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I thought I wanted to be a professor, then I served on a hiring committee (2021)
- mikewarot 3y agoThis reminds me of "your personal statement sucks"[1] by Dr. Angela Collier(Physics PhD), who also served on a hiring committee. The advice she gives is that your personal statement is your one shot to convince the hiring committee that you have unique things that would be a huge positive to the role you seek. I thought it was worth the watch time. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz42lx6BhqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz42lx6BhqY
- ysleepy 3y agoI like her videos a lot, her humour clicks with me.
- hgsgm 3y agoDisgusting display of preference for bullshitters.
- robwwilliams 3y agoPainful for me to watch. Rambles on and on.
- jvanderbot 3y agoA friend's spouse wanted to be a professor. They completed a PhD in electrical engineering, and some post-docs. Finding the market too hard, they decided to go back for another PhD, this time in Computer Science. The friend got a job at Google, and as far as I can tell, is supporting their spouse's dedication to this job search. I just don't have ... that. Give me a decent project and weekends, please.
- nickd2001 3y agoSounds like a decent way to spend an over-inflated Google salary ;)
- CoastalCoder 3y agoUugh. Do you think that aspiring professor is being irrational (in the sense of adopting a clearly suboptimal plan for overall happiness)? If I were doing that, it would almost certainly stem from an unhealthy fixation.
- jvanderbot 3y agoI don't know. If you ask a professor, they say it takes tenacity and grit, and accepting compromises regarding where you life, what work you do, etc. But that's a sampling problem. If you listen to that too much, you end up like this person. The 9X.YY% of those who want to be a professor probably had all that, plus a healthy dose of realism to get out while the getting is good. The absolute worst part of all this is that very few profs seem all that happy. Kind of like CEOs, but I think being a wage-earning, low-to-moderately successful founder has a higher likelihood of panning out than being a wage-earning professor by a long shot.
- tho234uii32o434 3y agoFrankly, most 'hard-workers' aren't doing the innovative work. Tenure-track faculty have barely any time to breathe given all the hassle they have to go through. It's mostly done by grad students who are still learning the ropes. Ofc. this is different in places like Math depts. where it can't work the way it does in CS/EE.
- jvanderbot 3y agoI think they'd say that constantly writing grants, publicizing, and coaching is the work they do now to keep those grad students fed, productive, and equipped. At least in my lab, the advisor was very attentive to make sure we were all doing our best work, even if he wasn't doing the work himself.
- paulusthe 3y agoYes.
- ke88y 3y ago> The friend got a job at Google, and as far as I can tell, is supporting their spouse's dedication to this job search. Your friend is a saint. Those types of multi-postdoc job hunts usually end in divorce. I can't imagine that PLUS another PhD.
- Agingcoder 3y agoI remember talking to one my professors about this particular research topic I found interesting, and that I’d be interested in working with prof X about this topic. I was told that it was a great idea, it was also important that I understand I would never get a stable job in academia if prof X was my advisor, because of political reasons. My father ( university professor) told me that unfortunately this was all too common. I stayed clear of academia after that.
- hgsgm 3y agoPolitically as in general society politics, or as in academic infighting politics?
- Agingcoder 3y agoAcademia infighting politics mainly - my sentence was indeed very ambiguous.
- drewcoo 3y agoProfessor X is misunderstood, even though he tries to coexist with non-mutants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_X
- hotpotamus 3y agoMy first job working for minimum wage in a theater, I was invited to go to IHOP or someplace like that after we closed. I asked what they talked about and the answer I got was, "mostly work politics", so I suppose that was a good early lesson for 15 year old me that basically wherever you get two people together, you will get politics. My suspicion for the reason that academia is seen as being so political is because they're actually not very good at it. The top of the heap of political practitioners in my experience tend to be the VP+ level leadership in publicly traded companies.
- hnfong 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law > Sayre's law states, in a formulation quoted by Charles Philip Issawi: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."
- rcme 3y agoI think the real takeaway is the professor adamantly demanding his postdoc get an interview. In business or academia, leveraging personal connections is the only guaranteed way to make career progress.
- ellisv 3y agoIt’s unsurprising though. If nothing else, it would be a good opportunity for the post doc. While there can be some stigma in staying at the same institution (cross-pollination is typically encouraged) it’s also a good show to at least pretend to like your own students/post docs enough to entertain keeping them around. Also keep in mind the professor has an interest in seeing the post doc succeed.
