15 ms·

Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories

248 points by danielmorozoff 10y ago

nonbel 10y ago
I would say "stay as far away from academic research as you possibly can" is the best advice someone can get these days. It is an awful, stressful waste of the prime of your life. From what I saw in biomed only 1/10,000 or so will end up with the time, skills, and appropriately ambitious project to allow a decent job to get done. The rest will be forced to produce BS (literally, most of it is just misinformation at this point) or quit before even graduating.
- BeetleB 10y ago
  >I would say "stay as far away from academic research as you possibly can" is the best advice someone can get these days. It is an awful, stressful waste of the prime of your life. On the other hand, spending some years pursuing a PhD can be a great time to build skills and introspect in life. I grew a lot in that time in a way I don't think I would have with a job. Of course, if you have a very stressful advisor, it isn't worth it.
  - nonbel 10y ago
    Actually, my adviser was quite laid back. As a result, I was able to build a lot of skills in order to complete my project. However, notice I said able. I had to self-teach and self-fund to do it, the academic stuff was really just an obstacle. I think something like a basic income would allow the a certain type of person to achieve the same, and do it much faster and cheaper than getting a higher degree. I wonder if that is one reason why most of these problems started when higher education/research became less of an "elite" activity, ie as discussed in subnaughts link in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805406
  - saiya-jin 10y ago
    > On the other hand, spending some years pursuing a PhD can be a great time to build skills and introspect in life. as software dev, I would never, ever, ever want to be in academia compared to the jobs I went through. much more life to be lived, much more money to spend on life to live (ie travelling around the world), and CV/skillset that gets door opened for next jobs. you can build proper introspect in life when trekking few weeks among 8000m peaks, diving in coral reefs or anything in between, just give it a bit more than 1-2 weeks. great PhD can be interesting experience, but for me, it would always be subpar to great job
  - arethuza 10y ago
    Doing something like a PhD is a great place to find other people who might be interested in co-founding a startup! NB That's what I did after ~5 years in academic research at a UK university and never really regretted not finishing by PhD as I had no intention of going back into research.
- chriskanan 10y ago
  I strongly disagree. A PhD in the sciences or engineering is a degree in how to do research and it prepares people for careers in research or for careers that require communicating research. If a person is only satisfied with being a professor at a R1 university, then don't do a PhD, but there are a ton of other jobs that require or greatly benefit from having one, e.g, teaching universities, NASA, government labs, many research oriented groups in companies (FAIR, Google Research, biomedical companies, etc.), science policy advising, etc. One needs to have clear expectations going into the PhD about what they are trying to do and they need to have clear communication with their advisor. The vast majority of PhDs in science and engineering do very well and find jobs, but most don't get professorships at research focused institutions. Having realistic expectations is key, but a career in research is great. A PhD is stressful and takes 5-6 years, but it can be a great experience with the correct expectations and a solid plan. The main problem is that most PhD students don't seem to think about those things nearly enough and have unreasonable expectations.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >A PhD is stressful and takes 5-6 years, but it can be a great experience with the correct expectations and a solid plan. The main problem is that most PhD students don't seem to think about those things nearly enough and have unreasonable expectations. Honestly, I think the main problem is mostly that PhD students are, on the one hand, full-grown adults supporting themselves, and yet are, on the other hand, paid McDonalds wages to do the most intensive intellectual work our society has for Goldman Sachs hours.
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      I'm a PhD student, and I doubt I could have said it better. And depending on the field you're in, your only choice might be working as a postdoc until a suitable academic position opens up. Thankfully, there a way more options post-PhD in engineering.
    - doctorsher 10y ago
      Damn. As a 4th year PhD student, this hit me hard. You've worded my feelings on academia better than I ever could. Edit: I see Cyph0n has beaten me by a few minutes. Oh well.
- deleted 10y ago
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- letitgo12345 10y ago
  I really really wish people would separate advice by field rather than unfairly tarnish all of academic research with an incredibly broad brush. I'm a PhD in CS and while a lot of results are incremental, there is far far far less BS than in biomed from what I've heard.
subnaught 10y ago
In the mid 90's, Caltech's David Goodstein predicted an impending "Big Crunch" in science, writing: "We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch." The essay is long but well worth reading: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
cryoshon 10y ago
yeah, i left science for the reasons the article outlined. it's a big weight off of my shoulders. i tell people who are thinking of going into science not to do so, now.
- hash-set 10y ago
  Me too. I loved it. I could not think of a better way I could have spent my 20s. But I was going broke and had to get out.
pvaldes 10y ago
"mediocre science", that line says it all.
kayhi 10y ago
In the HN spirit, where's the opportunity? How can we help improve the life of researchers? Start ups trying to help: Science Exchange (YCS11) https://www.scienceexchange.com/ https://www.scienceexchange.com/ : outsource parts of your research to companies Instrumentl (YCS16) https://www.instrumentl.com/ https://www.instrumentl.com/ : identify and push relevant grants towards applicable research Experiment (YCW13) https://experiment.com/ https://experiment.com/ : crowdfunding platform for scientific research Transcriptic (YCW15) https://www.transcriptic.com/ https://www.transcriptic.com/ : a robotic cloud laboratory for the life sciences LabGuru https://www.labguru.com/ https://www.labguru.com/ : inventory management and lab notebook Lab Spend https://labspend.com/ https://labspend.com/ : tracks spending and finds savings on supplies and chemicals
- timr 10y ago
