12 ms·

Working on the weekends – an academic necessity?

148 points by andreyk 4y ago

chrisseaton 4y ago
PhD students are like startup founders. You're working for yourself, building something, racing against competitors, trying to get a foothold so that you can have the lifestyle you want in the future. That's why I think both groups get tempted to work a lot.
- copperx 4y ago
  Are PhD students really racing against competitors? I can imagine that in some instances they might, e.g., in the race to discover the structure of DNA, but I don't think it's true in most cases.
  - troppl 4y ago
    This is actually not such a good example I think. A better example would be that you have a small improvement to an existing algorithm, but you know that another group across the globe is also working on/with that algorithm and maybe they also found out the same improvement as you did. If that is the case, then it will be a race on who publishes a paper about that first. If you're not first, there's no reason to publish a paper anymore. And you just lost a good paper... (And paper count is really almost all there is in academia, at least that is what it seems to me sometimes)
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > Are PhD students really racing against competitors? Often the next things to explore in research are fairly obvious from what has just been tried.
  - sonzohan 4y ago
    Yes, always. Consider when Pokémon Go came out, which for video game HCI researchers, was revolutionary from a social perspective. To give an idea: people standing on the street corner staring at their phone are now fellow trainers you can talk to. Colleagues and I started data collection. Submitted a paper and were rejected as another group beat us at a prior conference because they could move just a bit faster. Sucks when a reviewer says "Unoriginal. Already saw this last month."
    - recursive 4y ago
      Why not Ingress?
      - cecilpl2 4y ago
        Popularity. Ingress wasn't so popular that you could assume people in the same location as you were also playing. At the height of its popularity, you were the odd one out on the street corner if you weren't playing Pokemon Go.
    - kergonath 4y ago
      > Sucks when a reviewer says "Unoriginal. Already saw this last month." That’s a systemic problem where we end up chasing the latest fad not because it’s interesting, but merely hoping to end up before someone else. Luckily, not all fields have that short-term outlook.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    If most of science is normal science where you have a tough idea what you’re doing yes. You may not know the solution to your problem but you know the problem you’re trying to solve and mostly your trying to solve it with the same tools the rest of your discipline is using. Even when that’s not true you’re trying to finish a PhD faster than other PhD students or to publish more or better work so you can get a better postdoc. There’s a lot of competition.
  - antognini 4y ago
    I don't know, a lot of major discoveries happened independently in a very short time span. The discovery of dark energy was made by two independent groups. Einstein was racing against Hilbert to formulate general relativity. The quark model was developed independently by Gell-Mann and Ne'eman. Haumea was discovered independently by Mike Brown's group and Luis Ortiz Moreno's group. The Higgs mechanism was developed by three independent groups in 1964. At a more prosaic level, during my own Ph.D. another group published a paper very similar to one I had been working on. (By a strange coincidence the lead author on that paper had a very similar name to my own.) There is something to the idea that it's a good thing if you have to worry about other groups scooping your work. It means that you're probably on the right track --- it means your work is relevant and that you have a reasonable path to solving an important problem.
  - analog31 4y ago
    Yes. In some fields it is known that there are research groups that are dedicated to mining the conferences for ideas that can be quickly finished and published. The grad student who gets "scooped" is at a disadvantage because they have a variety of duties, including teaching, plus they are still getting up to speed on their technique. Students are advised to withhold their best ideas from conferences. My spouse is in a field like this, and "so-and-so got scooped today" is a not unfamiliar dinner table conversation. For my PhD, I was lucky that my project required a huge pile of expensive and rather unique equipment, plus I really did have a skill advantage for the work I was doing. Two other labs replicated my work using the plans that I supplied to them, but I made sure that I got there first.
  - btrettel 4y ago
    It varies a lot depending on the field. I was never particularly worried about being scooped during my PhD. I think that's because there were/are few people working on the same problem. To give an example: One idea I've been working on lately is in a very narrow field where almost no one has the background to do it. (I consider myself barely qualified.) Someone publishes something similar perhaps a few times each decade. I'm really not worried about being scooped on this. I've thought before that whatever paper I write on this is basically written for someone a decade or more in the future, as possibly no contemporary researchers will care.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    100% true even for small ideas. New ideas are worth everything in science, especially when doing experiments. When I started my PhD in physics our group leader told us repeatedly not to talk to people from MIT or Caltech about our work too early, because there will be a postdoc who will do what will take you about 3 years in the space of 6 months.
    - copperx 4y ago
      > When I started my PhD in physics our group leader told us repeatedly not to talk to people from MIT or Caltech about our work too early, because there will be a postdoc who will do what will take you about 3 years in the space of 6 months. Because of smarts, or because of their access to resources?
      - bowsamic 4y ago
        I would say experience instead of smarts, but also yes resources. Mainly the experience though: they know how to align a cavity, they know the theory, they can understand more quickly, etc.
Biologist123 4y ago
The following high-paying or high status (or both) careers seem to necessitate a very heavy workload: law, finance, academia, business or strategy consulting, VC-funded start-ups, medicine, certain media jobs, certain software development jobs. Although the author talks about competition, it’s hard for me to escape the conclusion this is the major factor in the long hours work culture. If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work.
- onion2k 4y ago
  If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work. Just tell people you work really hard but don't actually do it. You'd be surprised how many seemingly hard-working and successful people use this strategy. Some of them even believe themselves.
  - analog31 4y ago
    The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay. Decay can take the form of materials and equipment (often homemade) deteriorating, forgetting what you've read or done (your lab notes are never good enough). Also, you're paying an opportunity cost for taking more time to finish, and you face a constant risk of getting scooped, your professor dying, getting knocked off your horse by personal / health issues, etc. Klausewitz wrote that the only rational strategy in war is to make the maximum possible use of force. Your graduate research project is like that. Of course you also have to be cognizant of wearing out your mental equipment.
    - lumost 4y ago
      This makes sense if you are working on a problem in relative isolation, that's relatively well known, and who's research has low optionality to other work. However, there are many problems that are either utterly unknown, impractical to work on outside of a major collaboration, or option well into multiple papers. It would seem that in academia, focusing on the latter will yield better long term career results. If you're a PhD student in a large collaboration, then you can't get scooped. If you are working on a problem no one knows/cares about, then getting scooped is a low risk, if you're working in an area where scooping is common - but you have good equipment/infrastructure - then you can re-use the work for something else. In hindsight, almost all of my professors work was either part of a collaboration or focused on "high option" research. The few theoreticians and others working on areas which could be scooped seemed to either pick up more teaching/administrative work - or focus on "conservative" research.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
