5 ms·

Having worked with academics before, the biggest problem you will face is not having enough prestige to attract "great minds". You're probably off on the money

Having worked with academics before, the biggest problem you will face is not having enough prestige to attract "great minds". You're probably off on the money too - academics will expect to be able to buy a comfortable house and support a family on your stipend, not live on ramen like a startup. They're a fickle bunch, but very rewarding to work with!

barry-cotter 5y ago
You’re describing academics who have already made it, people who got tenure. There are plenty of really minted PhDs who would be quite happy to move to the arse of nowhere for a postdoc with no teaching duties. The competition for academic posts is intense in every field I’m aware of and the outside options are not great except in fields where a Bachelor’s is an excellent choice already. You could afford at least five post docs used to living in genteel poverty for the cost of one established academic.
- evanb 5y ago
  > There are plenty of really minted PhDs who would be quite happy [...] for a postdoc with no teaching duties. As one of those people, I'm happy to move to the middle of nowhere, IF it's for a place with a stellar reputation that's going to help me do good science and (unfortunately) has some name-brand recognition.
- mbreese 5y ago
  Recruiting a postdoc at a new institute without a track record of advancing people is a very tough sell. That would be an extremely risky career move. The best bet for a new research institute is to have a large endowment and recruit two or three large names in a field. People who already have a good reputation. The large endowment is necessary to prove that you will ongoing resources to keep the research funded into the future.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    > Recruiting a postdoc at a new institute without a track record of advancing people is a very tough sell. That would be an extremely risky career move. Doing a postdoc is itself a large bet that usually fails to pay off, retrospectively making both the PhD and the postdoc look like extremely poor choices by any monetary calculus. The supply of people who want to stay in Science/Research/Academia is a lot greater than the demand outside perhaps ML/AI. Even fields with great outside options for PhDs, like Economics, Computer Science or Engineering have enormous competition for academic jobs, or para-academic ones, like adjuncting.
    - goodcanadian 5y ago
      Off topic, but I always do a bit of a double-take at how Americans use "Adjunct Professor." In Canada, that would be called "Contract Academic" or similar. I'll bet it is different again in Europe, so for clarity, that is basically a low paid teaching position. In Canada, an Adjunct Professor is unpaid, but actually somewhat prestigious. It is a recognition of your abilities in a field and might be given to someone in industry who collaborates with a researcher at the university (for example).
      - Fomite 5y ago
        "In Canada, an Adjunct Professor is unpaid, but actually somewhat prestigious. It is a recognition of your abilities in a field and might be given to someone in industry who collaborates with a researcher at the university (for example)." That was originally how it was used in the U.S. too. "Someone who needs a non-permanent affiliation with the University to teach some classes" - usually someone from industry or the community, etc. whose expertise was valuable to the educational mission. The modern version is...sort of depressing.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        > Off topic, but I always do a bit of a double-take at how Americans use "Adjunct Professor." I think in the US, almost anyone with a job at a college is a 'professor'. You see 'professors' in their late 20s or early 30s.
- ___luigi 5y ago
  Sorry to bring the bad news, but the author the first comment is 100% right. Moreover, structure in academia is different than in Startups. In startups, people don't care about "names" and "prestige". In academia, it is different. In order to get your next job in academia, you need (1) recommendation letters (2) citations. Advisors usually have a larger network and experience to be able to publish papers and help you climb the ladder through their networks/recommendations. In Industry, you can come from no-name university, and you can still make it to FAANG (or top tier companies). In academia, that's impossible. To start, it is impossible to make it to good PhD program without publishing papers in top-tier conference, MSc student in no-name universities can't afford finding advisor to easily do that. Good PhD programs will help you to join a good Lab, and usually it is through network + recommendations. In Startup world, you can sit in your dorm room, without anyone believing in you and you can make it. P.S. I am a research engineer, I worked in both places and that was my observations. There is no shortcuts, everything is hierarchical in academia.