- creer 3y agoAnd a way to respond to that demand would be a allow one extra (that) post doc to interview. A trade off to humor that professor while keeping the good candidates around.
- DiscourseFan 3y agoUnfortunately this sort of thing makes sense in the end: one in the hand is worth two in the bush. Yeah he likes the guy and probably gives him more than he is due, but they know who he is, what he acts like, where he's going. They know how to work with him. In all these kinds of matters, no matter how shiny someone presents themselves to be, its only over the course of many months and years of knowing them that you can get an accurate picture.
- pkoird 3y agoThe bit about expertise overlap is curious. After all, why hire someone that can eventually be your competition? Academia is viciously competitive on the inside and it just doesn't look rational.
- dphidt 3y agoAnother perspective on this is that departments will have a long term hiring strategy that balances breadth of the overall research program against depth in a particular subdiscipline, with the goal of building a coherent ecosystem with good opportunities for faculty and students. That may be a factor beyond a candidate's control, but not necessarily just anticompetitive behavior in the hiring process.
- mocha_nate 3y agoAt a large university in Texas, I had two professors - one amazing in everyway, the other not. The amazing professor published great research, wrote well, and had great teaching skills. The other professor gave lackluster classes, published research that was routine, and shocked me that they could be teaching at this level (inspiring in a pessimistic way). Both up for tenure - the amazing professor was passed on because the other had a more desirable background. Both women. As a grad student, I understood the difficult of hiring, but this was honestly incredible. I thought of this when I read the following from the article: "I was startled to learn that academic achievements were not always what mattered most." and "only to fall short of securing a faculty position due to factors outside my control." Just a different story from academia.
- matthewmorgan 3y agoWhat does 'more desirable background' mean?
- hackyhacky 3y agoIn academia, this typically means being attached to more prestigious institutions.
- lazide 3y agoOr are likely to attract more lucrative donors.
- curtisblaine 3y agoThat she was part of a protected minority.
- postalrat 3y agoNo. She had a wealthy family.
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- azhenley 3y agoVery different experience than mine being on a hiring committee. The CS market has been so great that candidates have a lot of choice in where they land. We’d sift through maybe 200 applications, quickly reject most (i.e., do they have any top pubs in the area we are hiring for?). Most of them were wildly out of scope. Pick 10 from the remaining 30 applicants that we think (a) are the best and (b) would potentially accept the offer. We had several failed searches after many, many interviews.
- chriskanan 3y agoThis has been my experience as well as a professor in CS.
- matthewdgreen 3y agoCS is going through the abundance phase of its cyclical mismatch between jobs-available and candidates seeking jobs. This is driven by a decade of healthy industry hiring, which has seen a lot of candidates (plus existing faculty) depart academia for greener pastures. (NB: if you happen to be in ML, then nothing you’re experiencing now should be viewed as normal — this an unusual hiring spree due to “hot field” FOMO.) Eventually the economy will cool down the way it did in the early 2000s and after the 2007/2008 cycle: then you’ll see what musical chairs looks like when the music stops.
- xhkkffbf 3y agoSo what if you're one of the 170 people who are easy to reject immediately? Are you a candidate who has a "lot of choice"? It would seem not.
- raister 3y ago> One professor strongly advocated for his own postdoc, even though his CV was not at all competitive. After considerable debate—and without consensus—he was invited for an interview anyway. This alone happens more frequent than not. Idea here is to land (PhD) on a remarkable lab with a supervisor on the committee...
- sangel 3y agoThis is strange to me. Many universities, including mine, avoid interviewing applicants with a PhD or postdoc from the same institution to which they are applying.
- numbers_guy 3y agoBeing forced to upend your life and relocate far away every four years is also not a positive aspect of academic life.
- tgv 3y agoYou graduate, get an external, preferably foreign post-doc, and return to interview for the next available position. Problem solved.
