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Beware survivorship bias in advice on science careers

195 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

ekianjo 5y ago
Not just in science careers. For any kind of advice in anything.
- camhart 5y ago
  I agree with you. But lately I've felt like many articles I come across are so negative it's ridiculous. Like we can't inspire, or give hope, because the outcomes aren't guaranteed. Nothing of significance is guaranteed. There's going to be some risk. You need to weigh the risk yourself. While survivorship bias is a thing, we can't be so stuck on being 100% correct all the time (news flash, you won't ever be) that it cripples us from helping/inspiring others. Give advice. Inspire others. I'd rather someone tried on my advice and failed than failed to try anything. With that being said, don't sugar coat the truth. Accept that success takes some luck. But not "going for it" guarantees failure. Work hard, and you'll "make your own luck" eventually. Be lazy and you'll accomplish very little in your life. Working hard and failing at some thing is going to grow you and most likely open up other opportunities for you.
AmericanChopper 5y ago
Being too eager to evaluate everything as survivorship bias is it own form of bias. Scrutinizing any particular instance of success can invalidate it as a survivorship case. Being extended a unique opportunity during a chance social encounter is luck. Gaining greater access to new opportunities because you intentionally made an effort to develop good relationship with your colleagues and other people in your industry is not luck. It’s not a guarantee of success either, but it’s definitely not luck.
- blululu 5y ago
  >> It's not a guarantee of success, but it's definitely not luck Luck favors the well prepared, but if you can do everything right and success is still an even toss up, then that is what most people would consider luck.
  - AmericanChopper 5y ago
    That’s just self-defeating, because to draw these conclusions you have to artificially limit the scope of what your examining to a really contrived level. If your goal is to have a successful career, then you really don’t need to succeed at any particular task on any particular day, you need to succeed over time. If you want to get a new job, perhaps it’s luck if you get the one particular job that you wanted to get, at the one particular company you wanted to work for. But if your goal is to get a certain type of job offer within some reasonable timeframe, that likely doesn’t come down to luck very much at all. There are some career paths where luck plays a much greater role. Like if you want to be a famous musician, or the president. But for most careers, this isn’t highly relevant. The chance of success for anything is always less that 100%, so you can frame every event that will ever occur as the result of luck if you want to. But if your goal is to achieve a more general level of success over the course of many years, then you can absolutely devise a strategy for doing that.
dfdz 5y ago
I mostly agree with the article but the first quote is strange : > If today’s successful academics habitually work late in the laboratory, they’re likely to advocate that the next generation does the same. If all successful academics work late, then advocating others do the same seems reasonable?
- jychang 5y ago
  Humans aren't built to work late. There's a whole host of physical health issues and mental health issues that comes with working a large number of hours. The prey that a human is trying to hunt isn't gonna be up after sundown. Ancient humans can't hunt or forage or farm things late into the night.
  - airstrike 5y ago
    If I were to guess, I'd say you're being downvoted because your second paragraph seems like a bold claim with no supporting evidence, even though the first paragraph seems reasonable (and ostensibly supported given the growing frequency with which the topic seems to be discussed these days, whether online or by the media)
  - dfdz 5y ago
    > Humans aren’t built to work late What are humans build to do? And do we have an obligation to do what we are built for? Should I start persisting hunting [1] my meals? Should all my decision be dictated towards minimizing physical and mental health issues? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
- willis936 5y ago
  They also advocate that students work 60 hours while compensated for 20. The lack of protections is awful.
- airstrike 5y ago
  >If all successful academics work late, then advocating others do the same seems reasonable? And it seems particular important to define what constitutes "success" (is it getting a PhD or actually doing something useful with it?) and the means to obtain it (does it depend on the approval of said late-working academics, who therefore may be inclined to reward others who share their beliefs that working late merits rewarding?)
s0rce 5y ago
It took me a while to realize this but all the successful tenured faculty members telling me to become a professor was an extreme survivorship bias. I don't tell anyone to be a professor.
- bitexploder 5y ago
  It’s like telling someone to “be a millionaire” or “be a successful startup founder” without acknowledging the preconditions and low number of available open “positions”.
- waterhouse 5y ago
  > One of my students, we'll call him Bill, in an introductory computer science class said that he wanted to be a biologist when he grew up. What biologists had Bill met? They were all professors at MIT and about half of them had won the Nobel Prize. This is hardly an average sample of people who went to Biology graduate school! > Fortunately, Bill was a tall good-looking fellow. He managed to score himself a lovely girlfriend during the semester, we'll call her Theresa. Theresa was a biology postdoc, with a PhD from an elite institution and a plum job at MIT. Bill got to see how Theresa was treated in the lab, count her working hours, see the pay stubs she received as a young woman in her 30s with a PhD, wave goodbye as she got fired after her experiment did not work out, and write email to Theresa at her new postdoc at Stanford. By the end of the semester, Bill said, "I think I want to be an architect." https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    The irony of that statement is that architects are much worse treated than PhDs. It's quite common for them to go from internship to internship often with minimal to no pay.
wanderingmind 5y ago
Most of these students have learnt statistics and importance of random stratified sampling. Unfortunately they are not using them in real life to get feedback on an event so important that you might spend a good part of decade of your career on it. That said, personally I think doing a PhD is one of the worst things a person can do them financially long term. I think gambling is one of the few that ranks higher than PhD. They lose the most critical part of life they must be earning and saving to harness the power of compounding to become financially secure. On top, they learn no marketable skills that can get them a job out in industry or corporations. Not teaching economics in school and colleges to all students is partially to blame as many undergrads believe just doing a PhD with minimum wages can make them happy. But when commitments increase and when they realize academic jobs are very few they become disillusioned and desperate.
- picture 5y ago
  Can you go a bit more in depth on why PhD is a bad idea? Is it any different for the different fields/disciplines, and what if one already has some money from parents?
  - wanderingmind 5y ago