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    If academia is 100% about status hierarchies this definitely wouldn’t work. It probably won’t work anyway but if there’s anything real in the function used to judge academic worth of work then there’s potential for it to work. There are multiple ways to improve that likelihood, more money most obviously of all. But new successful research institutes are founded so it’s clearly possible. Very unlikely unless there’s a very big budget, excellent taste in selection of applicants or both, but hardly impossible.
    - ___luigi 5y ago
      > .. more money most obviously of all. I would challenge this point. There are few research labs in Singapore and middle east (UAE, Saudi Arabia) where money is not a problem. I have seen many researchers fly there to build research groups, but many of them leave after some time. You can see papers coming from these groups in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, KDD, etc) every years, but these papers come from individuals, not groups. Money is one ingredient, you need fresh blood and students to work on new ideas. You need an ecosystem for research and industry to adopt and develop some of these ideas (e.g. Standford/Google, UCLA/DeepMind, UoT/Uber, MIT/Boston startups, etc)
- azhenley 5y ago
  In the US, it is hard to recruit postdocs unless you are at a top 10 school (I tried several times). Potential postdocs are largely incentivized by: (1) name recognition of their mentor since their letter and networking will get them their next job and (2) the likelihood of getting top-tier publications. Also, they get a decent salary and health insurance in engineering fields. A brand new research institute does none of these things for them. I don't see why a fresh PhD would choose this over either FAANG or a university.
nerdponx 5y ago
I don't think it's fickle to want to make a decent living from your hard-earned and valuable skills.
- tlb 5y ago
  No, but there's often a trade-off between making a decent living as a cog in a machine, or living on ramen and working on what you want to work on. I've chosen both at various phases of life.
  - JabavuAdams 5y ago
    Was just talking about this with a post-doc in the lab I've joined. He was saying there's poor and then there's poor. Without downplaying the fact that post-docs are underpaid, there are many benefits. You get to work on something you're interested in; in many labs you have almost complete schedule freedom; you typically have good medical benefits, etc. So there's a lot of freedom. As in industry, a lot of the experience depends on whom you're working for, but moreso due to the recommendation requirements and power differential. If it's a bio-lab that expects butts in seats pipetting 9-6, that's outside of my experience.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Valuable skills will enable a decent living for sure.
- NationalPark 5y ago
  Of course! I only meant that (in my experience) academics tend to be headstrong and idiosyncratic, they don't always respond to incentives the way you might expect.
  - Fomite 5y ago
    I feel seen.
- hooande 5y ago
  It often makes sense to delay gratification. Like working with someone who is very well known in the field for little pay, knowing that their backing will give you many more opportunities in the future than a job that pays more now. Same is true of many startups. You make less than you would working for a FAANG company, but the experience and social connections can be worth far more in the future. It's definitely a personal decision
LeanderK 5y ago
why not cooperate with local research-institutions and try to get some part-time agreements with the tenured academics? It's Germany, so the the chances are good since the professors are always chasing grants. A permanent source of funding for some phd-students is attractive.
Fomite 5y ago
I will note I ended up at an institution (admittedly an academic one) that for my field is usually met with "Where?" because the funding allowed for some very nice quality of life considerations and more academic freedom/less pressure to support yourself with grants. It's not impossible, but you do have to figure out ways to offset the risk and prestige hit.