- sangel 3y agoAt least in my department, this will not work as long as the applicant's supervisor or dissertation committee members are still in the department. The crux of the issue, in my mind, is that it is hard to have candid and unbiased discussion about a candidate when the supervisor / dissertation committee is part of that discussion.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y agoI thought I wanted to be an academic after quitting my 'industry' job then I had to go through some traditions which are trying to teach me things I had to unlearn while working 'professionally' needless to say, my degree is on hiatus; why learn things which I know I will have to unlearn later when I go back into 'industry'? and then the pandemic happened, and then FAANG fired tens of thousands and now I cannot find a job to go back to
- jprete 3y agoThe author's piece makes me think that all PhD students should serve at least once on an academic hiring committee. This would be a very clear way of communicating to PhD students what research universities want from their tenure-track faculty, by putting them in the room where the decisions are actually made. I was in the author's shoes, but I was lucky enough to find out all the same information through Internet sites written by embittered PhDs who described what the negative side of the process was like. I went into industry instead, first for an R&D government contractor, then big tech. Like the author, I don't have any regrets about it. I don't blame the committee for filtering on specialty, though. The academic job market is so tight for applicants that every PhD has to flood every job opening with applications to have a chance. There's something to be said for channeling people to the right job instead of any old job. PhD programs IMO should stop being an implicit lottery for the ivory tower, maybe by having explicit "industry" and "academia" tracks and being careful with how many of the academic PhDs they're producing. But they'd have to admit just how unfair the system is to the students.
- thumbuddy 3y agoThe only surprising thing to me about this is that anyone is surprised by any of it. It's been going on for decades if not centuries. It's not like industry is any better really
- rtpg 3y agoThere is of course a lot of unfair social dynamics at play in industry hiring, but at least there are a lot of industry jobs to compensate a bit.
- lazide 3y agoIndustry tends to be more biased towards obvious concrete incentives too, so it's easier to see how to succeed. And those incentives pay the rent better. Academia tends to be really opaque and BS heavy because the the games that need to be played are far more opaque (by design), and concrete objectively useful results far less important.
- vegetablepotpie 3y agoThe last 4 paragraphs of that piece feel like it was AI generated. The overall nonspecificity and upbeat positive prose feels like something output by ChatGPT.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoIn 2021?
- hnbear 3y agoReminds me a lot of some of the ACOUP academic explanations, although those are history not science focused. The feel about academia being a tiny exclusionary club is the same. https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-explained-or-what-on-earth-is-an-adjunct/ https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-exp... https://acoup.blog/2022/12/23/fireside-friday-december-23-2022-whither-history/ https://acoup.blog/2022/12/23/fireside-friday-december-23-20... https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/ https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-...
- kergonath 3y agoIt’s way worse on the humanities side, from my experience. Not that it’s easy in STEM, but there are more positions and also better funding from both industry and government.
- LasEspuelas 3y agoThis is such a generalization that I deem it devoid of value. Besides the fact that not all hiring decisions happen that way, R1 institutions are not the only ones around. If you have a passion for teaching and want to stay engaged in research, there are other options like primarily undergraduate institutions. There are good reasons to prefer industrial posts to academia, and vice versa.
- guerrilla 3y agoThis is just what humans are like. I say this a lot but I still don't understand how people are so naive about this kind of thing. You're not going to find anywhere that isn't like this eventually. We not only don't live in a meritocracy but meritocracy itself is impossible. It's just idealism that disregards nature (unless you redefine it to some meaningless vague Darwinianism.)
- yobbo 3y agoRather, "meritocracy" is a theatre that provides perfect alibi for nepotism. Referring to someone's CV is not in principle different from referral by a person. It's just another document that has been curated by people, for the same purpose.
- briandear 3y agoSo how should we hire?
- yobbo 3y agoIf the position is such that it doesn't matter who is hired (meaning: there is usually no measurable difference in outcome for people in the role, and all candidates have basic qualifications), then nepotism isn't necessarily wrong, in my view. It creates a level of loyalty that true meritocracy does not, for example. I believe this is the mechanism for a lot of hiring through "networks". What I object to, in these cases, is pretending that the various versions of "basket weaving" are relevant merits, and that there is actual meritocracy. When the position is such that there are specific requirements; those abilities/skills can be tested with interviews etc, like how it works in most recruitment for professionals. This is my general perspective. There might be certain cases I'd have a different opinion.
- chmod600 3y agoIn healthier environments results are better. For instance, if a qualified person applies to a useful and growing company, they are going to be treated with respect and offered good pay.