  As a former scientist, current startup person: please stop. This is crass. Startups that sell services to scientists aren't helping with the fundamental problem (i.e. there aren't many jobs, and there isn't enough funding once you have a job). Crowdfunding is nice in theory, but just makes the problem of vanity science worse than it is right now. Crowds don't know shit about science. If you want to help researchers, vote for people who will increase scientific funding. Much of this crunch is directly attributable to congressional budgetary cutbacks since the early 2000s: http://www.faseb.org/portals/2/images/opa/Factsheet_Restore-NIH-Funding-Graph2.gif http://www.faseb.org/portals/2/images/opa/Factsheet_Restore-... (Oh also: encourage your local billionaire(s) to stop funding ridiculous vanity projects, and do scientific good by giving grants to researchers who are already doing peer-reviewed work. Or just encourage them to give their money to the organizations that exist and do a great job of this, like HHMI, or the Gates Foundation. How refreshing it would be to hear a nouveau riche Silicon Valley dudebro stand up and say: "I want my money to have the tiniest chance of curing cancer in my lifetime -- a task so impossibly large that even my vast wealth and gigantic ego cannot possibly tackle it alone -- so I'm making a massive charitable donation to the National Cancer Institute!" Alas...)
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Frankly, crowdfunded science scares the hell out of me. Pretty much every time I've seen it, it consists of some fringe researcher promising one weird trick to cure A, B, and C. They don't get funding through traditional channels, because actual experts recognize the subtle-but-inescapable reasons they won't succeed, so instead they go to crowdfunding to squander a bunch of public money. I'm sure this could work, genuinely viable projects lack funding all the time, but it's generally because they weren't sexy enough for the grant committee. If the NIH thought it wasn't exciting enough, what are the chances the general public will choose it over some guy promising to cure cancer with nanomachines?
hprotagonist 10y ago
"if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it. " -- J. J. Thompson"
- noonespecial 10y ago
  I think that was what tenure was supposed to be for.
  - hprotagonist 10y ago
    Somewhat. Sinecures come in many forms. Tenure's more important because it means you can say naughty but true things about the powerful without losing your job. As structured right now, in the physical sciences, a base salary won't support research.
    - kkylin 10y ago
      Yes and no. In some fields, such as mathematics (applied & pure), one can squeak by without a grant, and many do. This has to do with the funding model in different fields -- math departments tend to have enough TA positions to support all their grad students, which lightens the pressure to secure funding. Of course the trade-off is time spent teaching lower-division courses vs actually doing research. As for tenure, it qualifies one for all kinds of service. So job security is nice, no questions about it, but one has even less time for serious work (unless you are willing to say no to requests to serve -- and some of these committees do matter).
jawilson2 10y ago
I got my biomedical engineering PhD, and was a neurology professor at a top children's hospital doing brain/epilepsy research for a few years. Literally my dream job for most of my life. I left it two years ago due to many of the reasons listed, and got a job going quant/algorithmic trading at a prop firm. I have never been happier, it is a hell of of a lot less stressful, I may actually pay off my student loans before I retire, we just bought a house, and obviously don't regret it for a second. Most of my old friends at my old job are jealous; they have psych or bio backgrounds, and have more or less hit their ceilings in terms of where that skill set can take them. For engineers who know how to code (I was a core contributer to www.bci2000.org for a decade+), math is math, and it doesn't matter if it is doing real time processing of brain signals or market data.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- aswanson 10y ago
  Did you explicitly search for a quant job or did it happen opportunistically?
  - jawilson2 10y ago
    Pretty organically. Several neuroscience guys who did my kind of research got into finance/trading as well.
- JDiculous 10y ago
  Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents to have society employing you full-time to make rich people richer via gambling in the financial markets rather than something more beneficial to society? I don't blame you at all (I'm sure your quality of life is magnitudes of order better, and I'd do the same in your position) and this isn't personal at all, it just pains me that our brightest graduates are working in finance rather than something like curing cancer.
  - aswanson 10y ago
javiramos 10y ago
None of my research friends that have gone to industry regret it... Some of my friends that have gone on to academic jobs regret the decision.
javiramos 10y ago
None of my research friends that have gone to industry regret it... Some of my friends that have gone on to academic jobs regret the decision.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dekhn 10y ago
I feel for these scientists. I understand what they went through- I went through it myself during the run-up of biomedical training in the mid-to-late 90's. After being a PI at a national lab for a few years, trying to get funded against more experienced scientists (some of whom copied my ideas!) I decided to move to industry. Now I have a job with a well-defined 20% time dedicated to research with effectively no limits on what I can do. I don't need to ask for funding- the resources I need are just expenses I charge against my company's effectively infinite budget. If I want to write a paper, I do- and those papers get cited far more highly than my previous papers, because my employer's name is gold. My salary is high enough that I maintain a lab in my garage and self-fund most of my experiments. This path doesn't work for everybody (the number of positions in industry that allow this freedom is limited) but in my experience it allowed me far more time to be a productive researcher than if I had tried to be a professor at a tier-1 university or a researcher at a national lab. Interestingly, my PhD training (in biomed) turned out to be ideal for being a data scientist, and my personal interests that I pursued during my training turned out to be ideal for working at my firm. In some sense, PhD programs produce the best programmers and researchers in industry, along with teaching a fair amount of how to deal with politics, which is critical in both academia and industry.
- joshu 10y ago
  OT: pics of lab?
exox 10y ago
The problem I faced - and still am, to an extent - was that during my PhD I was given no support or really any information at all about the possibility of a life and career outside of academia. I was fortunate enough to be offered a postdoc position in the same group that I did my PhD (particle physics) before I’d actually submitted my thesis. However 6 months later I desperately needed a change and managed to find another postdoc as a research scientist in the Medical Physics department of a cancer hospital. Medical physics research has felt more fulfilling than particle physics, but I’m now in a position where my current contract expires in around 9 months, and with a mortgage to pay and a family to support I have to decide between: looking for yet another short-term postdoc position (in a hopefully related field of physics) - ending up in exactly the same position in 2-3 years; starting to apply for grants and funding with my current research group - a very stressful process with no guarantees of anything; moving into industry / private sector - assuming that it’d be possible to find a company that had a need for the very specific knowledge base and skills that developed over the past 7 years. Or all of the above, at the same time, while trying to continue working my current research projects. As someone that has always had an interest in computing, data analysis and software, but has ended up approaching them from a physics-based direction, I don’t feel qualified to compete with computer science/statistics grads for most of the software development or data science jobs that I see advertised. I'm sure that there are other fields out there that would suit me, but having never had a non-academic-research job, I'm struggling to know where and what to look for. Does anyone have any practical advice for moving away from an academic career path?
