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Serious question: Why don’t they leave? I’m not saying that they should, or that conditions shouldn’t improve, but if academia is that stressful to you, why s

Serious question: Why don’t they leave? I’m not saying that they should, or that conditions shouldn’t improve, but if academia is that stressful to you, why stick with it? The only potential outcomes sticking with it are that you will fail later on, or you will fill a role with an increasing amount of stressors.

chrisseaton 6y ago
> or you will fill a role with an increasing amount of stressors I think when you gain a fellowship or professorship in academia it does suddenly get a lot more relaxed and you get time and space to do what you want - which is the goal these postdocs are working towards.
- aaronblohowiak 6y ago
  If you get lucky in academia you get the possibility of tenure track which is a made race to publish and that means not only doing your research, but grant writing, dealing with internal politics and discovering life as a manager of grad students... oh yea, and can you lecture these undergrads too?
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    This isn't what I see in practice. Most professional researchers at the level of being a professor teach a couple of masters lectures for topics they're genuinely interested in and the rest of the time enjoy working on their research.
    - azalemeth 6y ago
      At Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, an explicit part of the system is that almost every senior academic teaches common, first/second-year "core" courses and spends a significant amount of time -- 6 or 12 hours a week in full term -- directly teaching 18-21 year olds. In addition to running a group and everything else. It is very rarely negotiable, and usually not.
    - PeterisP 6y ago
      There's a significant gap between the experience of a bunch of elite research-oriented universities, and the vast majority of universities where the professors are not "professional researchers at the level of being a professor" but rather teaching staff that might try to get some minimal research done but don't get much support and aren't really expected to succeed. The professors we read about on HN are the exception rather than the norm. The median professor working in a mid-rank institution (not a top-100 institution, not even close to that) does have academic freedom, but most of their time is taken with non-research duties, they do not have an a research group under him/her as they do not have an active research grant which would fund that, and so the median professor does a very limited amount of research which comes out, if I recall the statistics correctly, to approx. 1 paper per year.
- michaelhoffman 6y ago
  This is not at all the case in the fields I work in. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather be a professor than a postdoc but it is way, way more stressful.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    As a professor isn't your chair funded and guaranteed? What are you stressing about? Retaining the chair?
    - OminousWeapons 6y ago
      It depends on the field, but in several fields (eg life sciences) if you do not keep output up, you will be unable to attract grant funding or industry funding. Without funding, you cannot really do any work. Additionally, without funding or papers, you will not be able to recruit students because students want to get their name on papers and want to work for prestigious groups or labs. Without students, you will be doing all the grunt work on every project you take on yourself which will eat up all your time. You will also have newfound responsibilities such as teaching classes, and the university will expect you to teach more classes if you are not bringing in grant funding or doing prestigious research. It is not a free ride, and universities will take space from you and give it to people who can produce if you can't as space is scarce.
    - michaelhoffman 6y ago
      I don't know what you mean by my "chair". The biggest worry for most professors I talk to in grant-funded fields (which is most of the natural sciences and engineering) is not getting grant funding and having to lay off some or all members of our research group. In Canada, biomedical grant application success rates are around 14% so this is a pretty big worry. People who are pre-tenure or in organizational units where there is no tenure (which includes a lot of medical researchers) also have to worry about losing their job. In the U.S., very few professors can get paid their whole 12-month salary without getting some grant funding to pay for it. Some universities will commit 75% of the professor's salary as "hard money"—these are the ones with the bigger teaching loads. Others will provide only 5% of the salary and expect the professor to get the rest through grant funding. If you can't do it, expect to get a pay cut or lose your job. This is the prevailing model at elite medical research institutions like Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, or University of California, San Francisco.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Sunk Cost Fallacy. (At least, I suspect that's a big part of it.)
gjulianm 6y ago
A lot of them leave. A lot of them stay because they think the effort will be worth it when they have a better position. It's also important to note that people who want stay in academia tend to do it because they love research. It doesn't pay more, it's harder, it's more unstable... So a lot of them will enter knowing already they're going to be facing a lot of difficulty and stress.
- aaronblohowiak 6y ago
  There are more industry roles than academic roles for people with phds but there are FAR FAR FAR fewer research roles in industry than there are in academia and in some fields academic postdocs (or in some cases there are industry post docs) are required for even industry research positions! You can always off-ramp from research but very very hard to get back into if you do. Which is all to say the PI grant writing postdoc + grad student “exploitation” complex is reaffirmed from within and without. Like many self-reinforcing systems, change is... hard.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > there are FAR FAR FAR fewer research roles in industry than there are in academia I'm not sure this is true. How many PhDs does Google alone employ in research roles? Many hundreds I'd guess. That's many many many university faculties. And that's just Google. Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, etc etc out into the long tail. We're both just guessing but I'd reckon there are far more research roles in industry than academia.
    - dmurray 6y ago
      I don't understand why this is downvoted. Sure it's short on evidence, but it seems a plausible argument made in good faith. If "Google research" doesn't sit right with you because showing people more ads shouldn't count as research, think Pfizer, or ABB, or Lockheed Martin.
    - aaronblohowiak 6y ago
      Sorry, I should have put a disclaimer that my area of understanding here is of physical science, not math or comp sci
dzolob 6y ago
Why do people stay in abusive relationships? Why do people keep falling into unhealthy habits? It’s very humane to be trapped around our own mental/emotional constructions, and getting out of them is very very hard. It happens all the time and it happens at every level.
- willis936 6y ago
  I think it’s more to do with lack of protections. The rulemakers know fulfilling work lies in research, but doesn’t demand much to be done. Apply basics of microeconomics and you have contemporary US academia to a T.
quickthrower2 6y ago
A simple change of career? Not so simple (as a software developer how do I just leave? It might actually be hard to get menial work as I’d need a cv for that)
qmmmur 6y ago
Because you invest years of your life into a field and the aspects that are encouraging you to quit are often imposed by skill-less administrators.
analog31 6y ago
A couple of things. Once you leave, you're not going back. So it's a profound decision with a big unknown on the other side. Your publication output drops to zero. You won't have time to develop your own program. You won't keep up with the literature. (Maybe you're not doing those things already, in which case you should try to jump ship). Maybe you're an academic spouse, in which case you're probably living in an area that's already crowded with like minded PhDs. Maybe it's not really all that much better on the outside. Depending on your field of course. Even as a grad student, I noticed that acceptance into grad school doesn't necessarily select for the traits that are needed in a research or R&D leadership role, such as being outgoing, self confident, and competitive. Disclosure: Physics PhD, graduated early 90's, went straight to industry, never looked back.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
RhysU 6y ago
Sunk cost fallacy.
nmlnn 6y ago
A lot do (but they don't get surveyed by Nature). I quit physics after one postdoc - never thought that would happen - but reality and expectations often don't match up.
ProjectArcturis 6y ago
It took me years of trying before I could find a decent job to jump ship to. Employers are very skeptical of someone still in academia who has never had a "real" job before. Even if you've been doing crazy advanced research, the HR bots don't recognize that when scanning your resume.

