, that
| money will need to come out from something else and usually
| that's from other personnel expenses (as most funding
| agencies have set amounts that they will allocate to spending
| categories, so you cannot propose a grant with only personnel
| expenses for example). That means that increasing the postdoc
| pay will either (1) reduce the number of postdoc that can be
| hired on any specific grant or (2) reduce the amount of
| compensation that a PI will get from the grant. You can see
| how both of those option are a non-starter as (1) will reduce
| the manpower on the grant, leading to less productivity, and
| a reduction in likelihood of future funding and (2) is just a
| non-starter as most PIs feel like they should get something
| out from getting a grant (i.e., they don't do research just
| because is fun).
|
| Plus, there is a close to infinite supply of recent PhDs in
| pretty much any field that cannot get a faculty position and
| that will apply for postdocs, so there is really no market
| incentive to increase base postdoc pay.
|
| Note, I have only applied to NSF grants so other funding
| agencies (i.e., NIH) might have different budgetary
| requirements. Private foundations are the Wild West of
| funding and each one has its own requirements.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > The PI wrote the grant and budgeted for post docs.
| Meaning that they set the salary for the postdoc in advance
| at the time that they wrote the grant (most grant
| applications I was part of required approval from the
| University's finance office before submission). They can
| increase the postdoc salary if they want.
|
| This is often not true and the article addresses it: A PI
| needs the university's approval to increase salary,
| regardless of how much their funding is. It's usually set
| by the department. If a postdoc wanted more, they needed to
| apply for independent funding (e.g. a fellowship). These
| would have their own stipends defined, and the university
| could not take it away. Often, they're not even tied to a
| PI or even the university - if the postdoc decides to
| change institutions in the middle, he takes the money with
| him to the new institution.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > The ones in control of money and the ones in charge of
| running their lab and hiring postdocs are not the same
| people.
|
| Does this disconnect happen in other spending decisions?
|
| For example does the maintenance department ask the
| administrators for money for new lightbulbs that cost $1 each
| and the administrators ask them to buy them for 25c instead,
| even if they aren't available for that price?
|
| How can you even decide what to pay someone without looking
| at what the market says? Just pick a random number? If you're
| going to do that why not try to literally pay minimum wage?
| quantum_magpie wrote:
| With postdoc salaries the issue is that they are set by the
| governing bodies. I don't have my contract on hand ( I'm a
| research associate, but it's similar for postdocs), but
| it's set as some multiplier of minimum monthly wage.
|
| The maintenance funds part is where it gets even worse
| actually! As an example when you write a grant proposal,
| they are usually for 2-3 years. You may want to buy some
| piece of equipment with those funds, and that's fine.
| However you can't earmark some if that money for future
| maintenance of that equipment after the grant period ends.
| Then, when you apply for the next grant, on most occasions,
| you can't ask money for maintenance of old equipment. And
| once it breaks, there's enormous hurdles to overcome to get
| money for repairs.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| In the case of postdocs specifically, the PI's money comes
| from grants, which specify how much the postdocs can be
| paid. That's the limitation -- funding agencies, and the
| NIH pay guidelines in particular.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| One simple reform is to train fewer graduate students. Then
| the job prospects for post-docs will improve as the supply of
| potential professors is reduced.
| rschachte wrote:
| My partner is a post doc with an Ivy League background. If I
| wasn't in tech she would essentially be eating Ramen and living
| in a box to survive.
|
| The structure is such bullshit. Incentive to get a postdoc is
| super low IMO. You make 50k after 10+ years of training and
| publications and are treated like a second class citizen. They
| need to offer more money and better benefits with an actual path
| for growth.
| vt85 wrote:
| Welcome to the results of Leftists taking over the Academia.
| Coming soon to the whole country. And then - civil war, of
| course. As EVERY time.
| qayxc wrote:
| Wait, so back in 1861 - the first and last time a civil war
| erupted in the US - it was due to Leftist taking over academia
| and then the whole country?
|
| Interesting. Or maybe you are from Europe, where civil war has
| a long tradition.
|
| But maybe you insist that it was "Leftists" back in 130 BCE in
| the Roman Empire.
|
| The 8th century Chinese general An Lushan was a Leftist as
| well? Good to know.
|
| The "Roundheads" in the English parliament back in 1642 were
| basically commies as well, whereas the royalists "Cavaliers"
| were the level-headed ones - I mean what's not to love about
| absolutism, "All hail the King!" and all that.
|
| The Portuguese back in 1832 must have been Leftists as well; I
| just need to find out which of the royal brothers was the
| commie.
|
| But yeah, sure. EVERY time with the god damned leftists!
| refurb wrote:
| Supply and demand. We produce more PhDs than needed by either
| academia or industry.
|
| Hence, the burden of post-docs just grow (I was talking to a
| biology PhD who said 5-6 years of post-doc was typical, for
| chemistry I've seen people do 2).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > We produce more PhDs than needed by either academia or
| industry.
