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How long have you been out of grad school? If you are still in grad school... Write us back in ten years and tell us how academia is coming along. Meanwhile, c

How long have you been out of grad school? If you are still in grad school... Write us back in ten years and tell us how academia is coming along. Meanwhile, carpe diem. If you're out of grad school, tell us how much more awesome your career is than those of your relatively-untrained peers. More money? More respect? More challenges? What? I went to grad school, and then I did a postdoc, and these things were indeed very fun hobbies [1], though very very expensive in lost income and opportunity cost. But now I support a large number of PHP apps, make significantly more money than I did as a researcher, have significantly more impact on human lives than as a researcher, work less hard than a researcher... And am, gosh, approximately ten years behind my peers career-wise. Oh, those expensive hobbies! Still, nothing wrong with having hobbies. Just do be sure to know the difference between hobby and career. It can be similar to the difference between the transient and the steady-state. And if you're out of grad school and have managed to secure an awesome steady-state career as an academic researcher with job security and good pay and time to spend with your family, your other hobbies, and your community, please do write back and tell us again how arrogant we are. --- [1] In much the same way, I imagine, that the triathlon is fun.

_delirium 15y ago
The main arrogance, I think, is his claim that journals are just blog posts with more elitism, combined with a strange sort of anger towards academia (which doesn't seem to be based on knowledge of how academia works; it's not much of an ivory-tower fairy land, but really quite industry-like, with professors as managers in charge of running moderate-sized organizations, which they need to do PR, mentorship, and management for, along with generating revenue streams to keep the lab provisioned and grad students / postdocs paid). As for journals, I like blogging, and hope to see academic publishing move towards a more online, networked open model, but I simply don't think we're anywhere near that. A typical blog post and a typical journal article are miles apart, today, and very few novel scientific results are produced in blog posts. So if your goal is to advance science, you're probably going to be part of academic culture in one way or another, and probably going to publish your results in conferences or journals. That's also possible to do outside academia or an industrial research lab, but relatively few people outside those kinds of settings actually manage to get the time to do so, since their local incentives don't reward it. In some cases they actively hinder it; I've been working with some game-industry people who hope to publish some of their AI techniques in venues like (http://www.aiide.org/aiide11/ http://www.aiide.org/aiide11/), but publishing is often vetoed by their management.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  All sorts of stuff in there. Patrick stated that you can submit journal articles without being employed by a university or think tank. This is true. He also stated that, while it is perhaps thrilling to get a journal article published to an audience of hundreds, it is perhaps nearly as thrilling, plus one hell of a lot less work, to write essays on HN for an audience of tens of thousands. This is also true. Don't conflate the two statements. Scientific papers and blog posts are not the same thing, I don't think Patrick is claiming they are, and I'm actually quite doubtful that they'll ever be the same thing. (Anonymous peer review is important, blogs don't support it, and the online systems that do support it don't look much like blogs, they look like online scientific journals.) Now, on to other good stuff: academia... [is] really quite industry-like Indeed, it is very much like an industry. One with a tiny handful of customers, one of which is usually a major government. Often the government is the only customer. The difference between working for, say, a major military contractor, or a major pharmaceutical company, and working for a university is getting smaller every day. It's nice work so long as your customer is buying. Once your only customer stops buying, however, finding another one can be a real pain. Meanwhile, it's true that industry doesn't generally give a hoot about publishing new discoveries, often preferring to keep things secret. This is too bad. However, before we conclude that the only alternative is to become a professor, let me suggest that one could also look for a job where you can sell solutions to customers and keep control of your own IP, publishing it as you will. If you want to be told many stories about how this can work, go to an open source software conference.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    let me suggest that one could also look for a job where you can sell solutions to customers and keep control of your own IP, publishing it as you will. If you want to be told many stories about how this can work, go to an open source software conference. I believe this is possible, but if your goal is to do novel scientific research and publish the results, it's exceptionally uncommon. I rely on all sorts of statistical and machine-learning techniques developed by other people, for example. It's relatively common to set up shop as an independent data-mining consultant, and you can fairly easily pay the bills that way. So you might think that they've produced some of the results I rely on. But the way the economics work out, independent consultants rarely spend much time on basic research. The actual techniques and advances, as a result, come almost exclusively from researchers in academia and industrial research labs. In fact, I can't actually think of any influential advances in machine learning from the past few decades developed by independent researchers. Heck, looking through the R packages I use, even the software seems to come mainly from a mixture of universities and places like Rand (biggest surprise in this mini-inventory: lots of stuff from Merck, who I wouldn't have expected to be open-source-friendly). Nonetheless, that's actually my medium-term goal, so I hope you're right. ;-)
