9 ms·

Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

133 points by abhinavsns 1y ago

mandown2308 1y ago
I just summarized the article with GPT, and from what it seems, the points are still valid arguments today...speaking slightly from personal experience.
nickpsecurity 1y ago
I think it could be better titled "Don't Become an Academic Professional or Professional Scientist." They have good reasons for this. Whereas, you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget. You can publish whatever you want on your web sites, social media, etc. You can often get advice or peer review from professional scientists by asking them. You might pay them for their time if you feel your work was worth it.
- bluSCALE4 1y ago
  Feels to me a combination of old web with new web tricks is the key. People used to update obscure hobby details but there really was no way to donate. Creators didn't even think to bother to ask. All this democratization talk seems to be the solution.
  - btrettel 1y ago
    I don't think crowdfunding is a good funding source for science in general. Crowdfunding's going to overemphasize already popular and easy to explain science at the expense of everything else. Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed.
    - blooalien 1y ago
      > "Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed." "Boring sounding" to anyone who don't have a "passion" for that particular area of science as you must if you're wanting to research it. The (hard) trick is to get your crowdfunding request in front of the specific eyeballs that will understand (and be excited by) your motivations and interests enough to want to finance advancing that research.
    - bluSCALE4 1y ago
      I disagree. There's a guy that doesn't have much attention that's creating fuel from burning plastic. He got crowdfunded. I also recall finding a website way back when of a dude that explored the old railroad tunnels of downtown Chicago. I would have 100% funded that guy for content.
      - btrettel 1y ago
        This guy? https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-solarpowered-plastic-to-fuel-innovation https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-solarpowered-plastic-to-f... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Brown_(influencer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Brown_(influencer) He gets $36K from about 800 donors for a project that seems pretty easy to explain ("creating fuel from burning plastic") and is something probably millions of people are interested in. Wikipedia says he has millions of followers! The stuff I'd like to do would probably not have even 800 people interested in it after I carefully explained it. And $36K is not a lot when it comes to experimental research in the physical world. In my view, working a day job and taking periodic sabbaticals would have better ROI for this guy and myself.
- wasabi991011 1y ago
  > you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget Not in many fields/subfields, unless "chosen budget" is some unattainable amount of disposable income. Most people who want to do science have a specific field they are interested in. Your proposal is fine for theoreticians (and some computationalists, depending on the compute they require), but not many others.
  - wbl 1y ago
    Biology can be studied by observing outside in any park.
    - acdha 1y ago
      This is like saying you can study CS using pen and paper. It’s possible for certain rare edge cases but absolutely nobody is going through the process of applying for grants if they don’t need the money to work on the problems they’ve specialized for. People in the past were just as smart and motivated so the low-hanging fruit is gone.
      - linguae 1y ago
        Even for fields that can be done entirely with pen and paper, grad students and postdocs don't work for free, and often the only way a professor can keep up with a research university's publication expectations is to hire grad students and postdocs to contribute to research. Grants help pay for their stipends. Additionally, there are many universities that require their professors to raise grant money as a condition of tenure, since grant money is a significant source of revenue for research universities.
- linguae 1y ago
  I came to a similar conclusion as a computer scientist working in industry who ended up transitioning to a community college teaching career. I remember being inspired by the stories of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC as a high school student and undergrad, wanting to follow in the footsteps of researchers like Dennis Ritchie. However, the industrial research landscape has changed in the past 15 years. It's very difficult to find truly curiosity-driven places with long timelines and little pressure, and industrial researchers these days are pressured to work on projects with more immediate productization prospects. I've seen this firsthand at a few companies. The tenure-track at a research university route requires playing the "publish-or-perish" game, which is also a curb on freedom and is also filled with pressure. Being a tenure-track professor at a California community college is a happy situation for me. I love teaching, and for roughly 8 months of the year I'm dedicated to teaching. Tenure at my community college is entirely based on teaching and service; I'm not required (or even expected) to publish. I also get roughly 4 months of the year off (three months off in the summer, one month off in the winter). I spent much of the past summer in Japan collaborating with a professor on research. The only serious downside is not being able to afford a house within a reasonable commute from work, but I had the same problem in industry; not everyone in industry makes FAANG-level salaries. In fact, my compensation is effectively a raise from my previous job when factoring in going from roughly 3 weeks of PTO per year to 4 months off plus 10 days worth of sick leave; I took a roughly 10% pay cut in exchange for greater freedom and roughly 5-6x the annual time off. I've learned that being a hobbyist researcher with a stable job that provides summers off is quite a favorable situation, since I don't have to worry about my job security being tied to my publication and fund-raising counts. Most of my computer science research can be done on a mid-range laptop with an Internet connection and access to textbooks and academic databases; I don't need equipment that cost five- or six-figures (though it would be nice to have a GPU cluster....).
  - graycat 1y ago
    Bell Labs was part of AT&T which had in effect a government approved monopoly -- nearly all of the US telephone system, so was awash in earnings for transistors, lasers, information theory, the Fast Fourier Transform, etc. Xerox PARC was part of Xerox that was also "awash in earnings" from photocopying machines and for more whatever else, e.g., more in personal computing. So, for a high school student, the lesson there was not just to do great science but to join or start a business that is or soon can be "awash in money" and then do whatever you want, e.g., Jim and Marilyn Simons, including "great science". In more detail, now in practice, one of the main motivations of a company "awash in money" is to pursue research for luster, e.g., AI, quantum computing. Ah, Lesson 101 in US life and money!
- cozzyd 1y ago
  I don't know from where I sit "don't be a crank" might be better advice. Not to say it's impossible to do science as a hobby (there's some good stuff coming out of e.g. the ham community and amateur astronomers), but sadly most of my interactions with "hobbyist scientists" have been crackpots (ok, there is some selection bias here, crackpots go to all sorts of lengths to try to contact you).
PlunderBunny 1y ago
(1999)
- brolumir 1y ago
  While this is clearly an old post, I'm not sure about the actual date. On the bottom it says 1999, but there's also a citation for an article from 2001. > For many more details consult the Young Scientists' Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.
  - knuckleheadsmif 1y ago
    Being a physics researcher he built a time machine and in late 2001 went back in time to post it.
- drjasonharrison 1y ago