From the article: > I started my master's degree in 2018 and my PhD in 2020, and one of the most important things I learned during my master's was how NOT to work on weekends. I learned how to structure my time, deadlines and classwork in such a way that everything actually fits in an eight hour workday. I was also quite proud of this achievement, and barring my master's thesis and other major deadlines, I was moderately successful in defending my freedom. Not working on weekends seemed like a graduation from the messy life of an undergrad into the more structured life of an adult. The rest of the article talks about the various pressures leading the author away from the disciplined 5-day work week. Competition and a desire to get ahead is the obvious one. The competitive pressure is especially prescient for academic jobs, where universities are busy churning out huge numbers of grad students but the number of open academic positions can never accommodate more than a small percentage of them. Anecdotally, I've noticed two types of weekend workers: The first type simply works all the time. Instead of going idle, they gravitate toward their task list and start working on the next thing. For whatever reason (drive, anxiety, perceived pressures, boredom) they are wired to return to work by default and the 40 hour work week doesn't contain them. The second type of weekend worker is not actually producing or even "working" more than 40 hours per week, but they struggle to contain their work into the Monday-Friday bounds. Their weekend work isn't to get ahead or go the extra mile. They work weekends because they spent half of their weekdays doing fun things (meeting up with friends, exploring hobbies, exercising, messing around online) and the only way to accomplish their work is to repeat this half-focused schedule 7 days per week. Much like the author, they could contain their work neatly within a M-F, 9-5 schedule if they made an effort, but at every juncture they choose to follow spontaneous whims or to relax or procrastinate instead. Some of them may even like the eclectic and flexible work schedule that allows them to do the things they want when they want and to get their work done in the boring gaps in between. There's also a 3rd type of person who doesn't really work much on weekends, but will wait until Saturday or Sunday to send out important e-mails and type up a storm in Slack so that it looks like they're working hard on the weekend. Frankly, this is the type I see most frequently at tech companies in the past few years: Try to engage with their messages on a Saturday and you won't get a response until Monday, but they'll go to great lengths to look like they were working hard all weekend or tell you that they worked all weekend on something.
jleyank 4y ago
If the works not novel, there’s no PhD in it. So getting scooped can really suck…. And when doing wet work, access to the necessary machinery and getting enough time at the bench to make the desired white powder vs the undesired brown oil is critical. If you have to do x reactions to get good at doing reactions (ie you make what you set out to make), you can spent more time in a day or week running them and working them up. Or you can spend more months in the process.
seibelj 4y ago
I have yet to find the highly successful person who did it without working long hours. Sure you might not have to work weekends but the weekdays are very busy. Eventually you can coast on your past accomplishments but the path to get there requires a lot of effort, regardless of the field.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  Yeah this is probably an unpopular opinion here. But weekends and 40 hour work weeks are for employees. If you want to spend your life as an employee, more power to you. I don't.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  I don't know if I'm highly successful but I am probably a great PhD outcome who got a great postdoc position and I did it without working long hours. Extremely happy to be your counterexample :)
throwaway98797 4y ago
you either optimize to win or optimize to have a good life either path can lead to good life and success u r who u r, accept it
- crossroadsguy 4y ago
  Oh god, no! Please don’t. Pleaded don’t type lyk dis on HN. Please!!! Please.
boulos 4y ago
Huh. What I miss about being a grad student is working whenever I wanted and not working when it didn't make sense. Sometimes that meant working on a weekend, because I had an idea I was making progress on. Other times, even if it was Wednesday, I'd just not work. The article seems to focus on working too much due to fear of competition. I would add that working in a fast-paced field (the author is doing ML at the Vector Institute) can feel like you're always in competition, but that it's important to remind yourself that you can choose your topic of research (if you have some horrible advisor that dictates what you do, I'm sorry, but recommend you find someone / someplace else). Even within ML, there are tons of pockets that nobody is really working on. That does make it harder to publish though, as your work will be "weird" or "not very hot". tl;dr: people should choose topics and fields that fit their desired work profile. If you decide to compete in a heavily competitive subject, expect a competitive environment.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
Honestly, it’s hard to imagine getting tenure without working on weekends. The demands are just too high. What finally broke me and forced me to draw a hard line was the pandemic Zoom shift, however: the stress of constant scheduling required me to set aside a little time just to be bored and recharge. I can do this because I’m post-tenure but I feel terrible for my more junior colleagues.
tiahura 4y ago
temporallobe 4y ago
In my field, often times weekend work is needed to get actual work done, as most of my day is filled with meetings or other random things that require my attention — answering important emails, mentoring, managing the backlog, etc. Sure I have time in between these things, but rarely enough to focus uninterrupted for several consecutive hours. On a weekend I can knock out or catch up on things that would otherwise take me a full week or two under my normal week load. It’s just the way it is.
lmeyerov 4y ago
Numbers-wise, something like 3% of phds lead to professorships: it's not quite as competitive as becoming a professional athlete, but not far. Peak competition. Most professors watching their interview candidates nowadays freely admit they wouldn't have made the cut. That is unhealthy levels of competition bc at that point it is more of a lottery. But there is something valuable going on here for everyone else. Most eventually realize they are not in the 3% bucket one way or the other, so then it becomes whether they want to invest in themselves or not. (Good) Phd programs are rare opportunities to work with the best from around the world and not worry about $ as much as results and other impact, and with like-minded people. For example, in my cohort, as folks switched for entertaining the idea of continuing in academics, they used the environment to do other equally hard things, such as startups with their peers. In both cases, only as limited as your work ethic. Others got cushy jobs where they could work hard till 5p but then clock out, but it was rarer, and even folks with families generally pulled the long hours: this was their time to grow. For people happy to clock out and try to convince others to do the same, that devalues the experience for others who ARE there to work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals. A big part of picking a PhD program is the students you will be exploring with. Masters programs are great for learning technical skills and doing semi-structured technical projects, and a 9-5 view there makes sense. The PhD, which is researching new things, often starts after that, and a different environment. Think an artist colony where someone asks everyone to only do sports & gambling as soon as the sun sets.
- coastflow 4y ago
  I found myself agreeing with much of your comment, except: "For people happy to clock out and try to convince others to do the same, that devalues the experience for others who ARE there to work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals." Is there possibly a separation between PhD students who work 9-5 with a mentality of hard work but strong time boundaries, versus PhD students who work 9-5 but don't plan to make the most of the opportunity? I'm also instinctively wary of any romanticization of a PhD program, especially when working long hours. From anecdotal reports, national labs also provide the resources to do great research, with far more reasonable hours and less of a pressure to work longer hours. I've read of too many reports, which exist even if they are minority situations, where advisors take advantage of the power they have over students, such as in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367099 I believe that doing "amazing things with like-minded individuals" is worthwhile, but can also happen in the private sector where the pay is commensurate to the value of the provided work. In general, I'm very wary of the idea that working longer hours should ever be romanticized, because the potential downsides are severe and should not be underestimated (including physical/psychological health problems due to burnout from long hours and failed relationships/divorce).
photochemsyn 4y ago
There's another way to do a lot of work and get things done, but maybe it's not for everyone: it's basically three weeks on nonstop, one week off. However, this is more of a lab rat PhD approach, where you're working on ongoing experiments/procedures and your clock is kind of set by the experimental setup. Maybe it's more of a biotech thing, but I can see this being a fairly productive approach for compsci. You just have to make sure you take that week off. (*basically this means showing up in the morning, doing very little, leaving early and relaxing a bit and maybe reviewing the results a bit. If a PI or someone asks where you are, just let them know you're reviewing the results of your work binge). It probably doesn't work as well for people with other commitments who want the stable 9-5 routine five days a week (I personally loathe that routine with a passion), but for some things this approach is really productive and allows you to focus without distractions. The ones who go nuts and burnout, though, they don't take that week off.