    Except CS, or if you an international Olympiad champion, PhD is a bad idea across the board. Even if someone thinks they want to do a PhD, its better to work for a few years to understand market forces so they can do a thesis that is not fully removed from reality. This medium blog post from economist is a worthy read https://medium.economist.com/why-doing-a-phd-is-often-a-waste-of-time-349206f9addb https://medium.economist.com/why-doing-a-phd-is-often-a-wast...
    - urthor 5y ago
      Keep in mind that the system is also slightly different overseas. In many non-European, non American countries, a PhD is three years after your undergraduate (with honors year, 4 year undergraduate instead of the normal three). Very different equation.
    - deleted 5y ago
tibbar 5y ago
The terrifying thing about science (and, especially, medical) careers is how long it takes to train. An acquaintance showed me his plan for an MD/PhD with a master’s, which required 20 years of post-secondary education; he was 10 years in. At some point the sunk costs are so great that one can only imagine going forward, even if it would be easier to simply take up a new career.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  How much of that is actually useful? First, to even apply to medical school, you need a completely unrelated 4 year undergrads. Then there's residency where, let's face it, it's more of a contest of who can sleep the least and impress whoever's in charge and not at all about learning.
  - tibbar 5y ago
    As I understand it, doing high-level medical research requires an enormous amount of training - think of it, if you will, as on boarding into the insanely complex and poorly commented legacy system that is the human body. As an engineer I would much rather just throw it out and do a rewrite, but of course that’s not how any of this works. Probably there are very few careers where this amount of training is meaningful.
  - jstx1 5y ago
    > First, to even apply to medical school, you need a completely unrelated 4 year undergrads. This isn't the case outside of the US which shows that the American track can definitely be compressed.
blahedo 5y ago
Yes yes yes yes. I try to be very clear with my students about the risks in "following my path", because I was stupendously lucky; if they want to go get a PhD just so they can teach college (as I did!) the odds are overwhelmingly against them successfully doing so, and the fact that I tell them this is always very surprising to them. My students that have gone on to grad school have done so knowing what they were getting into, and I'm proud of their success and also proud of the ones that tried it and decided they wanted to do something else instead—because they had a better picture of what "sticking it out" would look like and what would await them on the other end.
twofornone 5y ago
Its more than just survivorship bias, its a toxically optimistic culture, imposed by somewhat rigid social norms. No one likes an excessive realist, even if they're speaking to fact. For an illustrative example, look at any sampling of questions tagged impostor syndrome on academia.stackexchange. You're guaranteed a dozen encouraging answers about how its normal even for the best of us to succumb to unwarranted feelings of inadequacy. But you're unlikely to find a single one discussing even the possibility that maybe the OP is, in fact, an "imposter". The imprints of this sort of toxic optimism are all over western culture. There is a hesitancy to criticize and without sufficient criticism you are unlikely to make sound choices/policies for complex systems which are liable to breakdown.
- willhinsa 5y ago
  Absolutely. Unfortunately, harsh reality doesn't get clicks or fill teaching positions at awful wages.
stonogo 5y ago
An English lit major can't get an English lit job, and postdocs are finding job opportunities via networking with peers, and we're supposed to regard this as a sobering finding indicting the state of modern science? Slogging your way through postdoc indentures isn't the only way into scientific research, just like starting in the mail room isn't the only way to become captain of industry. Science can also happen outside of acedemia, and you don't have to be a tenured lecturer to be a successful scientist. Careers in science are just like careers in anything else: you can demonstrate your value to an organization, or your can start your own organization. There's no point in positioning yourself at the very top of the bell curve and then complaining that your career is unremarkable.
tibbar 5y ago
Most of us read this article from the safe haven of the CS community, which offers the seemingly impossible combination of high pay, brief education, and interesting work. There are drawbacks too, such as the pressure to work 12 hour days, but generally speaking it is one of the nicest professions in the world. If I wasn’t aware of the alternative of going into software engineering, then I still think the gamble and sacrifice of a science PhD would be very attractive.
catillac 5y ago
I’m a working professional with no PhD in a field where it might make sense, and I’ve certainly made hiring decisions positive where one candidate had a PhD and the other did not. It has not affected me personally, but I could also see where it could be beneficial in the future. My company would gladly pay for me to get a PhD. Are there programs out there which are highly regarded, remote or part time, and in the cluster of CS/AI that would accept a professional and not an academic?
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  How about a professional with experience but no Bachelor? I'm super interested in an MBA but never finished college
- asdff 5y ago
  PhD programs in stem are typically funded and anyone can apply. I know people who were a professional in biotech who hit a cieling with their BS or MS and went back for PhD. If anything industry experience gives you a huge edge over students fresh out of undergrad. Probably none that are worth your time are going to let you work another job while in the program.
- JonathonW 5y ago
  The program where I got my master’s degree would take working professionals as part-time PhD students for about the first half of the program— for full-time students, this would be the first two years where you’re primarily focusing on course work. Part-time students would take a class or two a semester, gradually completing the PhD course work requirement over the course of several years. Once you completed the required courses, passed your PhD prelim exam, and started focusing on your dissertation work, the expectation was that you would become a full-time student. There’s no way you’d complete a dissertation in anything resembling a timely manner while maintaining a full time job elsewhere. (I even know some people who had their PhD work slowed down by research assistantship work in the same area— it can be tough to hit that balancing point, especially when funding’s on the line.) (I do not know if they offer any kind of remote postgraduate program; I’ve been away from that for several years.)
willhinsa 5y ago
Any advice on how to achieve career/business/financial success, really!
Waterluvian 5y ago
Beware survivorship bias in advice. Period.
- lbriner 5y ago
  Just thinking the same thing although I suspect a lot of people don't even know what it means anyway like they don't understand logical fallacies enough to learn how to evaluate any advice/information. Not that I do very well but I really wish I had been taught these high-level skills at school!
monkeyfacebag 5y ago
I don’t think this limited to careers in academia. I see similar kinds of survivorship bias in leadership seminars and talks in industry where they trot out the folks at the top of the pyramid to discuss their career trajectory and dispense wisdom to the rank and file. Of course, you can still get paid well as a rank and file employee in industry, so the harm is not the same.
- dnautics 5y ago