- sriram_sun 3y agoHere is my own experience of getting hired into a startup. The day I got hired the manager took the team out to lunch and I asked them how each one got hired. So results: White male - Room mate of employee White male - Room mate of employee White male - Knew early employee from college in Switzerland White female - Recruited off of LinkedIn Indian American - Recruited off of LinkedIn Immigrant Indian American - Recruited off of LinkedIn. There is a lot of favoritism that goes on in industry as well. However, it is so large that it can accommodate both merit-based and network based hiring. Hiring is a total crap shoot anyway and this is not to say that just because someone comes recommended by someone else they are automatically bad. They just look better in comparison because mentally we automatically lower the hiring bar as this person comes "recommended" from a known source.
- sriram_sun 3y agoThere is another dynamic that helps the recommended hire succeed in the workplace environment. They initially get help navigating the workplace. This is extremely important for career development. For e.g. If you know what to look for in a code base that might make a difference between a commit on day one versus messing around the code base for a week and trying to be really careful.
- poszlem 3y agoI am struggling to see what you are trying to say here, especially since you use somewhat arbitrary way to group people by race and sex. Can you clarify? Is the founder white? Does he/did he live in a majority white country (you mentioned a college in Switzerland, a country which is most likely 90% white)? If so, why is that weird and why does that matter? Unless you think that "white men" are fungible, using this category makes no sense.
- wccrawford 3y agoMy impression was that they think they've discovered nepotism, but what they've actually discovered is networking.
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- 6stringmerc 3y agoI thought I wanted to work on cars for a living, then I delivered parts for O'Reilly during one summer and was told straight to my face "If you like cars don't do this job."
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- CapitalistCartr 3y agoI have posted on HN before: If you can get out of Academia, do so. It's in your best interest to get out. This article spells out why. Academia is like spending your adult life in middle school.
- amatic 3y agoMy problem is how to stay in science, and outside of academia? Not sure.
- ke88y 3y agoWhat field? In CS this is trivial, as long as you're doing science that is still relevant to the world and not working on some inane corner of some pet project from the 1980s that people should've stopped thinking about a long time ago :)
- squarepizza 3y agoUntil ~10 years ago, deep learning was that “inane corner of some pet project.”
- ke88y 3y agoThis isn't even close to true (was: was there). Or maybe we're misunderstanding one another. By "inane corner" I mean "can't even fill a single session at a 100 person specialized conference". Even in the early 2000s NIPS was larger than I'd consider "inane corner sized".
- johnnyanmac 3y agoProbably different understanding. I'd say VR/XR is still that sort of niche corner but I don't deny that eventually it will blow up. You can certainly fill a conference room with dozens of topics, though.
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- robwwilliams 3y agoA superficial “my one experience” story published in Science by a recent PhD in chemical engineering two years ago. Little more than a non-specific catalyst for HN comments that are much more interesting.
- jll29 3y agoI've switched between academia and industry several times in my career (which some academic friends of mine claimed was not possible). Professorial hiring committees are often silly since they demand outrageous things yet the pay is laughable. Since I have a lot of hiring experience as a research director in industry, I saw a lot of talent that I would try to grab, but that academic colleagues did not consider a good enough match due to the limited fit with the desired profile, even if that meant re-advertising and wasting another year. While what you say about hiring committees is true, I would still not recommend to talented scientists to let all that deter them. If you have the passion for science, give it everything - so that you can say on your deathbed, "at least I tried"; any other life choice probably won't let you go in peace (who wants to think "what if...?").
- ke88y 3y ago> which some academic friends of mine claimed was not possible To be fair: "industry" is not one thing. There's a huge difference between being a software engineer at a non-R&D software company doing uninteresting consulting or project work and being a SWE in Google Brain/FAIR/etc. Hell, there's a huge difference between positions with the same job title in the same mega-corps. Most professors -- even in CS -- aren't able to get the types of industry jobs that keep the academic door open. It's really only a few subfields where those industry jobs are available. So, as a general role, saying that it's difficult to move between the two is fairly accurate. > since they demand outrageous things yet the pay is laughable. The process is prohibitive before the packet even reaches the committee. Writing three or four essays, asking for three letters of recommendation, and committing to a full on-site interview loop for a job that comes with at least a half million dollar pay cut.
- fooker 3y ago>being a SWE in Google Brain/FAIR/etc. Most SWEs in these places are doing uninteresting work.
