4 ms·

The quote from a prof upset that they only received 28 applicants in about 6 months is pretty rich to read, as someone who is in currently a PhD student. They s

The quote from a prof upset that they only received 28 applicants in about 6 months is pretty rich to read, as someone who is in currently a PhD student. They should be delighted so many people want a job with indefinite length, uncertain prospects, and very little pay. I just recently got a post doc offer from someone, which I will almost certainly turn down because I know the reality: academia sucks, science is great. For years, people have put up with the former to enjoy the latter, but I think we are hitting a threshold.

april_22 4y ago
I think what really changed is that people who have a PhD nowadays certainly also have great coding skills and the latter is so much more attractive job wise
- Master_Odin 4y ago
  Fair number of the CS PhD students I knew while I was there were not good coders, with professors being even worse at it. There's no incentive to write good code, just that it "functions".
  - ev1 4y ago
    I would always dread new teammates that were 100% academia with no industry experience or real project experience. More often than not if you leave them alone for a bit you come back to functions with several dozen one character parameters or something equally odd. Really uncertain why this is, but this has consistently happened multiple times and it's always this type of situation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
derbOac 4y ago
Yes, the whole article is sort of tone deaf: it's like they see a problem but not the actual problem. It's very typical of the whole thing: complaints without actually doing the painful work of restructuring things, because that would cause too much inconvenience for the people who have benefited. So we have these discussions about pay and supply and demand, which is part of it, but not the nature of the positions themselves, the ponzi funding scheme underlying it, the status hierarchies, none of it. No one wants to cut or line-item justify indirect funds, or turn those postdocs into faculty positions. The last place I was at this issue came up about being able to have grad students without funding: the argument was if you can't fund them off of grants you shouldn't have them. On the surface, this sounds great, pretty reasonable, until you realize that now you're incentivizing taking grad students to support grants, rather than as an end in itself. Basically you're incentivizing a permanent student culture, because the expected lifecycle of the researcher is maybe 30 years, whereas the student is expected to only be there maybe 5 in theory. It's so hard for me to wrap my head around it it: the best analogy maybe really is a ponzi scheme. The desired product is the input. It's so broken in so many ways. It's like no one is actually paying for research, they're paying for attracting students, attracting the money to pay for the research, the trappings of research, etc. That actual useful research gets done is a convenient side effect.

april_22 4y ago

I think what really changed is that people who have a PhD nowadays certainly also have great coding skills and the latter is so much more attractive job wise

Master_Odin 4y ago
Fair number of the CS PhD students I knew while I was there were not good coders, with professors being even worse at it. There's no incentive to write good code, just that it "functions".
- ev1 4y ago
  I would always dread new teammates that were 100% academia with no industry experience or real project experience. More often than not if you leave them alone for a bit you come back to functions with several dozen one character parameters or something equally odd. Really uncertain why this is, but this has consistently happened multiple times and it's always this type of situation.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

derbOac 4y ago

Yes, the whole article is sort of tone deaf: it's like they see a problem but not the actual problem. It's very typical of the whole thing: complaints without actually doing the painful work of restructuring things, because that would cause too much inconvenience for the people who have benefited. So we have these discussions about pay and supply and demand, which is part of it, but not the nature of the positions themselves, the ponzi funding scheme underlying it, the status hierarchies, none of it. No one wants to cut or line-item justify indirect funds, or turn those postdocs into faculty positions. The last place I was at this issue came up about being able to have grad students without funding: the argument was if you can't fund them off of grants you shouldn't have them. On the surface, this sounds great, pretty reasonable, until you realize that now you're incentivizing taking grad students to support grants, rather than as an end in itself. Basically you're incentivizing a permanent student culture, because the expected lifecycle of the researcher is maybe 30 years, whereas the student is expected to only be there maybe 5 in theory. It's so hard for me to wrap my head around it it: the best analogy maybe really is a ponzi scheme. The desired product is the input. It's so broken in so many ways. It's like no one is actually paying for research, they're paying for attracting students, attracting the money to pay for the research, the trappings of research, etc. That actual useful research gets done is a convenient side effect.