j7ake 4y ago
Although I agree that working weekends is common in academia, I believe that academia has more freedom in how to organise your time. Are there any other jobs where someone can take a month off at a time to travel to conferences, meet with international colleagues, and go on long visits to other institutions? Compare this with any tech or high powered job that has much more sensitive deadlines. The only real deadlines for academia are: PhD graduation (4-6 years), postdoc fellowship ends (2-4 years), and tenure (5-8 years). Between those selection cutoffs you are absolutely free to structure your life however you want. If it doesn’t work out, oh well, you go into industry and collect double pay.
- vaylian 4y ago
  > I believe that academia has more freedom in how to organise your time. In hindsight this is definitely true. But that freedom will be worth a whole lot less, if you are not aware of it. This is definitely something that I wish I had known earlier and it wasn't entirely clear to me, until I read your post.
- ulber 4y ago
  I feel this description overstates the freedom. Academia is full of rather hard deadlines, as the conference you're targeting a paper for might be the only fitting one for many months. Missing these deadlines can delay the whole "pipeline" of research, as you'd like to build on your existing work and properly cite it, but publishing subsequent work might make the original result harder to publish. Grant application deadlines are similarly hard. In contrast, deadlines in engineering are often even not expected to be hit. The "freedom" to travel for conferences is an integral part of your job as a researcher: either you network and sell your ideas, or you stay in obscurity. Of course travelling on someone else's dime can be fun, but the same is true of all business travel. It stops being fun the moment it becomes a chore and you'd rather be home putting time into your hobbies or family. Then it's just more work. If writing grant applications is your hobby and you're married to your research, academia can be great, but the freedom doesn't include a balance with all the other parts of life. I know I'm not fully contradicting you, there is indeed a lot of freedom to choose what you work on. I just think it's important that people considering academia understand what the job actually consists of.
bowsamic 4y ago
I'm a postdoc in Physics and I have very rarely worked on a weekend. Actually I would say that my workload even during my PhD has been far less than most people in the industry. IMO it is a combination of luck and "work smarter, not harder". Most of the people I know who worked extremely hard produced about the same amount of work as me, the difference was that they spent literally hundreds of hours down strange corners that are not very helpful to their work. For example, one guy I know when writing his thesis did a huge amount of research into the theory of gravitational waves, because his work was related to gravitational wave detectors, but it wasn't directly related to his work. I also worked on gravitational wave detectors, but I just left the theory out, because it has been covered so many times. No one asked about it. You could make the case that it was interesting or important to learn the theory of gravitational waves, but he didn't really seem to be enjoying it; actually his life seemed quite stressful at that moment due to the high workload. I would actually make the bold statement to say that, outside of cases of time consumption that are unavoidable, e.g. a lot of time in the lab/experimental difficulties, a huge amount of time is spent in academia because the student simply doesn't understand what they should spend their time on. This is because academia feels directionless or self-directed and the future of the research is uncertain, however you really should pause repeatedly and consider whether what you are doing is actually relevant to your research, and if it is "extra-curricular", you should ask yourself whether you are actually considering it with that mindset. Too many academics take their "research for fun" far too seriously.
- was_a_dev 4y ago
  I agree with this, I have read the theory for context sake but it has already been done. I'm building/using an instrument - that's where my focus is during the week, 9-5. All those interesting corners are my free-time reading, because I enjoy it.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    Yep. Scientists need to learn to differentiate between what needs to be done, and what they want to do. Many are woefully bad at estimating what needs to be done, and therefore they spend many hours doing what they want to do with the stressful mindset that it is something that needs to be done. It happened to me a few times, it happens to everyone to some degree, but the sooner you get a good compass for what you need to do the far smoother your life will be. My personal example is when I was doing a theoretical project that had a very intense pure mathematical underpinning. I thought I needed to understand it, but my supervisor kept saying "just work through examples that you know the solutions to". I could have spent 100s or even 1000s of hours learning all this pure mathematics but actually if I would have done so it would not really have helped me today. Instead I just needed to do a few simple examples, which took maybe 20 to 40 hours? And then I was basically done with the research and could write the paper. Maybe if you ask some they will say "you didn't really do it, you didn't know the theory, you were just pretending!" but in the end I got the work done that I wanted to get done, and then went and had a beer.
Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
> One point that was raised again and again was the fact of competition: (...) But at the same time, a lot of my friends in industry do not seem to feel the same guilt when taking the weekend off. (...) So there has to be something deeper going on here, since competition is not an exclusive feature of academia. Come on, maybe not "exclusive" in an absolute sense, but the level of competition isn't even remotely similar. As an academic, I'm directly competing for something literally dozens of times a year (in each grant application, promotion application, evaluation application, salary complement application, grant/project request, paper submission). Each of these has an acceptance rate, we are competing directly among other academics. And each of these directly affects our career. Even when we are tenured professors we can't get away from it, because we have postdocs and students whose own careers depend directly on us and we can't let them down. My friends in industry don't have an even remotely similar experience, of course competition exists in industry but it's not a constant pressure that you feel every day from several different sources. The post makes an effort to argue that competition is just one factor among many, but I think it explains like 90% of the overwork phenomenon.
- j7ake 4y ago
  The competition might be more akin to humanities careers like writer, musician, or artist rather than industry. But stability and money on average is still better in academia than being a musician.
  - light_hue_1 4y ago
    > But stability and money on average is still better in academia than being a musician. That's just not true. The average person in academia is a grad student. Their stability is low, they generally depend on one person who can easily take advantage of this. And unfortunately this often happens. And their pay is extremely low, below a living wage. The next most common position are itinerant teachers of various kinds, adjuncts, course support staff, etc. These positions are also paid very poorly and have no stability. Also if you're fired, for any reason, even if your department is abolished (which happens!), that's it. Now you need to move maybe across the country. So not only is your pay abysmal, at any moment you could lose your family, friends, etc. Even if you are tenured. Yeah, you have a job for life nominally. But, what if one of your fellow tenured professors turns out to be a verbally or even sexually abusive creep? Well, your options for moving are slim, and again, it means losing all of your connections and local life, for some unknown location at a roll of the dice. If you're lucky. Also, at the average university, in say, the average humanities department, a tenured professor after 20 years makes less than an entry-level CS grad at Google. No. Academia is neither stable nor well paid, with only some exceptions.
da39a3ee 4y ago
I worked at the weekends when I was in academia and I work at the weekends now that I'm a software engineer. Why? Because I chose both careers because they were my area of intellectual interest and I do them for pleasure, not just money. It's not that complicated, for me at least.
- was_a_dev 4y ago
  That's how I see it. However my weekends are more freeform - it doesn't matter if I make progress in my main objectives, I'm having fun
