4 ms·

Coming from another field, 23 years as a post-doc seems insane to me. Is this common in some fields? I never thought of post-docs as (semi-) permanent positions

Coming from another field, 23 years as a post-doc seems insane to me. Is this common in some fields? I never thought of post-docs as (semi-) permanent positions or something one would spend a major chunk of a career doing. I always thought of it as a transitional position, something people did while they worked on getting their own funding or transition to industry. Am I wrong or are there different standards in different fields, or is this person just an extreme outlier?

in_cahoots 8y ago
I’m also from another field, but 19 papers and 5 first-author papers over 23 years is a huge red flag. Many graduate students wind up with 3-4 first-author papers by the time they graduate. I don’t know what he was doing with his time, but the publication record seems to be the elephant in the room.
- rubidium 8y ago
  Agreed. I don't know if this applies to the article author, but I've met a few "lifestyle" post-docs. They do just enough to keep in the system, but don't rise above that (either capability or motivation).
- lijason 8y ago
  To be fair, even though it seems low, paper output/metrics are very field dependent.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    I'm close enough to their field to say that that's a really low number.
chrisseaton 8y ago
Obviously not everyone can promote all the way up, and not everyone wants to. There’s nothing wrong with someone doing good competent work at the level of a postdoc for as long as they want. We have a postdoc in his 40s in the lab I used to be in and he does excellent work as part of a group. I don’t think he wants to run his own lab and why must he?
- blancheneige 8y ago
  Idk he might eventually grow tired of living off tuition and taxpayer money.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    Would becoming tenured change that? I would have thought both postdocs and tenured researchers would usually be funded mostly by research grants.
    - Fomite 8y ago
      They are.
- Fomite 8y ago
  So a couple issues: 1) As postdocs get more experienced, their pay usually goes up. 2) As mentioned in the article, it's possible to "age out" of a lot of fellowships, which have limits like "5 years since your last degree" requirements. Which means the burden then falls on the PI of the lab to support them as essentially a staff scientist. If I pay a postdoc $60,000 a year, at 10% pay lines (which is not unreasonable for the NIH), I have to write about $600,000 in grants in expectation to be able to afford them. That's a lot of work, and unless they are significantly better than a new postdoc, potentially not worth it. They're also not a good speculative investment - they're not going to go on to be a PI of their own lab, which has benefits for their PI down the line.
  - mattkrause 8y ago
    The NIH scale doesn't rise that fast. A brand-new postdoc costs about $50k on NIH pay scales. There is often also an assumption that more senior people will also bring on money, either completely by themselves or by enabling more projects. The (completely idiotic, IMHO) 2 or 5-year cutoffs on some fellowships makes this somewhat more difficult. I also think experience is weirdly undervalued in academia. I would bet that, in many fields, three random students at $25k/ea are not appreciably better than one highly skilled staff scientist at $75k, especially if the lab actually paid full freight for the students instead of having them subsidized by training grants and time-limited fellowships. This is tricky to study though....
aaavl2821 8y ago
There's a huge glut of PhDs and postdocs in the life sciences compared to the number of jobs available. 8K new biology PhDs each year compared to maybe 2K in CS in the US; probably 25-30K biology postdocs today compared to 1-1.5K CS postdocs. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37 Big pharma is cutting R&D left and right, and there aren't enough small companies to provide jobs for all these scientists. There are very few tenure-track positions available, so a career in academia isn't really an option either. Compare this to CS where by the sounds of it there are far more open positions than qualified candidates (not my field, but i hear this all the time) If you are a smart software engineer who just wants to write good code and have good work / life balance, you can make low to mid six figures at a big company. If you are a smart biologist who just wants to do good science and have a good work / life balance....you don't really have many options. You can be an eternal postdoc, but the work life balance isn't that great, and you're making $40-60K, even in your 30s
- tschwimmer 8y ago
  Why is big pharma cutting R&D?
  - jchallis 8y ago
    The past decade of commercial research has failed to deliver the market successes needed to justify the premium. If you look at the biggest winners for pharmaceutical companies over the last decade (immunotherapy is the poster child), most of the research happened in academic labs. Cheaper to license the winners than do basic research yourself.
    - aaavl2821 8y ago
      That's partially true (big pharma r&d has failed to deliver returns) but it is not true that most of the research happened in academic labs. Most of the research and early development happens in small companies. Most of the later stage development happens at big pharma companies

in_cahoots 8y ago

I’m also from another field, but 19 papers and 5 first-author papers over 23 years is a huge red flag. Many graduate students wind up with 3-4 first-author papers by the time they graduate. I don’t know what he was doing with his time, but the publication record seems to be the elephant in the room.