barry-cotter 5y ago

You’re describing academics who have already made it, people who got tenure. There are plenty of really minted PhDs who would be quite happy to move to the arse of nowhere for a postdoc with no teaching duties. The competition for academic posts is intense in every field I’m aware of and the outside options are not great except in fields where a Bachelor’s is an excellent choice already. You could afford at least five post docs used to living in genteel poverty for the cost of one established academic.

evanb 5y ago
> There are plenty of really minted PhDs who would be quite happy [...] for a postdoc with no teaching duties. As one of those people, I'm happy to move to the middle of nowhere, IF it's for a place with a stellar reputation that's going to help me do good science and (unfortunately) has some name-brand recognition.
mbreese 5y ago
Recruiting a postdoc at a new institute without a track record of advancing people is a very tough sell. That would be an extremely risky career move. The best bet for a new research institute is to have a large endowment and recruit two or three large names in a field. People who already have a good reputation. The large endowment is necessary to prove that you will ongoing resources to keep the research funded into the future.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  > Recruiting a postdoc at a new institute without a track record of advancing people is a very tough sell. That would be an extremely risky career move. Doing a postdoc is itself a large bet that usually fails to pay off, retrospectively making both the PhD and the postdoc look like extremely poor choices by any monetary calculus. The supply of people who want to stay in Science/Research/Academia is a lot greater than the demand outside perhaps ML/AI. Even fields with great outside options for PhDs, like Economics, Computer Science or Engineering have enormous competition for academic jobs, or para-academic ones, like adjuncting.
  - goodcanadian 5y ago
    Off topic, but I always do a bit of a double-take at how Americans use "Adjunct Professor." In Canada, that would be called "Contract Academic" or similar. I'll bet it is different again in Europe, so for clarity, that is basically a low paid teaching position. In Canada, an Adjunct Professor is unpaid, but actually somewhat prestigious. It is a recognition of your abilities in a field and might be given to someone in industry who collaborates with a researcher at the university (for example).
    - Fomite 5y ago
      "In Canada, an Adjunct Professor is unpaid, but actually somewhat prestigious. It is a recognition of your abilities in a field and might be given to someone in industry who collaborates with a researcher at the university (for example)." That was originally how it was used in the U.S. too. "Someone who needs a non-permanent affiliation with the University to teach some classes" - usually someone from industry or the community, etc. whose expertise was valuable to the educational mission. The modern version is...sort of depressing.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      > Off topic, but I always do a bit of a double-take at how Americans use "Adjunct Professor." I think in the US, almost anyone with a job at a college is a 'professor'. You see 'professors' in their late 20s or early 30s.
___luigi 5y ago
Sorry to bring the bad news, but the author the first comment is 100% right. Moreover, structure in academia is different than in Startups. In startups, people don't care about "names" and "prestige". In academia, it is different. In order to get your next job in academia, you need (1) recommendation letters (2) citations. Advisors usually have a larger network and experience to be able to publish papers and help you climb the ladder through their networks/recommendations. In Industry, you can come from no-name university, and you can still make it to FAANG (or top tier companies). In academia, that's impossible. To start, it is impossible to make it to good PhD program without publishing papers in top-tier conference, MSc student in no-name universities can't afford finding advisor to easily do that. Good PhD programs will help you to join a good Lab, and usually it is through network + recommendations. In Startup world, you can sit in your dorm room, without anyone believing in you and you can make it. P.S. I am a research engineer, I worked in both places and that was my observations. There is no shortcuts, everything is hierarchical in academia.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  If academia is 100% about status hierarchies this definitely wouldn’t work. It probably won’t work anyway but if there’s anything real in the function used to judge academic worth of work then there’s potential for it to work. There are multiple ways to improve that likelihood, more money most obviously of all. But new successful research institutes are founded so it’s clearly possible. Very unlikely unless there’s a very big budget, excellent taste in selection of applicants or both, but hardly impossible.
  - ___luigi 5y ago
    > .. more money most obviously of all. I would challenge this point. There are few research labs in Singapore and middle east (UAE, Saudi Arabia) where money is not a problem. I have seen many researchers fly there to build research groups, but many of them leave after some time. You can see papers coming from these groups in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, KDD, etc) every years, but these papers come from individuals, not groups. Money is one ingredient, you need fresh blood and students to work on new ideas. You need an ecosystem for research and industry to adopt and develop some of these ideas (e.g. Standford/Google, UCLA/DeepMind, UoT/Uber, MIT/Boston startups, etc)
azhenley 5y ago
In the US, it is hard to recruit postdocs unless you are at a top 10 school (I tried several times). Potential postdocs are largely incentivized by: (1) name recognition of their mentor since their letter and networking will get them their next job and (2) the likelihood of getting top-tier publications. Also, they get a decent salary and health insurance in engineering fields. A brand new research institute does none of these things for them. I don't see why a fresh PhD would choose this over either FAANG or a university.

nerdponx 5y ago

I don't think it's fickle to want to make a decent living from your hard-earned and valuable skills.

tlb 5y ago
No, but there's often a trade-off between making a decent living as a cog in a machine, or living on ramen and working on what you want to work on. I've chosen both at various phases of life.
- JabavuAdams 5y ago
  Was just talking about this with a post-doc in the lab I've joined. He was saying there's poor and then there's poor. Without downplaying the fact that post-docs are underpaid, there are many benefits. You get to work on something you're interested in; in many labs you have almost complete schedule freedom; you typically have good medical benefits, etc. So there's a lot of freedom. As in industry, a lot of the experience depends on whom you're working for, but moreso due to the recommendation requirements and power differential. If it's a bio-lab that expects butts in seats pipetting 9-6, that's outside of my experience.
robertlagrant 5y ago
Valuable skills will enable a decent living for sure.
NationalPark 5y ago
Of course! I only meant that (in my experience) academics tend to be headstrong and idiosyncratic, they don't always respond to incentives the way you might expect.
- Fomite 5y ago
  I feel seen.
hooande 5y ago
It often makes sense to delay gratification. Like working with someone who is very well known in the field for little pay, knowing that their backing will give you many more opportunities in the future than a job that pays more now. Same is true of many startups. You make less than you would working for a FAANG company, but the experience and social connections can be worth far more in the future. It's definitely a personal decision

LeanderK 5y ago

why not cooperate with local research-institutions and try to get some part-time agreements with the tenured academics? It's Germany, so the the chances are good since the professors are always chasing grants. A permanent source of funding for some phd-students is attractive.

Fomite 5y ago

I will note I ended up at an institution (admittedly an academic one) that for my field is usually met with "Where?" because the funding allowed for some very nice quality of life considerations and more academic freedom/less pressure to support yourself with grants. It's not impossible, but you do have to figure out ways to offset the risk and prestige hit.