  Yeah but everyone already knows the rest of the job market is fucked beyond belief. There is an active false narrative that becoming an academic researcher is about doing good science. At best the cynicism goes "get published in a good journal"/grantsmanship deep. Nobody talks about the "don't be ugly", "Theranos-level oversell your research", "over interpret your data" strategies as positive factors in academic advancement.
  - monkeyfacebag 5y ago
    > Yeah but everyone already knows the rest of the job market is fucked beyond belief. I’m not sure what you mean.
- seibelj 5y ago
  If your goal is to make it to the top, then it is wise to hear from the people at the top how they got there. Inevitably it comes down to innate talent, passion, hard work, and luck. Luck is the element you can't control, but without hard work any luck presented would be useless. Even if you never get lucky, the character traits of high-ranking people in your field can still be useful to you. Unfortunately there is no guaranteed path to success, and you just need to keep trying and hanging around if you want to become top-tier in whatever career you choose.
  - monkeyfacebag 5y ago
    > without hard work any luck presented would be useless Can you say more about why you’re convinced this is true?
gtmitchell 5y ago
This article hits close to home. I was a very late-term dropout from a doctoral program in a hard science. I had neither the good sense to quit early on, nor the mental fortitude to complete my dissertation and ended up wasting years of my life in the process. Among my many regrets, I wish there had been a professor who could have been honest with me about my ability to succeed as well as the consequences of failure. Unfortunately, by the very fact that they were professors, they had never experienced anything like the misery that I did. I did miraculously salvage my science career, but any time I get the chance, I strongly discourage anyone from pursuing a graduate degree in my field.
- chrismcb 5y ago
  Why do you discourage ANYONE? Surely it is great for some people? Why not urge caution? Let people know it isn't for everyone.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    Because for most people going into a doctoral programme is a bad idea. If you do not come from money or have a spouse who can support you it's a terrible bet in terms of chances of success. Outside demand for PhDs is low in most fields. Most people who start a PhD don't graduate with one. They drop out. Substantial numbers of people who do get a PhD never even get a tenure track job. Getting a tenure track job often leads to looking for a new job after seven years, with the "rejected" sticker. Many fields are worse than that. They demand postdocs. Some people make the terrible mistake of thinking that adjuncting is a way of staying in the academy. It's not. If you are adjuncting full time you are extremely unlikely to ever get a real academic job, as a lecturer or professor. Get out. Getting a PhD is fine if you are in a field with great outside options, like Economics, CS, Math etc. but it's consumption, not an investment in future earnings. Outside top programmes the likelihood of becoming an academic drops of f rapidly. A PhD is training to become an academic. It can also be necessary to get a job in some fields with huge oversupply of PhDs, like the sciences, but those jobs are badly paid too. If you really, really want to be an acedemic and you can get into a good programme go for it. No one else should go unless they don't need the degree to earn a living or the degree comes with the prospect of radically improving their lives by making immigration possible.
globnomulous 5y ago
Nearly everybody who finished a PhD in the top-tier humanities graduate program I attended got an academic position. Those who didn't didn't deserve it, hadn't done the work, weren't capable of it, or were so personally disagreeable that no department in their right mind would hire them. The sciences are different, and the prospects for and conditions of academic employment seem worse. In the humanities, though, in the very best programs, the system still seems to work. This may no longer be true though. I finished about ten years ago. Additionally, I know a fair number of people who finished their PhDs in the humanities and the sciences, or didn't finish, and don't regret at all the time they 'lost.'
- slyall 5y ago
  You say "top-tier" and "very best programs" attendees get the jobs. But plenty of students study at other schools under the impression they also have the same sort of chance. I've heard about places that have programs but all the facility are hired from top-tier schools.
  - globnomulous 5y ago
    Right, that's true. I just figured I'd offer a perspective that I haven't seen yet in the thread. Crappy programs are, in my view, a sham, but in my field they're still a pathway to stable work. There are plenty of schools that won't hire PhDs from top schools because they know they won't stay. Second- and third-tier PhDs fill those positions. The pay is abysmal, but most of the people choose to stick it out make their peace -- and live very cheap places. But maybe I should be using the past tense. There has been no job market at any tier since the pandemic started, and I'm told universities are seizing the opportunity to make that permanent.
  - dsq 5y ago
    Found this: https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/university-hiring-if-you-didn-t-get-your-ph-d-at-an-elite-university-good-luck-finding-an-academic-job https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/university-hiring-i... Basically it states that most tenured positions are filled by PhDs from the top programs. Lower tier schools have far fewer future professors.
musicale 5y ago
It's like a tournament which randomly alternates rounds of tennis, chess, and russian roulette.
hatmatrix 5y ago
The other problem is that many of the people who are in these careers (the author of this article being an exception) are blind to the role that luck played in their own fortunes.
NumberCruncher 5y ago
There is a difference between an academic career in a field which has some real life applications, like CS, chemistry, economy, etc. and an academic career in a field which doesn't. The second group is basically nothing else than a "hobby for rich kids", where someone else has to pay your bills while you study, and high probably afterwards too. If you aren't a rich kid, go for the first option.
niemandhier 5y ago
Maybe a PhD should not be viewed as a preparation for anything, but rather as a period in life that, by means of keeping a person in a state of permanent exhaustion and under permanent pressure, creates a shift in the way they perceive the world. A bit like the training of zen monks.
chrisBob 5y ago
My wife and I both went to graduate school and had very different experiences. I have a few major takeaways from what happened to us: 1) I was a "failed" PhD student that left with a masters in mechanical engineering. Now I have a Software Engineer job that I love. A lot of credit for that goes to the software I wrote to run experiments as a grad student, and I am very happy with where I ended up. 2) My wife and I compared our advisors and they make a huge difference in your future prospects. Her post-doc advisor sent >95% of the people from his lab to tenure track positions. My advisor was successful at finding people jobs in industry and ran a great lab, but produced 0 tenured professors from his lab in 30 years. Look at where graduates of a lab end up before joining if you know what you want to do. 3) The academic job market is competitive in a strange way. Top candidates are clearly top candidates. Schools will get ~100 applications for an open position, but the top candidates will get job offers at nearly all of the places they apply. I don't think most job searches are weighted that way. 4) Research faculty positions are strange. You nominally get the job by being good at science, but then your job is to run a small business (your research lab). Being a good writer and good manager are probably the most important for running a successful lab, and PhD programs should probably focus on nurturing this more.