- platform 10y ago
  >I don’t feel qualified to compete with computer science/statistics grads for most of the software development or data science jobs that I see advertised. I suspect you are more qualified than most oracle-developer-turned-data-scientists Give it ago. review some of open source projects that can leverage your math or data understanding skills. Contribute to those. Use that as your experience/resume
  - hash-set 10y ago
    I hate to burst your bubble, but outside of the major metros, there are few data science type jobs that are any good. It's an up-and-coming field, maybe--but as someone with a PhD and a lot of software development experience, making the transition has been tricky (am still working on it). It may be a good track or it may fizzle out, we'll see. A few superstars will do well, the rest will be an urban myth of potential prosperity and happiness.
mpweiher 10y ago
My comment from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12717765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12717765 When I was first exposed to the research "environment" during my Diplom studies (undergraduate - graduate, early to mid 90ies), I immediately recognised that if you actually love research and knowledge, academia was the last thing you ever want to get into. No surer way to kill the spark. Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student. Interestingly, that's also the feedback I get, though as "helpful" advice that while what I am doing may be both good and important, it is unlikely to lead to success in academia. With the implication that I should stop doing it and concentrate on something more reasonable. Fortunately, I am not particularly interested in success in modern academia, so I get to do something I consider both good and important. A related issue is that there really is no such thing as a senior researcher. Instead, professors are turned into research managers, responsible for helping their charges' careers, who then also turn into research managers. Actual research appears to be mostly a still not entirely avoidable side-effect. (And this seems similar to the way the only real way to advancement in industry is to switch to management, all dual-track equivalence rhetoric aside).
martincmartin 10y ago
Many of these people will leave for academia. Some of them have spare time, or maybe will have spare time after their kids are grown, or will be able to retire early. Then they could become citizen scientists [1], independent scientists [2], etc. Like independent film or video games, they couldn't compete head-on with big budget research. But they could presumably make progress in areas ignored by them: longer term, more fundamental research for example. When I was a postdoc at MIT, it was common for the grad students to want to have a "lunatic fringe" track at conferences or an "unconvential ideas" seminar. But once you're in the heirarchy/buerocracy of academia, you understand why those don't exist. Perhaps independent scientists could actually do them? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist
- neuromantik8086 10y ago
  This is why I'm a fan of open data / data sharing, and why I wish federal grants would more emphasize intermediate steps that could lead to papers rather than the production of papers themselves. The barriers to data collection are quite large (it's at least $1 million to acquire an MRI scanner in my field, neuroimaging; a huge fixed cost that most individuals would never be able to afford), but the cost of hosting those data once they're acquired is trivial. Once up on the net and publicly shared, anyone can take a crack at the the data and see what they can find.
  - alex_hirner 10y ago
    Funding bodies emphasize data sharing more and more. However, that is along or after a publication. No one has figured out academic attribution of data-only in a satisfactory way yet, but some noteworthy attempts exist. E.g. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/new-data-journal-lets-researchers-share-their-data-open-access https://www.elsevier.com/connect/new-data-journal-lets-resea...
neumann 10y ago
I am finishing up my postdoc now. I went back to do a PhD from IT because I loved the field I was entering and ended up really enjoying my PhD. I learnt a lot, got exposed to some great minds, and raised the bar for my own standards of quality, efficiency and intellect. But now, after two years of a postdoc for a tenure track professor in the US, my academic dreams have unravelled. I am looking for jobs in industry even though I am being encouraged for academic track. From my experience, it seems like the classic scientific research method of the old guard who I was mentored by is fading. The greats in my field would concentrate on one topic, work slowly, wrap it up, move to a new topic, and cultivate protoges. Now, the people securing tenure-track and tenure all seem to have half a dozen diverse projects to start with (to see which one suceeds and look hungry) - I see a lot of corner-cutting in their research - being bold is rewarded over detail and care. Most of my peers whom I respect for their research output and well-roundedness haven't made the cut for academia. A cynical sure fire recipe for making tenure in academia? 1. Have a great knack for politics; 2. put yourself ahead of your students by treating them as monkeys for publishing with no regard for their scientific development; 3. cut corners (tell yourself you will fix it when you get tenure); and 4. be a narcissist - you can't afford to do anything that doesn't impact your track record positively (outreach counts!). That is not to say there are not some great people who have got positions - but the criteria for who makes the cut has changed sufficiently that it feels like it is being played by those who are willing to play the rules of the game. The worst part is that there is rarely any consequence down the line - once you have secured enough funding the community overlooks all but most severe transgressions.
rubidium 10y ago
"as a young researcher moving to the private sector, he’s had to prove himself all over again." This is true and is worth anyone making the switch keeping in mind. Commercial companies want a commercial track record before they trust you with important decisions.
hasbroslasher 10y ago
