20 ms·

Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles, with hundreds if not thousands of ap

Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles, with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role? Moreso, post doc'ing for the wrong professor can ruin your career, why risk that either? If the pay isn't good, the culture and work should be. In academia, that's almost never true. I couldn't support my family, nor ironically pay my families student loan payments as a post-doc, the decision was an easy one to make... But if I were really doing it for the love, the love isn't there. You might think "oh here's an industry person who doesn't like academia", wrong. I loved research, writing papers, teaching people stuff, forming collaborations, etc. Just can't make it survivable financially or psychologically.

jjoonathan 4y ago
"There's a shortage of Lamborghinis!" "Oh? At which price point?" "At the $4000 price point! It's a travesty!"
- plaguepilled 4y ago
  That is a perverse misreading of the original comment. Calling a livable wage and fair working conditions a Lamborghini is not applicable.
  - TheTacoMerchant 4y ago
    I think the comment was comparing good post-doc researchers to Lamborghinis. Makes sense as the academic are not offering enough ($4000) for it to make sense.
  - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    In this metaphor, the postdoc is the Lamborghini, the speaker is the employer bemoaning the difficulty of acquiring a postdoc/Lamborghini for an unreasonable price point, and the $4000 is the unreasonable price point.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Good CS researches are in some sense the Lamborghinis of developers.
- Spivak 4y ago
  There's some nuance here because the reason this logic works is that labor is special (to me at least) because measures to forcibly reduce the cost of labor increase human suffering. But for basically every other good prices being driven well beyond the norm (during normalish market conditions) is basically the definition of a shortage. It doesn't really matter if it's a "luxary" good or not (since that category is ill-defined anyway grumble grumble tampons). If the price of milk shot up from $2/gal to $20/gal that's a shortage.
  - bsder 4y ago
    > If the price of milk shot up from $2/gal to $20/gal that's a shortage. Erm, exactly? If there were a real shortage, salaries would be going up. The fact that salaries aren't going up to counteract that "shortage" tells me that there really isn't one.
OccamsRazr 4y ago
yup. deeply regret my time as a postdoc. especially the last few years in the pandemic have been the absolute worst work experience in terms of culture and job satisfaction. it's killed the passion for research i had at the start. the worst part is that i think this experience has completely tanked my confidence. now id take a jr python dev job in a second.
throwawayarnty 4y ago
Postdocs in Europe are pretty comfortable and labs often have more stable/core funding. Work can be pretty good postdocing in some labs in Europe. But the end of the road is still that after the postdoc you’re expected to either be a rockstar or a nobody. So anxiety is always there.
- Qem 4y ago
  I think the core problem is lack of a intermediate default path, besides rockstar or nobody. In some places being a high school teacher was a reasonable, and even quite prestigious intermediate path. Some researchers even did significant contributions to science while in such roles, like Hermann Grassmann. But today being a teacher is a ugly duckling between professions that require higher education, overworked and with worse pay nearly everywhere. In some places they even have to worry about shootouts at work.
tiahura 4y ago
Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc Access to coeds.
enriquto 4y ago
> a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role Where do you get these numbers from? This is not at all like that in Europe. A postdoc gets (say, in France) 30k per year, doing a calm, interesting job and paid travel to a couple of conferences per year, with almost total freedom to choose their daily schedule. This is not a high salary, but it is certainly livable and quite above the median of the country. A 150k salary is nearly out of reach for even quite senior developers, and nonsensical for "junior python developer roles".
- WesleyLivesay 4y ago
  I think this is very much a uniquely American article and comment. I believe in many other nations the situation is different on both sides. Postdocs are treated different and get more pay, junior developers get paid less.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    I agree with you. I don't know why but the most disfunctional labs I know about are all in the US (Prof putting meetings on sat morning so everyone comes in to work on weekends...), although I know of some pretty bad places in Switzerland as well. You're also correct postdoc salaries higher in Europe (and developer ones are lower). However, there is definitely a problem finding postdocs also here. I should say that this seems to be not just academia, all my industry colleagues are desperate for applicants.
    - derbOac 4y ago
      The economics of higher education are different in the US and elsewhere, especially Europe. The culture is as well in my experience.
- draw_down 4y ago
- zenlf 4y ago
jboggan 4y ago
Absolutely true. I saw this play out in my lab where we had 1-2 PhD students (including myself) and about 12-16 rotating postdocs. They worked insane hours for very little pay, no benefits, and produced 95% of the output of the lab. Our professor was definitely the "wrong" kind of professor, as about 50% of them left academia entirely and not by choice after being wrung dry of all productive output and then discarded. The professor also only hired visa applicants to have extra leverage over them. I know that isn't the case everywhere in American universities, but it was common enough that no one cared or thought it was extraordinary.
- hervature 4y ago
  > The professor also only hired visa applicants to have extra leverage over them. For any postdoc that thinks the university has leverage for this reason, if you are able to get a H1B, you can switch employers easily. You are not stuck at whichever company sponsored you.
  - junar 4y ago
    Is that a realistic scenario? * My understanding is that universities prefer J-1 visas in almost all cases [1][2], and such visas are not portable. * H-1B is more flexible than J-1, but still not as flexible compared to a green card. In particular, the new employer has to fill out a new application, pay the fees, etc. Also, universities are exempt from the H-1B cap, but other employers may not be. [1] https://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/ucb_departments/h-1b/policies https://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/ucb_departments/h-1... [2] https://postdocs.stanford.edu/postdoc-admins/how-quick-links/request-visas-postdoctoral-scholars https://postdocs.stanford.edu/postdoc-admins/how-quick-links...