- ImaCake 5y ago
  Number 2 is huge for anyone considering the option of a PhD. My supervisors did not have a good track record and it is likely this is why my PhD burnt out into a Masters. They were amazing people, smart and hard working, but they just had no ability to nurture students into future scientists. I am still in science, but not on a career path up the ladder.
yodsanklai 5y ago
When I started a PhD, everybody warned me that it would be very hard to get a permanent position. Turned out it wasn't (at least in my field and in my country). Also, contrary to what other comments say, my PhD wasn't particularly stressful (probably less than all other jobs I had in my life). Overall, it was very interesting. I traveled the world, met interesting people, learned about science, research, academia. There were other issues though: 1. being a professor is quite different from being a PhD student 2. research is a global competition, and most likely, you won't be a superstar but an average researcher surrounded by big egos. Just like a skinny guy in a room full of people who value the size of their muscles above all. 3. The pay sucks, esp. if you can earn many times more somewhere else. I didn't care when I was 20. But as I grew older, I started to get more concerned. 4. A lot of cool stuff happens in companies, and the smart people are there too (maybe even more so)
irthomasthomas 5y ago
Beware of survivorship bias everywhere. E.g. look at performance tables for retail fund managers. Do these tables tell you which managers have performed best? No. Because these trackers and tables only track active funds. Each company runs a basket of funds, and if one performs badly, it is quietly closed. And now that firms performance apears better than it really is. This is standard practice in retail finance. The only way arround it is to keep track of defunct funds and factor in their performance yourself, but it is hardly worth the effort for most individuals.
BrandoElFollito 5y ago
I did a PhD in physics in the mid 90's. It was fantastic. The people, the parties, the science, the girlfriends, not sure if I mentioned the parties. Learning to do science was fantastic, teaching was awesome. I really loved the uni environment. I started to do some well-paid consulting for IBM and when I first heard about the pay of someone more or less my age, I realized that I have to make hard choices. I also started to get involved with the university politics and realized that there are plenty of people who want to assess dominance over a stack of paper, because they have it and you do not. I went to industry to see plenty of great people, plenty of politics - but the politics was on a x100 scale, for a x5 or so pay long term. I will always cherish my PhD years, they were fantastic. I am also glad I ultimately moved to industry because I have the same stress level for a more comfortable life. One thing I really, really miss is teaching.
- jan_Inkepa 5y ago
  Yeah, it feels really weird having moved from phd study with lots of teaching to a more normal job (self-employed) that there are no natural opportunities to pass on knowledge - if you're not in a profession with apprenticeships society probably moved a lot of teaching to colleges. It's weird to know lots of things and to know you'll never explain them to another person. Wanting to teach is a natural drive and not having an outlet is weird.
  - kirsebaer 5y ago
    You can make youtube videos. You will reach a way bigger audience than one-on-one teaching.
ImaCake 5y ago
I have worked as a research assistant in two labs in different areas of medical biology. Much of what I do is act as a helper and interface for the PhD students and PostDocs. There is a lot of diversity in PhD students! They also face some incredible challenges, especially the ones who are studying internationally and have to worry about getting kicked out of the country when they finish. I had an unsuccessful PhD due to poor project planning. It led to pretty severe burnout which I am lucky to have recovered well from. But it is good to share that there is life to be lived after quitting a PhD. I still encourage PhD students to pursue science, but I do so with a word of caution and a note that there are alternatives to the sick system that is academia.
teekert 5y ago
During my PhD we had an off-site week, with science, drinking and sailing. At such a conference you think you will be in science for ever. You will travel, give talks, receive applause and solve the worlds problems together with you science buddies, who are all just a bit smarter than the rest of the world. One afternoon we were with 100 PhD students in one room, a Prof. addressed us and told us: "You are here with 100 scientists, only 1 of you will make it to become a Professor. The rest will find jobs elsewhere or get stuck eternally as a postdoc." It woke me up, I'm not a hard worker, I'm not that 1%. I started to think about alternatives soon afterwards. This was 20 years ago and I never regretted it. There is an elegance in science, traveling and trying to become a Rock Star of science [0]. But there is also "publish or perish", a high percentage of time spend traveling (away from family) and a work-long-hours honor system. I'm in industry now, it can really be seen as selling out by some scientists, but it's much less stressful if you ask me. And I'm lucky I found a company where I am still quite free to do science (although I now develop software most of the time and haven't seen a biolab since covid...) [0]: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/rock-stars-of-science https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/rock-stars-of-...
- a_conservative 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing this! It brings to my mind the tension and conflict between Robin Williams and the Fields' medal mathematician in Good Will Hunting. It sounds like you still do get to do science. I suspect that you may be having a bigger impact on the world now than you would have had as another science professor. Can you offer any comment on this? Am I off base?
  - teekert 5y ago
    I'm not sure, perhaps. I work in Oncology and I enjoy it indeed, it feels meaningful. Still, of all the research projects I worked on (from circulating tumor cells to Next Generation Sequencing data processing pipelines), only 1 project is actually used on the market (let's say 3 years of work of the past 11). A lot is killed. Some research becomes IP, some research becomes a paper. In a way I find corporate research to be pretty honest work, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work and it's killed. There is no pressure to publish it anyway. There is pressure though to get the FDA to approve something in the end. And for that, it really has to work and be real. We spend a lot of time on reproducing things, also research papers we base our work on. But then you need to patent your work, and that still doesn't always feel right, at least sometimes it doesn't, especially when you won't actually make a product in the end. I try to avoid that. Some professors do pretty amazing stuff. We work with academic groups a lot, they focus on new science, we focus on IP and making products or software we can use.
johnaduley 5y ago
I wrote about this exact effect in 2004. Got me some hate mail at the time... LoL... https://www.nature.com/articles/427013a https://www.nature.com/articles/427013a

