6 ms·

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their energy was going into cultivating relationships that would aid their career trajectories, rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research. They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn't hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time. The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there's a pool of funding available for something? That's not worth the bother. In that case it's just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that? Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives, and maybe some politicians with special interests, and if they're not interested in supporting research into your field of interest, you might as well forget about it, unless you can finance a million-dollar-a-year research lab on your own. I suppose it's possible, but not very common. Regardless, not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about, unfortunately. Overwork and risking burnout might be part of the price you have to pay to get there, at least in our rather dystopian modern American society. (Notably, the author of this piece relocated from UK to Norway...)

Ultimatt 4y ago
Plenty of research doesn't need millions to do. If you're a mathematician or almost any kind of theoretician or computational scientist you need a laptop maybe the odd bit of cloud time on a bigger blob of compute, in the case of mathematicians you might need chalk. The millions you do need to spend though are on private per-paper viewing of literature, thats the real mind killer. If universities just had alumni access to literature they would rapidly just become subscription library services for theory people! I can work like 3 months a year and finance literally the rest of my time on theoretical work. But only if I don't have to pay £60 to read enough of a paper to realise its a worthless piece of crap.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Ultimatt 4y ago
  I should add those 3 months would also pay me about 2x better than a postdoc working fulltime in a university. Thats the level of pay disparity with industry, and the level of pointlessness of a university as an institution if you dont need a wet lab to work. A genuinely good business idea would be a virtual institution with library services.
- DonaldPShimoda 4y ago
  You're forgetting the cost of funding students, but also there are costs in securing prestige for your institution. The university benefits when your grants are large and plentiful, so they encourage research faculty to pursue those projects which earn more money, even if it's not exactly what they care most about.
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    > You're forgetting the cost of funding students, but also there are costs in securing prestige for your institution. But why does he need students to do his own research? I made a similar calculation and went into industry. I am now at the point where I could self-fund an indefinite post-doc (with benefits) at the risk-free rate of return. By the time I would be going up for Full Professor, I'll be able to self-fund an equivalent salary -- again, at the risk-free rate. And I don't have to worry about the inevitable layoffs coming to higher-ed, tenure be damned. And I can do my Science from a ski slope or a beach instead of from some random rural town. If you want to do Science, just spend 1-2 decades in industry and save your money. If you want to lead "The $LASTNAME Lab" at "Famous University" where you have "X PhD students" and "Y post-docs", then you're going to pay for the silly prestige game by giving up actually doing Science for the rest of your life. The situation may be different for people who need wet labs, but in Math and CS here's just no reason to bust your ass to get tenure. Just bust your ass in industry instead. You'll be working for The Man instead of doing what you really want either way, I promise, and honestly industry often has more interesting problems than whatever happens to be of interest to whichever person was willing to live in an expensive boring place on a small salary while shoving their ideas into the Heilmeier Catechism.
fallingknife 4y ago
Yeah, you have to either do work that other people are willing to pay you for or pay to have it done yourself. I'm not seeing a problem here.
bumby 4y ago
>rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research. We probably should first acknowledge that the vast majority of research is incremental and not groundbreaking. >not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about Depending on your interest, this may be a case of expectation management. We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case. If it's wildly interesting, chances are lots of people are also interested and the competition drives down wages. If it's truly groundbreaking, there may not be a viable market for it so it likewise wouldn't have high wages (as wages tend to be commensurate with the differential contribution to the economy). If you are lucky to work in a field you love and are such an outlier technically that you can command high wages, you must by definition be a low probability case. So most people are left trying to find the balance of making money and doing something they are truly passionate about unless you happen to be passionate about something valuable that most people dislike.
- plonk 4y ago
  > We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case. But you’re not eating it, salaries suck in STEM academia compared to private jobs. If you don’t have freedom either, what’s the point?
  - bumby 4y ago
