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Let me just say to all those out there who have left academia and went into industry: academia would be happy to have you back! I went into "academia" (or clos

• gammarator 6y ago
  (Obligatory "we're hiring" link): https://www.lsst.org/hiring/ https://www.lsst.org/hiring/
• andi999 6y ago
  Maybe this is true for your country, but not true here (there is even a limited number of years you are allowed to work in academia by law)
  • cbanek 6y ago
    Very interesting, could you tell me where that is? At least in the US, tenure is a really big thing. But there are plenty of people who are paid employees at the university and aren't teaching, and I'd also consider that academia.
    • jacobr1 6y ago
      And I'd love to work assisting cutting-edge research, but I also am not willing to cut my salary that severely. I wonder if there is a way to do this that doesn't presume near-grad-student rates.
      • analog31 6y ago
        My spouse works at the nearby public university as a non tenure track scientist. The work certainly pays better than a grad student stipend. I'm not sure how it compares to entry level "science" jobs that are basically manual factory work such as transferring liquids from one tray to another using a pipette. The good thing is that public universities tend to post jobs with salary ranges, so you can get an idea of what labs are looking for what, at what pay rate. The pay tends to follow the expectation of having a somewhat less competitive and intensive work environment, more flexible hours, etc.
    • mattkrause 6y ago
      The US and Canada tend to "squeeze" non-tenure-track people out a few years after they receive their PhD. A huge number of postdoc fellowships[0] cut off at 12 months (NIH DP-1, various NSF postdocs) to 4-5 years (NIH K99, Simons Foundation BTI, Burroughs Wellcome Career/CASI Awards). You can, of course, hang on for longer by being paid from research grants. However, even that is tricky because the size of a "standard" modular NIH grant hasn't gone up in ages and even a modest salary ($60k + benefits) will now eat up a substantial chunk of it, so you'll spend a lot of time looking for money. Frustratingly, you often can't be the PI on grants either, so it devolves into ghost-writing. It also makes it hard to settle down if you are piecing together a string of 1-2 year contracts. This is, IMO, stupid. It's not good for doing science and a few studies have shown that not good for training scientists either. A system that funded a few more staff scientists would likely produce more and better research and training. [0] It's even worse, as many awards for tenure-track profs are ALSO gated on time-since-degree.
      • Kalium 6y ago
        I suspect this is what a solution might look like if someone was designing a system to produce tenured professors and attached minimal value to other things.
    • andi999 6y ago
      It is Germany. Yes there are a lot of paid employees at the university that arent teaching, but almost all of them in admin or maintenance/workshop. Historically there was a problem that there were way too many people who were not professors but working as a scientist at university (well it was called a problem, who knows why it was a problem); now it swung the other way.
• in_cahoots 6y ago
  I read it as being difficult to go back to the same type of work they were doing before they left. Marcel's expertise was in simulations and theory. As you note it's (relatively) easy to get a job in telescope software development coming from industry, but it's much harder on the theoretical (and probably experimental) side where it's less about technical skills and more about being up-to-date on the literature and advocating for your ideas. You would have to essentially start over at the thesis stage of grad school to regain the domain knowledge and build up a body of work. You'd probably work faster than you were the first time just because of the additional knowledge and wisdom, but I doubt many professors would be willing to hire you at even a Postdoc salary without a second thesis-like investment.
  • 38298ruhdi9 6y ago
    This is all highly field dependent but I doubt a thesis-like investment is required. Maybe being involved in a publication or two somehow without pay but not a thesis. Having been a tenured professor who left (sort of, not completely), these issues are really salient to me. I was surprised when I left how many stories I heard of others doing the same. They just aren't mentioned for many reasons, including institutional ego. Academics in many fields is in a crisis from my perspective. It's not obvious because there's always amazing advancements like the new mRNA vaccine, but it comes at a huge human cost that is rarely covered (pieces like the recent Atlantic article notwithstanding, and some stuff in places like STAT). Also, those advancements are often misleading, because the volumes of stuff that are more typical (like the hydroxychloroquine story) you don't hear about, without the skeptical eye of the world waiting for a much-needed and very-real product. At least in my field, I suspect the author would have problems returning only because they don't fit the narrative that's required for positions. Again, this depends on field, but a lot of academic hiring, at least at the level of faculty, is about branding of sorts, of building up a story of them being on a meteoric trajectory of genius so brilliant it can't be contained by fate or circumstances of any sort. I've read it referred to as the madonna-whore complex, which is quite accurate. It's hard to explain unless you've been on the side of faculty hiring, but it's very much about looking like the next super-Einstein-Nobel Winner in a room full of people who will never attain anywhere near that much fame (but who think they have), in a scientific process that is really about incremental contributions anyway. It's all heavily location-dependent too. The author talks about nomadic lifestyles which is accurate, but there's also an element of that which is important to keep in mind: if your nomadic wanderings leads you to a great place, it's great, but if that place is dysfunctional, it's horrible. It's hard for me to say it's a case of grass-is-greener only because it really depends on all sorts of things, including that individual, their connections, and a lot of luck. I think the pathology of modern academics only increases as you go up the ladder, to be honest, unless you're in a good place. I can't stress enough how much of an oversupply there is at the moment of extremely talented labor, and dysfunctional, corrupt systems that are broken and outdated. There's plenty of academics that is cutting edge and open-minded, but there's also a lot of it that is supremely dated and behind the times, years behind industry due to narrow-mindedness, reinforced by distorted incentive systems. I keep thinking something has to give but so far there's no end in sight, at least in the US.
• libraryofbabel 6y ago
  Agree with you - but I think the author of the article wants to get back in as a tenure-track professor rather than a programmer or data scientist on a scientific project. They would probably see coming back in as “staff” as an unacceptable loss of status and prestige in their field. (I think that status distinction is a terrible and stupid feature of academic research but it is very deeply-ingrained as folks are socialized in PhD programs to believe that the tenure track is the only route to happiness and academic success). I wish more people thought like you and very much agree that academia could benefit from an influx for folks with industry experience and programming best practices!
  • concreteblock 6y ago
    I have a PhD in math but I often dream about how nice it would be to get paid to write simulations for big shot mathematicians. Usually this work goes to undergrad/grad students. Maybe it’s just not worth paying for professional code.
    • Ma8ee 6y ago
      It’s often hard to get money to fund anything else than PhD students or post docs.
      • Kalium 6y ago
        I suspect it may also be hard to swallow the idea that a professional engineer's skills are needed when such a person costs more than the researcher's salary.
        • Ma8ee 6y ago
          I actually don’t think that is the problem. In addition to the shortage of funds, there’s often a culture of doing most things yourself. When I was a PhD student, I did everything from vacuum systems, electronics, high current equipment, plumbing for cooling water, setting up a real time control system for all the equipment, data collection and analysis, and programmed quantum Monte Carlo simulation that was run on a high performance cluster (on top of writing papers and a thesis). Each of these tasks would have probably been done better by someone specialising in it, but there was certainly no money for that. (I had almost forgotten how much fun I had.)
• hertzrat 6y ago
  I applied for some academic-related software development positions a couple of times. In the interviews they never asked a single software development question and each time revealed they had decided to “just let IT handle the software details.” I am not certain that much of academia understands the complexity of the systems they want to build except from the viewpoint of their research