195 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

ekianjo 5y ago

Not just in science careers. For any kind of advice in anything.

camhart 5y ago
I agree with you. But lately I've felt like many articles I come across are so negative it's ridiculous. Like we can't inspire, or give hope, because the outcomes aren't guaranteed. Nothing of significance is guaranteed. There's going to be some risk. You need to weigh the risk yourself. While survivorship bias is a thing, we can't be so stuck on being 100% correct all the time (news flash, you won't ever be) that it cripples us from helping/inspiring others. Give advice. Inspire others. I'd rather someone tried on my advice and failed than failed to try anything. With that being said, don't sugar coat the truth. Accept that success takes some luck. But not "going for it" guarantees failure. Work hard, and you'll "make your own luck" eventually. Be lazy and you'll accomplish very little in your life. Working hard and failing at some thing is going to grow you and most likely open up other opportunities for you.

AmericanChopper 5y ago

Being too eager to evaluate everything as survivorship bias is it own form of bias. Scrutinizing any particular instance of success can invalidate it as a survivorship case. Being extended a unique opportunity during a chance social encounter is luck. Gaining greater access to new opportunities because you intentionally made an effort to develop good relationship with your colleagues and other people in your industry is not luck. It’s not a guarantee of success either, but it’s definitely not luck.

blululu 5y ago
>> It's not a guarantee of success, but it's definitely not luck Luck favors the well prepared, but if you can do everything right and success is still an even toss up, then that is what most people would consider luck.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  That’s just self-defeating, because to draw these conclusions you have to artificially limit the scope of what your examining to a really contrived level. If your goal is to have a successful career, then you really don’t need to succeed at any particular task on any particular day, you need to succeed over time. If you want to get a new job, perhaps it’s luck if you get the one particular job that you wanted to get, at the one particular company you wanted to work for. But if your goal is to get a certain type of job offer within some reasonable timeframe, that likely doesn’t come down to luck very much at all. There are some career paths where luck plays a much greater role. Like if you want to be a famous musician, or the president. But for most careers, this isn’t highly relevant. The chance of success for anything is always less that 100%, so you can frame every event that will ever occur as the result of luck if you want to. But if your goal is to achieve a more general level of success over the course of many years, then you can absolutely devise a strategy for doing that.

dfdz 5y ago

I mostly agree with the article but the first quote is strange : > If today’s successful academics habitually work late in the laboratory, they’re likely to advocate that the next generation does the same. If all successful academics work late, then advocating others do the same seems reasonable?

jychang 5y ago
Humans aren't built to work late. There's a whole host of physical health issues and mental health issues that comes with working a large number of hours. The prey that a human is trying to hunt isn't gonna be up after sundown. Ancient humans can't hunt or forage or farm things late into the night.
- airstrike 5y ago
  If I were to guess, I'd say you're being downvoted because your second paragraph seems like a bold claim with no supporting evidence, even though the first paragraph seems reasonable (and ostensibly supported given the growing frequency with which the topic seems to be discussed these days, whether online or by the media)
- dfdz 5y ago
  > Humans aren’t built to work late What are humans build to do? And do we have an obligation to do what we are built for? Should I start persisting hunting [1] my meals? Should all my decision be dictated towards minimizing physical and mental health issues? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
willis936 5y ago
They also advocate that students work 60 hours while compensated for 20. The lack of protections is awful.
airstrike 5y ago
>If all successful academics work late, then advocating others do the same seems reasonable? And it seems particular important to define what constitutes "success" (is it getting a PhD or actually doing something useful with it?) and the means to obtain it (does it depend on the approval of said late-working academics, who therefore may be inclined to reward others who share their beliefs that working late merits rewarding?)

s0rce 5y ago

It took me a while to realize this but all the successful tenured faculty members telling me to become a professor was an extreme survivorship bias. I don't tell anyone to be a professor.

bitexploder 5y ago
It’s like telling someone to “be a millionaire” or “be a successful startup founder” without acknowledging the preconditions and low number of available open “positions”.
waterhouse 5y ago
> One of my students, we'll call him Bill, in an introductory computer science class said that he wanted to be a biologist when he grew up. What biologists had Bill met? They were all professors at MIT and about half of them had won the Nobel Prize. This is hardly an average sample of people who went to Biology graduate school! > Fortunately, Bill was a tall good-looking fellow. He managed to score himself a lovely girlfriend during the semester, we'll call her Theresa. Theresa was a biology postdoc, with a PhD from an elite institution and a plum job at MIT. Bill got to see how Theresa was treated in the lab, count her working hours, see the pay stubs she received as a young woman in her 30s with a PhD, wave goodbye as she got fired after her experiment did not work out, and write email to Theresa at her new postdoc at Stanford. By the end of the semester, Bill said, "I think I want to be an architect." https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
- cycomanic 5y ago
  The irony of that statement is that architects are much worse treated than PhDs. It's quite common for them to go from internship to internship often with minimal to no pay.

wanderingmind 5y ago

Most of these students have learnt statistics and importance of random stratified sampling. Unfortunately they are not using them in real life to get feedback on an event so important that you might spend a good part of decade of your career on it. That said, personally I think doing a PhD is one of the worst things a person can do them financially long term. I think gambling is one of the few that ranks higher than PhD. They lose the most critical part of life they must be earning and saving to harness the power of compounding to become financially secure. On top, they learn no marketable skills that can get them a job out in industry or corporations. Not teaching economics in school and colleges to all students is partially to blame as many undergrads believe just doing a PhD with minimum wages can make them happy. But when commitments increase and when they realize academic jobs are very few they become disillusioned and desperate.

picture 5y ago
Can you go a bit more in depth on why PhD is a bad idea? Is it any different for the different fields/disciplines, and what if one already has some money from parents?
- wanderingmind 5y ago
  Except CS, or if you an international Olympiad champion, PhD is a bad idea across the board. Even if someone thinks they want to do a PhD, its better to work for a few years to understand market forces so they can do a thesis that is not fully removed from reality. This medium blog post from economist is a worthy read https://medium.economist.com/why-doing-a-phd-is-often-a-waste-of-time-349206f9addb https://medium.economist.com/why-doing-a-phd-is-often-a-wast...
  - urthor 5y ago
    Keep in mind that the system is also slightly different overseas. In many non-European, non American countries, a PhD is three years after your undergraduate (with honors year, 4 year undergraduate instead of the normal three). Very different equation.
  - deleted 5y ago

tibbar 5y ago

The terrifying thing about science (and, especially, medical) careers is how long it takes to train. An acquaintance showed me his plan for an MD/PhD with a master’s, which required 20 years of post-secondary education; he was 10 years in. At some point the sunk costs are so great that one can only imagine going forward, even if it would be easier to simply take up a new career.