  - bananaquant 4y ago
    False. H1B visas given to work for a university are "cap exempt." They allow to work for universities and other nonprofits only. H1B visas to work for a for-profit company can only be obtained through a lottery.
    - 4y ago
borroka 4y ago
Very understandable. I worked as a post doc for 8 years, with a paltry salary, I must say I had excellent advisors, so the experience was professionally enjoyable and I had the opportunity to sharpen my skills, travel the world for work, and have fun in general. But in spite of an excellent CV, with the caveat that I had no affiliations with top schools and was not part of any in-group--I did not know how important both would be for an academic career, I though my many well-cited publications and clear and long-term research plans would have been enough. Over the years, I applied for at least 70 tenure-track positions for which I felt I had a good chance of making at least the shortlist of 20 viable candidates. I was called for just one preliminary phone interview. I started applying for industrial positions in Machine Learning and, after receiving a few offers, took a job that paid 5 times my last postdoc salary (my last contract was 6 months, so it would have been 10 times). It has been a fulfilling, very well paid, and fun career so far. I always recommend that not-too-promising postdocs consider a career in the private sector early on, especially in technology or related fields. They rarely listen, think or led to believe they are different. They aren't.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  > But in spite of an excellent CV, with the caveat that I had no affiliations with top schools and was not part of any in-group--I did not know how important both would be for an academic career, I though my many well-cited publications and clear and long-term research plans would have been enough. Even those are not enough. I had all of those (great undergrad and grad school pedigree, postdoc with a novel laureate, publications...) You need to have a final boss who will go to bat for you, unfortunately the Nobel laureate was 84 and more into playing slots at the Indian casino/fucking around in the lab than he was in advocating for my career.
  - apohn 4y ago
    >You need to have a final boss who will go to bat for you, unfortunately the Nobel laureate was 84 and more into playing slots at the Indian casino/fucking around in the lab than he was in advocating for my career. This is one of the things I like about industry jobs. Your career at a company might grow or be derailed by one person, but it's just that particular company. If it's a big company, it's just that particular org. In academia a single person can derail your entire career. As you've pointed out, sometimes it's not even malice. They just aren't interested in doing what they need to support you. At one point my skip-level was a VP at a software company who loved to push people into doing things by saying "Think about your career. If you do things right you will be set for life." Outside of his tiny universe at that company, nobody even knew he existed. I burned some bridges with that person and some of his sycophants, but I just moved on to a different company with zero ramifications. It's liberating to be able to just say F-it and move on.
gautamdivgi 4y ago
I was an industry person who wanted to transition to academia. I just decided against it obviously. I liked all the aspects you pointed out above. The one thing that is missed is that most places are publishing sweatshops where the pay and work conditions are horrible. The “boss” or the PI has unlimited control and can destroy your career. The problems are also way out of the ordinary. I’d like to draw a parallel with medicine. Most researchers are doctors who interact and treat patients. In contrast - I think a lot of engineering post docs or phds may not be working on stuff the industry cares about.
- travisporter 4y ago
  Is the whole patent clerk discovering stuff in their free time still possible? I know people say do what you love etc but I’ve found something I kinda like as a day job but I’d rather be doing astronomy.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - sasaf5 4y ago
    Particularly in the case of astronomy, citizen science is important. It probably won't give you an Annus Mirabilis, but might be satisfying.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > I just decided against it obviously. Why is it obvious? There might be some groupthink on HN (and bias toward our career paths), but plenty of people go into academia. > pay and work conditions are horrible It's not like bosses and businesses in the private sector are Nirvana. You can see plenty of stories about them on HN.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    Private sector pay is much better and working conditions are also on average much better. You have professional management and HR functions and one manager can’t destroy your career. More importantly the exit options are better. The relative power imbalances lead to people being treated differently.
apohn 4y ago
>If the pay isn't good, the culture and work should be. In academia, that's almost never true When I think back to my thought process when I was applying for academic and research jobs after my PhD, there's one thing I remember that always keeps me from ever second guessing my decision to move to the private sector. At least in my field, so many people in academia and research had big egos and were a-holes. Some of them were brilliant, many of them just thought they were. It was so easy to end up in a toxic mess. You know that interviewer who makes you feel small because they knew some random minutiae that you didn't know? There are plenty of those in academia and you'll be answerable to them. I've worked for a bunch of big companies and there's less acceptance of a-holes. If nothing else, your colleagues will acknowledge they are a-holes and validate how you feel. Even if somebody is a brilliant 10X a-hole, a decent management layer will put walls around them to minimize their damage. And if you find yourself stuck working with or for an a-hole, you have more options to switch because there are more jobs.
- vecter 4y ago
  My friend who is a professor at a university aiming for tenure put it succinctly: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
  - oefrha 4y ago
    The stakes are in fact very high for the academics themselves. There’s night and day difference between getting tenure, and not.
    - apohn 4y ago
