3 ms·

I know a (non-PhD) researcher who moved on after one of those labs closed and sadly he finds it impossible to get a research job again. Academia is his only opt

• ylem 6y ago
  Yeah--it's a different era. I know people who do research who have masters, but they are effectively grandfathered in.
• linguae 6y ago
  It’s a tough situation, especially for non-PhD holders. Even with a PhD it’s possible for a researcher to enter a rough patch where a career change looks inevitable. The last time I was unemployed I started sending out my résumé to various community colleges and universities to enter their part-time/adjunct lecturer pools (I have a masters), but unfortunately my lay-off period didn’t match well with the academic hiring period. I managed to get a few interviews for software engineering positions, but the algorithms-based interviewing bar is very high these days for a software engineering job, and admittedly my software engineering chops degraded due to spending years in research. Ultimately I ended up finding an AI residency program at a research lab, which is how I ended up at my current position, but it required switching research areas and taking a minor salary drop.
• kjs3 6y ago
  "Job" or "research job"? I mean, yeah, it's tough to find a job purely navel-gazing without a PhD (if then), but we hired all the refugees from PARC, Digital Equipment WRL and Olivetti Research Center we could. Most of them made the transition to a more product-focused, results-measured workplace. Maybe adjusting expectations would help.