alecbenzer 15y ago
I'm still an undergrad so it'd be completely logical to just ignore my opinion, but..... you went from doing research to supporting PHP apps? Did you initially want to go into more researchy things and then decide "this is boring, I want to just support PHP apps instead", or did you go into research knowing you'd eventually want to do something like supporting PHP apps? I'm unsure about my own career but going to grad school and doing research (potentially at a company, after I graduate) is definitely something I'm seriously considering, primarily because I feel like (perhaps naively, I don't know) I want to be doing more interesting, "fundamental/ground-breaking" work in cs, and not just managing PHP apps for some company, or something along those lines. I don't see much personal value/fulfillment in that.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Did you initially want to go into more researchy things and then decide "this is boring, I want to just support PHP apps instead"? Yeah, stripped of all the romance and intrigue, that's basically it. Things I would tell someone in your position: Don't underestimate the wonderful things that money can do for your life. Don't underestimate the joy of being given money by grateful customers because you have made them incredibly happy in real time by doing something that's completely trivial for you, like running EXPLAIN on a SQL query from the slow log and then doing an OPTIMIZE TABLE and a CREATE INDEX and refactoring a simple loop to use a hash properly. Know this: Even "fundamental" and "ground-breaking" work may only be read by a few dozen people, then filed away, perhaps never to be of any use at all, except as a very important footnote in the paper that catches fire ten years from now. And the large majority of research projects take five or ten years and then fail to discover anything noteworthy. Learn to be perfectly happy with that, or do something other than research. Do not underestimate the fundamentally slow and boring nature of research. It is a long, long game, the kind of game that started before you were born and that may make only a handful of moves in your lifetime. Your field may go backwards for decades at a time. Don't worry, do good work, all will sort itself out eventually. You will spend literally decades getting it right, exploring all the important side tracks, perfecting the difficult techniques. Going to school in science, reading other people's science, is about novelty, because you discover new things as quickly as you can read. But your own science is about consistency. Think of Knuth, who started his grand project nearly fifty years ago and who is up to volume 4 of 7. Remember that, by the time you are the world expert in some fundamental and ground-breaking field, it won't seem that special to you. It's like being the world expert on your own backyard. You will know more about half of the plants in your yard than mankind was meant to know, but you'll also live in secret terror because people expect you to know about the other half as well, and you know that you really don't. And, unless you're lucky and the soil in your backyard turns out to contain the cure for stomach cancer, you will never meet anyone who particularly cares that you're the world expert on your own backyard. It will bore people almost as much as talk of PHP applications bores people. [1] Except at the annual convention of backyard fetishists. There's a couple hundred of you in the world. Those conventions are the highlight of your professional year. Read the life story of Gregor Mendel. That's you. Now, by all accounts Gregor Mendel had a pretty good life, puttering around in the pea patch, but he was out of biology, and dead, before people figured out he was on to something. That's fundamental research for you. Don't go into research because you want to be a superstar. Go into it because you like puttering around with peas and hanging out with the other smart gardeners. Start writing a research grant today, even if the first draft sucks, even if it takes you months to read the existing literature and figure out something new and interesting to propose. I used to think it was torture for universities like MIT to force first-year grad students to pick an adviser at the time of admission and propose their own research. Now I'm not so sure. Practice grant-writing now, because that's really what your future in research is about. If you can't sell your line of research to the customer in advance, you don't want to be a researcher. Read A Ph.D. is Not Enough, read Hamming's You and Your Research, and good luck to you! Grad school in science or engineering may or may not be a mistake in any particular case, but at least it's one of the most survivable mistakes you'll ever make. Oh, that's right, I almost forgot: For god's sake, survive. Be alert for signs of depression. First-year grad school is overwhelming, and actually getting out of grad school can be even harder. Hardest thing I ever did. --- [1] There is at least one exception to this rule: You can take up cancer research. The good news: People will fall over themselves to thank you for heroically working on cancer, even if all you really do is change the light bulbs in the oncology department elevator. It will be only slightly surreal. The bad news: If you actually talk about cancer, which is an absolutely fascinating subject, civilians will always be grossed out, at least subliminally. Often, they will be utterly terrified. You see, the word cancer will never again mean the same thing to you as it does to everyone else.