  - da39a3ee 4y ago
    Yes, agreed. My work when colleagues are offline is more freeform, and usually much more efficient. It's much easier to get work done when you're not paying attention to Slack. The idiots who think that software engineers can be more productive in offices are very hard for me to understand.
lokimedes 4y ago
Beyond the sheer competitive aspects of modern academia, it is also a hodgepodge of ancient tradition and the reappropriation of the universities as schooling for the masses. I bought in on the romantic dream of “monastic” pursuit of wisdom, where my whole being was dedicated to the search for tryth. That fits well with working most of the time. Then, next to me sat the career professional, she wanted good grades and as little impact on her personal life from the “research experience” as she knew McKinsey was waiting. The came family and the monastic dreams turned into work :)
Helmut10001 4y ago
I think it depends to some degree on the compromises you're ready to accept. I have worked 12 years in academia, got my PhD but then realized it is a lottery to proceed further. Nonetheless, Postdoc positions are still available in Germany and often no one wants those because they are so unreliable. I enjoy my work, produce good science - and for this, I have to ignore deadlines and requirements. I have a small child and I need to stay healthy, if only because I am responsible, for my child, for my research. In the corona situation, I switched to breaking almost all deadlines - what is not possible is not possible. No weekend work. I work from 7am to 2 PM. If that means loosing my job, then that is it. But the outcome was different: I did not loose my job - others quit, because they could not stand the pressure, but I kept healthy and produced stable, ongoing work. Slower than everyone else, but higher quality (this is subjective, of course). I reduced my contract to 75% time (30hrs), which also helped. My compromise: No security for long term employment and no money saved. We do everything by bike, no car, no travels outside the country, no restaurants etc. - really everything cut down to the bare minimum. This is fine and it works for us/me, but a lot of PhDs in our department have higher expectations and I think they are better to pursue their career outside science. Look at how scientists worked a century ago: Their life was often equally precarious, but still their motivations helped them sustain constant progress.
- currycurry16 4y ago
  Interesting perspective. Which academic field is that?
  - Helmut10001 4y ago
    Difficult to say, I got my MA/Diploma in Landscape Architecture, then went into Environmental Planning & GIS, then Cartography & Data Science [1]. Yes, it probably is (still) a niche field and maybe it is only possible to do like I do because it is. [1]: https://www.alexanderdunkel.com/cv_alexanderdunkel.pdf https://www.alexanderdunkel.com/cv_alexanderdunkel.pdf
zemvpferreira 4y ago
Out of my many friends who have gone into academia, the most successful one works the least by far: maybe 1-2 hours per day on average. He publishes more papers than the rest of his department put together. At 35 he had more citations than 90% of PhDs at the end of their career. This individual chose his field of study, university, department, collaborators etc etc based on time leverage. Everything is done remotely and there are practically no meetings. Every paper written produces material for another three. Every sentence is recycled from publication to publication if possible. Automation (python scripts) performs most of the analytical work. Conferences are attended exclusively to find more collaborators to feed into the system. Tier 1 journals are pursued relentlessly. Extra-research commitments are brutally minimised. Most importantly his data collection methodologies are hundreds of times more time-effective than his peers. We're at the beach together most summer afternoons. Having read some of his work, it's much better science than most as well. The fact is most people aren't tactical about their careers. They don't want to hear what it takes to be successful in the system and would rather treat their PhD as a hoity-toity vocation than admit they have more in common with a blue-collar miner than with Kant or Mendel. If you want to cosplay as Darwin then you need to get on a boat for 5 years on your father's money and cross your fingers you have a brilliant revelation. But if you see your education as a job and apply a hacker mentality academia is easy ground to till.
- rm445 4y ago
  Your friend sounds like a remarkable person, but it's not really clear from your account whether he has hacked career success in the career field of academia, or has found more efficient ways to do great science. If you accept there's a difference between those things, and that the latter is more important to the world at large, it's concerning.
  - zemvpferreira 4y ago
    I wouldn't say he does 'great science' and I don't think he would either. He pokes at the edges of a highly specific field using math/programming tools that are incredibly basic by HN's standards but almost magical to his peers. It's all leverage. It's good, solid work done very efficiently. Will the next Pasteur or Semmelweis work this way? Probably not. But let's not pretend 99.9999% of PhD's are on that route anyway. And no big deal. Science would do better optimising for an army of effective workers than the odd genius. Those tend to make themselves known anyway.
readerbaza 4y ago
From the outside it seems academia is an end, not a mean. Which in itself could be the full explanation. Also explains why even in "industry", as the author calls it, there's plenty of people willing to work (or appear to) a lot more than expected/required: to acquire more money/status/position/power/etc. When you don't care to have your name plastered on numerous publications or on some company report, saying "no" to peer/company pressure is much easier. Bonus point: Propaganda. Movies and tv shows are full of hard working heroes with impossible schedules and deadlines (literal most of the time) which makes for interesting entertainment but terrible lives.
rapjr9 4y ago
I worked as a software engineer for 20 years in a computer science department and there are several reasons it is often necessary to work on weekends: * Paper deadlines. If everyone planned well there would be no need to work on weekends, but nobody plans well, so a lot of the work is done last minute. Also research is international and as a result many conference paper deadlines are set randomly so as not to always be convenient for USA and inconvenient for everyone else. Hence some deadlines are on weekends. Again, if the work was well planned there would be no need even then to work on a weekend, you could submit the paper before the weekend, but no one plans well. * Students time schedule. Students have classes. They sleep late and work nights. They go to parties and drink. They have exams and assignments that take all their attention during the week and then they get back to the research on weekends. If you are collaborating you often have to be connected in real time, even if it is remote work. This means working nights, weekends, really any time of the day. It can be like being on call. * Profs and advisors try to get you to cram as much as possible into the paper to make it better. This means working up to the absolute last minute continuing to make minor revisions. I've seen changes made to papers in the last seconds before a deadline, and changes continue to be made for the hours grace period some conferences offer after the deadline. As long as the paper submission portal is open changes continue to be made. It's a stupid way to work, but it is common. That said, since I was an employee I had more freedom to restrict my hours. Grad students on the other hand are slaves and are expected to work 80+ hour weeks. They are essentially almost always working. So they will try to access other people any time they encounter an issue. It's difficult to not interface with them during "off" hours because you know it might mean they can't get anything done until they talk with you, which can mean wasting days of time for them. They'll mention this at meetings, which makes it look like YOU are blocking the project. And you are, but for reasonable reasons. But that doesn't look reasonable to the student. And profs used to be students and in many cases that's basically the only life they know so they tend to sympathize with the students and not with you. Some things that would help: Plan for papers, posters, meetings so it's not all last minute. The conferences happen around the same time every year. It's not like it's a big surprise when the date is set. Get grad students to form unions so they are not so overworked. Set rules on what profs can task grad students with. Getting coffee, creating lessons for the profs classes, getting the profs laundry, being volunteered for work, being assigned more than 40hrs work/week, should not be on the list. This is a large part of why grad students are overworked. Require management courses for profs so they learn that people are not machines. There is a reason we have a 40hr work week, and while going beyond 40hrs is _sometimes_ required, working longer hours continuously just damages productivity and is actually making the work go slower and burning people out.

