6 ms·

Academia nowadays is a high-tech bureaucracy; you are forced to churn out documents (papers) that need to cite other documents, and you're evaluated based on yo

Academia nowadays is a high-tech bureaucracy; you are forced to churn out documents (papers) that need to cite other documents, and you're evaluated based on your position in the inter-document citation network. Then you have to write other documents (grant proposals) to grab money to write more documents (papers) by gaming the inner mechanics of some comittee. If partner-track investment bankers are overworked, depressed sociopaths with Lamborghinis, then tenure-track postdocs are investment bankers with crappy bicycles. Needless to say, I left academia 3 years ago and never looked back.

zucchini_head 9y ago
This is essentially exactly why I have not chosen to do a PhD, but go into industry. The bureaucracy is intense in academia and you can in some places spend far too long brown-nosing upper-positions to get anywhere at all. Some of the horror stories I've heard from older people who have done a PhD are awful. For example, apparently, it's quite often that there will be a collection of people gossiping when a particular upper senior will retire or die so that they can all compete for the opened slot. It's quite terrible and grimy when you get past the good PR angle that the Universities and mass media portray. Just like any bureaucracy.
- jtauber1 9y ago
  Not a big fan of academia either, but I don't see how this is any different than upper management/leaderahip positions in industry.
  - taway_1212 9y ago
    It's true that you need to eat the same shit, but at least upper mgmt/leadership pays much better.
- Analog24 9y ago
  I wouldn't extrapolate too far from those horror stories you heard. My experience was nothing like what you describe. Plus there are many reasons to get a PhD other than going into academia and when you're a grad student you don't have to deal with any of the politics or the other "grimy" parts (at least not in the vast majority of cases). There are many downsides to academia, the papermill mentality that has become pervasive being a big one, but this picture of a morally bankrupt subculture where people do whatever they can to get to the top is nothing like what I experienced.
loarake 9y ago
-Working for a big tech company: you're writing code to deliver more ads to more people so the company can grow and deliver even more ads to even more people -Being a truck driver: you're moving boxes around -Being a professional hockey player: you and your team are moving really fast with a disk shaped object trying to put it in a net while people try to prevent you from doing it -Being a stock trader: making money by spending your whole life reading company reports and hoping you're right about whether they're doing well or not -Being a quant: using your hard earned computer science skills to move money around and turn a profit instead of helping humanity Almost every human endeavor can be trivialized if you choose to only see one side of it.
- yannis7 9y ago
  I guess my point was that the "moral" aspect of academia (="pushing the limits of knowledge") has faded away over the last few decades. Currently departments are pressing researchers towards output rather than long-term quality work - at least that was the key aspect of my post-doctoral experience.
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  Baker/cook: you're making food for people, either to nourish them or give them joy. Farmer: you're making food for people. Construction worker: you're making buildings for people to live or work or play in. I think the problem is that many of our jobs are crappy, not that almost every human endeavor is equivalent to pushing paper around. Nurses, doctors, etc, are doing important work as well. The bad part is when it's 90% paper (common in healthcare in the US). Find you a tech company that is actually building something physical, not just selling ads.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Curiously none of the jobs you mentioned are well paid (well, I guess it depends on who you mean to include, since owning a farm or being Mario Batali probably isn't bad). But besides that I think we could do the same thing, really. A cynic could say a farmer just grows surplus corn to collect subsidies on ethanol.
turk184 9y ago
I will state, however, that I did make some interesting contributions to knowledge and even helped invent some things we all see every day in modern web browsers. Unfortunately, my university never backed my group to patent any of those inventions and so the most we got out of them was conference talks and a few papers while others adopted the ideas we gave away for free and made a lot of money off of them. Not that I'm cynical, but damn I ate a lot of crappy food and even had $0 tax returns a couple of years there.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
JepZ 9y ago
Actually, I see the same problems, but in my opinion those are symtoms. I do not know whats the real problem behind it, but it seems related to financing. Something must have change in recent years, which changed the way scientists work nowadays. While I left academia too, I wish scientists would have the freedom to work on larger/long term subjects again.

zucchini_head 9y ago

This is essentially exactly why I have not chosen to do a PhD, but go into industry. The bureaucracy is intense in academia and you can in some places spend far too long brown-nosing upper-positions to get anywhere at all. Some of the horror stories I've heard from older people who have done a PhD are awful. For example, apparently, it's quite often that there will be a collection of people gossiping when a particular upper senior will retire or die so that they can all compete for the opened slot. It's quite terrible and grimy when you get past the good PR angle that the Universities and mass media portray. Just like any bureaucracy.

jtauber1 9y ago
Not a big fan of academia either, but I don't see how this is any different than upper management/leaderahip positions in industry.
- taway_1212 9y ago
  It's true that you need to eat the same shit, but at least upper mgmt/leadership pays much better.
Analog24 9y ago
I wouldn't extrapolate too far from those horror stories you heard. My experience was nothing like what you describe. Plus there are many reasons to get a PhD other than going into academia and when you're a grad student you don't have to deal with any of the politics or the other "grimy" parts (at least not in the vast majority of cases). There are many downsides to academia, the papermill mentality that has become pervasive being a big one, but this picture of a morally bankrupt subculture where people do whatever they can to get to the top is nothing like what I experienced.

loarake 9y ago

-Working for a big tech company: you're writing code to deliver more ads to more people so the company can grow and deliver even more ads to even more people -Being a truck driver: you're moving boxes around -Being a professional hockey player: you and your team are moving really fast with a disk shaped object trying to put it in a net while people try to prevent you from doing it -Being a stock trader: making money by spending your whole life reading company reports and hoping you're right about whether they're doing well or not -Being a quant: using your hard earned computer science skills to move money around and turn a profit instead of helping humanity Almost every human endeavor can be trivialized if you choose to only see one side of it.

yannis7 9y ago
I guess my point was that the "moral" aspect of academia (="pushing the limits of knowledge") has faded away over the last few decades. Currently departments are pressing researchers towards output rather than long-term quality work - at least that was the key aspect of my post-doctoral experience.
Robotbeat 9y ago
Baker/cook: you're making food for people, either to nourish them or give them joy. Farmer: you're making food for people. Construction worker: you're making buildings for people to live or work or play in. I think the problem is that many of our jobs are crappy, not that almost every human endeavor is equivalent to pushing paper around. Nurses, doctors, etc, are doing important work as well. The bad part is when it's 90% paper (common in healthcare in the US). Find you a tech company that is actually building something physical, not just selling ads.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Curiously none of the jobs you mentioned are well paid (well, I guess it depends on who you mean to include, since owning a farm or being Mario Batali probably isn't bad). But besides that I think we could do the same thing, really. A cynic could say a farmer just grows surplus corn to collect subsidies on ethanol.

turk184 9y ago

I will state, however, that I did make some interesting contributions to knowledge and even helped invent some things we all see every day in modern web browsers. Unfortunately, my university never backed my group to patent any of those inventions and so the most we got out of them was conference talks and a few papers while others adopted the ideas we gave away for free and made a lot of money off of them. Not that I'm cynical, but damn I ate a lot of crappy food and even had $0 tax returns a couple of years there.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

JepZ 9y ago

Actually, I see the same problems, but in my opinion those are symtoms. I do not know whats the real problem behind it, but it seems related to financing. Something must have change in recent years, which changed the way scientists work nowadays. While I left academia too, I wish scientists would have the freedom to work on larger/long term subjects again.