      As whymauri has illustrated, there's a ton of pettiness that goes on between tenured professors and outside of anything to do with the tenure process. It's nothing but people with big egos being a small fish in a small pond and then stomping around like toddlers to make sure everybody knows they are there. I still have memories of wanting to tell some of my tenured professors that they needed to grow up and find bigger things to cry about. I was in my 20s, they were all 40+. At least IME, the younger non-tenured professors were less likely to engage in this pettiness because they had, as you have pointed out, a lot more to lose.
simonsaysso 4y ago
Both my parents went to graduate school. One of them loved the academic setting and went through with the postdoc and then found a tenure track job, the other decided it wasn't for them. I talked to them recently and the one still teaching said they would never choose that path if they were coming out of college now. It can take 5-10 years to find a tenure track job now because professors don't retire. I've seen 90+ year olds walking around departments, and 70 year olds are common. All the low hanging fruit is gone, so projects and problems take longer and longer. Together, it means that whatever semblance of academic integrity and honor is gone. There's too much pressure to produce something big that you'll hide data or even steal it. Even collaborations don't mean you'll see your name on a paper. My partner got their research scooped by former collaborators!! And your recourse for blatant plagiarism? Nothing! No institution will fight for you because your career doesn't matter to them. There's a huge pool of postdocs they can pick from if you give up. Most of the professors still pretend that they can talk things out and share data, or blame you for not anticipating the issues. The pay is secondary for most people who made it through grad school. They generally _want_ to do research. But when the pay is less for a more toxic environment, it's a no brainer. And somehow the professors are confused why no one wants to stay...
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > All the low hanging fruit is gone, so projects and problems take longer and longer. That is survivorship bias. There are low-hanging fruit in newer fields, or fields with recent major shifts.
mr_gibbins 4y ago
I've posted on this before but I make twice as much, more, as an industry pro than in my work as a non-tenured academic. I've been offered tenure and turned it down, because if I took it, my family would starve. It needs to change. But imagine the displacement of those ivory-tower academic greybeards who will suddenly have to compete with actual professionals? They're still teaching HTML/CSS in my university, for example; cloud is largely pooh-poohed; AI and ML are barely on the curriculum, and sub-par at that; more interesting subjects, like e.g. computational neuroscience, or any software engineering that isn't Python, simply doesn't feature. They'll be out on their ear.
- bsder 4y ago
  Careful. Not every PhD is STEM. There are lots of humanities PhDs. In addition, most of my EE professors were from industry and would smoke their contemporaries. They knew their shit cold and then some.
- Calavar 4y ago
  Just my personal observations: Plain HTML/CSS is still relevant today. Not everything needs to be an SPA. I also don't understand how one would write SPAs with React/Vue/whatever other framework without first having at least some understanding of HTML and CSS. Agree with the cloud being poo-pooed. Don't agree with barely any classes in ML. Grant money in ML has been hot, which means academic hiring in ML has been hot, and a good number of those hires are teaching classes. Basically every major CS department has a broad selection of ML courses or even ML concentrations and minors. Most smaller departments seem to have at least one or two courses to choose from. I've never seen Python used to teach software engineering. Java is the classic language for that, even today. Although I suspect that we may have different definitions of software engineering.
thephyber 4y ago
Are there other postdoc countries/systems which work well, that we could use as examples?
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Who needs a PhD for a "junior python developer role". Is it really necessary. This "python developer" idea sounds like it only applies to a small slice of PhD programs, notably the ones focused solely on computers. For example, what percentage of PhDs in molecular biology choose to become "junior python developer". When someone who believes a computer performing pattern recognition equates to a child having feelings and sensations^1 can become a "senior software engineer" at Google,^2 why is a PhD needed. 1. https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte... 2. https://research.google/people/106471/ https://research.google/people/106471/ (Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20220612100903if_/https://research.google/people/106471/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220612100903if_/https://resear... )
- Retric 4y ago
  People get PHD’s because they love the subject matter and can get loans etc. But they then have a PHD that might not actually be worth anything and still need to eat. Assuming just because you have a PHD means you need to use it is a sunk cost fallacy. Starting over can be a completely rational choice.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
    Does sunk cost fallacy apply to an assumption that because one has an ability to program a computer one must use it, i.e., demand pay for time spent on programming, e.g., with the end goal of coercing people to surrender personal data and/or click on ads. Perhaps the value of a PhD is not limited to its "market value". I hope that part of the intrinsic value of a degree is an ability to think critically, unlike the "senior software engineer" example I cited, for which the "market value" is probably quite high. Sometimes markets are not rational. Myself, I do not care what any job market suggests. To me, education has value, both for the individual and for society at large. "Tech" companies are not well-known for fostering crtitical thinking ability. Most of the world is eating, and feeding families, without knowing how to program computers. It has been that way since the dawn of humankind.
dinvlad 4y ago
I would even say this goes down further - the motivation to even finish a PhD program may disappear entirely after hearing piles and piles of such stories in the first few years. The lack of sufficient funding from above combined with oversaturation of the industry with PhDs has a long-lasting and chilling effect on the entire academia, and possibly the industry itself too.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jjoonathan 4y ago