chrisseaton 6y ago

> or you will fill a role with an increasing amount of stressors I think when you gain a fellowship or professorship in academia it does suddenly get a lot more relaxed and you get time and space to do what you want - which is the goal these postdocs are working towards.

aaronblohowiak 6y ago
If you get lucky in academia you get the possibility of tenure track which is a made race to publish and that means not only doing your research, but grant writing, dealing with internal politics and discovering life as a manager of grad students... oh yea, and can you lecture these undergrads too?
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  This isn't what I see in practice. Most professional researchers at the level of being a professor teach a couple of masters lectures for topics they're genuinely interested in and the rest of the time enjoy working on their research.
  - azalemeth 6y ago
    At Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, an explicit part of the system is that almost every senior academic teaches common, first/second-year "core" courses and spends a significant amount of time -- 6 or 12 hours a week in full term -- directly teaching 18-21 year olds. In addition to running a group and everything else. It is very rarely negotiable, and usually not.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    There's a significant gap between the experience of a bunch of elite research-oriented universities, and the vast majority of universities where the professors are not "professional researchers at the level of being a professor" but rather teaching staff that might try to get some minimal research done but don't get much support and aren't really expected to succeed. The professors we read about on HN are the exception rather than the norm. The median professor working in a mid-rank institution (not a top-100 institution, not even close to that) does have academic freedom, but most of their time is taken with non-research duties, they do not have an a research group under him/her as they do not have an active research grant which would fund that, and so the median professor does a very limited amount of research which comes out, if I recall the statistics correctly, to approx. 1 paper per year.
michaelhoffman 6y ago
This is not at all the case in the fields I work in. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather be a professor than a postdoc but it is way, way more stressful.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  As a professor isn't your chair funded and guaranteed? What are you stressing about? Retaining the chair?
  - OminousWeapons 6y ago
    It depends on the field, but in several fields (eg life sciences) if you do not keep output up, you will be unable to attract grant funding or industry funding. Without funding, you cannot really do any work. Additionally, without funding or papers, you will not be able to recruit students because students want to get their name on papers and want to work for prestigious groups or labs. Without students, you will be doing all the grunt work on every project you take on yourself which will eat up all your time. You will also have newfound responsibilities such as teaching classes, and the university will expect you to teach more classes if you are not bringing in grant funding or doing prestigious research. It is not a free ride, and universities will take space from you and give it to people who can produce if you can't as space is scarce.
  - michaelhoffman 6y ago
    I don't know what you mean by my "chair". The biggest worry for most professors I talk to in grant-funded fields (which is most of the natural sciences and engineering) is not getting grant funding and having to lay off some or all members of our research group. In Canada, biomedical grant application success rates are around 14% so this is a pretty big worry. People who are pre-tenure or in organizational units where there is no tenure (which includes a lot of medical researchers) also have to worry about losing their job. In the U.S., very few professors can get paid their whole 12-month salary without getting some grant funding to pay for it. Some universities will commit 75% of the professor's salary as "hard money"—these are the ones with the bigger teaching loads. Others will provide only 5% of the salary and expect the professor to get the rest through grant funding. If you can't do it, expect to get a pay cut or lose your job. This is the prevailing model at elite medical research institutions like Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, or University of California, San Francisco.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