- SKCarr 3y agoNot really my experience in a science department at a top university in Canada. I've served on several hiring committees and also been involved in about 20 hirings over the years. Yes, there are typically 100+ applicants, but only about 5-10 of them are truly excellent. In contrast to what the writer described, I had an experience where a colleague strongly opposed considering his former PhD student for a position because their research interests were significantly different from the advertised position. One thing that has consistently surprised me during these hiring exercises is encountering candidates who appear exceptional on paper and deliver a decent public talk about their past research but completely fail when it comes to their proposed research talk. At least in science, if you're truly exceptional, you will find a position at a top place, despite whatever politicking or EDI considerations are influencing the hiring process.
- ftyers 3y agoIt's great that the author found a good job and is happy, but being a tenured professor has its own advantages (at least in the US system)... 9 month years (three-four months holiday/year), essentially no boss, salary (maybe lower than equivalent in private sector, but is sufficient), paid sabbaticals, unpaid leaves, 2-days/week teaching and the rest of the time on pet projects, job security, ability to do contracting on the side. But to get that there is quite an upfront commitment and its uncertain. Probably if you did the same amount of effort in the private sector you could get some of those things, but I doubt all of them...
- squidgyhead 3y agoThe summers are when research happens - this is not a holiday. Sabbaticals are also for research. "Pet projects" is actually just research. Did I mention research? There's also grant proposals.
- ftyers 3y agoYes, pet projects is research. For me at least it's a holiday, I get to set my hours, I can do what I want, read what I want, be where I want. That sounds like a holiday to me.
- bonniemuffin 3y agoIn what field do tenured professors take 3-4 months of holiday per year? In the hard sciences (US, R1 research universities), I saw tenured professors doing long hours of research all year, and treating summer as a time when they could focus more-fully on research and grant-writing with less of those pesky classes getting in the way.
- ftyers 3y agoThat's because they like doing research, not because if they don't do it they'll get fired. If they wanted they could just take that time off, they have tenure after all. No classes basically means no work outside of the work that you want to do.
- lisper 3y agoI finished my Ph.D. in 1991 and thought I wanted to be a professor. I applied to a few dozen openings, but it was the middle of a recession [1] and there were hundreds of people applying for single openings. I was not a standout candidate so I never stood a chance. In retrospect, having now learned more about the realities of academic life, this is probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. I think I would have been as miserable as a professor as I was as a grad student. The idea that tenure == freedom turns out to be a Big Lie. There is no more freedom in academia than there is anywhere else in the world. The life of a professor is, first and foremost, a never-ending Sisyphean treadmill of writing grant proposals. At the end of the day, it's all about the money. Of course you can get yourself into a nice comfortable niche where you are The Man and all your proposals are greenlit by default, but you can do that outside of academia too by finding a patron or a big enough group of fans, but then you are beholden to them. The only real freedom is having money of your own, and even that comes with strings attached because then you have to manage the money and deal with people asking you to write checks. Always be careful what you wish for. The hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out what it is. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession_in_the_U...
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y agoThe idea that tenure == freedom turns out to be a Big Lie. (...) The life of a professor is, first and foremost, a never-ending Sisyphean treadmill of writing grant proposals. At the end of the day, it's all about the money. (...) The only real freedom is having money of your own, and even that comes with strings attached because then you have to manage the money and deal with people asking you to write checks. As a tenured professor, I can confirm all this as an accurate description. Furthermore, to add to what you said, you don't even have real freedom on things like where to publish - the typical question of "why don't you just refuse to submit articles to exploitative for-profit publishers like Elsevier?" - because you are almost always working with PhD students, postdocs, etc. And while your career may not depend on where you publish, theirs does. (A possible exception to this is mathematics, and maybe some other research fields, where many papers are single-author. But that only happens in a minority of disciplines). There is something where the freedom is more or less real, though: choosing research subjects. This year I wanted to do some fun experiments with LLMs, not very related to my usual research. I found a collaborator, did that, had fun, and it's part of the work I'm paid to do. That's a kind of freedom that most jobs don't give you. Even that is quite restricted because most of your research has to be on things that funding agencies like, but at least it's something.