I'm curious why this field hasn't been "privatized" to some degree. Why doesn't division of labor apply? Why not have scientists go off and do their research and rely on a team that is skilled at hoarding grants or publishing works from raw data? I imagine it's probably due to some institutional barriers (e.g. you can't get funding outside of a university context). I imagine the reason is as always - our leaders are two-faced in their support of science. They claim that it's a national issue but fail to make professorship even remotely competitive in the hard sciences. This kind of thing raises the most righteous indignation in me. We have a nation of know-nothing politicians claiming "We need more kids in STEM!" without doing anything to address the quagmire academia has become, largely because of over-competition for resources. For all of this myopia around STEM it's largely a misnomer. No one in industry cares about climate science, geology, theoretical physics, abstract algebra, topology, combinatorics or number theory - at least not in the dollars and cents view. They may care insofar as there's a cash benefit, but not to the degree that they care about building better oil pipelines, faster algorithms and more efficient fabrics. So what we end up with is a world where Nike, Facebook and Exxon Mobil attract the best talent - a world where PhD's are basically forced to quit their jobs in order to go make money for the bourgeois.
- hash-set 10y ago
  It's because the whole rotten mess that is academia is dying, that's why.
- sseagull 10y ago
  > Why not have scientists go off and do their research and rely on a team that is skilled at hoarding grants or publishing works from raw data? Partly because science is very specialized. If I work on something new, then it's possible there is very few people in the world that know it or will easily understand it. I couldn't have someone else write a paper or grant proposal based on it - either they wouldn't understand it, or they are a fellow scientist who wouldn't want to do it either. The mistake, in my opinion, is making the number of papers published a metric on which you determine a scientist's worth. Just like most metric-ization of society today, it's a bad idea.
markkat 10y ago
I've been in biomedical research for 15 years, and I am leaving the lab atm. Many of my peers are as well. It's not a viable or enjoyable career anymore. Funding is extremely political, and proposal reviews border on arbitrary. Typically, the funding has been decided by seniority and politics, and the review is justification. I imagine that it will get better eventually, but I can't wait for that to come to pass, and I can't in good conscience advise others to do so.
- seanopedia 10y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, are you moving to somewhere in the biomedical industry?
  - markkat 10y ago
    Yes, I started my own company. Doing something that I have wanted to for a while.
santaclaus 10y ago
The main problem with science is the lack of agile methodologies -- the scientific process is ripe for disruption.
- meech 10y ago
  Is this sarcastic?
  - santaclaus 10y ago
    Satire :)
    - meech 10y ago
      Excellent.
- neuromantik8086 10y ago
  CAPITALIST SCIENCE! https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2474 https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2474 (which may or may not bear an odd resemblance to insider trading)
hash-set 10y ago
Having gone through a lot of what is discussed in the article, I have concluded that academic research careers are for rich people only. I didn't even have student loans, but the pay was ridiculous given how many years of my 20s I spent in school, i.e. not making any income. Retirement is a real thing you know? So is getting old and having poor health. The comments on the nature.com page are interesting, too. No matter how much you love your career and your research, there is more to life. Also, you can see how climate research has become a total echo chamber--the people fighting over the scraps of funding will gladly sell their souls to a communist lie if that's what it takes to get by.
- pvaldes 10y ago
  > I have concluded that academic research careers are for rich people only. 100% correct. There is a lot of artifitial barriers with the only purpose of deter the poor, introverted, physically disabled, unable to lie convincingly, or coming from incorrect countries to pass. Maybe we should warn young people to not spending too much time doing science until reaching 50 years old or so. Science, as we understand it currently, is not much different to doing drugs. Will slurp all your money with some glimpses of a promised paradise, isolate you from friends and family, will boost your stress levels, increase your probability of having cancer and will damage your health. Your opportunities of having children or a good life will be seriously handicapped. I wonder why is not forbidden still.
bluetwo 10y ago
I understand this article is mostly about the pressure of finding grants and doing research, but the role also includes teaching. I would be curious to hear, based on the experience of others, how much of the money generated by teaching a class goes to the professor. Something like: % = ($ Professor paid per Class) / (Students per Class * Number of Credits for Class * $ Charged per Credit) At least by my calculations based on my own experience, 90% of the revenue here gets sucked up by overhead with only 10% going to the person teaching. If a non-profit was run this way, it would get shut down.
debt 10y ago
i hear this is the same problem in politics. a ton of fundraising and very little politicking or whatever it is politicians use to do normally during the day.
Balgair 10y ago
I'll put my 2 cents in here too. PhD in bioeng. Not planning on academia. Unfortunately, most of my cohort of grad students are ... blind?... to the data that we all know is out there. I'm part of 2 groups on campus that specialize in industry networking and start-ups. We do monthly happy-hours where we pay for the beer and nachos and we also bring in speakers that have PhDs in industry to talk about the transition and network with them too. We get a lot of people (30+) to show up to these events. But they are ALL 2nd or 3rd round post-docs. Almost no actual grad-students. I've talk to them. They all know that they have no real shot, they all know the odds in the lottery. They do not care. The only thing I can think is that these 22-27 year olds really think they can out-work each other and 'make it'. Past data in their lives says that they have always done so, and the next time should be no different. It's amazing that such smart people can be so damn bullheaded. Scientists are people too, including the stupidity.
xamuel 10y ago
Pure math phd here, now working in finance. On a personal level I wish I could've been a research professor. But on an objective level, in pure math the invisible hand of the market is acting correctly. There's already so much amazing pure math published, you could devote your whole life just to understanding 1/100th of the math published in the 1990s, to say nothing of the stuff published in 2016. We don't need more basic researchers right now. Sucks though that a lot of people (like me) have to watch a life dream crumble, though.
- Chinjut 10y ago
  Do we need more finance people? I wouldn't say we "need" much of anything; we could go any which way. So who says the invisible hand of the market is acting correctly if it makes your life dream of being a research professor crumble and forces you into finance work instead?