  The first copy of this essay captured by the Internet Archive was in October of 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20011013031756/http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html https://web.archive.org/web/20011013031756/http://wuphys.wus... The same timestamp at the bottom of the essay can be found on other pages by Professor Katz, such as his list of publications which includes papers from 2019. I suspect that the timestamp of 1999 is incorrect. https://web.archive.org/web/20191206233227/https://web.physics.wustl.edu/katz/publist.html https://web.archive.org/web/20191206233227/https://web.physi...
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - piznaul 1y ago
    I was a TA for this professor in ~2000, and this article had already existed (and made the rounds of the grad student offices). I suspect that 1999 is correct.
neverkn0wsb357 1y ago
I wonder if this is a parallel trap for people who study PoliSci and want to go into government to make a difference. Regardless, each career has a disillusionment curve — although yes in this case the financial reality of it (still is) is super unfortunate. If I had to guess, probably mostly because it doesn’t fit in a nice capitalist box of money in / money out.
- next_xibalba 1y ago
  The capitalist box is the best box there is, for better or worse. It may also be worth pointing out that many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in human history were either achieved before institutional science existed in a modern form, or were achieved outside the formal system. We may have been better off with a system in which science was left to a tiny elite of eccentric geniuses with academic freedom. It certainly doesn't seem as though society is bettered by cranking out 1,000 government funded PoliSci Phds each year.
  - blooalien 1y ago
    > "The capitalist box is the best box there is, for better or worse." Only because on the whole we've been utterly resistant to every attempt to try any other way since inventing "<$money>". Bottomless greed is a real thing, and it's deeply dangerous to us all...
    - next_xibalba 1y ago
      Many other ways have been tried. They have been abject failures with a little mass murder, famine, and war for bonus points! Is there some way you're thinking of that has not been tried?
      - harimau777 1y ago
        Democratic socialism, also called social democracy, has been dramatically more effective than America's late stage capitalism. The heavily unionized capitalism that we had in the decades after WW2 also worked much better than our present system.
worik 1y ago
Has anything changed for the better? Ten years ago the cleaners in the labs at The University of Otago had job security most of the scientists could only dream about. I was in the business school (very low rankings!) and I was amazed at the infighting, back stabbing and general lack of collegiality amongst the academic staff. I could not wait together out of there
- bee_rider 1y ago
  “The cleaners have job security the scientists could only dream of” is pithy, but is it actually saying much? Cleaning is an essential, low-prestige, and potentially quite unpleasant job… I bet the cleaner is the most secure job in a lot of places.
  - tehjoker 1y ago
    Not really because there’s an oversupply of people that will do it and petulant bosses
tomhow 1y ago
Previously on HN: Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789844 - Aug 2018 (2 comments) Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836622 - July 2015 (4 comments) Don't become a scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8702841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8702841 - Dec 2014 (33 comments) Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763737 - May 2014 (159 comments)
a1pulley 1y ago
"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs." This seems a bit hyperbolic. In the mid to late 2000s, only 5 of the 15 close grad student friends I had at Caltech didn't get a tenure track position somewhere. Four of the five work in tech, and the fifth is a government electrical engineer. 4/5 were homegrown, the fifth is an immigrant, and all ten tenure track (now mostly tenured) profs are immigrants.
- deleted 1y ago
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- tomrod 1y ago
  To be fair, Caltech is a top school for physics.
- cortesoft 1y ago
  Maybe he just doesn’t know many people whose life was ruined by drugs.
LarsDu88 1y ago
I can retrospectively look back at folks in my (non computer science) PhD cohort, and say that this bearish outlook is only true for folks who stay in science too long or pursue actual academic careers. The vast majority of folks I know flipped into more lucrative careers in industry... some of which require PhDs or Masters degrees. Furthermore, it really depends on your track. You can wind up in a lab studying something totally obscure or you can be in a lab with multi-million dollar funding and state-of-the-art equipment you can't find elsewhere. Sadly the most well funded scientific research right now is actually being bankrolled by techbro oligarchs for tax deduction purposes, even more so with the cuts to US funding.
- dr_dshiv 1y ago
  > Sadly the most well funded scientific research right now is actually being bankrolled by techbro oligarchs for tax deduction purposes What’s an example?
  - LarsDu88 1y ago
    Chan Zuckerberg Institute The Arc Institute (bankrolled by one of the Stripe guys) Deepmind (think alphafold) Heck, even Deepseek
api 1y ago
This reminds me of numerous pieces I’ve read by authors on why not to try to become an author, like this: https://www.elysian.press/p/publishing-industry-truth https://www.elysian.press/p/publishing-industry-truth What it boils down to is that these are fields with a supply glut of people and/or product. My take is: never try to enter such a field unless you really think you have a chance at performing in the top 20% of all entrants in that field. Anything else is a dice roll. A few people get lucky, but statistically it won’t be you. Discouraging people from trying is a good filter for these fields, since the only people who will ignore such advice is people who really deeply love it or are really driven. Those are the people most likely to ascend to the top 20%. Nobody gets that good at something they aren’t driven to do. It’s also a way to maybe make things better for people in those fields in the future. If the only people who enter the field are those who are deeply driven, it might cut down on the overpopulation problem. Edit: some fields are worse than others of course. Glance at up and coming Hollywood actors and actresses for a worst case. Of the ones who are not nepo babies, look into how much work and hustle and luck (combined) it took for them to make it. Most are insanely good looking talented people who started acting as kids and hustled for years and then got lucky. It’s wild. Physics is not that bad, but it’s not great. Fiction writing might be that bad, especially since the money is less even if someone does make it.
- analog31 1y ago
  Unfortunately, I met a lot of people in graduate school who were in that top 20% in terms of their ability in their discipline. But they were on a collision course with expectations of employers for what kinds of work they were interested in. The conventional wisdom is you got a science PhD because you want to be an outgoing, driven, competitive leader. And they may have been treating the academe as a shelter from those expectations too.
  - watwut 1y ago
    > The conventional wisdom is you got a science PhD because you want to be an outgoing, driven, competitive leader. I have never seen such wisdom. In my neck of woods, PhD is about being hugely into some aspect of science, seeing value in it and being willing to work a lot on it even in bad conditions. The only that tracks is being competitive. But, you can be introverted, you wont lead anything and no one expects you to.
nritchie 1y ago
What he says is still correct for academics. There are too many candidates for too few positions. The pay is lousy. The hours are long. You don't really get to follow you best creative instincts. You spend an inordinate amount of time writing grants. Teaching, particularly pre-meds, can suck. Now with Trump, the problem has only been compounded. That isn't to say that there are no non-academic jobs for PhDs that can be satisfying. Just you may be a glorified engineer. No shame in that if that is what you want.
- williamDafoe 1y ago