rubidium 8y ago
Agreed. I don't know if this applies to the article author, but I've met a few "lifestyle" post-docs. They do just enough to keep in the system, but don't rise above that (either capability or motivation).
lijason 8y ago
To be fair, even though it seems low, paper output/metrics are very field dependent.
- Fomite 8y ago
  I'm close enough to their field to say that that's a really low number.

chrisseaton 8y ago

Obviously not everyone can promote all the way up, and not everyone wants to. There’s nothing wrong with someone doing good competent work at the level of a postdoc for as long as they want. We have a postdoc in his 40s in the lab I used to be in and he does excellent work as part of a group. I don’t think he wants to run his own lab and why must he?

blancheneige 8y ago
Idk he might eventually grow tired of living off tuition and taxpayer money.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  Would becoming tenured change that? I would have thought both postdocs and tenured researchers would usually be funded mostly by research grants.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    They are.
Fomite 8y ago
So a couple issues: 1) As postdocs get more experienced, their pay usually goes up. 2) As mentioned in the article, it's possible to "age out" of a lot of fellowships, which have limits like "5 years since your last degree" requirements. Which means the burden then falls on the PI of the lab to support them as essentially a staff scientist. If I pay a postdoc $60,000 a year, at 10% pay lines (which is not unreasonable for the NIH), I have to write about $600,000 in grants in expectation to be able to afford them. That's a lot of work, and unless they are significantly better than a new postdoc, potentially not worth it. They're also not a good speculative investment - they're not going to go on to be a PI of their own lab, which has benefits for their PI down the line.
- mattkrause 8y ago
  The NIH scale doesn't rise that fast. A brand-new postdoc costs about $50k on NIH pay scales. There is often also an assumption that more senior people will also bring on money, either completely by themselves or by enabling more projects. The (completely idiotic, IMHO) 2 or 5-year cutoffs on some fellowships makes this somewhat more difficult. I also think experience is weirdly undervalued in academia. I would bet that, in many fields, three random students at $25k/ea are not appreciably better than one highly skilled staff scientist at $75k, especially if the lab actually paid full freight for the students instead of having them subsidized by training grants and time-limited fellowships. This is tricky to study though....

aaavl2821 8y ago

There's a huge glut of PhDs and postdocs in the life sciences compared to the number of jobs available. 8K new biology PhDs each year compared to maybe 2K in CS in the US; probably 25-30K biology postdocs today compared to 1-1.5K CS postdocs. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37 Big pharma is cutting R&D left and right, and there aren't enough small companies to provide jobs for all these scientists. There are very few tenure-track positions available, so a career in academia isn't really an option either. Compare this to CS where by the sounds of it there are far more open positions than qualified candidates (not my field, but i hear this all the time) If you are a smart software engineer who just wants to write good code and have good work / life balance, you can make low to mid six figures at a big company. If you are a smart biologist who just wants to do good science and have a good work / life balance....you don't really have many options. You can be an eternal postdoc, but the work life balance isn't that great, and you're making $40-60K, even in your 30s

tschwimmer 8y ago
Why is big pharma cutting R&D?
- jchallis 8y ago
  The past decade of commercial research has failed to deliver the market successes needed to justify the premium. If you look at the biggest winners for pharmaceutical companies over the last decade (immunotherapy is the poster child), most of the research happened in academic labs. Cheaper to license the winners than do basic research yourself.
  - aaavl2821 8y ago
    That's partially true (big pharma r&d has failed to deliver returns) but it is not true that most of the research happened in academic labs. Most of the research and early development happens in small companies. Most of the later stage development happens at big pharma companies