Sunk Cost Fallacy. (At least, I suspect that's a big part of it.)

gjulianm 6y ago

A lot of them leave. A lot of them stay because they think the effort will be worth it when they have a better position. It's also important to note that people who want stay in academia tend to do it because they love research. It doesn't pay more, it's harder, it's more unstable... So a lot of them will enter knowing already they're going to be facing a lot of difficulty and stress.

aaronblohowiak 6y ago
There are more industry roles than academic roles for people with phds but there are FAR FAR FAR fewer research roles in industry than there are in academia and in some fields academic postdocs (or in some cases there are industry post docs) are required for even industry research positions! You can always off-ramp from research but very very hard to get back into if you do. Which is all to say the PI grant writing postdoc + grad student “exploitation” complex is reaffirmed from within and without. Like many self-reinforcing systems, change is... hard.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > there are FAR FAR FAR fewer research roles in industry than there are in academia I'm not sure this is true. How many PhDs does Google alone employ in research roles? Many hundreds I'd guess. That's many many many university faculties. And that's just Google. Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, etc etc out into the long tail. We're both just guessing but I'd reckon there are far more research roles in industry than academia.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    I don't understand why this is downvoted. Sure it's short on evidence, but it seems a plausible argument made in good faith. If "Google research" doesn't sit right with you because showing people more ads shouldn't count as research, think Pfizer, or ABB, or Lockheed Martin.
  - aaronblohowiak 6y ago
    Sorry, I should have put a disclaimer that my area of understanding here is of physical science, not math or comp sci

dzolob 6y ago

Why do people stay in abusive relationships? Why do people keep falling into unhealthy habits? It’s very humane to be trapped around our own mental/emotional constructions, and getting out of them is very very hard. It happens all the time and it happens at every level.

willis936 6y ago
I think it’s more to do with lack of protections. The rulemakers know fulfilling work lies in research, but doesn’t demand much to be done. Apply basics of microeconomics and you have contemporary US academia to a T.

quickthrower2 6y ago

A simple change of career? Not so simple (as a software developer how do I just leave? It might actually be hard to get menial work as I’d need a cv for that)

qmmmur 6y ago

Because you invest years of your life into a field and the aspects that are encouraging you to quit are often imposed by skill-less administrators.

analog31 6y ago

A couple of things. Once you leave, you're not going back. So it's a profound decision with a big unknown on the other side. Your publication output drops to zero. You won't have time to develop your own program. You won't keep up with the literature. (Maybe you're not doing those things already, in which case you should try to jump ship). Maybe you're an academic spouse, in which case you're probably living in an area that's already crowded with like minded PhDs. Maybe it's not really all that much better on the outside. Depending on your field of course. Even as a grad student, I noticed that acceptance into grad school doesn't necessarily select for the traits that are needed in a research or R&D leadership role, such as being outgoing, self confident, and competitive. Disclosure: Physics PhD, graduated early 90's, went straight to industry, never looked back.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

RhysU 6y ago

Sunk cost fallacy.

nmlnn 6y ago

A lot do (but they don't get surveyed by Nature). I quit physics after one postdoc - never thought that would happen - but reality and expectations often don't match up.

ProjectArcturis 6y ago

It took me years of trying before I could find a decent job to jump ship to. Employers are very skeptical of someone still in academia who has never had a "real" job before. Even if you've been doing crazy advanced research, the HR bots don't recognize that when scanning your resume.