148 points by andreyk 4y ago

PhD students are like startup founders. You're working for yourself, building something, racing against competitors, trying to get a foothold so that you can have the lifestyle you want in the future. That's why I think both groups get tempted to work a lot.

copperx 4y ago
Are PhD students really racing against competitors? I can imagine that in some instances they might, e.g., in the race to discover the structure of DNA, but I don't think it's true in most cases.
- troppl 4y ago
  This is actually not such a good example I think. A better example would be that you have a small improvement to an existing algorithm, but you know that another group across the globe is also working on/with that algorithm and maybe they also found out the same improvement as you did. If that is the case, then it will be a race on who publishes a paper about that first. If you're not first, there's no reason to publish a paper anymore. And you just lost a good paper... (And paper count is really almost all there is in academia, at least that is what it seems to me sometimes)
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > Are PhD students really racing against competitors? Often the next things to explore in research are fairly obvious from what has just been tried.
- sonzohan 4y ago
  Yes, always. Consider when Pokémon Go came out, which for video game HCI researchers, was revolutionary from a social perspective. To give an idea: people standing on the street corner staring at their phone are now fellow trainers you can talk to. Colleagues and I started data collection. Submitted a paper and were rejected as another group beat us at a prior conference because they could move just a bit faster. Sucks when a reviewer says "Unoriginal. Already saw this last month."
  - recursive 4y ago
    Why not Ingress?
    - cecilpl2 4y ago
      Popularity. Ingress wasn't so popular that you could assume people in the same location as you were also playing. At the height of its popularity, you were the odd one out on the street corner if you weren't playing Pokemon Go.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    > Sucks when a reviewer says "Unoriginal. Already saw this last month." That’s a systemic problem where we end up chasing the latest fad not because it’s interesting, but merely hoping to end up before someone else. Luckily, not all fields have that short-term outlook.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  If most of science is normal science where you have a tough idea what you’re doing yes. You may not know the solution to your problem but you know the problem you’re trying to solve and mostly your trying to solve it with the same tools the rest of your discipline is using. Even when that’s not true you’re trying to finish a PhD faster than other PhD students or to publish more or better work so you can get a better postdoc. There’s a lot of competition.
- antognini 4y ago
  I don't know, a lot of major discoveries happened independently in a very short time span. The discovery of dark energy was made by two independent groups. Einstein was racing against Hilbert to formulate general relativity. The quark model was developed independently by Gell-Mann and Ne'eman. Haumea was discovered independently by Mike Brown's group and Luis Ortiz Moreno's group. The Higgs mechanism was developed by three independent groups in 1964. At a more prosaic level, during my own Ph.D. another group published a paper very similar to one I had been working on. (By a strange coincidence the lead author on that paper had a very similar name to my own.) There is something to the idea that it's a good thing if you have to worry about other groups scooping your work. It means that you're probably on the right track --- it means your work is relevant and that you have a reasonable path to solving an important problem.
- analog31 4y ago
  Yes. In some fields it is known that there are research groups that are dedicated to mining the conferences for ideas that can be quickly finished and published. The grad student who gets "scooped" is at a disadvantage because they have a variety of duties, including teaching, plus they are still getting up to speed on their technique. Students are advised to withhold their best ideas from conferences. My spouse is in a field like this, and "so-and-so got scooped today" is a not unfamiliar dinner table conversation. For my PhD, I was lucky that my project required a huge pile of expensive and rather unique equipment, plus I really did have a skill advantage for the work I was doing. Two other labs replicated my work using the plans that I supplied to them, but I made sure that I got there first.
- btrettel 4y ago
  It varies a lot depending on the field. I was never particularly worried about being scooped during my PhD. I think that's because there were/are few people working on the same problem. To give an example: One idea I've been working on lately is in a very narrow field where almost no one has the background to do it. (I consider myself barely qualified.) Someone publishes something similar perhaps a few times each decade. I'm really not worried about being scooped on this. I've thought before that whatever paper I write on this is basically written for someone a decade or more in the future, as possibly no contemporary researchers will care.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  100% true even for small ideas. New ideas are worth everything in science, especially when doing experiments. When I started my PhD in physics our group leader told us repeatedly not to talk to people from MIT or Caltech about our work too early, because there will be a postdoc who will do what will take you about 3 years in the space of 6 months.
  - copperx 4y ago
    > When I started my PhD in physics our group leader told us repeatedly not to talk to people from MIT or Caltech about our work too early, because there will be a postdoc who will do what will take you about 3 years in the space of 6 months. Because of smarts, or because of their access to resources?
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      I would say experience instead of smarts, but also yes resources. Mainly the experience though: they know how to align a cavity, they know the theory, they can understand more quickly, etc.

Biologist123 4y ago

The following high-paying or high status (or both) careers seem to necessitate a very heavy workload: law, finance, academia, business or strategy consulting, VC-funded start-ups, medicine, certain media jobs, certain software development jobs. Although the author talks about competition, it’s hard for me to escape the conclusion this is the major factor in the long hours work culture. If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work.

onion2k 4y ago
If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work. Just tell people you work really hard but don't actually do it. You'd be surprised how many seemingly hard-working and successful people use this strategy. Some of them even believe themselves.
- analog31 4y ago
  The work knows. That's actually the problem. Your work is constantly decaying. You have to beat the rate of decay. Decay can take the form of materials and equipment (often homemade) deteriorating, forgetting what you've read or done (your lab notes are never good enough). Also, you're paying an opportunity cost for taking more time to finish, and you face a constant risk of getting scooped, your professor dying, getting knocked off your horse by personal / health issues, etc. Klausewitz wrote that the only rational strategy in war is to make the maximum possible use of force. Your graduate research project is like that. Of course you also have to be cognizant of wearing out your mental equipment.
  - lumost 4y ago
    This makes sense if you are working on a problem in relative isolation, that's relatively well known, and who's research has low optionality to other work. However, there are many problems that are either utterly unknown, impractical to work on outside of a major collaboration, or option well into multiple papers. It would seem that in academia, focusing on the latter will yield better long term career results. If you're a PhD student in a large collaboration, then you can't get scooped. If you are working on a problem no one knows/cares about, then getting scooped is a low risk, if you're working in an area where scooping is common - but you have good equipment/infrastructure - then you can re-use the work for something else. In hindsight, almost all of my professors work was either part of a collaboration or focused on "high option" research. The few theoreticians and others working on areas which could be scooped seemed to either pick up more teaching/administrative work - or focus on "conservative" research.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