"There's a shortage of Lamborghinis!" "Oh? At which price point?" "At the $4000 price point! It's a travesty!"

plaguepilled 4y ago
That is a perverse misreading of the original comment. Calling a livable wage and fair working conditions a Lamborghini is not applicable.
- TheTacoMerchant 4y ago
  I think the comment was comparing good post-doc researchers to Lamborghinis. Makes sense as the academic are not offering enough ($4000) for it to make sense.
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  In this metaphor, the postdoc is the Lamborghini, the speaker is the employer bemoaning the difficulty of acquiring a postdoc/Lamborghini for an unreasonable price point, and the $4000 is the unreasonable price point.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Good CS researches are in some sense the Lamborghinis of developers.
Spivak 4y ago
There's some nuance here because the reason this logic works is that labor is special (to me at least) because measures to forcibly reduce the cost of labor increase human suffering. But for basically every other good prices being driven well beyond the norm (during normalish market conditions) is basically the definition of a shortage. It doesn't really matter if it's a "luxary" good or not (since that category is ill-defined anyway grumble grumble tampons). If the price of milk shot up from $2/gal to $20/gal that's a shortage.
- bsder 4y ago
  > If the price of milk shot up from $2/gal to $20/gal that's a shortage. Erm, exactly? If there were a real shortage, salaries would be going up. The fact that salaries aren't going up to counteract that "shortage" tells me that there really isn't one.

OccamsRazr 4y ago

yup. deeply regret my time as a postdoc. especially the last few years in the pandemic have been the absolute worst work experience in terms of culture and job satisfaction. it's killed the passion for research i had at the start. the worst part is that i think this experience has completely tanked my confidence. now id take a jr python dev job in a second.

throwawayarnty 4y ago

Postdocs in Europe are pretty comfortable and labs often have more stable/core funding. Work can be pretty good postdocing in some labs in Europe. But the end of the road is still that after the postdoc you’re expected to either be a rockstar or a nobody. So anxiety is always there.