908B64B197 5y ago
How much of that is actually useful? First, to even apply to medical school, you need a completely unrelated 4 year undergrads. Then there's residency where, let's face it, it's more of a contest of who can sleep the least and impress whoever's in charge and not at all about learning.
- tibbar 5y ago
  As I understand it, doing high-level medical research requires an enormous amount of training - think of it, if you will, as on boarding into the insanely complex and poorly commented legacy system that is the human body. As an engineer I would much rather just throw it out and do a rewrite, but of course that’s not how any of this works. Probably there are very few careers where this amount of training is meaningful.
- jstx1 5y ago
  > First, to even apply to medical school, you need a completely unrelated 4 year undergrads. This isn't the case outside of the US which shows that the American track can definitely be compressed.

blahedo 5y ago

Yes yes yes yes. I try to be very clear with my students about the risks in "following my path", because I was stupendously lucky; if they want to go get a PhD just so they can teach college (as I did!) the odds are overwhelmingly against them successfully doing so, and the fact that I tell them this is always very surprising to them. My students that have gone on to grad school have done so knowing what they were getting into, and I'm proud of their success and also proud of the ones that tried it and decided they wanted to do something else instead—because they had a better picture of what "sticking it out" would look like and what would await them on the other end.

twofornone 5y ago

Its more than just survivorship bias, its a toxically optimistic culture, imposed by somewhat rigid social norms. No one likes an excessive realist, even if they're speaking to fact. For an illustrative example, look at any sampling of questions tagged impostor syndrome on academia.stackexchange. You're guaranteed a dozen encouraging answers about how its normal even for the best of us to succumb to unwarranted feelings of inadequacy. But you're unlikely to find a single one discussing even the possibility that maybe the OP is, in fact, an "imposter". The imprints of this sort of toxic optimism are all over western culture. There is a hesitancy to criticize and without sufficient criticism you are unlikely to make sound choices/policies for complex systems which are liable to breakdown.

willhinsa 5y ago
Absolutely. Unfortunately, harsh reality doesn't get clicks or fill teaching positions at awful wages.

stonogo 5y ago

An English lit major can't get an English lit job, and postdocs are finding job opportunities via networking with peers, and we're supposed to regard this as a sobering finding indicting the state of modern science? Slogging your way through postdoc indentures isn't the only way into scientific research, just like starting in the mail room isn't the only way to become captain of industry. Science can also happen outside of acedemia, and you don't have to be a tenured lecturer to be a successful scientist. Careers in science are just like careers in anything else: you can demonstrate your value to an organization, or your can start your own organization. There's no point in positioning yourself at the very top of the bell curve and then complaining that your career is unremarkable.

tibbar 5y ago

Most of us read this article from the safe haven of the CS community, which offers the seemingly impossible combination of high pay, brief education, and interesting work. There are drawbacks too, such as the pressure to work 12 hour days, but generally speaking it is one of the nicest professions in the world. If I wasn’t aware of the alternative of going into software engineering, then I still think the gamble and sacrifice of a science PhD would be very attractive.

catillac 5y ago

I’m a working professional with no PhD in a field where it might make sense, and I’ve certainly made hiring decisions positive where one candidate had a PhD and the other did not. It has not affected me personally, but I could also see where it could be beneficial in the future. My company would gladly pay for me to get a PhD. Are there programs out there which are highly regarded, remote or part time, and in the cluster of CS/AI that would accept a professional and not an academic?

calvinmorrison 5y ago
How about a professional with experience but no Bachelor? I'm super interested in an MBA but never finished college
asdff 5y ago
PhD programs in stem are typically funded and anyone can apply. I know people who were a professional in biotech who hit a cieling with their BS or MS and went back for PhD. If anything industry experience gives you a huge edge over students fresh out of undergrad. Probably none that are worth your time are going to let you work another job while in the program.
JonathonW 5y ago
The program where I got my master’s degree would take working professionals as part-time PhD students for about the first half of the program— for full-time students, this would be the first two years where you’re primarily focusing on course work. Part-time students would take a class or two a semester, gradually completing the PhD course work requirement over the course of several years. Once you completed the required courses, passed your PhD prelim exam, and started focusing on your dissertation work, the expectation was that you would become a full-time student. There’s no way you’d complete a dissertation in anything resembling a timely manner while maintaining a full time job elsewhere. (I even know some people who had their PhD work slowed down by research assistantship work in the same area— it can be tough to hit that balancing point, especially when funding’s on the line.) (I do not know if they offer any kind of remote postgraduate program; I’ve been away from that for several years.)

willhinsa 5y ago

Any advice on how to achieve career/business/financial success, really!