    It’s a colloquialism about trade-offs and not meant to be taken so literally. Again, autonomy is another aspect that you may need to consider as part of that tradeoff. If you want to maximize autonomy, great, but it’s unlikely you’ll also maximize pay (as a general rule). Most jobs are like this, I don’t see why academia should be any different. I also don’t think it’s coincidence that pay in academia has stagnated as the number of PhDs ballon.
    - sideshowb 4y ago
      > If you want to maximize autonomy, great, but it’s unlikely you’ll also maximize pay And that's the literal trade off gp was referring to
_yb2s 4y ago
I'll second this, I've also seen a lot of people that like to brag about, e.g. working 80 hour weeks, but usually don't actually do much work. At any given moment they're likely talking to someone, or playing on a phone, etc. As a single dad of a young child, and an academic, this is just impossible for me. I have a few precious hours to work, and need to get the most out of them. I end up being pretty socially isolated at work. I don't agree with the "you might as well forget about it" thing you wrote. Funding in academia is about explaining why what you want to do actually furthers the agenda of the funding agency. If you can master this skill, you can fund almost any work from almost any funding source. It might sound dishonest, but I am convinced it's actually not- the phenomena in our natural world are all connected, and we don't understand them that well. To solve almost any random problem deeply requires work that translates to fundamental advances in almost everything else. Norbert Wiener explains this well in his book Cybernetics, where he talks about how work on missile guiding technology led to his concept of cybernetics, which was a revolutionary way to understand both engineering and biology.
cableshaft 4y ago
This sounds pretty similar to non-academic corporate life. People who show up to hang out, get mad at people who don't do the same, you're encouraged to work extra hours to get ahead, only able to work on things you get funding for (i.e. what clients will pay you for or projects that those above you will greenlight), being controlled by corporate executives, etc. But you probably get paid more in the corporate world, at least.
psychomugs 4y ago
> The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there's a pool of funding available for something? That's not worth the bother. In that case it's just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that? This is how I tried to justified my poor work-life balance from working on things I am deeply and personally interested in. If we treated grad school like a 9-5 job like all of the internal forces told us to, there's little incentive to stay in a worse version of an industry position that actually has work-life balance and magnitudes-higher compensation.
trieste92 4y ago
> They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn't hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time. did they piss you off or something?
Upvoter33 4y ago
"Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives...." This is not really true in the US. For example, NSF review processes are basically determined by peers, panels of PhDs who are experts in the field. While their expertise may vary, they generally do a reasonable and fair and scientifically meaningful review. To claim this is all "controlled by government burearcrats" is lazy and mostly wrong.
- filoleg 4y ago
  > This is not really true in the US. Maybe not in the most technical sense, but what funds most of the research projects? Government (with NIH being the largest funder of biomedical research in the world), private companies, and non-profits[0]. US government dumps absolutely enormous amounts of money on research funding. The difference in numbers can be pretty stark. I don't have data on hand for the exact breakdown for all research funding in general, but I have numbers for health research specifically (and I expect the trend overall to stay the same regarding research funding overall). Top 3 funders in the world are NIH ($26.1bn), European Commission ($3.7bn), and UK Medical Research Council ($1.3bn). For comparison, the largest non-profit contribution comes from Welcome Trust and is sitting only at $909.1mil, with WHO coming in third at $135mil. Here is a published paper[1] from 2016 containing all these numbers. 0. https://undsci.berkeley.edu/who-pays-for-science/ https://undsci.berkeley.edu/who-pays-for-science/ 1. https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12961-015-0074-z https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
  - rsfern 4y ago
    The point isn’t that the government doesn’t fund the research or set the big picture priorities, it’s that funding decisions aren’t really made by some random bureaucrat in isolation. In my experience NSF/DOE/DOD program managers are pretty sharp, often moving into that line of work after doing scientific research of their own, and they’re really good at eliciting and synthesizing technical feedback from reviewers (mostly academics and researchers from the national labs). That’s not to say that there are no problems with the funding model, but I think it’s more that it’s difficult to get funding for new high risk ideas either already having funding and attention
type0 4y ago
There are certainly some pockets of academic circles that only try to appear to be working hard 12h every single day and only care for having you rub my back I'll rub yours kinda deals. But many of Ph.D students that are monkeying around in STEM doing seemingly useless stuff actually expand their areas of expertise and encourage each other, gain curiosity, become creative and it helps them to make progress. You have to look for certain clues, they can't be having too much fun -then they are not doing any good work, if they appear too bogged down -they don't know what they are doing and shouldn't be there in the first place.

