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> 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

> 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, ...
  - InefficientRed 4y ago
    > I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ... sseagull mentioned NSF, NIH and DOE. None of those funds ethnomusicology, philosophy, or social history.
    - sseagull 4y ago
      You left out ecology (again, which wouldn't be funded by business and I would consider important for society). The NSF also gets somewhat close to the others via Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, which includes anthropology/archaeology and linguistics.
      - InefficientRed 4y ago
        I am highly suspicious of the need for post-doctoral training in philosophy, ecology, or social history and even more skeptical of the ethics of using tax payer's money to fund those positions. Ecology is a probably a field where the world would be better off if we re-appropriated post-doc funding to USFS and hired people with bs or even no degrees to do important work on the ground.
- sseagull 4y ago
  Don't get me wrong, we are mostly on the same page w.r.t. salaries and what not. > BTW, what is your university's pension plan like? Postdocs get the same pension plan/401k plan as any other faculty (postdocs are indeed research faculty). You are also an employee of the state government, with reasonably good health insurance and other benefits. It can't compare to private sector (especially tech sector), but compared to a lot of other businesses, it's fairly good. (Also a downside - lots of bureaucracy from the state legislature). EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5% match by the university. My comment about school teachers was mostly about the salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just fine on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is an anomaly. Now, again, don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of postdocs, academia is a mess, and I want it change. But I really just wanted to point out that the "simple" solutions are not "simple". They require coordinated action among many stakeholders, and lots of dealing with squishy humans and their emotions.
WkndTriathlete 4y ago
> This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. That's actually a really bad analysis and entirely misses the point. Fundamentally (in the US) too many postdocs are being funded from a fixed grant pool NIH/NSF/etc. has to offer. Too many professors think their research is so much more important than anything else they hire postdocs for peanuts. Too few postdocs have a career path because so few faculty positions are available after completing their postdoc. Yes, not all science is interesting to the private sector. But that doesn't mean that publicly-funded science has to proceed at its current rate with its unsustainable model of employing postdoctoral slaves.
- InefficientRed 4y ago
  > Too many professors think their research is so much more important than anything else they hire postdocs for peanuts. Thanks. This is my point. If you want to manage a team of PhDs, especially in STEM, figure out a research agenda that allows you to do that in a fair and reasonable way. If you want to do things that are uninteresting to anyone outside of one tiny (likely incestual) sphere of grant-committee-political-influence, then do those things with your own time. Don't drag others into it. BTW: if no one wants to fund this work then what jobs are the post-docs being trained to do?! And if post-docs aren't being trained for useful jobs then why are we taxpayers funding these ostensibly trainee positions?

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, ...
- InefficientRed 4y ago
  > I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ... sseagull mentioned NSF, NIH and DOE. None of those funds ethnomusicology, philosophy, or social history.
  - sseagull 4y ago
    You left out ecology (again, which wouldn't be funded by business and I would consider important for society). The NSF also gets somewhat close to the others via Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, which includes anthropology/archaeology and linguistics.
    - InefficientRed 4y ago
      I am highly suspicious of the need for post-doctoral training in philosophy, ecology, or social history and even more skeptical of the ethics of using tax payer's money to fund those positions. Ecology is a probably a field where the world would be better off if we re-appropriated post-doc funding to USFS and hired people with bs or even no degrees to do important work on the ground.
sseagull 4y ago
Don't get me wrong, we are mostly on the same page w.r.t. salaries and what not. > BTW, what is your university's pension plan like? Postdocs get the same pension plan/401k plan as any other faculty (postdocs are indeed research faculty). You are also an employee of the state government, with reasonably good health insurance and other benefits. It can't compare to private sector (especially tech sector), but compared to a lot of other businesses, it's fairly good. (Also a downside - lots of bureaucracy from the state legislature). EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5% match by the university. My comment about school teachers was mostly about the salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just fine on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is an anomaly. Now, again, don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of postdocs, academia is a mess, and I want it change. But I really just wanted to point out that the "simple" solutions are not "simple". They require coordinated action among many stakeholders, and lots of dealing with squishy humans and their emotions.

WkndTriathlete 4y ago

> This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. That's actually a really bad analysis and entirely misses the point. Fundamentally (in the US) too many postdocs are being funded from a fixed grant pool NIH/NSF/etc. has to offer. Too many professors think their research is so much more important than anything else they hire postdocs for peanuts. Too few postdocs have a career path because so few faculty positions are available after completing their postdoc. Yes, not all science is interesting to the private sector. But that doesn't mean that publicly-funded science has to proceed at its current rate with its unsustainable model of employing postdoctoral slaves.

InefficientRed 4y ago
> Too many professors think their research is so much more important than anything else they hire postdocs for peanuts. Thanks. This is my point. If you want to manage a team of PhDs, especially in STEM, figure out a research agenda that allows you to do that in a fair and reasonable way. If you want to do things that are uninteresting to anyone outside of one tiny (likely incestual) sphere of grant-committee-political-influence, then do those things with your own time. Don't drag others into it. BTW: if no one wants to fund this work then what jobs are the post-docs being trained to do?! And if post-docs aren't being trained for useful jobs then why are we taxpayers funding these ostensibly trainee positions?