  The oversupply has extended from phds down to bachelor's degrees. With 37% of Americans getting bachelor's degrees it doesn't mean anything anymore and is wasteful overtraining. I'm no Trumper but somebody has to stop the greedy life-wasting that academics have created by overfunding a lot of stupid duplicate research and excessive college educations by people who never have an impact...
  - tehjoker 1y ago
    Some would say you educate people to cultivate an engaged citizenry
    - lisper 1y ago
      Very few people say that. Overwhelmingly the rhetoric one hears is that the purpose of higher education is to get a better job. Personally, I think it would be great if we educated people to cultivate an engaged citizenry. But if we're going to do that we have to be up-front about it an work on an economic model that supports it. So, for example, you can't have student loans that are predicated on being able to obtain a certain level of income on graduation, and you certainly can't make those loans impossible to discharge even in bankruptcy. If you lie about it, as we have been for decades now, it all unravels sooner or later.
      - neftaly 1y ago
        Thomas Jefferson said that a bunch
cozzyd 1y ago
Scientist here. It's certainly not always an easy path, but if it's what you want, it's what you want. It's not something you fall into though...
- somenameforme 1y ago
  Is it not? I'd assumed that the dramatic increase in people with doctorates was simply a mix of the new era of practically unlimited student loans, university being quite enjoyable, and a desire to avoid entering into the 'real world.' It's not like people are planning to become academics, but by the time somebody completes a doctorate in e.g. sociology, they're gonna be buried in a mountain of debt with relatively few career options.
  - cozzyd 1y ago
    Most doctorates are funded, at least in the sciences. There are certainly some people who go to grad school because it seems like the logical next step but they tend not to complete a PhD.
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- azalemeth 1y ago
  Also a scientist here. The part of this article I disagree with is "Science is a profession, not a religious vocation, and does not justify an oath of poverty or celibacy". I really think it is the closest thing I have to a religion. It alters how I see the world, defines the way I think about how to approach problems, and consumes every waking moment of my life. Of course, I've had many failed relationships either directly or indirectly for my career, and it has taken my health (I sustained a spinal injury at work) and best years of my life. I feel deeply uncomfortable when I am _not_ working and it is difficult for me to relax. Intellectually I recognise that it is deeply unhealthy but every time I write a grant everyone else in the world who applies is ranked and objectively compared to me -- and I can't shake this feeling that _they don't sleep_, so why should I? It's an absolute obsession and I go into this hyper-focussed mode when I _actually_ get things done and, when an experiment reveals something for the first time in the world, the feeling is amazing. I've just won an academic prize and have a tenured post. I'm deeply, deeply insecure and have a very unhealthy relationship with work. Many academics I know – especially in medicine – are likely diagnosable with very real conditions...
williamDafoe 1y ago
This is 100% true but by the early 1990s computer science Phds were ALSO in the shitter because of all the 1990 layoffs and the total shutdown of industrial basic research and so every industry CS PhD was trying to get a professorship job so they could continue to do research after all the researchers in industry had been laid off!!! Science is a pyramid scheme and a very shallow pyamid with 80-90% cuts at every level !!! Computer science has become the worst profession of all now because all the OTHER scientists say, "it's okay if I can never have a career in a scientific field I'll just switch and become a computer scientist!" And most of them will work for food ... I graduated in 1993 when there were 20 usa positions for the 1000 CS PhDs. "That's okay" you say? "How many were from top schools" you say? 200, thats how many PhDs were from top 10 schools ... So, 10:1, a 90% cut ... I did get a tenure track job (outside the usa - in canada) but could not afford the incredibly low pay in the most expensive city in north america (income vs housing costs ratio).
- vincentpants 1y ago
  Vancouver mentioned!
Metacelsus 1y ago
Wow, and things have gotten even worse in academia over the last 25 years.
Awesomedonut 1y ago
A family friend who has a PhD in math told us that PhD stands for Permanent Head Damage
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MarioMan 1y ago
Those interested in the article may also enjoy reading this one, which really helps to sober your perspective on why one would even go for a CS PhD: “So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!” a.k.a. “Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school at the beginning but didn’t learn until later.” https://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html https://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html
jakobnissen 1y ago
I'm a research scientist, and I think it's fine. Though it may vary with your country and time. During my PhD, we learned that about 1 in 10 PhDs got a permanent academic position. That's intentional - the industry wants way more PhDs than the university. If we only trained future professors, we'd train many fewer. But PhDs have low unemployment, even in subjects like history and philosophy, and the jobs they get in industry are usually good. So getting a PhD is not exactly the career suicide that people paint it as. The author is right about the whole grant game though. Fuck that.
- kergonath 1y ago
  > So getting a PhD is not exactly the career suicide that people paint it as. Even when it is not career suicide, it usually is a pay cut in real terms compared to getting a job at a company earlier and accumulating experience on the job.
  - watwut 1y ago
    The original claim was that PhD in physics destroys your life more then drugs. Which is not a thing even if we talk about marihuanna rather then heroin.
- prerok 1y ago
  Industries that want PhDs are quite limited IME. Very few companies are running their own research labs. I guess pharma would but in CS? Not one company in my country. I also don't remember seeing PhD requirement/advantage in who's hiring on HN. There may be, but they are for sure rare. In my country, in some job positions, a company is also required to give higher salaries to PhDs, so they reject such candidates because of overqualification. I know of a few cases where people actually officially removed their PhD from their education list. YMMV, and I am glad it's working out for you but, at least in my country, the reality is very different.
  - jltsiren 1y ago
    CS is an outlier, as most software jobs require relatively little formal education. STEM in general is not as forgiving. In many sciences, your primary job options are teaching and research. And if you are going to do research, employers generally expect a PhD. Physics is probably the most extreme case, as it's common to see physics departments award one PhD for every three bachelor's degrees.
megamix 1y ago
Would be interesting to read something about engineering degrees too. Are some degrees less worth pursuing? Is it sensible to spend 5 years if you're gonna become a PPT wizard ( sure good pay probably).
n4r9 1y ago
One of George Orwell's essays (I forget which) talks about how writing only suits people who feel compelled to do it, even to the point of starvation if it doesn't reap an income. When I left academia in the mid 2010's I had a similar feeling about it. > The struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support, and again there is a glut of scientists. Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. I've always wondered how far this contributes to the apparent slowdown of fundamental breakthroughs in theoretical physics.
- gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
  >Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention --EAB, Why I Write (The trick could be for some of us amateurs to preferentially attend to the preternaturally funny babies)
  - n4r9 1y ago