m0th87 15y ago
It's sad when academia is demoted to a "hobby." For me at least, money is less important than having discretion to work on novel projects. Also, I never called anyone arrogant, but rather the article itself. Big difference. I don't know Patrick personally, so I wouldn't label him as such.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  money is less important than having discretion to work on novel projects Sure. Like I said: talk to me in ten years. Maybe you'll still believe that academia gives you freedom to work on whatever you like. All my academic friends do. They are devoted and talented enough that they can soar blithely above the fact that: A) In academia, you work where the research grants are. You are free to start a research project in an underfunded corner of academia to the precise extent that you are free to run your laboratory without any income; B) You will spend the majority of your time writing those research grants. C) Because your grant proposals can be anonymously torpedoed by any one of your colleagues with sufficient clout, you will actually spend a lot of time with your finger in the wind, carefully adjusting what you're working on to stay in tune with the zeitgeist. None of the above feels much like freedom to me. Your own mileage may vary, of course. Maybe you're in CS and you can run your lab on a relative pittance. Maybe you'll meet a rich benefactor who loves to fund whatever you want to do. Maybe you can hold down a day job until your peers give you funding for your novel project, like my former field's big hero Judah Folkman did: His proposals to study antiangiogenesis went nowhere for something like fifteen years, so he just kept his day job as Director of Surgical Research at Children's Hospital Boston and kept trying. What can I say? Clearly my advice would have been useless to Folkman. Patrick and I are trying to advise the median programmer, not the fourth standard deviation.
  - ashr 15y ago
    Agree with m0th87. Right after my undergrad, I worked in the industry for 5 years and then went to Grad school. Since completing the grad school it has been 10 more years in the industry. My industry experience has been great so far and I love what I do. I consider my Grad school experience as an enlightening and enjoyable period of my life. Not everyone has a bad grad school experience. No need to beat down the academic experience. A lot of people gain from it. A career in academia is not the same as being a student. It seems to me that both are being looked down upon here.
bfrs 15y ago
... And am, gosh, approximately ten years behind my peers career-wise. Oh, those expensive hobbies! That is the hardest part to stomach. I've also wasted the better part of a decade, pursuing what seems to now be "pie in the sky". Guys who got GPAs way behind me, are now way ahead of me.
impendia 15y ago
I worked at a startup for 2 1/2 years, quit, went to grad school in math, did a postdoc, and am now a professor. For me it was a wonderful choice. I didn't like the startup work for precisely the reasons patio sort of hints at. Our business was primarily about making money, and we had to focus on what customers actually wanted rather than what (I thought) would be most interesting, most challenging, or most elegant. Nothing wrong with that, but going to work was a drag in the morning. Now there are downsides to academia -- committees, teaching freshmen who don't want to learn, and yes I have to write grant proposals -- but the bottom line is that all of my research (and most of my teaching) gives me a deep sense of satisfaction. What I am learning and teaching, mathematics, is inherently perfect -- even if our understanding of it isn't. I could not say the same of the half-baked APIs I was writing wrappers to as a professional programmer. Now about opportunity costs... I don't follow you here. I am making about $72,000, which is about half what I could be making in the private sector. But so what? I value my time way more than I value my money, and I want to spend 9-5 everyday doing something I personally care about. And I don't place any value on luxury, which means that $70k is easily enough for me. And, yes, I have plenty of time to spend with my hobbies, my friends, etc. There are a lot of people who derive intense satisfaction of providing products that people in the business world need and are happy to pay money for. I have nothing to take away from them. But personally, I am a perfectionist and an idealist, and the opportunity to work in the field of "pure knowledge" is one I am immensely grateful for. Academia has its disadvantages, but for many, it is incredible. At any rate it is for me.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  I'm glad to hear it's great for you. Being a tenured professor in a field with low overhead is great. However: The median undergraduate won't get to be a prof. The median grad student won't get to be a prof, however much they might wish to. In physics the median postdoc won't make it to prof. Too many postdocs. Not enough new profs. I went to a top grad school and made a bunch of friends. Of all my Ph.D.-holding friends I know of exactly one tenured professor. He recently graduated his first Ph.D. student, who promptly got a junior faculty position. He jokes that his work is done: All of his future grad students will be aimed at positions that don't exist yet. May never exist. I'm aware that being a successful prof seems like a fun job, just as I'm aware that being Lady Gaga is a silly and remunerative job. But when I advise anonymous people on the internet I try to advise the median person, and the median person ain't going to get tenure, just as the median musician isn't going to be Lady Gaga. Or is it different in your field? The physicists used to dream of easier advancement in math or CS, but the grass is always greener. Congratulations on being a winner, by the way. Have fun, and help your students have fun!