Ultimatt 4y ago

Plenty of research doesn't need millions to do. If you're a mathematician or almost any kind of theoretician or computational scientist you need a laptop maybe the odd bit of cloud time on a bigger blob of compute, in the case of mathematicians you might need chalk. The millions you do need to spend though are on private per-paper viewing of literature, thats the real mind killer. If universities just had alumni access to literature they would rapidly just become subscription library services for theory people! I can work like 3 months a year and finance literally the rest of my time on theoretical work. But only if I don't have to pay £60 to read enough of a paper to realise its a worthless piece of crap.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Ultimatt 4y ago
I should add those 3 months would also pay me about 2x better than a postdoc working fulltime in a university. Thats the level of pay disparity with industry, and the level of pointlessness of a university as an institution if you dont need a wet lab to work. A genuinely good business idea would be a virtual institution with library services.
DonaldPShimoda 4y ago
You're forgetting the cost of funding students, but also there are costs in securing prestige for your institution. The university benefits when your grants are large and plentiful, so they encourage research faculty to pursue those projects which earn more money, even if it's not exactly what they care most about.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  > You're forgetting the cost of funding students, but also there are costs in securing prestige for your institution. But why does he need students to do his own research? I made a similar calculation and went into industry. I am now at the point where I could self-fund an indefinite post-doc (with benefits) at the risk-free rate of return. By the time I would be going up for Full Professor, I'll be able to self-fund an equivalent salary -- again, at the risk-free rate. And I don't have to worry about the inevitable layoffs coming to higher-ed, tenure be damned. And I can do my Science from a ski slope or a beach instead of from some random rural town. If you want to do Science, just spend 1-2 decades in industry and save your money. If you want to lead "The $LASTNAME Lab" at "Famous University" where you have "X PhD students" and "Y post-docs", then you're going to pay for the silly prestige game by giving up actually doing Science for the rest of your life. The situation may be different for people who need wet labs, but in Math and CS here's just no reason to bust your ass to get tenure. Just bust your ass in industry instead. You'll be working for The Man instead of doing what you really want either way, I promise, and honestly industry often has more interesting problems than whatever happens to be of interest to whichever person was willing to live in an expensive boring place on a small salary while shoving their ideas into the Heilmeier Catechism.

fallingknife 4y ago

Yeah, you have to either do work that other people are willing to pay you for or pay to have it done yourself. I'm not seeing a problem here.

bumby 4y ago

>rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research. We probably should first acknowledge that the vast majority of research is incremental and not groundbreaking. >not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about Depending on your interest, this may be a case of expectation management. We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case. If it's wildly interesting, chances are lots of people are also interested and the competition drives down wages. If it's truly groundbreaking, there may not be a viable market for it so it likewise wouldn't have high wages (as wages tend to be commensurate with the differential contribution to the economy). If you are lucky to work in a field you love and are such an outlier technically that you can command high wages, you must by definition be a low probability case. So most people are left trying to find the balance of making money and doing something they are truly passionate about unless you happen to be passionate about something valuable that most people dislike.

plonk 4y ago
> We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case. But you’re not eating it, salaries suck in STEM academia compared to private jobs. If you don’t have freedom either, what’s the point?
- bumby 4y ago
  It’s a colloquialism about trade-offs and not meant to be taken so literally. Again, autonomy is another aspect that you may need to consider as part of that tradeoff. If you want to maximize autonomy, great, but it’s unlikely you’ll also maximize pay (as a general rule). Most jobs are like this, I don’t see why academia should be any different. I also don’t think it’s coincidence that pay in academia has stagnated as the number of PhDs ballon.
  - sideshowb 4y ago
    > If you want to maximize autonomy, great, but it’s unlikely you’ll also maximize pay And that's the literal trade off gp was referring to