    That may be what I was thinking of. An AI-assisted search suggests I may have conflated that passage with this one from Keep the Aspidistra flying: > Over and over again he tried, quite vainly, to explain to them why he would not yield himself to the servitude of a ‘good’ job. ‘But what are you going to live on? What are you going to live on?’ was what they all wailed at him. He refused to think seriously about it. Of course, he still harboured the notion that he could make a living of sorts by ‘writing’ ... The next seven months were devastating. They scared him and almost broke his spirit. He learned what it means to live for weeks on end on bread and margarine, to try to ‘write’ when you are half starved And there's also this other passage from Why I Write: > The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
I did my Ph. D. between 1998 and 2003. I did not regret doing that but after one year as a post doc I left the academic world for one simple reason: I realized the career paths were limited to two options I did not like: option 1) try to shoot for a tenure position somewhere via a long series of post doc positions. Expect to be mostly busy managing postdocs and researchers and lobbying for funding by the time you get there. Tenured professors delegate all the fun bits (i.e. research). 2) Become a lecturer. That's what happens to all the post docs that don't make it all the way. It sounds harsh and it's unfair to the great teachers I had in university. But that roughly is the pecking order at many universities. If you're not cut out for securing lots of funding, you get to do the chore of teaching. Those are the two main things universities need to get done. The pesky business of actually doing the research is something that gets delegated to young phd students and post docs. Tenure positions are for those with a proven track record of securing funding. Typically via getting others to do great research. That's the reason I left. Because I liked the research part, didn't mind the teaching part but absolutely hated the dreary university politics and the endless stupid infighting for power, funding, etc. So I moved into industry, worked at an industrial research center for a bit (Nokia Research) and then found my way into startups. Building startups is a lot like doing research. You are solving fascinating problems that haven't been solved before. It requires the same sort of skills, you are running experiments, theorizing solutions, learning about new problems to solve, etc. You don't get to write a lot of papers and articles. Which isn't something I miss that much. While doing my Ph. D. the pressure to publish was so high it barely left any time for the actual research. With a startup it's the other way around.
- laurencerowe 1y ago
  I’ve never done a PhD (though have worked as a software developer in a research lab) but I feel I’ve had the most freedom to push the state of the art in the tech I work on in open source while funding myself through consulting. My fear of going the startup route is that it ends up more like being a PI and having to chase funding and so much of the success lies less in the tech and more in the execution of how you sell it. So go for funding and get the money to hire a team to do the fun stuff or do the fun stuff yourself on the side…
- 1y ago
TrackerFF 1y ago
Looking back, we only had two guys in our class that went for Ph.D - both ended up doing a Ph.D in ML, coming from electrical engineering. This was back when ImageNet changed the scene. Both were extremely sharp. One of them ended up leaving for industry after 5 years postdoc, the other publishes like a machine, had stints at some really prestigious schools (Stanford, CMU) - but as far as I can find, still postdoc 10 years after getting his Ph.D So while this is only N=2 sample size / anecdotal, it would seem to me that even in red hot fields like AI/ML you'd be better off finding some good company / private research group that matches your interest, and go for that. Probably going to get paid 5 times more, and not have to think about research grants and tenure track.
- contrarian1234 1y ago
  > still postdoc 10 years after getting his Ph.D I think this is just a matter of what position you want. A classmate of mine wrote one paper on machine learning (he basically barely know how to run the Python to train some ancient neural net), did a short 1 year postdoc with his advisor and got a job as a professor at some no-name university in Japan. I'm sure your classmate could get a professorship somewhere if he wanted. If his goal is to be a professor at Caltech then it's a different story
  - phillipharris 1y ago
    Was he Japanese, or fluent in Japanese?
    - contrarian1234 1y ago
      no, not at all. in asia many many international professors and postdocs work 100% in English. Its the norm. Extremely rare to meet the exception. Many dont even have a conversational grasp of the local language Even if you aquire the local language, getting to a proficiency level where you can discuss scientific topics is nearly impossible (bc in the meantime youre doing all your work in english)
cryptography 1y ago
Here's what nobody talks about: the author was RIGHT about the structural problems. But completely wrong about the solution. The PhD glut? Real. The postdoc treadmill? Absolutely real. The funding crisis? Still here. But here's what changed: The same skills that make you survive a PhD—deep research, systems thinking, hypothesis testing, data analysis—became the EXACT skills the market desperately needs. 2025 reality: - AI companies hiring PhDs at $300K+ base - Biotech startups led by former academics - Data science roles requiring scientific rigor - Deep tech ventures solving real problems The trap wasn't the PhD. The trap was assuming the ONLY path was tenure-track academia. The researchers who thrived? They took their training and built different careers: → Industry R&D leadership → Technical founding teams → Quantitative roles in finance → Policy and strategy positions → Scientific consulting The irony: that essay discouraged a generation from science right before scientific thinking became the most valuable skill set in the economy. The lesson isn't "don't get a PhD." It's "don't limit yourself to one narrow definition of what a scientist does." The best training for solving hard problems is still solving hard problems. You just get to choose which ones.
- phillipharris 1y ago
  Is this LLM written?
- Kudos 1y ago
  I've been on LinkedIn a bunch lately while I'm looking for work. The cadence and "But here's what changed:" are extremely LinkedIn coded. I hope this is just an LLM and people aren't actually starting to talk this way.
  - xnorswap 1y ago
    Yeah, the only difference between that post and a full linkedIn post is the AI generated illustration.
    - gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
      It's the LinkedIn version of the challenge to tell people they can prove P=NP without te ... As far as Jane Jacobs (not a professional) is concerned, this is the hardest problem for any tribe of humans: how to survive as a culture? On values (some say fumes) or on money. Values vs value. Academia back in the days of Athena was a "solution" on the values end of the spectrum. Religion, too, until they figured out they could appeal to the "charity" of the spiritually hungry rich (& later, everyone) (I appreciate the Benedictine orders for limiting their offer of spiritual goods to some devilish brews )
soufron 1y ago
Leaving the science cult is indeed the right move in order to discover the reality of life.
- Gooblebrai 1y ago
  Which is...?
  - soufron 1y ago
    Well... the cult of science :)
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paloblanco 1y ago
As someone who is 12 years out from completing a PHD in chemical engineering, this hurts to read today. Because it's so true. I was a great student who became a middling researcher. I come from a privileged background - my younger sibling has already achieved greater success than I ever will, largely from choosing to follow the family business. I've poured tons of extra time outside work into honing my software and ml skills. While I do like what I do, and I am respected at work, that doesn't translate into promotions, success, or justification for dragging my poor wife all over the country. What a fool I was. Ugh. I didn't need to read this today.