From the article: > I started my master's degree in 2018 and my PhD in 2020, and one of the most important things I learned during my master's was how NOT to work on weekends. I learned how to structure my time, deadlines and classwork in such a way that everything actually fits in an eight hour workday. I was also quite proud of this achievement, and barring my master's thesis and other major deadlines, I was moderately successful in defending my freedom. Not working on weekends seemed like a graduation from the messy life of an undergrad into the more structured life of an adult. The rest of the article talks about the various pressures leading the author away from the disciplined 5-day work week. Competition and a desire to get ahead is the obvious one. The competitive pressure is especially prescient for academic jobs, where universities are busy churning out huge numbers of grad students but the number of open academic positions can never accommodate more than a small percentage of them. Anecdotally, I've noticed two types of weekend workers: The first type simply works all the time. Instead of going idle, they gravitate toward their task list and start working on the next thing. For whatever reason (drive, anxiety, perceived pressures, boredom) they are wired to return to work by default and the 40 hour work week doesn't contain them. The second type of weekend worker is not actually producing or even "working" more than 40 hours per week, but they struggle to contain their work into the Monday-Friday bounds. Their weekend work isn't to get ahead or go the extra mile. They work weekends because they spent half of their weekdays doing fun things (meeting up with friends, exploring hobbies, exercising, messing around online) and the only way to accomplish their work is to repeat this half-focused schedule 7 days per week. Much like the author, they could contain their work neatly within a M-F, 9-5 schedule if they made an effort, but at every juncture they choose to follow spontaneous whims or to relax or procrastinate instead. Some of them may even like the eclectic and flexible work schedule that allows them to do the things they want when they want and to get their work done in the boring gaps in between. There's also a 3rd type of person who doesn't really work much on weekends, but will wait until Saturday or Sunday to send out important e-mails and type up a storm in Slack so that it looks like they're working hard on the weekend. Frankly, this is the type I see most frequently at tech companies in the past few years: Try to engage with their messages on a Saturday and you won't get a response until Monday, but they'll go to great lengths to look like they were working hard all weekend or tell you that they worked all weekend on something.

jleyank 4y ago

If the works not novel, there’s no PhD in it. So getting scooped can really suck…. And when doing wet work, access to the necessary machinery and getting enough time at the bench to make the desired white powder vs the undesired brown oil is critical. If you have to do x reactions to get good at doing reactions (ie you make what you set out to make), you can spent more time in a day or week running them and working them up. Or you can spend more months in the process.

seibelj 4y ago

I have yet to find the highly successful person who did it without working long hours. Sure you might not have to work weekends but the weekdays are very busy. Eventually you can coast on your past accomplishments but the path to get there requires a lot of effort, regardless of the field.

ramesh31 4y ago
Yeah this is probably an unpopular opinion here. But weekends and 40 hour work weeks are for employees. If you want to spend your life as an employee, more power to you. I don't.
bowsamic 4y ago
I don't know if I'm highly successful but I am probably a great PhD outcome who got a great postdoc position and I did it without working long hours. Extremely happy to be your counterexample :)

throwaway98797 4y ago

you either optimize to win or optimize to have a good life either path can lead to good life and success u r who u r, accept it

crossroadsguy 4y ago
Oh god, no! Please don’t. Pleaded don’t type lyk dis on HN. Please!!! Please.

boulos 4y ago

Huh. What I miss about being a grad student is working whenever I wanted and not working when it didn't make sense. Sometimes that meant working on a weekend, because I had an idea I was making progress on. Other times, even if it was Wednesday, I'd just not work. The article seems to focus on working too much due to fear of competition. I would add that working in a fast-paced field (the author is doing ML at the Vector Institute) can feel like you're always in competition, but that it's important to remind yourself that you can choose your topic of research (if you have some horrible advisor that dictates what you do, I'm sorry, but recommend you find someone / someplace else). Even within ML, there are tons of pockets that nobody is really working on. That does make it harder to publish though, as your work will be "weird" or "not very hot". tl;dr: people should choose topics and fields that fit their desired work profile. If you decide to compete in a heavily competitive subject, expect a competitive environment.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine getting tenure without working on weekends. The demands are just too high. What finally broke me and forced me to draw a hard line was the pandemic Zoom shift, however: the stress of constant scheduling required me to set aside a little time just to be bored and recharge. I can do this because I’m post-tenure but I feel terrible for my more junior colleagues.

tiahura 4y ago

temporallobe 4y ago

In my field, often times weekend work is needed to get actual work done, as most of my day is filled with meetings or other random things that require my attention — answering important emails, mentoring, managing the backlog, etc. Sure I have time in between these things, but rarely enough to focus uninterrupted for several consecutive hours. On a weekend I can knock out or catch up on things that would otherwise take me a full week or two under my normal week load. It’s just the way it is.

lmeyerov 4y ago

Numbers-wise, something like 3% of phds lead to professorships: it's not quite as competitive as becoming a professional athlete, but not far. Peak competition. Most professors watching their interview candidates nowadays freely admit they wouldn't have made the cut. That is unhealthy levels of competition bc at that point it is more of a lottery. But there is something valuable going on here for everyone else. Most eventually realize they are not in the 3% bucket one way or the other, so then it becomes whether they want to invest in themselves or not. (Good) Phd programs are rare opportunities to work with the best from around the world and not worry about $ as much as results and other impact, and with like-minded people. For example, in my cohort, as folks switched for entertaining the idea of continuing in academics, they used the environment to do other equally hard things, such as startups with their peers. In both cases, only as limited as your work ethic. Others got cushy jobs where they could work hard till 5p but then clock out, but it was rarer, and even folks with families generally pulled the long hours: this was their time to grow. For people happy to clock out and try to convince others to do the same, that devalues the experience for others who ARE there to work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals. A big part of picking a PhD program is the students you will be exploring with. Masters programs are great for learning technical skills and doing semi-structured technical projects, and a 9-5 view there makes sense. The PhD, which is researching new things, often starts after that, and a different environment. Think an artist colony where someone asks everyone to only do sports & gambling as soon as the sun sets.

coastflow 4y ago
I found myself agreeing with much of your comment, except: "For people happy to clock out and try to convince others to do the same, that devalues the experience for others who ARE there to work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals." Is there possibly a separation between PhD students who work 9-5 with a mentality of hard work but strong time boundaries, versus PhD students who work 9-5 but don't plan to make the most of the opportunity? I'm also instinctively wary of any romanticization of a PhD program, especially when working long hours. From anecdotal reports, national labs also provide the resources to do great research, with far more reasonable hours and less of a pressure to work longer hours. I've read of too many reports, which exist even if they are minority situations, where advisors take advantage of the power they have over students, such as in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367099 I believe that doing "amazing things with like-minded individuals" is worthwhile, but can also happen in the private sector where the pay is commensurate to the value of the provided work. In general, I'm very wary of the idea that working longer hours should ever be romanticized, because the potential downsides are severe and should not be underestimated (including physical/psychological health problems due to burnout from long hours and failed relationships/divorce).

photochemsyn 4y ago

There's another way to do a lot of work and get things done, but maybe it's not for everyone: it's basically three weeks on nonstop, one week off. However, this is more of a lab rat PhD approach, where you're working on ongoing experiments/procedures and your clock is kind of set by the experimental setup. Maybe it's more of a biotech thing, but I can see this being a fairly productive approach for compsci. You just have to make sure you take that week off. (*basically this means showing up in the morning, doing very little, leaving early and relaxing a bit and maybe reviewing the results a bit. If a PI or someone asks where you are, just let them know you're reviewing the results of your work binge). It probably doesn't work as well for people with other commitments who want the stable 9-5 routine five days a week (I personally loathe that routine with a passion), but for some things this approach is really productive and allows you to focus without distractions. The ones who go nuts and burnout, though, they don't take that week off.