_delirium 15y ago

The main arrogance, I think, is his claim that journals are just blog posts with more elitism, combined with a strange sort of anger towards academia (which doesn't seem to be based on knowledge of how academia works; it's not much of an ivory-tower fairy land, but really quite industry-like, with professors as managers in charge of running moderate-sized organizations, which they need to do PR, mentorship, and management for, along with generating revenue streams to keep the lab provisioned and grad students / postdocs paid). As for journals, I like blogging, and hope to see academic publishing move towards a more online, networked open model, but I simply don't think we're anywhere near that. A typical blog post and a typical journal article are miles apart, today, and very few novel scientific results are produced in blog posts. So if your goal is to advance science, you're probably going to be part of academic culture in one way or another, and probably going to publish your results in conferences or journals. That's also possible to do outside academia or an industrial research lab, but relatively few people outside those kinds of settings actually manage to get the time to do so, since their local incentives don't reward it. In some cases they actively hinder it; I've been working with some game-industry people who hope to publish some of their AI techniques in venues like (http://www.aiide.org/aiide11/ http://www.aiide.org/aiide11/), but publishing is often vetoed by their management.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
All sorts of stuff in there. Patrick stated that you can submit journal articles without being employed by a university or think tank. This is true. He also stated that, while it is perhaps thrilling to get a journal article published to an audience of hundreds, it is perhaps nearly as thrilling, plus one hell of a lot less work, to write essays on HN for an audience of tens of thousands. This is also true. Don't conflate the two statements. Scientific papers and blog posts are not the same thing, I don't think Patrick is claiming they are, and I'm actually quite doubtful that they'll ever be the same thing. (Anonymous peer review is important, blogs don't support it, and the online systems that do support it don't look much like blogs, they look like online scientific journals.) Now, on to other good stuff: academia... [is] really quite industry-like Indeed, it is very much like an industry. One with a tiny handful of customers, one of which is usually a major government. Often the government is the only customer. The difference between working for, say, a major military contractor, or a major pharmaceutical company, and working for a university is getting smaller every day. It's nice work so long as your customer is buying. Once your only customer stops buying, however, finding another one can be a real pain. Meanwhile, it's true that industry doesn't generally give a hoot about publishing new discoveries, often preferring to keep things secret. This is too bad. However, before we conclude that the only alternative is to become a professor, let me suggest that one could also look for a job where you can sell solutions to customers and keep control of your own IP, publishing it as you will. If you want to be told many stories about how this can work, go to an open source software conference.
- _delirium 15y ago
  let me suggest that one could also look for a job where you can sell solutions to customers and keep control of your own IP, publishing it as you will. If you want to be told many stories about how this can work, go to an open source software conference. I believe this is possible, but if your goal is to do novel scientific research and publish the results, it's exceptionally uncommon. I rely on all sorts of statistical and machine-learning techniques developed by other people, for example. It's relatively common to set up shop as an independent data-mining consultant, and you can fairly easily pay the bills that way. So you might think that they've produced some of the results I rely on. But the way the economics work out, independent consultants rarely spend much time on basic research. The actual techniques and advances, as a result, come almost exclusively from researchers in academia and industrial research labs. In fact, I can't actually think of any influential advances in machine learning from the past few decades developed by independent researchers. Heck, looking through the R packages I use, even the software seems to come mainly from a mixture of universities and places like Rand (biggest surprise in this mini-inventory: lots of stuff from Merck, who I wouldn't have expected to be open-source-friendly). Nonetheless, that's actually my medium-term goal, so I hope you're right. ;-)