133 points by abhinavsns 1y ago

I just summarized the article with GPT, and from what it seems, the points are still valid arguments today...speaking slightly from personal experience.

nickpsecurity 1y ago

I think it could be better titled "Don't Become an Academic Professional or Professional Scientist." They have good reasons for this. Whereas, you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget. You can publish whatever you want on your web sites, social media, etc. You can often get advice or peer review from professional scientists by asking them. You might pay them for their time if you feel your work was worth it.

bluSCALE4 1y ago
Feels to me a combination of old web with new web tricks is the key. People used to update obscure hobby details but there really was no way to donate. Creators didn't even think to bother to ask. All this democratization talk seems to be the solution.
- btrettel 1y ago
  I don't think crowdfunding is a good funding source for science in general. Crowdfunding's going to overemphasize already popular and easy to explain science at the expense of everything else. Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed.
  - blooalien 1y ago
    > "Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed." "Boring sounding" to anyone who don't have a "passion" for that particular area of science as you must if you're wanting to research it. The (hard) trick is to get your crowdfunding request in front of the specific eyeballs that will understand (and be excited by) your motivations and interests enough to want to finance advancing that research.
  - bluSCALE4 1y ago
    I disagree. There's a guy that doesn't have much attention that's creating fuel from burning plastic. He got crowdfunded. I also recall finding a website way back when of a dude that explored the old railroad tunnels of downtown Chicago. I would have 100% funded that guy for content.
    - btrettel 1y ago
      This guy? https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-solarpowered-plastic-to-fuel-innovation https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-solarpowered-plastic-to-f... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Brown_(influencer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Brown_(influencer) He gets $36K from about 800 donors for a project that seems pretty easy to explain ("creating fuel from burning plastic") and is something probably millions of people are interested in. Wikipedia says he has millions of followers! The stuff I'd like to do would probably not have even 800 people interested in it after I carefully explained it. And $36K is not a lot when it comes to experimental research in the physical world. In my view, working a day job and taking periodic sabbaticals would have better ROI for this guy and myself.
wasabi991011 1y ago
> you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget Not in many fields/subfields, unless "chosen budget" is some unattainable amount of disposable income. Most people who want to do science have a specific field they are interested in. Your proposal is fine for theoreticians (and some computationalists, depending on the compute they require), but not many others.
- wbl 1y ago
  Biology can be studied by observing outside in any park.
  - acdha 1y ago
    This is like saying you can study CS using pen and paper. It’s possible for certain rare edge cases but absolutely nobody is going through the process of applying for grants if they don’t need the money to work on the problems they’ve specialized for. People in the past were just as smart and motivated so the low-hanging fruit is gone.
    - linguae 1y ago
      Even for fields that can be done entirely with pen and paper, grad students and postdocs don't work for free, and often the only way a professor can keep up with a research university's publication expectations is to hire grad students and postdocs to contribute to research. Grants help pay for their stipends. Additionally, there are many universities that require their professors to raise grant money as a condition of tenure, since grant money is a significant source of revenue for research universities.
linguae 1y ago
I came to a similar conclusion as a computer scientist working in industry who ended up transitioning to a community college teaching career. I remember being inspired by the stories of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC as a high school student and undergrad, wanting to follow in the footsteps of researchers like Dennis Ritchie. However, the industrial research landscape has changed in the past 15 years. It's very difficult to find truly curiosity-driven places with long timelines and little pressure, and industrial researchers these days are pressured to work on projects with more immediate productization prospects. I've seen this firsthand at a few companies. The tenure-track at a research university route requires playing the "publish-or-perish" game, which is also a curb on freedom and is also filled with pressure. Being a tenure-track professor at a California community college is a happy situation for me. I love teaching, and for roughly 8 months of the year I'm dedicated to teaching. Tenure at my community college is entirely based on teaching and service; I'm not required (or even expected) to publish. I also get roughly 4 months of the year off (three months off in the summer, one month off in the winter). I spent much of the past summer in Japan collaborating with a professor on research. The only serious downside is not being able to afford a house within a reasonable commute from work, but I had the same problem in industry; not everyone in industry makes FAANG-level salaries. In fact, my compensation is effectively a raise from my previous job when factoring in going from roughly 3 weeks of PTO per year to 4 months off plus 10 days worth of sick leave; I took a roughly 10% pay cut in exchange for greater freedom and roughly 5-6x the annual time off. I've learned that being a hobbyist researcher with a stable job that provides summers off is quite a favorable situation, since I don't have to worry about my job security being tied to my publication and fund-raising counts. Most of my computer science research can be done on a mid-range laptop with an Internet connection and access to textbooks and academic databases; I don't need equipment that cost five- or six-figures (though it would be nice to have a GPU cluster....).
- graycat 1y ago
  Bell Labs was part of AT&T which had in effect a government approved monopoly -- nearly all of the US telephone system, so was awash in earnings for transistors, lasers, information theory, the Fast Fourier Transform, etc. Xerox PARC was part of Xerox that was also "awash in earnings" from photocopying machines and for more whatever else, e.g., more in personal computing. So, for a high school student, the lesson there was not just to do great science but to join or start a business that is or soon can be "awash in money" and then do whatever you want, e.g., Jim and Marilyn Simons, including "great science". In more detail, now in practice, one of the main motivations of a company "awash in money" is to pursue research for luster, e.g., AI, quantum computing. Ah, Lesson 101 in US life and money!
cozzyd 1y ago
I don't know from where I sit "don't be a crank" might be better advice. Not to say it's impossible to do science as a hobby (there's some good stuff coming out of e.g. the ham community and amateur astronomers), but sadly most of my interactions with "hobbyist scientists" have been crackpots (ok, there is some selection bias here, crackpots go to all sorts of lengths to try to contact you).