Waterluvian 5y ago

Beware survivorship bias in advice. Period.

lbriner 5y ago
Just thinking the same thing although I suspect a lot of people don't even know what it means anyway like they don't understand logical fallacies enough to learn how to evaluate any advice/information. Not that I do very well but I really wish I had been taught these high-level skills at school!

monkeyfacebag 5y ago

I don’t think this limited to careers in academia. I see similar kinds of survivorship bias in leadership seminars and talks in industry where they trot out the folks at the top of the pyramid to discuss their career trajectory and dispense wisdom to the rank and file. Of course, you can still get paid well as a rank and file employee in industry, so the harm is not the same.

dnautics 5y ago
Yeah but everyone already knows the rest of the job market is fucked beyond belief. There is an active false narrative that becoming an academic researcher is about doing good science. At best the cynicism goes "get published in a good journal"/grantsmanship deep. Nobody talks about the "don't be ugly", "Theranos-level oversell your research", "over interpret your data" strategies as positive factors in academic advancement.
- monkeyfacebag 5y ago
  > Yeah but everyone already knows the rest of the job market is fucked beyond belief. I’m not sure what you mean.
seibelj 5y ago
If your goal is to make it to the top, then it is wise to hear from the people at the top how they got there. Inevitably it comes down to innate talent, passion, hard work, and luck. Luck is the element you can't control, but without hard work any luck presented would be useless. Even if you never get lucky, the character traits of high-ranking people in your field can still be useful to you. Unfortunately there is no guaranteed path to success, and you just need to keep trying and hanging around if you want to become top-tier in whatever career you choose.
- monkeyfacebag 5y ago
  > without hard work any luck presented would be useless Can you say more about why you’re convinced this is true?

gtmitchell 5y ago

This article hits close to home. I was a very late-term dropout from a doctoral program in a hard science. I had neither the good sense to quit early on, nor the mental fortitude to complete my dissertation and ended up wasting years of my life in the process. Among my many regrets, I wish there had been a professor who could have been honest with me about my ability to succeed as well as the consequences of failure. Unfortunately, by the very fact that they were professors, they had never experienced anything like the misery that I did. I did miraculously salvage my science career, but any time I get the chance, I strongly discourage anyone from pursuing a graduate degree in my field.

chrismcb 5y ago
Why do you discourage ANYONE? Surely it is great for some people? Why not urge caution? Let people know it isn't for everyone.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  Because for most people going into a doctoral programme is a bad idea. If you do not come from money or have a spouse who can support you it's a terrible bet in terms of chances of success. Outside demand for PhDs is low in most fields. Most people who start a PhD don't graduate with one. They drop out. Substantial numbers of people who do get a PhD never even get a tenure track job. Getting a tenure track job often leads to looking for a new job after seven years, with the "rejected" sticker. Many fields are worse than that. They demand postdocs. Some people make the terrible mistake of thinking that adjuncting is a way of staying in the academy. It's not. If you are adjuncting full time you are extremely unlikely to ever get a real academic job, as a lecturer or professor. Get out. Getting a PhD is fine if you are in a field with great outside options, like Economics, CS, Math etc. but it's consumption, not an investment in future earnings. Outside top programmes the likelihood of becoming an academic drops of f rapidly. A PhD is training to become an academic. It can also be necessary to get a job in some fields with huge oversupply of PhDs, like the sciences, but those jobs are badly paid too. If you really, really want to be an acedemic and you can get into a good programme go for it. No one else should go unless they don't need the degree to earn a living or the degree comes with the prospect of radically improving their lives by making immigration possible.

globnomulous 5y ago

Nearly everybody who finished a PhD in the top-tier humanities graduate program I attended got an academic position. Those who didn't didn't deserve it, hadn't done the work, weren't capable of it, or were so personally disagreeable that no department in their right mind would hire them. The sciences are different, and the prospects for and conditions of academic employment seem worse. In the humanities, though, in the very best programs, the system still seems to work. This may no longer be true though. I finished about ten years ago. Additionally, I know a fair number of people who finished their PhDs in the humanities and the sciences, or didn't finish, and don't regret at all the time they 'lost.'

slyall 5y ago
You say "top-tier" and "very best programs" attendees get the jobs. But plenty of students study at other schools under the impression they also have the same sort of chance. I've heard about places that have programs but all the facility are hired from top-tier schools.
- globnomulous 5y ago
  Right, that's true. I just figured I'd offer a perspective that I haven't seen yet in the thread. Crappy programs are, in my view, a sham, but in my field they're still a pathway to stable work. There are plenty of schools that won't hire PhDs from top schools because they know they won't stay. Second- and third-tier PhDs fill those positions. The pay is abysmal, but most of the people choose to stick it out make their peace -- and live very cheap places. But maybe I should be using the past tense. There has been no job market at any tier since the pandemic started, and I'm told universities are seizing the opportunity to make that permanent.
- dsq 5y ago
  Found this: https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/university-hiring-if-you-didn-t-get-your-ph-d-at-an-elite-university-good-luck-finding-an-academic-job https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/university-hiring-i... Basically it states that most tenured positions are filled by PhDs from the top programs. Lower tier schools have far fewer future professors.

musicale 5y ago

It's like a tournament which randomly alternates rounds of tennis, chess, and russian roulette.

hatmatrix 5y ago

The other problem is that many of the people who are in these careers (the author of this article being an exception) are blind to the role that luck played in their own fortunes.

NumberCruncher 5y ago

There is a difference between an academic career in a field which has some real life applications, like CS, chemistry, economy, etc. and an academic career in a field which doesn't. The second group is basically nothing else than a "hobby for rich kids", where someone else has to pay your bills while you study, and high probably afterwards too. If you aren't a rich kid, go for the first option.

niemandhier 5y ago

Maybe a PhD should not be viewed as a preparation for anything, but rather as a period in life that, by means of keeping a person in a state of permanent exhaustion and under permanent pressure, creates a shift in the way they perceive the world. A bit like the training of zen monks.

chrisBob 5y ago

My wife and I both went to graduate school and had very different experiences. I have a few major takeaways from what happened to us: 1) I was a "failed" PhD student that left with a masters in mechanical engineering. Now I have a Software Engineer job that I love. A lot of credit for that goes to the software I wrote to run experiments as a grad student, and I am very happy with where I ended up. 2) My wife and I compared our advisors and they make a huge difference in your future prospects. Her post-doc advisor sent >95% of the people from his lab to tenure track positions. My advisor was successful at finding people jobs in industry and ran a great lab, but produced 0 tenured professors from his lab in 30 years. Look at where graduates of a lab end up before joining if you know what you want to do. 3) The academic job market is competitive in a strange way. Top candidates are clearly top candidates. Schools will get ~100 applications for an open position, but the top candidates will get job offers at nearly all of the places they apply. I don't think most job searches are weighted that way. 4) Research faculty positions are strange. You nominally get the job by being good at science, but then your job is to run a small business (your research lab). Being a good writer and good manager are probably the most important for running a successful lab, and PhD programs should probably focus on nurturing this more.