248 points by danielmorozoff 10y ago

I would say "stay as far away from academic research as you possibly can" is the best advice someone can get these days. It is an awful, stressful waste of the prime of your life. From what I saw in biomed only 1/10,000 or so will end up with the time, skills, and appropriately ambitious project to allow a decent job to get done. The rest will be forced to produce BS (literally, most of it is just misinformation at this point) or quit before even graduating.

BeetleB 10y ago
>I would say "stay as far away from academic research as you possibly can" is the best advice someone can get these days. It is an awful, stressful waste of the prime of your life. On the other hand, spending some years pursuing a PhD can be a great time to build skills and introspect in life. I grew a lot in that time in a way I don't think I would have with a job. Of course, if you have a very stressful advisor, it isn't worth it.
- nonbel 10y ago
  Actually, my adviser was quite laid back. As a result, I was able to build a lot of skills in order to complete my project. However, notice I said able. I had to self-teach and self-fund to do it, the academic stuff was really just an obstacle. I think something like a basic income would allow the a certain type of person to achieve the same, and do it much faster and cheaper than getting a higher degree. I wonder if that is one reason why most of these problems started when higher education/research became less of an "elite" activity, ie as discussed in subnaughts link in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805406
- saiya-jin 10y ago
  > On the other hand, spending some years pursuing a PhD can be a great time to build skills and introspect in life. as software dev, I would never, ever, ever want to be in academia compared to the jobs I went through. much more life to be lived, much more money to spend on life to live (ie travelling around the world), and CV/skillset that gets door opened for next jobs. you can build proper introspect in life when trekking few weeks among 8000m peaks, diving in coral reefs or anything in between, just give it a bit more than 1-2 weeks. great PhD can be interesting experience, but for me, it would always be subpar to great job
- arethuza 10y ago
  Doing something like a PhD is a great place to find other people who might be interested in co-founding a startup! NB That's what I did after ~5 years in academic research at a UK university and never really regretted not finishing by PhD as I had no intention of going back into research.
chriskanan 10y ago
I strongly disagree. A PhD in the sciences or engineering is a degree in how to do research and it prepares people for careers in research or for careers that require communicating research. If a person is only satisfied with being a professor at a R1 university, then don't do a PhD, but there are a ton of other jobs that require or greatly benefit from having one, e.g, teaching universities, NASA, government labs, many research oriented groups in companies (FAIR, Google Research, biomedical companies, etc.), science policy advising, etc. One needs to have clear expectations going into the PhD about what they are trying to do and they need to have clear communication with their advisor. The vast majority of PhDs in science and engineering do very well and find jobs, but most don't get professorships at research focused institutions. Having realistic expectations is key, but a career in research is great. A PhD is stressful and takes 5-6 years, but it can be a great experience with the correct expectations and a solid plan. The main problem is that most PhD students don't seem to think about those things nearly enough and have unreasonable expectations.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >A PhD is stressful and takes 5-6 years, but it can be a great experience with the correct expectations and a solid plan. The main problem is that most PhD students don't seem to think about those things nearly enough and have unreasonable expectations. Honestly, I think the main problem is mostly that PhD students are, on the one hand, full-grown adults supporting themselves, and yet are, on the other hand, paid McDonalds wages to do the most intensive intellectual work our society has for Goldman Sachs hours.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    I'm a PhD student, and I doubt I could have said it better. And depending on the field you're in, your only choice might be working as a postdoc until a suitable academic position opens up. Thankfully, there a way more options post-PhD in engineering.
  - doctorsher 10y ago
    Damn. As a 4th year PhD student, this hit me hard. You've worded my feelings on academia better than I ever could. Edit: I see Cyph0n has beaten me by a few minutes. Oh well.
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letitgo12345 10y ago
I really really wish people would separate advice by field rather than unfairly tarnish all of academic research with an incredibly broad brush. I'm a PhD in CS and while a lot of results are incremental, there is far far far less BS than in biomed from what I've heard.

subnaught 10y ago

In the mid 90's, Caltech's David Goodstein predicted an impending "Big Crunch" in science, writing: "We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch." The essay is long but well worth reading: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

cryoshon 10y ago

yeah, i left science for the reasons the article outlined. it's a big weight off of my shoulders. i tell people who are thinking of going into science not to do so, now.

hash-set 10y ago
Me too. I loved it. I could not think of a better way I could have spent my 20s. But I was going broke and had to get out.

pvaldes 10y ago

"mediocre science", that line says it all.

kayhi 10y ago

In the HN spirit, where's the opportunity? How can we help improve the life of researchers? Start ups trying to help: Science Exchange (YCS11) https://www.scienceexchange.com/ https://www.scienceexchange.com/ : outsource parts of your research to companies Instrumentl (YCS16) https://www.instrumentl.com/ https://www.instrumentl.com/ : identify and push relevant grants towards applicable research Experiment (YCW13) https://experiment.com/ https://experiment.com/ : crowdfunding platform for scientific research Transcriptic (YCW15) https://www.transcriptic.com/ https://www.transcriptic.com/ : a robotic cloud laboratory for the life sciences LabGuru https://www.labguru.com/ https://www.labguru.com/ : inventory management and lab notebook Lab Spend https://labspend.com/ https://labspend.com/ : tracks spending and finds savings on supplies and chemicals