- chmod600 3y agoSometimes it's hard to calibrate and compare expectations about something far in the future. There's kind of a "haha, we're screwed" undertone to a lot of things. How is a young person really supposed to know which ones are really horrible dead ends and which ones are actually workable if you care? Is a singing career or a professor more of a dead end? English PhD or history PhD? Lawyer or video game programmer? Those all have different chances for success, different time horizons, and different off-ramps when they don't work out. Tracks that allow you to have some kind of job earlier, even an unskilled/unrelated one, at least allow you to potentially collect some savings or maybe even start a family. It grounds you in reality somewhat so you can compare your life against the world around you rather than only seeing your peers struggling with you.
- lambdasquirrel 3y agoI'm reminded of (I think?) one of Paul Graham's essays on the difficult and rewarding things in life – that if you knew how difficult it would be, you might not have done it? You might not have started. I don't know... sometimes, there are those things that might be difficult and then not worth it. It strikes me that to be a professor, you have to be a little out of it, maybe even a little psycho.
- karaterobot 3y agoThe absolute best professor I ever had in undergrad or grad school was in his 60s, had been teaching for decades, and was still an assistant professor. He didn't publish much, had written one book a long time ago, but god damn he was just a natural master at teaching. I took classes I wasn't interested in, just because he was teaching them. He liked to do the thing professors are supposed to do, and was punished for it. I notice that academic achievements, even in this article about the messed up priorities of university hiring, doesn't seem to include being good at educating kids.
- GlenTheMachine 3y agoThat isn't what brings the money in.
- lacrimacida 3y agoIt’s like in software, the user gets the most abusive treatment while other metrics are invented to take attention away from that.
- creer 3y agoPerhaps there is an issue with expectations - which might be managed with schools actually teaching about what professional life is about (whether academic / industry, empoyed / freelance, for profit / nfp, etc), including teaching things like how debt works and what it's for, funding independence, funding retirement.This was ignored by ALL the schools and universities I have been through. People are expected to learn this on their own (or by reading HN which is also seriously flawed). For example it's okay for a PhD not to be a professor, not to do research, not even work in their original field, etc - and have a satisfactory career trajectory. It also happens to get a PhD, "do everything right" and get tenure and not be happy about it. The problem whether with PhD or anything else, is this "shot in the dark" problem and lack of well, guidance about the wealth of options out there.
- paulcole 3y ago> I began to see a career in business as an appealing alternative to the personal sacrifices, hypercompetitiveness, and arbitrary hiring decisions I would encounter in academia What a sweet kid.
- contemporary343 3y agoAs a professor who served on a hiring committee this past year in a top-15 engineering department in the US (and not in CS), some of this did not really ring as true to me. Overall, I came away more pleasantly surprised by our process than how I might have assumed it to be as a PhD student (where I assumed it was entirely based on favoritism). Based on the intersection of publication record, research statement and topic areas we were recruiting for this cycle (which was clearly advertised in our position), there were really only about 20-25 applications which were plausibly competitive. We ended up doing a standardized set of Zoom interviews for about 15 of them - here too, many candidates were simply unable to clearly explain their past work and make a clear pitch for their vision and work (even with slides). This is an essential skill for running a lab and one any prospective candidate should practice and refine! From that point on the whole department was involved and, at least for us, everyone had an equal say and felt safe speaking up. ~4-5 were invited for on-campus interviews and one candidate was liked the most by nearly everyone, leading to a consensus. As a public university, there are a lot of things we do in a standardized way, and sets of personal questions etc. we do not ask. Is it fair? I'll leave others to judge, as selecting one person to hire out of ~200 applicants is not an easy task. But I don't think it was capricious either. At our department, we intend for everyone who comes as an assistant prof to be tenured, so it is very much a long-term hire and commitment we are making. We take that job seriously.
- dpflan 3y ago> "...many candidates were simply unable to clearly explain their past work and make a clear pitch for their vision and work (even with slides)..." This is interesting, why do you think they fumbled? Is it a lack of practice/experience in presenting these ideas or is it an indicator of a grad student who has become a foot soldier for a PI?
- contemporary343 3y agoI'm genuinely not sure! The virtual pre-screen interview has become the de facto norm in my field, so it's not like it's surprising or unexpected. And it's not like we are looking for TED speakers here - anyone should be capable with sufficient practice and preparation. If anything, I've seen people that look great on paper, coming from the pedigreed lab/ and fancy PhD institution fail at this stage. So perhaps there's some overconfidence there. Indeed, no one in our department had any connection to, or prior knowledge of, the candidate who was ultimately given the offer. Once they got past the initial screening, through both virtual and in-person interviews, their technical depth and breadth, teaching skills and overall collegiality shone through. All that being said, I don't doubt that all the questionable things mentioned in the article above occur, and perhaps widely. But, there is hope! And there's no better place to start than those of us who are younger faculty.