ImaCake 5y ago
Number 2 is huge for anyone considering the option of a PhD. My supervisors did not have a good track record and it is likely this is why my PhD burnt out into a Masters. They were amazing people, smart and hard working, but they just had no ability to nurture students into future scientists. I am still in science, but not on a career path up the ladder.

yodsanklai 5y ago

When I started a PhD, everybody warned me that it would be very hard to get a permanent position. Turned out it wasn't (at least in my field and in my country). Also, contrary to what other comments say, my PhD wasn't particularly stressful (probably less than all other jobs I had in my life). Overall, it was very interesting. I traveled the world, met interesting people, learned about science, research, academia. There were other issues though: 1. being a professor is quite different from being a PhD student 2. research is a global competition, and most likely, you won't be a superstar but an average researcher surrounded by big egos. Just like a skinny guy in a room full of people who value the size of their muscles above all. 3. The pay sucks, esp. if you can earn many times more somewhere else. I didn't care when I was 20. But as I grew older, I started to get more concerned. 4. A lot of cool stuff happens in companies, and the smart people are there too (maybe even more so)

irthomasthomas 5y ago

Beware of survivorship bias everywhere. E.g. look at performance tables for retail fund managers. Do these tables tell you which managers have performed best? No. Because these trackers and tables only track active funds. Each company runs a basket of funds, and if one performs badly, it is quietly closed. And now that firms performance apears better than it really is. This is standard practice in retail finance. The only way arround it is to keep track of defunct funds and factor in their performance yourself, but it is hardly worth the effort for most individuals.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

I did a PhD in physics in the mid 90's. It was fantastic. The people, the parties, the science, the girlfriends, not sure if I mentioned the parties. Learning to do science was fantastic, teaching was awesome. I really loved the uni environment. I started to do some well-paid consulting for IBM and when I first heard about the pay of someone more or less my age, I realized that I have to make hard choices. I also started to get involved with the university politics and realized that there are plenty of people who want to assess dominance over a stack of paper, because they have it and you do not. I went to industry to see plenty of great people, plenty of politics - but the politics was on a x100 scale, for a x5 or so pay long term. I will always cherish my PhD years, they were fantastic. I am also glad I ultimately moved to industry because I have the same stress level for a more comfortable life. One thing I really, really miss is teaching.

jan_Inkepa 5y ago
Yeah, it feels really weird having moved from phd study with lots of teaching to a more normal job (self-employed) that there are no natural opportunities to pass on knowledge - if you're not in a profession with apprenticeships society probably moved a lot of teaching to colleges. It's weird to know lots of things and to know you'll never explain them to another person. Wanting to teach is a natural drive and not having an outlet is weird.
- kirsebaer 5y ago
  You can make youtube videos. You will reach a way bigger audience than one-on-one teaching.

ImaCake 5y ago

I have worked as a research assistant in two labs in different areas of medical biology. Much of what I do is act as a helper and interface for the PhD students and PostDocs. There is a lot of diversity in PhD students! They also face some incredible challenges, especially the ones who are studying internationally and have to worry about getting kicked out of the country when they finish. I had an unsuccessful PhD due to poor project planning. It led to pretty severe burnout which I am lucky to have recovered well from. But it is good to share that there is life to be lived after quitting a PhD. I still encourage PhD students to pursue science, but I do so with a word of caution and a note that there are alternatives to the sick system that is academia.

teekert 5y ago

During my PhD we had an off-site week, with science, drinking and sailing. At such a conference you think you will be in science for ever. You will travel, give talks, receive applause and solve the worlds problems together with you science buddies, who are all just a bit smarter than the rest of the world. One afternoon we were with 100 PhD students in one room, a Prof. addressed us and told us: "You are here with 100 scientists, only 1 of you will make it to become a Professor. The rest will find jobs elsewhere or get stuck eternally as a postdoc." It woke me up, I'm not a hard worker, I'm not that 1%. I started to think about alternatives soon afterwards. This was 20 years ago and I never regretted it. There is an elegance in science, traveling and trying to become a Rock Star of science [0]. But there is also "publish or perish", a high percentage of time spend traveling (away from family) and a work-long-hours honor system. I'm in industry now, it can really be seen as selling out by some scientists, but it's much less stressful if you ask me. And I'm lucky I found a company where I am still quite free to do science (although I now develop software most of the time and haven't seen a biolab since covid...) [0]: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/rock-stars-of-science https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/rock-stars-of-...

a_conservative 5y ago
Thank you for sharing this! It brings to my mind the tension and conflict between Robin Williams and the Fields' medal mathematician in Good Will Hunting. It sounds like you still do get to do science. I suspect that you may be having a bigger impact on the world now than you would have had as another science professor. Can you offer any comment on this? Am I off base?
- teekert 5y ago
  I'm not sure, perhaps. I work in Oncology and I enjoy it indeed, it feels meaningful. Still, of all the research projects I worked on (from circulating tumor cells to Next Generation Sequencing data processing pipelines), only 1 project is actually used on the market (let's say 3 years of work of the past 11). A lot is killed. Some research becomes IP, some research becomes a paper. In a way I find corporate research to be pretty honest work, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work and it's killed. There is no pressure to publish it anyway. There is pressure though to get the FDA to approve something in the end. And for that, it really has to work and be real. We spend a lot of time on reproducing things, also research papers we base our work on. But then you need to patent your work, and that still doesn't always feel right, at least sometimes it doesn't, especially when you won't actually make a product in the end. I try to avoid that. Some professors do pretty amazing stuff. We work with academic groups a lot, they focus on new science, we focus on IP and making products or software we can use.

johnaduley 5y ago

I wrote about this exact effect in 2004. Got me some hate mail at the time... LoL... https://www.nature.com/articles/427013a https://www.nature.com/articles/427013a