_yb2s 4y ago

I'll second this, I've also seen a lot of people that like to brag about, e.g. working 80 hour weeks, but usually don't actually do much work. At any given moment they're likely talking to someone, or playing on a phone, etc. As a single dad of a young child, and an academic, this is just impossible for me. I have a few precious hours to work, and need to get the most out of them. I end up being pretty socially isolated at work. I don't agree with the "you might as well forget about it" thing you wrote. Funding in academia is about explaining why what you want to do actually furthers the agenda of the funding agency. If you can master this skill, you can fund almost any work from almost any funding source. It might sound dishonest, but I am convinced it's actually not- the phenomena in our natural world are all connected, and we don't understand them that well. To solve almost any random problem deeply requires work that translates to fundamental advances in almost everything else. Norbert Wiener explains this well in his book Cybernetics, where he talks about how work on missile guiding technology led to his concept of cybernetics, which was a revolutionary way to understand both engineering and biology.

cableshaft 4y ago

This sounds pretty similar to non-academic corporate life. People who show up to hang out, get mad at people who don't do the same, you're encouraged to work extra hours to get ahead, only able to work on things you get funding for (i.e. what clients will pay you for or projects that those above you will greenlight), being controlled by corporate executives, etc. But you probably get paid more in the corporate world, at least.

psychomugs 4y ago

> The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there's a pool of funding available for something? That's not worth the bother. In that case it's just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that? This is how I tried to justified my poor work-life balance from working on things I am deeply and personally interested in. If we treated grad school like a 9-5 job like all of the internal forces told us to, there's little incentive to stay in a worse version of an industry position that actually has work-life balance and magnitudes-higher compensation.

trieste92 4y ago

> They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn't hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time. did they piss you off or something?

Upvoter33 4y ago

"Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives...." This is not really true in the US. For example, NSF review processes are basically determined by peers, panels of PhDs who are experts in the field. While their expertise may vary, they generally do a reasonable and fair and scientifically meaningful review. To claim this is all "controlled by government burearcrats" is lazy and mostly wrong.

filoleg 4y ago
> This is not really true in the US. Maybe not in the most technical sense, but what funds most of the research projects? Government (with NIH being the largest funder of biomedical research in the world), private companies, and non-profits[0]. US government dumps absolutely enormous amounts of money on research funding. The difference in numbers can be pretty stark. I don't have data on hand for the exact breakdown for all research funding in general, but I have numbers for health research specifically (and I expect the trend overall to stay the same regarding research funding overall). Top 3 funders in the world are NIH ($26.1bn), European Commission ($3.7bn), and UK Medical Research Council ($1.3bn). For comparison, the largest non-profit contribution comes from Welcome Trust and is sitting only at $909.1mil, with WHO coming in third at $135mil. Here is a published paper[1] from 2016 containing all these numbers. 0. https://undsci.berkeley.edu/who-pays-for-science/ https://undsci.berkeley.edu/who-pays-for-science/ 1. https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12961-015-0074-z https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
- rsfern 4y ago
  The point isn’t that the government doesn’t fund the research or set the big picture priorities, it’s that funding decisions aren’t really made by some random bureaucrat in isolation. In my experience NSF/DOE/DOD program managers are pretty sharp, often moving into that line of work after doing scientific research of their own, and they’re really good at eliciting and synthesizing technical feedback from reviewers (mostly academics and researchers from the national labs). That’s not to say that there are no problems with the funding model, but I think it’s more that it’s difficult to get funding for new high risk ideas either already having funding and attention

type0 4y ago

There are certainly some pockets of academic circles that only try to appear to be working hard 12h every single day and only care for having you rub my back I'll rub yours kinda deals. But many of Ph.D students that are monkeying around in STEM doing seemingly useless stuff actually expand their areas of expertise and encourage each other, gain curiosity, become creative and it helps them to make progress. You have to look for certain clues, they can't be having too much fun -then they are not doing any good work, if they appear too bogged down -they don't know what they are doing and shouldn't be there in the first place.