- satisfice 3y agoBeing a hiring manager in Silicon Valley for a decade taught me how hiring really works. I will never again take it personally (or take it seriously) when I am not hired, because hiring is inherently irrational and can be subject to all sorts of weird biases. It’s like dating. If a company is just not into me, I shrug and move on.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y agoIn Spain, we have a quite idiosyncratic system. There is very little mobility, people typically stay in the university where they graduate. A PhD student often starts by doing their Master's or even Bachelor's thesis with a professor. If the professor is happy, they can suggest the student to apply for competitive grants to study a PhD, or hire them directly with grant money (the PhD here is typically seen as a job, almost all PhD students get a salary). Right after the PhD, people typically apply for entry-level positions at that same university. At that point, there is some "weeding out" (no positions for everyone) but if you get one, you're pretty much set for stability. You need to endure years of crappy salary and a lot of evaluations, but if you can generate a decent amount of publications (even if not stellar) you will typically promote until you eventually get to a permanent position. In theory, promotions are public calls open to anyone, but in practice the "home" candidate almost always wins because no one wants to kick out someone who is already working there and familiar with the specific research topic, courses, etc. to hire someone who would have to learn from scratch. Plus, if you do that, the disgruntled candidate will then try to kick others out of their positions to take their place, people don't want to open that Pandora's box, so most promotions (e.g. from associate to full professor) have only one candidate, the "home" candidate. This system has obvious problems: first, nepotism is easy, because the real selection (not the promotions that are mostly just a formality, as I explained) is done quite early and typically the professor has a lot of say on who to hire. Mostly professors want the best candidates, because there is a lot of competition for grants, salary complements, etc. (everything is evaluated and measured here), but sometimes people will just favor a friend, relative or whatever. Second, mobility is almost impossible, because you'll practically never be able to get a non-entry-level position from a different university. Let alone applying to a Spanish position from outside Spain! This system is frowned upon, many in society view university as corrupt, so there is a lot of push to go towards an "Anglo-Saxon" system as described in this post. Now they are emphasizing a second way to become a professor, by applying to a competitive postdoc with forced mobility to the government, as universities are incentivized (with money) to create permanent positions for people who have that. It's good that there is this alternative as a backup for good candidates, and I would definitely support other measures like making selection for entry-level positions fairer or reserving a percentage of positions for outside candidates, but after seeing accounts like this, I think our system is less bad than it gets credit for and it wouldn't be a good idea to go full Anglo-Saxon. For all its faults, at least here you finish your PhD at 27 years old or so (it's 3-4 years, not 5-6 as in the US) and not much later, you already have an idea of your chance for a position. Better to be unfairly excluded due to nepotism at that point in your career than 10 years later, like the post seems to be describing. And if you leave for industry, the PhD was a job with a normal salary so you haven't paid too harsh an opportunity cost. Under the more "modern" Anglo-Saxon system, it's common to be in your late thirties doing postdocs, moving from place to place (something that most Spaniards don't want, here family ties are stronger than in the US and most people want to stay close to family) and with difficulties to form a family or settle down due to uncertainty and constant mobility. And if that were implemented here, we wouldn't even have the consolation of a good salary, as academia is quite underpaid here - so I think it would actually lower the quality of the staff hired by making the academic career quite undesirable for many... I wonder if there is an ideal system with the best of both worlds. I have good vibes about France (I know people who got permanent positions there soon after PhD, under what seemed like a merit-based system with committees) but maybe I'm just idealizing due to ignorance, as many Spaniards do with the Anglo-Saxon system which they view as fair and free from corruption.
- gillesjacobs 3y agoI have seen the hiring process too when doing my PhD and decided to go to others sector too. Scarily similar story to OP. Granted it was not the main motivator for my leaving, as it also showed me that being close to faculty staff similar guaranteed a position eventually and I was generally close to all senior faculty. But I saw people being skipped with stellar records. Industry hiring isn't fair either, but there is a lot less competition, more flexibility and generally much better pay.
- vlark 3y ago"The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low." -- Wallace S. Sayre