PlunderBunny 1y ago

(1999)

brolumir 1y ago
While this is clearly an old post, I'm not sure about the actual date. On the bottom it says 1999, but there's also a citation for an article from 2001. > For many more details consult the Young Scientists' Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.
- knuckleheadsmif 1y ago
  Being a physics researcher he built a time machine and in late 2001 went back in time to post it.
drjasonharrison 1y ago
The first copy of this essay captured by the Internet Archive was in October of 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20011013031756/http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html https://web.archive.org/web/20011013031756/http://wuphys.wus... The same timestamp at the bottom of the essay can be found on other pages by Professor Katz, such as his list of publications which includes papers from 2019. I suspect that the timestamp of 1999 is incorrect. https://web.archive.org/web/20191206233227/https://web.physics.wustl.edu/katz/publist.html https://web.archive.org/web/20191206233227/https://web.physi...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- piznaul 1y ago
  I was a TA for this professor in ~2000, and this article had already existed (and made the rounds of the grad student offices). I suspect that 1999 is correct.

neverkn0wsb357 1y ago

I wonder if this is a parallel trap for people who study PoliSci and want to go into government to make a difference. Regardless, each career has a disillusionment curve — although yes in this case the financial reality of it (still is) is super unfortunate. If I had to guess, probably mostly because it doesn’t fit in a nice capitalist box of money in / money out.

next_xibalba 1y ago
The capitalist box is the best box there is, for better or worse. It may also be worth pointing out that many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in human history were either achieved before institutional science existed in a modern form, or were achieved outside the formal system. We may have been better off with a system in which science was left to a tiny elite of eccentric geniuses with academic freedom. It certainly doesn't seem as though society is bettered by cranking out 1,000 government funded PoliSci Phds each year.
- blooalien 1y ago
  > "The capitalist box is the best box there is, for better or worse." Only because on the whole we've been utterly resistant to every attempt to try any other way since inventing "<$money>". Bottomless greed is a real thing, and it's deeply dangerous to us all...
  - next_xibalba 1y ago
    Many other ways have been tried. They have been abject failures with a little mass murder, famine, and war for bonus points! Is there some way you're thinking of that has not been tried?
    - harimau777 1y ago
      Democratic socialism, also called social democracy, has been dramatically more effective than America's late stage capitalism. The heavily unionized capitalism that we had in the decades after WW2 also worked much better than our present system.

worik 1y ago

Has anything changed for the better? Ten years ago the cleaners in the labs at The University of Otago had job security most of the scientists could only dream about. I was in the business school (very low rankings!) and I was amazed at the infighting, back stabbing and general lack of collegiality amongst the academic staff. I could not wait together out of there

bee_rider 1y ago
“The cleaners have job security the scientists could only dream of” is pithy, but is it actually saying much? Cleaning is an essential, low-prestige, and potentially quite unpleasant job… I bet the cleaner is the most secure job in a lot of places.
- tehjoker 1y ago
  Not really because there’s an oversupply of people that will do it and petulant bosses

tomhow 1y ago

Previously on HN: Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789844 - Aug 2018 (2 comments) Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836622 - July 2015 (4 comments) Don't become a scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8702841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8702841 - Dec 2014 (33 comments) Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763737 - May 2014 (159 comments)

a1pulley 1y ago

"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs." This seems a bit hyperbolic. In the mid to late 2000s, only 5 of the 15 close grad student friends I had at Caltech didn't get a tenure track position somewhere. Four of the five work in tech, and the fifth is a government electrical engineer. 4/5 were homegrown, the fifth is an immigrant, and all ten tenure track (now mostly tenured) profs are immigrants.

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tomrod 1y ago
To be fair, Caltech is a top school for physics.
cortesoft 1y ago
Maybe he just doesn’t know many people whose life was ruined by drugs.

LarsDu88 1y ago

I can retrospectively look back at folks in my (non computer science) PhD cohort, and say that this bearish outlook is only true for folks who stay in science too long or pursue actual academic careers. The vast majority of folks I know flipped into more lucrative careers in industry... some of which require PhDs or Masters degrees. Furthermore, it really depends on your track. You can wind up in a lab studying something totally obscure or you can be in a lab with multi-million dollar funding and state-of-the-art equipment you can't find elsewhere. Sadly the most well funded scientific research right now is actually being bankrolled by techbro oligarchs for tax deduction purposes, even more so with the cuts to US funding.

dr_dshiv 1y ago
> Sadly the most well funded scientific research right now is actually being bankrolled by techbro oligarchs for tax deduction purposes What’s an example?
- LarsDu88 1y ago
  Chan Zuckerberg Institute The Arc Institute (bankrolled by one of the Stripe guys) Deepmind (think alphafold) Heck, even Deepseek

api 1y ago

This reminds me of numerous pieces I’ve read by authors on why not to try to become an author, like this: https://www.elysian.press/p/publishing-industry-truth https://www.elysian.press/p/publishing-industry-truth What it boils down to is that these are fields with a supply glut of people and/or product. My take is: never try to enter such a field unless you really think you have a chance at performing in the top 20% of all entrants in that field. Anything else is a dice roll. A few people get lucky, but statistically it won’t be you. Discouraging people from trying is a good filter for these fields, since the only people who will ignore such advice is people who really deeply love it or are really driven. Those are the people most likely to ascend to the top 20%. Nobody gets that good at something they aren’t driven to do. It’s also a way to maybe make things better for people in those fields in the future. If the only people who enter the field are those who are deeply driven, it might cut down on the overpopulation problem. Edit: some fields are worse than others of course. Glance at up and coming Hollywood actors and actresses for a worst case. Of the ones who are not nepo babies, look into how much work and hustle and luck (combined) it took for them to make it. Most are insanely good looking talented people who started acting as kids and hustled for years and then got lucky. It’s wild. Physics is not that bad, but it’s not great. Fiction writing might be that bad, especially since the money is less even if someone does make it.

analog31 1y ago
Unfortunately, I met a lot of people in graduate school who were in that top 20% in terms of their ability in their discipline. But they were on a collision course with expectations of employers for what kinds of work they were interested in. The conventional wisdom is you got a science PhD because you want to be an outgoing, driven, competitive leader. And they may have been treating the academe as a shelter from those expectations too.
- watwut 1y ago
  > The conventional wisdom is you got a science PhD because you want to be an outgoing, driven, competitive leader. I have never seen such wisdom. In my neck of woods, PhD is about being hugely into some aspect of science, seeing value in it and being willing to work a lot on it even in bad conditions. The only that tracks is being competitive. But, you can be introverted, you wont lead anything and no one expects you to.