timr 10y ago
As a former scientist, current startup person: please stop. This is crass. Startups that sell services to scientists aren't helping with the fundamental problem (i.e. there aren't many jobs, and there isn't enough funding once you have a job). Crowdfunding is nice in theory, but just makes the problem of vanity science worse than it is right now. Crowds don't know shit about science. If you want to help researchers, vote for people who will increase scientific funding. Much of this crunch is directly attributable to congressional budgetary cutbacks since the early 2000s: http://www.faseb.org/portals/2/images/opa/Factsheet_Restore-NIH-Funding-Graph2.gif http://www.faseb.org/portals/2/images/opa/Factsheet_Restore-... (Oh also: encourage your local billionaire(s) to stop funding ridiculous vanity projects, and do scientific good by giving grants to researchers who are already doing peer-reviewed work. Or just encourage them to give their money to the organizations that exist and do a great job of this, like HHMI, or the Gates Foundation. How refreshing it would be to hear a nouveau riche Silicon Valley dudebro stand up and say: "I want my money to have the tiniest chance of curing cancer in my lifetime -- a task so impossibly large that even my vast wealth and gigantic ego cannot possibly tackle it alone -- so I'm making a massive charitable donation to the National Cancer Institute!" Alas...)
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Frankly, crowdfunded science scares the hell out of me. Pretty much every time I've seen it, it consists of some fringe researcher promising one weird trick to cure A, B, and C. They don't get funding through traditional channels, because actual experts recognize the subtle-but-inescapable reasons they won't succeed, so instead they go to crowdfunding to squander a bunch of public money. I'm sure this could work, genuinely viable projects lack funding all the time, but it's generally because they weren't sexy enough for the grant committee. If the NIH thought it wasn't exciting enough, what are the chances the general public will choose it over some guy promising to cure cancer with nanomachines?

hprotagonist 10y ago

"if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it. " -- J. J. Thompson"

noonespecial 10y ago
I think that was what tenure was supposed to be for.
- hprotagonist 10y ago
  Somewhat. Sinecures come in many forms. Tenure's more important because it means you can say naughty but true things about the powerful without losing your job. As structured right now, in the physical sciences, a base salary won't support research.
  - kkylin 10y ago
    Yes and no. In some fields, such as mathematics (applied & pure), one can squeak by without a grant, and many do. This has to do with the funding model in different fields -- math departments tend to have enough TA positions to support all their grad students, which lightens the pressure to secure funding. Of course the trade-off is time spent teaching lower-division courses vs actually doing research. As for tenure, it qualifies one for all kinds of service. So job security is nice, no questions about it, but one has even less time for serious work (unless you are willing to say no to requests to serve -- and some of these committees do matter).

jawilson2 10y ago

I got my biomedical engineering PhD, and was a neurology professor at a top children's hospital doing brain/epilepsy research for a few years. Literally my dream job for most of my life. I left it two years ago due to many of the reasons listed, and got a job going quant/algorithmic trading at a prop firm. I have never been happier, it is a hell of of a lot less stressful, I may actually pay off my student loans before I retire, we just bought a house, and obviously don't regret it for a second. Most of my old friends at my old job are jealous; they have psych or bio backgrounds, and have more or less hit their ceilings in terms of where that skill set can take them. For engineers who know how to code (I was a core contributer to www.bci2000.org for a decade+), math is math, and it doesn't matter if it is doing real time processing of brain signals or market data.

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aswanson 10y ago
Did you explicitly search for a quant job or did it happen opportunistically?
- jawilson2 10y ago
  Pretty organically. Several neuroscience guys who did my kind of research got into finance/trading as well.
JDiculous 10y ago
Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents to have society employing you full-time to make rich people richer via gambling in the financial markets rather than something more beneficial to society? I don't blame you at all (I'm sure your quality of life is magnitudes of order better, and I'd do the same in your position) and this isn't personal at all, it just pains me that our brightest graduates are working in finance rather than something like curing cancer.
- aswanson 10y ago

javiramos 10y ago

None of my research friends that have gone to industry regret it... Some of my friends that have gone on to academic jobs regret the decision.

javiramos 10y ago

None of my research friends that have gone to industry regret it... Some of my friends that have gone on to academic jobs regret the decision.

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dekhn 10y ago

I feel for these scientists. I understand what they went through- I went through it myself during the run-up of biomedical training in the mid-to-late 90's. After being a PI at a national lab for a few years, trying to get funded against more experienced scientists (some of whom copied my ideas!) I decided to move to industry. Now I have a job with a well-defined 20% time dedicated to research with effectively no limits on what I can do. I don't need to ask for funding- the resources I need are just expenses I charge against my company's effectively infinite budget. If I want to write a paper, I do- and those papers get cited far more highly than my previous papers, because my employer's name is gold. My salary is high enough that I maintain a lab in my garage and self-fund most of my experiments. This path doesn't work for everybody (the number of positions in industry that allow this freedom is limited) but in my experience it allowed me far more time to be a productive researcher than if I had tried to be a professor at a tier-1 university or a researcher at a national lab. Interestingly, my PhD training (in biomed) turned out to be ideal for being a data scientist, and my personal interests that I pursued during my training turned out to be ideal for working at my firm. In some sense, PhD programs produce the best programmers and researchers in industry, along with teaching a fair amount of how to deal with politics, which is critical in both academia and industry.

joshu 10y ago
OT: pics of lab?