j7ake 4y ago

Although I agree that working weekends is common in academia, I believe that academia has more freedom in how to organise your time. Are there any other jobs where someone can take a month off at a time to travel to conferences, meet with international colleagues, and go on long visits to other institutions? Compare this with any tech or high powered job that has much more sensitive deadlines. The only real deadlines for academia are: PhD graduation (4-6 years), postdoc fellowship ends (2-4 years), and tenure (5-8 years). Between those selection cutoffs you are absolutely free to structure your life however you want. If it doesn’t work out, oh well, you go into industry and collect double pay.

vaylian 4y ago
> I believe that academia has more freedom in how to organise your time. In hindsight this is definitely true. But that freedom will be worth a whole lot less, if you are not aware of it. This is definitely something that I wish I had known earlier and it wasn't entirely clear to me, until I read your post.
ulber 4y ago
I feel this description overstates the freedom. Academia is full of rather hard deadlines, as the conference you're targeting a paper for might be the only fitting one for many months. Missing these deadlines can delay the whole "pipeline" of research, as you'd like to build on your existing work and properly cite it, but publishing subsequent work might make the original result harder to publish. Grant application deadlines are similarly hard. In contrast, deadlines in engineering are often even not expected to be hit. The "freedom" to travel for conferences is an integral part of your job as a researcher: either you network and sell your ideas, or you stay in obscurity. Of course travelling on someone else's dime can be fun, but the same is true of all business travel. It stops being fun the moment it becomes a chore and you'd rather be home putting time into your hobbies or family. Then it's just more work. If writing grant applications is your hobby and you're married to your research, academia can be great, but the freedom doesn't include a balance with all the other parts of life. I know I'm not fully contradicting you, there is indeed a lot of freedom to choose what you work on. I just think it's important that people considering academia understand what the job actually consists of.

bowsamic 4y ago

I'm a postdoc in Physics and I have very rarely worked on a weekend. Actually I would say that my workload even during my PhD has been far less than most people in the industry. IMO it is a combination of luck and "work smarter, not harder". Most of the people I know who worked extremely hard produced about the same amount of work as me, the difference was that they spent literally hundreds of hours down strange corners that are not very helpful to their work. For example, one guy I know when writing his thesis did a huge amount of research into the theory of gravitational waves, because his work was related to gravitational wave detectors, but it wasn't directly related to his work. I also worked on gravitational wave detectors, but I just left the theory out, because it has been covered so many times. No one asked about it. You could make the case that it was interesting or important to learn the theory of gravitational waves, but he didn't really seem to be enjoying it; actually his life seemed quite stressful at that moment due to the high workload. I would actually make the bold statement to say that, outside of cases of time consumption that are unavoidable, e.g. a lot of time in the lab/experimental difficulties, a huge amount of time is spent in academia because the student simply doesn't understand what they should spend their time on. This is because academia feels directionless or self-directed and the future of the research is uncertain, however you really should pause repeatedly and consider whether what you are doing is actually relevant to your research, and if it is "extra-curricular", you should ask yourself whether you are actually considering it with that mindset. Too many academics take their "research for fun" far too seriously.

was_a_dev 4y ago
I agree with this, I have read the theory for context sake but it has already been done. I'm building/using an instrument - that's where my focus is during the week, 9-5. All those interesting corners are my free-time reading, because I enjoy it.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Yep. Scientists need to learn to differentiate between what needs to be done, and what they want to do. Many are woefully bad at estimating what needs to be done, and therefore they spend many hours doing what they want to do with the stressful mindset that it is something that needs to be done. It happened to me a few times, it happens to everyone to some degree, but the sooner you get a good compass for what you need to do the far smoother your life will be. My personal example is when I was doing a theoretical project that had a very intense pure mathematical underpinning. I thought I needed to understand it, but my supervisor kept saying "just work through examples that you know the solutions to". I could have spent 100s or even 1000s of hours learning all this pure mathematics but actually if I would have done so it would not really have helped me today. Instead I just needed to do a few simple examples, which took maybe 20 to 40 hours? And then I was basically done with the research and could write the paper. Maybe if you ask some they will say "you didn't really do it, you didn't know the theory, you were just pretending!" but in the end I got the work done that I wanted to get done, and then went and had a beer.

Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago

> One point that was raised again and again was the fact of competition: (...) But at the same time, a lot of my friends in industry do not seem to feel the same guilt when taking the weekend off. (...) So there has to be something deeper going on here, since competition is not an exclusive feature of academia. Come on, maybe not "exclusive" in an absolute sense, but the level of competition isn't even remotely similar. As an academic, I'm directly competing for something literally dozens of times a year (in each grant application, promotion application, evaluation application, salary complement application, grant/project request, paper submission). Each of these has an acceptance rate, we are competing directly among other academics. And each of these directly affects our career. Even when we are tenured professors we can't get away from it, because we have postdocs and students whose own careers depend directly on us and we can't let them down. My friends in industry don't have an even remotely similar experience, of course competition exists in industry but it's not a constant pressure that you feel every day from several different sources. The post makes an effort to argue that competition is just one factor among many, but I think it explains like 90% of the overwork phenomenon.

j7ake 4y ago
The competition might be more akin to humanities careers like writer, musician, or artist rather than industry. But stability and money on average is still better in academia than being a musician.
- light_hue_1 4y ago
  > But stability and money on average is still better in academia than being a musician. That's just not true. The average person in academia is a grad student. Their stability is low, they generally depend on one person who can easily take advantage of this. And unfortunately this often happens. And their pay is extremely low, below a living wage. The next most common position are itinerant teachers of various kinds, adjuncts, course support staff, etc. These positions are also paid very poorly and have no stability. Also if you're fired, for any reason, even if your department is abolished (which happens!), that's it. Now you need to move maybe across the country. So not only is your pay abysmal, at any moment you could lose your family, friends, etc. Even if you are tenured. Yeah, you have a job for life nominally. But, what if one of your fellow tenured professors turns out to be a verbally or even sexually abusive creep? Well, your options for moving are slim, and again, it means losing all of your connections and local life, for some unknown location at a roll of the dice. If you're lucky. Also, at the average university, in say, the average humanities department, a tenured professor after 20 years makes less than an entry-level CS grad at Google. No. Academia is neither stable nor well paid, with only some exceptions.

da39a3ee 4y ago

I worked at the weekends when I was in academia and I work at the weekends now that I'm a software engineer. Why? Because I chose both careers because they were my area of intellectual interest and I do them for pleasure, not just money. It's not that complicated, for me at least.

was_a_dev 4y ago
That's how I see it. However my weekends are more freeform - it doesn't matter if I make progress in my main objectives, I'm having fun
- da39a3ee 4y ago
  Yes, agreed. My work when colleagues are offline is more freeform, and usually much more efficient. It's much easier to get work done when you're not paying attention to Slack. The idiots who think that software engineers can be more productive in offices are very hard for me to understand.