nritchie 1y ago

What he says is still correct for academics. There are too many candidates for too few positions. The pay is lousy. The hours are long. You don't really get to follow you best creative instincts. You spend an inordinate amount of time writing grants. Teaching, particularly pre-meds, can suck. Now with Trump, the problem has only been compounded. That isn't to say that there are no non-academic jobs for PhDs that can be satisfying. Just you may be a glorified engineer. No shame in that if that is what you want.

williamDafoe 1y ago
The oversupply has extended from phds down to bachelor's degrees. With 37% of Americans getting bachelor's degrees it doesn't mean anything anymore and is wasteful overtraining. I'm no Trumper but somebody has to stop the greedy life-wasting that academics have created by overfunding a lot of stupid duplicate research and excessive college educations by people who never have an impact...
- tehjoker 1y ago
  Some would say you educate people to cultivate an engaged citizenry
  - lisper 1y ago
    Very few people say that. Overwhelmingly the rhetoric one hears is that the purpose of higher education is to get a better job. Personally, I think it would be great if we educated people to cultivate an engaged citizenry. But if we're going to do that we have to be up-front about it an work on an economic model that supports it. So, for example, you can't have student loans that are predicated on being able to obtain a certain level of income on graduation, and you certainly can't make those loans impossible to discharge even in bankruptcy. If you lie about it, as we have been for decades now, it all unravels sooner or later.
    - neftaly 1y ago
      Thomas Jefferson said that a bunch

cozzyd 1y ago

Scientist here. It's certainly not always an easy path, but if it's what you want, it's what you want. It's not something you fall into though...

somenameforme 1y ago
Is it not? I'd assumed that the dramatic increase in people with doctorates was simply a mix of the new era of practically unlimited student loans, university being quite enjoyable, and a desire to avoid entering into the 'real world.' It's not like people are planning to become academics, but by the time somebody completes a doctorate in e.g. sociology, they're gonna be buried in a mountain of debt with relatively few career options.
- cozzyd 1y ago
  Most doctorates are funded, at least in the sciences. There are certainly some people who go to grad school because it seems like the logical next step but they tend not to complete a PhD.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
azalemeth 1y ago
Also a scientist here. The part of this article I disagree with is "Science is a profession, not a religious vocation, and does not justify an oath of poverty or celibacy". I really think it is the closest thing I have to a religion. It alters how I see the world, defines the way I think about how to approach problems, and consumes every waking moment of my life. Of course, I've had many failed relationships either directly or indirectly for my career, and it has taken my health (I sustained a spinal injury at work) and best years of my life. I feel deeply uncomfortable when I am _not_ working and it is difficult for me to relax. Intellectually I recognise that it is deeply unhealthy but every time I write a grant everyone else in the world who applies is ranked and objectively compared to me -- and I can't shake this feeling that _they don't sleep_, so why should I? It's an absolute obsession and I go into this hyper-focussed mode when I _actually_ get things done and, when an experiment reveals something for the first time in the world, the feeling is amazing. I've just won an academic prize and have a tenured post. I'm deeply, deeply insecure and have a very unhealthy relationship with work. Many academics I know – especially in medicine – are likely diagnosable with very real conditions...

williamDafoe 1y ago

This is 100% true but by the early 1990s computer science Phds were ALSO in the shitter because of all the 1990 layoffs and the total shutdown of industrial basic research and so every industry CS PhD was trying to get a professorship job so they could continue to do research after all the researchers in industry had been laid off!!! Science is a pyramid scheme and a very shallow pyamid with 80-90% cuts at every level !!! Computer science has become the worst profession of all now because all the OTHER scientists say, "it's okay if I can never have a career in a scientific field I'll just switch and become a computer scientist!" And most of them will work for food ... I graduated in 1993 when there were 20 usa positions for the 1000 CS PhDs. "That's okay" you say? "How many were from top schools" you say? 200, thats how many PhDs were from top 10 schools ... So, 10:1, a 90% cut ... I did get a tenure track job (outside the usa - in canada) but could not afford the incredibly low pay in the most expensive city in north america (income vs housing costs ratio).

vincentpants 1y ago
Vancouver mentioned!

Metacelsus 1y ago

Wow, and things have gotten even worse in academia over the last 25 years.

Awesomedonut 1y ago

A family friend who has a PhD in math told us that PhD stands for Permanent Head Damage

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MarioMan 1y ago

Those interested in the article may also enjoy reading this one, which really helps to sober your perspective on why one would even go for a CS PhD: “So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!” a.k.a. “Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school at the beginning but didn’t learn until later.” https://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html https://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html

jakobnissen 1y ago

I'm a research scientist, and I think it's fine. Though it may vary with your country and time. During my PhD, we learned that about 1 in 10 PhDs got a permanent academic position. That's intentional - the industry wants way more PhDs than the university. If we only trained future professors, we'd train many fewer. But PhDs have low unemployment, even in subjects like history and philosophy, and the jobs they get in industry are usually good. So getting a PhD is not exactly the career suicide that people paint it as. The author is right about the whole grant game though. Fuck that.

kergonath 1y ago
> So getting a PhD is not exactly the career suicide that people paint it as. Even when it is not career suicide, it usually is a pay cut in real terms compared to getting a job at a company earlier and accumulating experience on the job.
- watwut 1y ago
  The original claim was that PhD in physics destroys your life more then drugs. Which is not a thing even if we talk about marihuanna rather then heroin.
prerok 1y ago
Industries that want PhDs are quite limited IME. Very few companies are running their own research labs. I guess pharma would but in CS? Not one company in my country. I also don't remember seeing PhD requirement/advantage in who's hiring on HN. There may be, but they are for sure rare. In my country, in some job positions, a company is also required to give higher salaries to PhDs, so they reject such candidates because of overqualification. I know of a few cases where people actually officially removed their PhD from their education list. YMMV, and I am glad it's working out for you but, at least in my country, the reality is very different.
- jltsiren 1y ago
  CS is an outlier, as most software jobs require relatively little formal education. STEM in general is not as forgiving. In many sciences, your primary job options are teaching and research. And if you are going to do research, employers generally expect a PhD. Physics is probably the most extreme case, as it's common to see physics departments award one PhD for every three bachelor's degrees.