exox 10y ago

The problem I faced - and still am, to an extent - was that during my PhD I was given no support or really any information at all about the possibility of a life and career outside of academia. I was fortunate enough to be offered a postdoc position in the same group that I did my PhD (particle physics) before I’d actually submitted my thesis. However 6 months later I desperately needed a change and managed to find another postdoc as a research scientist in the Medical Physics department of a cancer hospital. Medical physics research has felt more fulfilling than particle physics, but I’m now in a position where my current contract expires in around 9 months, and with a mortgage to pay and a family to support I have to decide between: looking for yet another short-term postdoc position (in a hopefully related field of physics) - ending up in exactly the same position in 2-3 years; starting to apply for grants and funding with my current research group - a very stressful process with no guarantees of anything; moving into industry / private sector - assuming that it’d be possible to find a company that had a need for the very specific knowledge base and skills that developed over the past 7 years. Or all of the above, at the same time, while trying to continue working my current research projects. As someone that has always had an interest in computing, data analysis and software, but has ended up approaching them from a physics-based direction, I don’t feel qualified to compete with computer science/statistics grads for most of the software development or data science jobs that I see advertised. I'm sure that there are other fields out there that would suit me, but having never had a non-academic-research job, I'm struggling to know where and what to look for. Does anyone have any practical advice for moving away from an academic career path?

platform 10y ago
>I don’t feel qualified to compete with computer science/statistics grads for most of the software development or data science jobs that I see advertised. I suspect you are more qualified than most oracle-developer-turned-data-scientists Give it ago. review some of open source projects that can leverage your math or data understanding skills. Contribute to those. Use that as your experience/resume
- hash-set 10y ago
  I hate to burst your bubble, but outside of the major metros, there are few data science type jobs that are any good. It's an up-and-coming field, maybe--but as someone with a PhD and a lot of software development experience, making the transition has been tricky (am still working on it). It may be a good track or it may fizzle out, we'll see. A few superstars will do well, the rest will be an urban myth of potential prosperity and happiness.

mpweiher 10y ago

My comment from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12717765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12717765 When I was first exposed to the research "environment" during my Diplom studies (undergraduate - graduate, early to mid 90ies), I immediately recognised that if you actually love research and knowledge, academia was the last thing you ever want to get into. No surer way to kill the spark. Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student. Interestingly, that's also the feedback I get, though as "helpful" advice that while what I am doing may be both good and important, it is unlikely to lead to success in academia. With the implication that I should stop doing it and concentrate on something more reasonable. Fortunately, I am not particularly interested in success in modern academia, so I get to do something I consider both good and important. A related issue is that there really is no such thing as a senior researcher. Instead, professors are turned into research managers, responsible for helping their charges' careers, who then also turn into research managers. Actual research appears to be mostly a still not entirely avoidable side-effect. (And this seems similar to the way the only real way to advancement in industry is to switch to management, all dual-track equivalence rhetoric aside).

martincmartin 10y ago

Many of these people will leave for academia. Some of them have spare time, or maybe will have spare time after their kids are grown, or will be able to retire early. Then they could become citizen scientists [1], independent scientists [2], etc. Like independent film or video games, they couldn't compete head-on with big budget research. But they could presumably make progress in areas ignored by them: longer term, more fundamental research for example. When I was a postdoc at MIT, it was common for the grad students to want to have a "lunatic fringe" track at conferences or an "unconvential ideas" seminar. But once you're in the heirarchy/buerocracy of academia, you understand why those don't exist. Perhaps independent scientists could actually do them? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist

neuromantik8086 10y ago
This is why I'm a fan of open data / data sharing, and why I wish federal grants would more emphasize intermediate steps that could lead to papers rather than the production of papers themselves. The barriers to data collection are quite large (it's at least $1 million to acquire an MRI scanner in my field, neuroimaging; a huge fixed cost that most individuals would never be able to afford), but the cost of hosting those data once they're acquired is trivial. Once up on the net and publicly shared, anyone can take a crack at the the data and see what they can find.
- alex_hirner 10y ago
  Funding bodies emphasize data sharing more and more. However, that is along or after a publication. No one has figured out academic attribution of data-only in a satisfactory way yet, but some noteworthy attempts exist. E.g. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/new-data-journal-lets-researchers-share-their-data-open-access https://www.elsevier.com/connect/new-data-journal-lets-resea...

neumann 10y ago

I am finishing up my postdoc now. I went back to do a PhD from IT because I loved the field I was entering and ended up really enjoying my PhD. I learnt a lot, got exposed to some great minds, and raised the bar for my own standards of quality, efficiency and intellect. But now, after two years of a postdoc for a tenure track professor in the US, my academic dreams have unravelled. I am looking for jobs in industry even though I am being encouraged for academic track. From my experience, it seems like the classic scientific research method of the old guard who I was mentored by is fading. The greats in my field would concentrate on one topic, work slowly, wrap it up, move to a new topic, and cultivate protoges. Now, the people securing tenure-track and tenure all seem to have half a dozen diverse projects to start with (to see which one suceeds and look hungry) - I see a lot of corner-cutting in their research - being bold is rewarded over detail and care. Most of my peers whom I respect for their research output and well-roundedness haven't made the cut for academia. A cynical sure fire recipe for making tenure in academia? 1. Have a great knack for politics; 2. put yourself ahead of your students by treating them as monkeys for publishing with no regard for their scientific development; 3. cut corners (tell yourself you will fix it when you get tenure); and 4. be a narcissist - you can't afford to do anything that doesn't impact your track record positively (outreach counts!). That is not to say there are not some great people who have got positions - but the criteria for who makes the cut has changed sufficiently that it feels like it is being played by those who are willing to play the rules of the game. The worst part is that there is rarely any consequence down the line - once you have secured enough funding the community overlooks all but most severe transgressions.

rubidium 10y ago

"as a young researcher moving to the private sector, he’s had to prove himself all over again." This is true and is worth anyone making the switch keeping in mind. Commercial companies want a commercial track record before they trust you with important decisions.