lokimedes 4y ago

Beyond the sheer competitive aspects of modern academia, it is also a hodgepodge of ancient tradition and the reappropriation of the universities as schooling for the masses. I bought in on the romantic dream of “monastic” pursuit of wisdom, where my whole being was dedicated to the search for tryth. That fits well with working most of the time. Then, next to me sat the career professional, she wanted good grades and as little impact on her personal life from the “research experience” as she knew McKinsey was waiting. The came family and the monastic dreams turned into work :)

Helmut10001 4y ago

I think it depends to some degree on the compromises you're ready to accept. I have worked 12 years in academia, got my PhD but then realized it is a lottery to proceed further. Nonetheless, Postdoc positions are still available in Germany and often no one wants those because they are so unreliable. I enjoy my work, produce good science - and for this, I have to ignore deadlines and requirements. I have a small child and I need to stay healthy, if only because I am responsible, for my child, for my research. In the corona situation, I switched to breaking almost all deadlines - what is not possible is not possible. No weekend work. I work from 7am to 2 PM. If that means loosing my job, then that is it. But the outcome was different: I did not loose my job - others quit, because they could not stand the pressure, but I kept healthy and produced stable, ongoing work. Slower than everyone else, but higher quality (this is subjective, of course). I reduced my contract to 75% time (30hrs), which also helped. My compromise: No security for long term employment and no money saved. We do everything by bike, no car, no travels outside the country, no restaurants etc. - really everything cut down to the bare minimum. This is fine and it works for us/me, but a lot of PhDs in our department have higher expectations and I think they are better to pursue their career outside science. Look at how scientists worked a century ago: Their life was often equally precarious, but still their motivations helped them sustain constant progress.

currycurry16 4y ago
Interesting perspective. Which academic field is that?
- Helmut10001 4y ago
  Difficult to say, I got my MA/Diploma in Landscape Architecture, then went into Environmental Planning & GIS, then Cartography & Data Science [1]. Yes, it probably is (still) a niche field and maybe it is only possible to do like I do because it is. [1]: https://www.alexanderdunkel.com/cv_alexanderdunkel.pdf https://www.alexanderdunkel.com/cv_alexanderdunkel.pdf

zemvpferreira 4y ago

Out of my many friends who have gone into academia, the most successful one works the least by far: maybe 1-2 hours per day on average. He publishes more papers than the rest of his department put together. At 35 he had more citations than 90% of PhDs at the end of their career. This individual chose his field of study, university, department, collaborators etc etc based on time leverage. Everything is done remotely and there are practically no meetings. Every paper written produces material for another three. Every sentence is recycled from publication to publication if possible. Automation (python scripts) performs most of the analytical work. Conferences are attended exclusively to find more collaborators to feed into the system. Tier 1 journals are pursued relentlessly. Extra-research commitments are brutally minimised. Most importantly his data collection methodologies are hundreds of times more time-effective than his peers. We're at the beach together most summer afternoons. Having read some of his work, it's much better science than most as well. The fact is most people aren't tactical about their careers. They don't want to hear what it takes to be successful in the system and would rather treat their PhD as a hoity-toity vocation than admit they have more in common with a blue-collar miner than with Kant or Mendel. If you want to cosplay as Darwin then you need to get on a boat for 5 years on your father's money and cross your fingers you have a brilliant revelation. But if you see your education as a job and apply a hacker mentality academia is easy ground to till.

rm445 4y ago
Your friend sounds like a remarkable person, but it's not really clear from your account whether he has hacked career success in the career field of academia, or has found more efficient ways to do great science. If you accept there's a difference between those things, and that the latter is more important to the world at large, it's concerning.
- zemvpferreira 4y ago
  I wouldn't say he does 'great science' and I don't think he would either. He pokes at the edges of a highly specific field using math/programming tools that are incredibly basic by HN's standards but almost magical to his peers. It's all leverage. It's good, solid work done very efficiently. Will the next Pasteur or Semmelweis work this way? Probably not. But let's not pretend 99.9999% of PhD's are on that route anyway. And no big deal. Science would do better optimising for an army of effective workers than the odd genius. Those tend to make themselves known anyway.

readerbaza 4y ago

From the outside it seems academia is an end, not a mean. Which in itself could be the full explanation. Also explains why even in "industry", as the author calls it, there's plenty of people willing to work (or appear to) a lot more than expected/required: to acquire more money/status/position/power/etc. When you don't care to have your name plastered on numerous publications or on some company report, saying "no" to peer/company pressure is much easier. Bonus point: Propaganda. Movies and tv shows are full of hard working heroes with impossible schedules and deadlines (literal most of the time) which makes for interesting entertainment but terrible lives.

rapjr9 4y ago

I worked as a software engineer for 20 years in a computer science department and there are several reasons it is often necessary to work on weekends: * Paper deadlines. If everyone planned well there would be no need to work on weekends, but nobody plans well, so a lot of the work is done last minute. Also research is international and as a result many conference paper deadlines are set randomly so as not to always be convenient for USA and inconvenient for everyone else. Hence some deadlines are on weekends. Again, if the work was well planned there would be no need even then to work on a weekend, you could submit the paper before the weekend, but no one plans well. * Students time schedule. Students have classes. They sleep late and work nights. They go to parties and drink. They have exams and assignments that take all their attention during the week and then they get back to the research on weekends. If you are collaborating you often have to be connected in real time, even if it is remote work. This means working nights, weekends, really any time of the day. It can be like being on call. * Profs and advisors try to get you to cram as much as possible into the paper to make it better. This means working up to the absolute last minute continuing to make minor revisions. I've seen changes made to papers in the last seconds before a deadline, and changes continue to be made for the hours grace period some conferences offer after the deadline. As long as the paper submission portal is open changes continue to be made. It's a stupid way to work, but it is common. That said, since I was an employee I had more freedom to restrict my hours. Grad students on the other hand are slaves and are expected to work 80+ hour weeks. They are essentially almost always working. So they will try to access other people any time they encounter an issue. It's difficult to not interface with them during "off" hours because you know it might mean they can't get anything done until they talk with you, which can mean wasting days of time for them. They'll mention this at meetings, which makes it look like YOU are blocking the project. And you are, but for reasonable reasons. But that doesn't look reasonable to the student. And profs used to be students and in many cases that's basically the only life they know so they tend to sympathize with the students and not with you. Some things that would help: Plan for papers, posters, meetings so it's not all last minute. The conferences happen around the same time every year. It's not like it's a big surprise when the date is set. Get grad students to form unions so they are not so overworked. Set rules on what profs can task grad students with. Getting coffee, creating lessons for the profs classes, getting the profs laundry, being volunteered for work, being assigned more than 40hrs work/week, should not be on the list. This is a large part of why grad students are overworked. Require management courses for profs so they learn that people are not machines. There is a reason we have a 40hr work week, and while going beyond 40hrs is _sometimes_ required, working longer hours continuously just damages productivity and is actually making the work go slower and burning people out.