Qem 4y ago
I think the core problem is lack of a intermediate default path, besides rockstar or nobody. In some places being a high school teacher was a reasonable, and even quite prestigious intermediate path. Some researchers even did significant contributions to science while in such roles, like Hermann Grassmann. But today being a teacher is a ugly duckling between professions that require higher education, overworked and with worse pay nearly everywhere. In some places they even have to worry about shootouts at work.

tiahura 4y ago

Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc Access to coeds.

enriquto 4y ago

> a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role Where do you get these numbers from? This is not at all like that in Europe. A postdoc gets (say, in France) 30k per year, doing a calm, interesting job and paid travel to a couple of conferences per year, with almost total freedom to choose their daily schedule. This is not a high salary, but it is certainly livable and quite above the median of the country. A 150k salary is nearly out of reach for even quite senior developers, and nonsensical for "junior python developer roles".

WesleyLivesay 4y ago
I think this is very much a uniquely American article and comment. I believe in many other nations the situation is different on both sides. Postdocs are treated different and get more pay, junior developers get paid less.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  I agree with you. I don't know why but the most disfunctional labs I know about are all in the US (Prof putting meetings on sat morning so everyone comes in to work on weekends...), although I know of some pretty bad places in Switzerland as well. You're also correct postdoc salaries higher in Europe (and developer ones are lower). However, there is definitely a problem finding postdocs also here. I should say that this seems to be not just academia, all my industry colleagues are desperate for applicants.
  - derbOac 4y ago
    The economics of higher education are different in the US and elsewhere, especially Europe. The culture is as well in my experience.
draw_down 4y ago
zenlf 4y ago

jboggan 4y ago

Absolutely true. I saw this play out in my lab where we had 1-2 PhD students (including myself) and about 12-16 rotating postdocs. They worked insane hours for very little pay, no benefits, and produced 95% of the output of the lab. Our professor was definitely the "wrong" kind of professor, as about 50% of them left academia entirely and not by choice after being wrung dry of all productive output and then discarded. The professor also only hired visa applicants to have extra leverage over them. I know that isn't the case everywhere in American universities, but it was common enough that no one cared or thought it was extraordinary.

hervature 4y ago
> The professor also only hired visa applicants to have extra leverage over them. For any postdoc that thinks the university has leverage for this reason, if you are able to get a H1B, you can switch employers easily. You are not stuck at whichever company sponsored you.
- junar 4y ago
  Is that a realistic scenario? * My understanding is that universities prefer J-1 visas in almost all cases [1][2], and such visas are not portable. * H-1B is more flexible than J-1, but still not as flexible compared to a green card. In particular, the new employer has to fill out a new application, pay the fees, etc. Also, universities are exempt from the H-1B cap, but other employers may not be. [1] https://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/ucb_departments/h-1b/policies https://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/ucb_departments/h-1... [2] https://postdocs.stanford.edu/postdoc-admins/how-quick-links/request-visas-postdoctoral-scholars https://postdocs.stanford.edu/postdoc-admins/how-quick-links...
- bananaquant 4y ago
  False. H1B visas given to work for a university are "cap exempt." They allow to work for universities and other nonprofits only. H1B visas to work for a for-profit company can only be obtained through a lottery.
  - 4y ago