hasbroslasher 10y ago

I'm curious why this field hasn't been "privatized" to some degree. Why doesn't division of labor apply? Why not have scientists go off and do their research and rely on a team that is skilled at hoarding grants or publishing works from raw data? I imagine it's probably due to some institutional barriers (e.g. you can't get funding outside of a university context). I imagine the reason is as always - our leaders are two-faced in their support of science. They claim that it's a national issue but fail to make professorship even remotely competitive in the hard sciences. This kind of thing raises the most righteous indignation in me. We have a nation of know-nothing politicians claiming "We need more kids in STEM!" without doing anything to address the quagmire academia has become, largely because of over-competition for resources. For all of this myopia around STEM it's largely a misnomer. No one in industry cares about climate science, geology, theoretical physics, abstract algebra, topology, combinatorics or number theory - at least not in the dollars and cents view. They may care insofar as there's a cash benefit, but not to the degree that they care about building better oil pipelines, faster algorithms and more efficient fabrics. So what we end up with is a world where Nike, Facebook and Exxon Mobil attract the best talent - a world where PhD's are basically forced to quit their jobs in order to go make money for the bourgeois.

hash-set 10y ago
It's because the whole rotten mess that is academia is dying, that's why.
sseagull 10y ago
> Why not have scientists go off and do their research and rely on a team that is skilled at hoarding grants or publishing works from raw data? Partly because science is very specialized. If I work on something new, then it's possible there is very few people in the world that know it or will easily understand it. I couldn't have someone else write a paper or grant proposal based on it - either they wouldn't understand it, or they are a fellow scientist who wouldn't want to do it either. The mistake, in my opinion, is making the number of papers published a metric on which you determine a scientist's worth. Just like most metric-ization of society today, it's a bad idea.

markkat 10y ago

I've been in biomedical research for 15 years, and I am leaving the lab atm. Many of my peers are as well. It's not a viable or enjoyable career anymore. Funding is extremely political, and proposal reviews border on arbitrary. Typically, the funding has been decided by seniority and politics, and the review is justification. I imagine that it will get better eventually, but I can't wait for that to come to pass, and I can't in good conscience advise others to do so.

seanopedia 10y ago
If you don't mind me asking, are you moving to somewhere in the biomedical industry?
- markkat 10y ago
  Yes, I started my own company. Doing something that I have wanted to for a while.

santaclaus 10y ago

The main problem with science is the lack of agile methodologies -- the scientific process is ripe for disruption.

meech 10y ago
Is this sarcastic?
- santaclaus 10y ago
  Satire :)
  - meech 10y ago
    Excellent.
neuromantik8086 10y ago
CAPITALIST SCIENCE! https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2474 https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2474 (which may or may not bear an odd resemblance to insider trading)

hash-set 10y ago

Having gone through a lot of what is discussed in the article, I have concluded that academic research careers are for rich people only. I didn't even have student loans, but the pay was ridiculous given how many years of my 20s I spent in school, i.e. not making any income. Retirement is a real thing you know? So is getting old and having poor health. The comments on the nature.com page are interesting, too. No matter how much you love your career and your research, there is more to life. Also, you can see how climate research has become a total echo chamber--the people fighting over the scraps of funding will gladly sell their souls to a communist lie if that's what it takes to get by.

pvaldes 10y ago
> I have concluded that academic research careers are for rich people only. 100% correct. There is a lot of artifitial barriers with the only purpose of deter the poor, introverted, physically disabled, unable to lie convincingly, or coming from incorrect countries to pass. Maybe we should warn young people to not spending too much time doing science until reaching 50 years old or so. Science, as we understand it currently, is not much different to doing drugs. Will slurp all your money with some glimpses of a promised paradise, isolate you from friends and family, will boost your stress levels, increase your probability of having cancer and will damage your health. Your opportunities of having children or a good life will be seriously handicapped. I wonder why is not forbidden still.

bluetwo 10y ago

I understand this article is mostly about the pressure of finding grants and doing research, but the role also includes teaching. I would be curious to hear, based on the experience of others, how much of the money generated by teaching a class goes to the professor. Something like: % = ($ Professor paid per Class) / (Students per Class * Number of Credits for Class * $ Charged per Credit) At least by my calculations based on my own experience, 90% of the revenue here gets sucked up by overhead with only 10% going to the person teaching. If a non-profit was run this way, it would get shut down.

debt 10y ago

i hear this is the same problem in politics. a ton of fundraising and very little politicking or whatever it is politicians use to do normally during the day.

Balgair 10y ago

I'll put my 2 cents in here too. PhD in bioeng. Not planning on academia. Unfortunately, most of my cohort of grad students are ... blind?... to the data that we all know is out there. I'm part of 2 groups on campus that specialize in industry networking and start-ups. We do monthly happy-hours where we pay for the beer and nachos and we also bring in speakers that have PhDs in industry to talk about the transition and network with them too. We get a lot of people (30+) to show up to these events. But they are ALL 2nd or 3rd round post-docs. Almost no actual grad-students. I've talk to them. They all know that they have no real shot, they all know the odds in the lottery. They do not care. The only thing I can think is that these 22-27 year olds really think they can out-work each other and 'make it'. Past data in their lives says that they have always done so, and the next time should be no different. It's amazing that such smart people can be so damn bullheaded. Scientists are people too, including the stupidity.

xamuel 10y ago

Pure math phd here, now working in finance. On a personal level I wish I could've been a research professor. But on an objective level, in pure math the invisible hand of the market is acting correctly. There's already so much amazing pure math published, you could devote your whole life just to understanding 1/100th of the math published in the 1990s, to say nothing of the stuff published in 2016. We don't need more basic researchers right now. Sucks though that a lot of people (like me) have to watch a life dream crumble, though.

Chinjut 10y ago
Do we need more finance people? I wouldn't say we "need" much of anything; we could go any which way. So who says the invisible hand of the market is acting correctly if it makes your life dream of being a research professor crumble and forces you into finance work instead?