alecbenzer 15y ago

I'm still an undergrad so it'd be completely logical to just ignore my opinion, but..... you went from doing research to supporting PHP apps? Did you initially want to go into more researchy things and then decide "this is boring, I want to just support PHP apps instead", or did you go into research knowing you'd eventually want to do something like supporting PHP apps? I'm unsure about my own career but going to grad school and doing research (potentially at a company, after I graduate) is definitely something I'm seriously considering, primarily because I feel like (perhaps naively, I don't know) I want to be doing more interesting, "fundamental/ground-breaking" work in cs, and not just managing PHP apps for some company, or something along those lines. I don't see much personal value/fulfillment in that.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
Did you initially want to go into more researchy things and then decide "this is boring, I want to just support PHP apps instead"? Yeah, stripped of all the romance and intrigue, that's basically it. Things I would tell someone in your position: Don't underestimate the wonderful things that money can do for your life. Don't underestimate the joy of being given money by grateful customers because you have made them incredibly happy in real time by doing something that's completely trivial for you, like running EXPLAIN on a SQL query from the slow log and then doing an OPTIMIZE TABLE and a CREATE INDEX and refactoring a simple loop to use a hash properly. Know this: Even "fundamental" and "ground-breaking" work may only be read by a few dozen people, then filed away, perhaps never to be of any use at all, except as a very important footnote in the paper that catches fire ten years from now. And the large majority of research projects take five or ten years and then fail to discover anything noteworthy. Learn to be perfectly happy with that, or do something other than research. Do not underestimate the fundamentally slow and boring nature of research. It is a long, long game, the kind of game that started before you were born and that may make only a handful of moves in your lifetime. Your field may go backwards for decades at a time. Don't worry, do good work, all will sort itself out eventually. You will spend literally decades getting it right, exploring all the important side tracks, perfecting the difficult techniques. Going to school in science, reading other people's science, is about novelty, because you discover new things as quickly as you can read. But your own science is about consistency. Think of Knuth, who started his grand project nearly fifty years ago and who is up to volume 4 of 7. Remember that, by the time you are the world expert in some fundamental and ground-breaking field, it won't seem that special to you. It's like being the world expert on your own backyard. You will know more about half of the plants in your yard than mankind was meant to know, but you'll also live in secret terror because people expect you to know about the other half as well, and you know that you really don't. And, unless you're lucky and the soil in your backyard turns out to contain the cure for stomach cancer, you will never meet anyone who particularly cares that you're the world expert on your own backyard. It will bore people almost as much as talk of PHP applications bores people. [1] Except at the annual convention of backyard fetishists. There's a couple hundred of you in the world. Those conventions are the highlight of your professional year. Read the life story of Gregor Mendel. That's you. Now, by all accounts Gregor Mendel had a pretty good life, puttering around in the pea patch, but he was out of biology, and dead, before people figured out he was on to something. That's fundamental research for you. Don't go into research because you want to be a superstar. Go into it because you like puttering around with peas and hanging out with the other smart gardeners. Start writing a research grant today, even if the first draft sucks, even if it takes you months to read the existing literature and figure out something new and interesting to propose. I used to think it was torture for universities like MIT to force first-year grad students to pick an adviser at the time of admission and propose their own research. Now I'm not so sure. Practice grant-writing now, because that's really what your future in research is about. If you can't sell your line of research to the customer in advance, you don't want to be a researcher. Read A Ph.D. is Not Enough, read Hamming's You and Your Research, and good luck to you! Grad school in science or engineering may or may not be a mistake in any particular case, but at least it's one of the most survivable mistakes you'll ever make. Oh, that's right, I almost forgot: For god's sake, survive. Be alert for signs of depression. First-year grad school is overwhelming, and actually getting out of grad school can be even harder. Hardest thing I ever did. --- [1] There is at least one exception to this rule: You can take up cancer research. The good news: People will fall over themselves to thank you for heroically working on cancer, even if all you really do is change the light bulbs in the oncology department elevator. It will be only slightly surreal. The bad news: If you actually talk about cancer, which is an absolutely fascinating subject, civilians will always be grossed out, at least subliminally. Often, they will be utterly terrified. You see, the word cancer will never again mean the same thing to you as it does to everyone else.