|
| I don't think so - industry can't hire enough PhDs. In my field
| (programming languages) shortage of qualified people is a bit
| of a problem at the moment! We wish there were more being
| produced.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Most Ph.D.s are unemployable in the field that they did Ph.D.
| in. There is only say very small pool Ph.D. topics which are
| needed in industry like ML, distributed system, pharmacy etc.
| Most of the Ph.D. is in fields like humanities, psycology,
| physics etc. doesn't have many openings in industry.
| april_22 wrote:
| 100% agree with you. In some areas you literally need to
| move to another country because there are no options in
| academia in your country
| the_only_law wrote:
| Someone else mentioned something similar, but some of the
| Postdoc position are oddly specific.
|
| Like I get the schooling you do prior is supposed to allow
| you to hyperfocus something, but at the same time, I've
| seen jobs asking for postdocs with experience in highly
| niche areas, often cross disciplinary. One I saw was
| looking for someone with encyclopedic knowledge of some
| crazy domain specific algorithm at the intersection of two
| sciences.
|
| Wild guess, but I if I were to bet, I'd bet most people
| with a PhD or even professional experience in the filed
| would not have heard of this algorithm.
|
| I guess I've seen similar software jobs, but at least with
| software I can usually afford the equipment to learn things
| myself.
| johnmyleswhite wrote:
| This seems pretty off-base to me. A lot of folks with PhD's
| in physics are working in industry. And a lot of the folks
| working on distributed systems don't have PhD's in that
| field.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| Do you think this shortage might be very recent/rather
| localized? It seems to me as if there are comparatively few
| places that hire PL folks.
|
| I'm a (relatively early on) grad student at a chair that does
| PL and ML, and it's been pretty depressing to look up alumni
| or authors of papers more on the PL/FM side and seeing those
| that left academia at 'normal' jobs that seem unrelated to
| PL, whereas the vast majority of people more on the ML side
| work directly with it. I like PLT a lot, but especially if
| you're not at a top school it seems like quite a gamble.
| dagw wrote:
| _industry can 't hire enough PhDs_
|
| I think both are true. Academia is producing too many PhDs in
| fields that industry isn't interested in and too few with a
| background that industry wants/needs.
| jonsen wrote:
| Shortage of qualified people does not imply shortage of PhDs.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| A PhD is the most common way to gain the experience and
| context needed to work professionally on compilers. If
| there aren't many PhDs, then the supply of people with the
| experience needed in practice is going to be low, even if
| there are also people without PhDs who can do it.
| quantumwannabe wrote:
| No university class teaches modern compilers and the
| state of the art is in open source projects. If someone
| is interested in compilers, they don't need to get a PhD
| in order to learn. Many major companies that maintain
| programming languages do not require PhDs in order to
| work on their compiler teams; they are willing to train
| you on the job. The supply of people interested is just
| low in general, and if you are biased towards people with
| PhDs and preexisting experience for junior hires, of
| course you will find a shortage of workers.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > No university class teaches modern compilers
|
| Yeah... hence why you need a PhD. 90% of domain knowledge
| in this field isn't even written down - you have to sit
| down with a wide range of people to learn from them -
| which you get to do on a PhD.
|
| > Many major companies that maintain programming
| languages do not require PhDs in order to work on their
| compiler teams
|
| They don't require it... but look at who's actually there
| and how many of them in practice have a PhD.
|
| > if you are biased towards people with PhDs and
| preexisting experience for junior hires
|
| As I've said elsewhere I've taken on people with no high-
| school diploma and zero experience in the past - I'm not
| personally gatekeeping.
| jonsen wrote:
| I think we were better off trying to raise the percentage
| of PhDs who are qualified, rather than just increasing
| the number of PhDs.
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious, does the work you are hiring for
| really require a PhD? To put it a different way, if you and
| the current employees in your job all started immediately
| after finishing your undergrad degree would you be any worse
| at your job?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| It doesn't literally require a PhD (I'm not sure how that
| would even work - unless it was regulated by the
| government!) but it does require context on the state of
| the art in the field, and a network of peers to talk to.
| You get that from doing a PhD. If you can get it otherwise,
| then great, but that's pretty hard to do in practice.
|
| I've worked with people without even a high-school diploma
| in my compilers team, so I'm not snobby, just realistic
| that to succeed you need things and that a PhD is a great
| way to get them.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > I'm not sure how that would even work - unless it was
| regulated by the government!
|
| Easy, you just have your ATS automatically reject any
| resumes that don't appear to have a PhD
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Well that's choosing to not hire people without a PhD,
| not that the work actually requires it. Also most people
| hiring compiler people aren't doing it with an open
| application system. It's a lot of word-of-mouth.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Are you saying the article is wrong? They talk about evidence
| exactly the opposite of your comment.
| edge17 wrote:
| Is this situation also reflected in gradschool and phd
| applications, or is it as competitive as ever?
| qgin wrote:
| Wages get set by supply and demand. In the past, there were still
| people lined up around the block for limited academic positions.
| Now thats not working, so something has to give if they want to
| fill those positions.
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