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I hate the helplessness of this. You have agency. You also have responsibility. You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's

I hate the helplessness of this. You have agency. You also have responsibility. You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed. I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had the moral stomach requires to convince highly educated broke 30 year olds to give me hundreds of thousands of dollars in free labor. But I don't. So instead I turned down TT offers and went to industry where I spend a lot of time convincing people with the money to actually pay living wages with good benefits to people who can work on slightly different things. I don't have a lab with my name on it. I don't have an office. I will never have tenure. No on calls me Professor or even Doctor. But I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. My post-docs are paid $100k-$200k. Stop relying on broke kids to fund your dreams. Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. Or stay in academia and don't hire people to help you unless you can pay them even close to what they're worth.

cs137 4y ago
You know, I agree with 90 percent of what you're saying, but on this... > I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. ... I've got to say, you probably work for someone who is. It sounds like you're a decent human being and that's great--we need more of those--but the entire point of corporate capitalism (although this behavior exists in ostensibly noncapitalist organizations, too) is exploitation. Do you think CEOs care about whether they destroy the careers of people under them? There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there's no ethical production either, but ultimately, we have to survive.
- InefficientRed 4y ago
  > you probably work for someone who is. This is actually a very fair point, so I'm not sure why you are downvoted (perhaps the last sentence comes across as inviting trolling). But I take my responsibility for not doing so to people under me seriously.
sseagull 4y ago
> Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. I worked for a large company once that in the past had large labs for researching charge transfer and other fundamental physics. When I toured those labs, they were all empty, with broken and unused machines. I know this site focuses on computers and tech. But there is a large world of scientific disciplines out there that just aren’t useful to business. But useful to society as a whole. Lastly, postdocs typically make ~50-55kk in my neck of the woods. Underpaid, maybe depending on the field. But far from “broke”. Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions.
- InefficientRed 4y ago
  > Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. More helplessness. My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I still do the most important bits of pushing advances in my field, but there's a lot of auxiliary work that has immediate value as well. It's less fun, it's CERTAINLY more humbling, and it's a lot more labor. But it provides both short-term and long-term value. BTW: if you want to do work no one will fund, that's fine. Just at least acknowledge that your largest funding source is the massively under-paid labor of 20-35 year olds. > Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions. Your post-docs are >= 28, have graduate degrees, and have several years of research experience. Also, "teachers and many other professions" almost NEVER sign fixed term contracts that require them to move all over the country/world. BTW, what is your university's pension plan like? Many teachers have great pension plans (that actually make sense to use since they have jobs that last more than 2-3 years). If comparing to industry, what's your 401K match and stock purchase program? You can't even beat the working conditions and wages that mediocre 22 year olds can get right out of college in a famously under-compensated field. "My PhD employees would be substantially better off as secondary school teachers" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
  - kaffee 4y ago
    >> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. > My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...
katz_ 4y ago
- katz_ 4y ago
katz_ 4y ago
katz_ 4y ago
abdel_nasser 4y ago

cs137 4y ago

You know, I agree with 90 percent of what you're saying, but on this... > I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. ... I've got to say, you probably work for someone who is. It sounds like you're a decent human being and that's great--we need more of those--but the entire point of corporate capitalism (although this behavior exists in ostensibly noncapitalist organizations, too) is exploitation. Do you think CEOs care about whether they destroy the careers of people under them? There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there's no ethical production either, but ultimately, we have to survive.

InefficientRed 4y ago
> you probably work for someone who is. This is actually a very fair point, so I'm not sure why you are downvoted (perhaps the last sentence comes across as inviting trolling). But I take my responsibility for not doing so to people under me seriously.

sseagull 4y ago

> Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. I worked for a large company once that in the past had large labs for researching charge transfer and other fundamental physics. When I toured those labs, they were all empty, with broken and unused machines. I know this site focuses on computers and tech. But there is a large world of scientific disciplines out there that just aren’t useful to business. But useful to society as a whole. Lastly, postdocs typically make ~50-55kk in my neck of the woods. Underpaid, maybe depending on the field. But far from “broke”. Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions.

InefficientRed 4y ago
> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. More helplessness. My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I still do the most important bits of pushing advances in my field, but there's a lot of auxiliary work that has immediate value as well. It's less fun, it's CERTAINLY more humbling, and it's a lot more labor. But it provides both short-term and long-term value. BTW: if you want to do work no one will fund, that's fine. Just at least acknowledge that your largest funding source is the massively under-paid labor of 20-35 year olds. > Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions. Your post-docs are >= 28, have graduate degrees, and have several years of research experience. Also, "teachers and many other professions" almost NEVER sign fixed term contracts that require them to move all over the country/world. BTW, what is your university's pension plan like? Many teachers have great pension plans (that actually make sense to use since they have jobs that last more than 2-3 years). If comparing to industry, what's your 401K match and stock purchase program? You can't even beat the working conditions and wages that mediocre 22 year olds can get right out of college in a famously under-compensated field. "My PhD employees would be substantially better off as secondary school teachers" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
- kaffee 4y ago
  >> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. > My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...

katz_ 4y ago

katz_ 4y ago

katz_ 4y ago

abdel_nasser 4y ago