m0th87 15y ago

It's sad when academia is demoted to a "hobby." For me at least, money is less important than having discretion to work on novel projects. Also, I never called anyone arrogant, but rather the article itself. Big difference. I don't know Patrick personally, so I wouldn't label him as such.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
money is less important than having discretion to work on novel projects Sure. Like I said: talk to me in ten years. Maybe you'll still believe that academia gives you freedom to work on whatever you like. All my academic friends do. They are devoted and talented enough that they can soar blithely above the fact that: A) In academia, you work where the research grants are. You are free to start a research project in an underfunded corner of academia to the precise extent that you are free to run your laboratory without any income; B) You will spend the majority of your time writing those research grants. C) Because your grant proposals can be anonymously torpedoed by any one of your colleagues with sufficient clout, you will actually spend a lot of time with your finger in the wind, carefully adjusting what you're working on to stay in tune with the zeitgeist. None of the above feels much like freedom to me. Your own mileage may vary, of course. Maybe you're in CS and you can run your lab on a relative pittance. Maybe you'll meet a rich benefactor who loves to fund whatever you want to do. Maybe you can hold down a day job until your peers give you funding for your novel project, like my former field's big hero Judah Folkman did: His proposals to study antiangiogenesis went nowhere for something like fifteen years, so he just kept his day job as Director of Surgical Research at Children's Hospital Boston and kept trying. What can I say? Clearly my advice would have been useless to Folkman. Patrick and I are trying to advise the median programmer, not the fourth standard deviation.
- ashr 15y ago
  Agree with m0th87. Right after my undergrad, I worked in the industry for 5 years and then went to Grad school. Since completing the grad school it has been 10 more years in the industry. My industry experience has been great so far and I love what I do. I consider my Grad school experience as an enlightening and enjoyable period of my life. Not everyone has a bad grad school experience. No need to beat down the academic experience. A lot of people gain from it. A career in academia is not the same as being a student. It seems to me that both are being looked down upon here.

bfrs 15y ago

... And am, gosh, approximately ten years behind my peers career-wise. Oh, those expensive hobbies! That is the hardest part to stomach. I've also wasted the better part of a decade, pursuing what seems to now be "pie in the sky". Guys who got GPAs way behind me, are now way ahead of me.

impendia 15y ago

I worked at a startup for 2 1/2 years, quit, went to grad school in math, did a postdoc, and am now a professor. For me it was a wonderful choice. I didn't like the startup work for precisely the reasons patio sort of hints at. Our business was primarily about making money, and we had to focus on what customers actually wanted rather than what (I thought) would be most interesting, most challenging, or most elegant. Nothing wrong with that, but going to work was a drag in the morning. Now there are downsides to academia -- committees, teaching freshmen who don't want to learn, and yes I have to write grant proposals -- but the bottom line is that all of my research (and most of my teaching) gives me a deep sense of satisfaction. What I am learning and teaching, mathematics, is inherently perfect -- even if our understanding of it isn't. I could not say the same of the half-baked APIs I was writing wrappers to as a professional programmer. Now about opportunity costs... I don't follow you here. I am making about $72,000, which is about half what I could be making in the private sector. But so what? I value my time way more than I value my money, and I want to spend 9-5 everyday doing something I personally care about. And I don't place any value on luxury, which means that $70k is easily enough for me. And, yes, I have plenty of time to spend with my hobbies, my friends, etc. There are a lot of people who derive intense satisfaction of providing products that people in the business world need and are happy to pay money for. I have nothing to take away from them. But personally, I am a perfectionist and an idealist, and the opportunity to work in the field of "pure knowledge" is one I am immensely grateful for. Academia has its disadvantages, but for many, it is incredible. At any rate it is for me.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
I'm glad to hear it's great for you. Being a tenured professor in a field with low overhead is great. However: The median undergraduate won't get to be a prof. The median grad student won't get to be a prof, however much they might wish to. In physics the median postdoc won't make it to prof. Too many postdocs. Not enough new profs. I went to a top grad school and made a bunch of friends. Of all my Ph.D.-holding friends I know of exactly one tenured professor. He recently graduated his first Ph.D. student, who promptly got a junior faculty position. He jokes that his work is done: All of his future grad students will be aimed at positions that don't exist yet. May never exist. I'm aware that being a successful prof seems like a fun job, just as I'm aware that being Lady Gaga is a silly and remunerative job. But when I advise anonymous people on the internet I try to advise the median person, and the median person ain't going to get tenure, just as the median musician isn't going to be Lady Gaga. Or is it different in your field? The physicists used to dream of easier advancement in math or CS, but the grass is always greener. Congratulations on being a winner, by the way. Have fun, and help your students have fun!