borroka 4y ago

Very understandable. I worked as a post doc for 8 years, with a paltry salary, I must say I had excellent advisors, so the experience was professionally enjoyable and I had the opportunity to sharpen my skills, travel the world for work, and have fun in general. But in spite of an excellent CV, with the caveat that I had no affiliations with top schools and was not part of any in-group--I did not know how important both would be for an academic career, I though my many well-cited publications and clear and long-term research plans would have been enough. Over the years, I applied for at least 70 tenure-track positions for which I felt I had a good chance of making at least the shortlist of 20 viable candidates. I was called for just one preliminary phone interview. I started applying for industrial positions in Machine Learning and, after receiving a few offers, took a job that paid 5 times my last postdoc salary (my last contract was 6 months, so it would have been 10 times). It has been a fulfilling, very well paid, and fun career so far. I always recommend that not-too-promising postdocs consider a career in the private sector early on, especially in technology or related fields. They rarely listen, think or led to believe they are different. They aren't.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throwawaymaths 4y ago
> But in spite of an excellent CV, with the caveat that I had no affiliations with top schools and was not part of any in-group--I did not know how important both would be for an academic career, I though my many well-cited publications and clear and long-term research plans would have been enough. Even those are not enough. I had all of those (great undergrad and grad school pedigree, postdoc with a novel laureate, publications...) You need to have a final boss who will go to bat for you, unfortunately the Nobel laureate was 84 and more into playing slots at the Indian casino/fucking around in the lab than he was in advocating for my career.
- apohn 4y ago
  >You need to have a final boss who will go to bat for you, unfortunately the Nobel laureate was 84 and more into playing slots at the Indian casino/fucking around in the lab than he was in advocating for my career. This is one of the things I like about industry jobs. Your career at a company might grow or be derailed by one person, but it's just that particular company. If it's a big company, it's just that particular org. In academia a single person can derail your entire career. As you've pointed out, sometimes it's not even malice. They just aren't interested in doing what they need to support you. At one point my skip-level was a VP at a software company who loved to push people into doing things by saying "Think about your career. If you do things right you will be set for life." Outside of his tiny universe at that company, nobody even knew he existed. I burned some bridges with that person and some of his sycophants, but I just moved on to a different company with zero ramifications. It's liberating to be able to just say F-it and move on.

gautamdivgi 4y ago

I was an industry person who wanted to transition to academia. I just decided against it obviously. I liked all the aspects you pointed out above. The one thing that is missed is that most places are publishing sweatshops where the pay and work conditions are horrible. The “boss” or the PI has unlimited control and can destroy your career. The problems are also way out of the ordinary. I’d like to draw a parallel with medicine. Most researchers are doctors who interact and treat patients. In contrast - I think a lot of engineering post docs or phds may not be working on stuff the industry cares about.

travisporter 4y ago
Is the whole patent clerk discovering stuff in their free time still possible? I know people say do what you love etc but I’ve found something I kinda like as a day job but I’d rather be doing astronomy.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sasaf5 4y ago
  Particularly in the case of astronomy, citizen science is important. It probably won't give you an Annus Mirabilis, but might be satisfying.
wolverine876 4y ago
> I just decided against it obviously. Why is it obvious? There might be some groupthink on HN (and bias toward our career paths), but plenty of people go into academia. > pay and work conditions are horrible It's not like bosses and businesses in the private sector are Nirvana. You can see plenty of stories about them on HN.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  Private sector pay is much better and working conditions are also on average much better. You have professional management and HR functions and one manager can’t destroy your career. More importantly the exit options are better. The relative power imbalances lead to people being treated differently.

apohn 4y ago

>If the pay isn't good, the culture and work should be. In academia, that's almost never true When I think back to my thought process when I was applying for academic and research jobs after my PhD, there's one thing I remember that always keeps me from ever second guessing my decision to move to the private sector. At least in my field, so many people in academia and research had big egos and were a-holes. Some of them were brilliant, many of them just thought they were. It was so easy to end up in a toxic mess. You know that interviewer who makes you feel small because they knew some random minutiae that you didn't know? There are plenty of those in academia and you'll be answerable to them. I've worked for a bunch of big companies and there's less acceptance of a-holes. If nothing else, your colleagues will acknowledge they are a-holes and validate how you feel. Even if somebody is a brilliant 10X a-hole, a decent management layer will put walls around them to minimize their damage. And if you find yourself stuck working with or for an a-hole, you have more options to switch because there are more jobs.

vecter 4y ago
My friend who is a professor at a university aiming for tenure put it succinctly: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
- oefrha 4y ago
  The stakes are in fact very high for the academics themselves. There’s night and day difference between getting tenure, and not.
  - apohn 4y ago
    As whymauri has illustrated, there's a ton of pettiness that goes on between tenured professors and outside of anything to do with the tenure process. It's nothing but people with big egos being a small fish in a small pond and then stomping around like toddlers to make sure everybody knows they are there. I still have memories of wanting to tell some of my tenured professors that they needed to grow up and find bigger things to cry about. I was in my 20s, they were all 40+. At least IME, the younger non-tenured professors were less likely to engage in this pettiness because they had, as you have pointed out, a lot more to lose.

