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> There are way more PhD's then there are research positions Nonsense. Look at how many job openings there are for PhDs - people can't hire them fast enough. I

> There are way more PhD's then there are research positions Nonsense. Look at how many job openings there are for PhDs - people can't hire them fast enough. I was in a call the other day saying how hard it is to even find PhDs to interview, let alone get them to accept your offer.

selimthegrim 4y ago
Pray tell, where is this Elysium?
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  I have never heard of a PhD student in computing struggling to find a job.
  - jobs_throwaway 4y ago
    now do every other field
Rayhem 4y ago
Job != research. Many people see a PhD as an indicator of "really smart person" (good for jobs!...maybe...until you have too many of them and they get bored or act like divas), but it's more an indicator of an ability to do independent research (good for a very specific type of job). We are producing vastly more PhDs than we need for jobs that require the latter.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  Research job openings. Big tech can’t hoover them up fast enough.
hadlock 4y ago
Link to a graph of open tenure-track phd positions over time? I can't find one but from what I've been reading it would indicate there are not enough positions open to fill demand.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  Why is tenure the be-all in your mind? I never wanted tenure after my PhD - I think that’s pretty typical.
- tomrod 4y ago
  The last 30-40 years has seen massive expansion on the post-WWII model of PhD-as-industry-expert model. It's not uncommon to see PhDs after five to seven years in industry in the C-suite. That is less common for MBAs, from my view.
zahllos 4y ago
There are three types of jobs a PhD could go into: A) industry job (just job to us mortals), B) industrial research lab (a company, but does research. An example would be IBM or Microsoft Research in CS), or C) a professor. For context, I work in a research group in a building full of PhDs, postdocs and professors. For A, PhDs ought never be short of work. They were likely good students, they also spent 3-5 years looking at the state of the art in their field. Something should've rubbed off along the way. So a PhD is usually a good signal (but many smart people decide not to do PhDs, as well). For B - the supply of places which will pay you to do actual research rather than company-specific goal stuff is much reduced compared to the supply of PhDs. This is why you'll find plenty of PhDs at Google doing software engineering - sure they're PhDs and they're smart, but they're likely not still publishing much. Whereas MSR/IBM research groups do publish (and in many ways act like a university). For C - the chances of getting to tenure-track professorship are low, and when people say there aren't enough jobs for PhDs this is generally what they mean: there aren't enough academic jobs. The usual process is to become a postdoc and then to become junior faculty - a professor, but not tenured. Then you must seek promotion into a tenured role. Sometimes people skip steps, but this is the path people I've talked to have taken. Each stage is competitive: you have to convince a professor to take you on as a postdoc, then you must convince hiring committees you should become faculty and that you have the potential to become tenured. All the while, you must deliver enough research output to back that up. At each of those stages, there's a relatively high attrition rate, and this is amongst people who obtained PhDs.
- Someone 4y ago
  As to C, the math is simple. If each tenured professor has tenure for 30 years and has a single phD student graduate every 5 years, statistically the number of tenured professors need to grow by 500% in 30 years (over 6% per year) for all those phD students to get a tenured job. Now, there are hot topics that may see something around this amount of growth for a while, but many don’t. For example, in biology, genetics and biochemistry may somewhat have that growth rate, but if you’re in any other subfield such as ethology, forget it. If you’re a historian, did research on some ‘obscure’ language such as Middle English, or are working in some corner of mathematics that doesn’t have direct applications, you can forget it, too. If anything, the number of tenureships in those fields is shrinking. Of course, many tenured professors have a lot more graduating students during their career. In medicine, one a year isn’t uncommon. That would require a field that grows by over 12% each year. The deceptive thing about this is that, as a phD student, you don’t see those 30 competitors. You’ll only see maybe eight to ten. Some of them graduated a few years before you, others will start after you graduated.

selimthegrim 4y ago

Pray tell, where is this Elysium?

chrisseaton 4y ago
I have never heard of a PhD student in computing struggling to find a job.
- jobs_throwaway 4y ago
  now do every other field

Rayhem 4y ago

Job != research. Many people see a PhD as an indicator of "really smart person" (good for jobs!...maybe...until you have too many of them and they get bored or act like divas), but it's more an indicator of an ability to do independent research (good for a very specific type of job). We are producing vastly more PhDs than we need for jobs that require the latter.

chrisseaton 4y ago
Research job openings. Big tech can’t hoover them up fast enough.

hadlock 4y ago

Link to a graph of open tenure-track phd positions over time? I can't find one but from what I've been reading it would indicate there are not enough positions open to fill demand.

chrisseaton 4y ago
Why is tenure the be-all in your mind? I never wanted tenure after my PhD - I think that’s pretty typical.
tomrod 4y ago
The last 30-40 years has seen massive expansion on the post-WWII model of PhD-as-industry-expert model. It's not uncommon to see PhDs after five to seven years in industry in the C-suite. That is less common for MBAs, from my view.

zahllos 4y ago

There are three types of jobs a PhD could go into: A) industry job (just job to us mortals), B) industrial research lab (a company, but does research. An example would be IBM or Microsoft Research in CS), or C) a professor. For context, I work in a research group in a building full of PhDs, postdocs and professors. For A, PhDs ought never be short of work. They were likely good students, they also spent 3-5 years looking at the state of the art in their field. Something should've rubbed off along the way. So a PhD is usually a good signal (but many smart people decide not to do PhDs, as well). For B - the supply of places which will pay you to do actual research rather than company-specific goal stuff is much reduced compared to the supply of PhDs. This is why you'll find plenty of PhDs at Google doing software engineering - sure they're PhDs and they're smart, but they're likely not still publishing much. Whereas MSR/IBM research groups do publish (and in many ways act like a university). For C - the chances of getting to tenure-track professorship are low, and when people say there aren't enough jobs for PhDs this is generally what they mean: there aren't enough academic jobs. The usual process is to become a postdoc and then to become junior faculty - a professor, but not tenured. Then you must seek promotion into a tenured role. Sometimes people skip steps, but this is the path people I've talked to have taken. Each stage is competitive: you have to convince a professor to take you on as a postdoc, then you must convince hiring committees you should become faculty and that you have the potential to become tenured. All the while, you must deliver enough research output to back that up. At each of those stages, there's a relatively high attrition rate, and this is amongst people who obtained PhDs.

Someone 4y ago
As to C, the math is simple. If each tenured professor has tenure for 30 years and has a single phD student graduate every 5 years, statistically the number of tenured professors need to grow by 500% in 30 years (over 6% per year) for all those phD students to get a tenured job. Now, there are hot topics that may see something around this amount of growth for a while, but many don’t. For example, in biology, genetics and biochemistry may somewhat have that growth rate, but if you’re in any other subfield such as ethology, forget it. If you’re a historian, did research on some ‘obscure’ language such as Middle English, or are working in some corner of mathematics that doesn’t have direct applications, you can forget it, too. If anything, the number of tenureships in those fields is shrinking. Of course, many tenured professors have a lot more graduating students during their career. In medicine, one a year isn’t uncommon. That would require a field that grows by over 12% each year. The deceptive thing about this is that, as a phD student, you don’t see those 30 competitors. You’ll only see maybe eight to ten. Some of them graduated a few years before you, others will start after you graduated.