simonsaysso 4y ago

Both my parents went to graduate school. One of them loved the academic setting and went through with the postdoc and then found a tenure track job, the other decided it wasn't for them. I talked to them recently and the one still teaching said they would never choose that path if they were coming out of college now. It can take 5-10 years to find a tenure track job now because professors don't retire. I've seen 90+ year olds walking around departments, and 70 year olds are common. All the low hanging fruit is gone, so projects and problems take longer and longer. Together, it means that whatever semblance of academic integrity and honor is gone. There's too much pressure to produce something big that you'll hide data or even steal it. Even collaborations don't mean you'll see your name on a paper. My partner got their research scooped by former collaborators!! And your recourse for blatant plagiarism? Nothing! No institution will fight for you because your career doesn't matter to them. There's a huge pool of postdocs they can pick from if you give up. Most of the professors still pretend that they can talk things out and share data, or blame you for not anticipating the issues. The pay is secondary for most people who made it through grad school. They generally _want_ to do research. But when the pay is less for a more toxic environment, it's a no brainer. And somehow the professors are confused why no one wants to stay...

wolverine876 4y ago
> All the low hanging fruit is gone, so projects and problems take longer and longer. That is survivorship bias. There are low-hanging fruit in newer fields, or fields with recent major shifts.

mr_gibbins 4y ago

I've posted on this before but I make twice as much, more, as an industry pro than in my work as a non-tenured academic. I've been offered tenure and turned it down, because if I took it, my family would starve. It needs to change. But imagine the displacement of those ivory-tower academic greybeards who will suddenly have to compete with actual professionals? They're still teaching HTML/CSS in my university, for example; cloud is largely pooh-poohed; AI and ML are barely on the curriculum, and sub-par at that; more interesting subjects, like e.g. computational neuroscience, or any software engineering that isn't Python, simply doesn't feature. They'll be out on their ear.

bsder 4y ago
Careful. Not every PhD is STEM. There are lots of humanities PhDs. In addition, most of my EE professors were from industry and would smoke their contemporaries. They knew their shit cold and then some.
Calavar 4y ago
Just my personal observations: Plain HTML/CSS is still relevant today. Not everything needs to be an SPA. I also don't understand how one would write SPAs with React/Vue/whatever other framework without first having at least some understanding of HTML and CSS. Agree with the cloud being poo-pooed. Don't agree with barely any classes in ML. Grant money in ML has been hot, which means academic hiring in ML has been hot, and a good number of those hires are teaching classes. Basically every major CS department has a broad selection of ML courses or even ML concentrations and minors. Most smaller departments seem to have at least one or two courses to choose from. I've never seen Python used to teach software engineering. Java is the classic language for that, even today. Although I suspect that we may have different definitions of software engineering.

thephyber 4y ago

Are there other postdoc countries/systems which work well, that we could use as examples?

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

Who needs a PhD for a "junior python developer role". Is it really necessary. This "python developer" idea sounds like it only applies to a small slice of PhD programs, notably the ones focused solely on computers. For example, what percentage of PhDs in molecular biology choose to become "junior python developer". When someone who believes a computer performing pattern recognition equates to a child having feelings and sensations^1 can become a "senior software engineer" at Google,^2 why is a PhD needed. 1. https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte... 2. https://research.google/people/106471/ https://research.google/people/106471/ (Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20220612100903if_/https://research.google/people/106471/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220612100903if_/https://resear... )

Retric 4y ago
People get PHD’s because they love the subject matter and can get loans etc. But they then have a PHD that might not actually be worth anything and still need to eat. Assuming just because you have a PHD means you need to use it is a sunk cost fallacy. Starting over can be a completely rational choice.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  Does sunk cost fallacy apply to an assumption that because one has an ability to program a computer one must use it, i.e., demand pay for time spent on programming, e.g., with the end goal of coercing people to surrender personal data and/or click on ads. Perhaps the value of a PhD is not limited to its "market value". I hope that part of the intrinsic value of a degree is an ability to think critically, unlike the "senior software engineer" example I cited, for which the "market value" is probably quite high. Sometimes markets are not rational. Myself, I do not care what any job market suggests. To me, education has value, both for the individual and for society at large. "Tech" companies are not well-known for fostering crtitical thinking ability. Most of the world is eating, and feeding families, without knowing how to program computers. It has been that way since the dawn of humankind.

dinvlad 4y ago

I would even say this goes down further - the motivation to even finish a PhD program may disappear entirely after hearing piles and piles of such stories in the first few years. The lack of sufficient funding from above combined with oversaturation of the industry with PhDs has a long-lasting and chilling effect on the entire academia, and possibly the industry itself too.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]