megamix 1y ago

Would be interesting to read something about engineering degrees too. Are some degrees less worth pursuing? Is it sensible to spend 5 years if you're gonna become a PPT wizard ( sure good pay probably).

n4r9 1y ago

One of George Orwell's essays (I forget which) talks about how writing only suits people who feel compelled to do it, even to the point of starvation if it doesn't reap an income. When I left academia in the mid 2010's I had a similar feeling about it. > The struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support, and again there is a glut of scientists. Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. I've always wondered how far this contributes to the apparent slowdown of fundamental breakthroughs in theoretical physics.

gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
>Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention --EAB, Why I Write (The trick could be for some of us amateurs to preferentially attend to the preternaturally funny babies)
- n4r9 1y ago
  That may be what I was thinking of. An AI-assisted search suggests I may have conflated that passage with this one from Keep the Aspidistra flying: > Over and over again he tried, quite vainly, to explain to them why he would not yield himself to the servitude of a ‘good’ job. ‘But what are you going to live on? What are you going to live on?’ was what they all wailed at him. He refused to think seriously about it. Of course, he still harboured the notion that he could make a living of sorts by ‘writing’ ... The next seven months were devastating. They scared him and almost broke his spirit. He learned what it means to live for weeks on end on bread and margarine, to try to ‘write’ when you are half starved And there's also this other passage from Why I Write: > The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.

jillesvangurp 1y ago

I did my Ph. D. between 1998 and 2003. I did not regret doing that but after one year as a post doc I left the academic world for one simple reason: I realized the career paths were limited to two options I did not like: option 1) try to shoot for a tenure position somewhere via a long series of post doc positions. Expect to be mostly busy managing postdocs and researchers and lobbying for funding by the time you get there. Tenured professors delegate all the fun bits (i.e. research). 2) Become a lecturer. That's what happens to all the post docs that don't make it all the way. It sounds harsh and it's unfair to the great teachers I had in university. But that roughly is the pecking order at many universities. If you're not cut out for securing lots of funding, you get to do the chore of teaching. Those are the two main things universities need to get done. The pesky business of actually doing the research is something that gets delegated to young phd students and post docs. Tenure positions are for those with a proven track record of securing funding. Typically via getting others to do great research. That's the reason I left. Because I liked the research part, didn't mind the teaching part but absolutely hated the dreary university politics and the endless stupid infighting for power, funding, etc. So I moved into industry, worked at an industrial research center for a bit (Nokia Research) and then found my way into startups. Building startups is a lot like doing research. You are solving fascinating problems that haven't been solved before. It requires the same sort of skills, you are running experiments, theorizing solutions, learning about new problems to solve, etc. You don't get to write a lot of papers and articles. Which isn't something I miss that much. While doing my Ph. D. the pressure to publish was so high it barely left any time for the actual research. With a startup it's the other way around.

laurencerowe 1y ago
I’ve never done a PhD (though have worked as a software developer in a research lab) but I feel I’ve had the most freedom to push the state of the art in the tech I work on in open source while funding myself through consulting. My fear of going the startup route is that it ends up more like being a PI and having to chase funding and so much of the success lies less in the tech and more in the execution of how you sell it. So go for funding and get the money to hire a team to do the fun stuff or do the fun stuff yourself on the side…
1y ago

TrackerFF 1y ago

Looking back, we only had two guys in our class that went for Ph.D - both ended up doing a Ph.D in ML, coming from electrical engineering. This was back when ImageNet changed the scene. Both were extremely sharp. One of them ended up leaving for industry after 5 years postdoc, the other publishes like a machine, had stints at some really prestigious schools (Stanford, CMU) - but as far as I can find, still postdoc 10 years after getting his Ph.D So while this is only N=2 sample size / anecdotal, it would seem to me that even in red hot fields like AI/ML you'd be better off finding some good company / private research group that matches your interest, and go for that. Probably going to get paid 5 times more, and not have to think about research grants and tenure track.

contrarian1234 1y ago
> still postdoc 10 years after getting his Ph.D I think this is just a matter of what position you want. A classmate of mine wrote one paper on machine learning (he basically barely know how to run the Python to train some ancient neural net), did a short 1 year postdoc with his advisor and got a job as a professor at some no-name university in Japan. I'm sure your classmate could get a professorship somewhere if he wanted. If his goal is to be a professor at Caltech then it's a different story
- phillipharris 1y ago
  Was he Japanese, or fluent in Japanese?
  - contrarian1234 1y ago
    no, not at all. in asia many many international professors and postdocs work 100% in English. Its the norm. Extremely rare to meet the exception. Many dont even have a conversational grasp of the local language Even if you aquire the local language, getting to a proficiency level where you can discuss scientific topics is nearly impossible (bc in the meantime youre doing all your work in english)

cryptography 1y ago

Here's what nobody talks about: the author was RIGHT about the structural problems. But completely wrong about the solution. The PhD glut? Real. The postdoc treadmill? Absolutely real. The funding crisis? Still here. But here's what changed: The same skills that make you survive a PhD—deep research, systems thinking, hypothesis testing, data analysis—became the EXACT skills the market desperately needs. 2025 reality: - AI companies hiring PhDs at $300K+ base - Biotech startups led by former academics - Data science roles requiring scientific rigor - Deep tech ventures solving real problems The trap wasn't the PhD. The trap was assuming the ONLY path was tenure-track academia. The researchers who thrived? They took their training and built different careers: → Industry R&D leadership → Technical founding teams → Quantitative roles in finance → Policy and strategy positions → Scientific consulting The irony: that essay discouraged a generation from science right before scientific thinking became the most valuable skill set in the economy. The lesson isn't "don't get a PhD." It's "don't limit yourself to one narrow definition of what a scientist does." The best training for solving hard problems is still solving hard problems. You just get to choose which ones.

phillipharris 1y ago
Is this LLM written?
Kudos 1y ago
I've been on LinkedIn a bunch lately while I'm looking for work. The cadence and "But here's what changed:" are extremely LinkedIn coded. I hope this is just an LLM and people aren't actually starting to talk this way.
- xnorswap 1y ago
  Yeah, the only difference between that post and a full linkedIn post is the AI generated illustration.
  - gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
    It's the LinkedIn version of the challenge to tell people they can prove P=NP without te ... As far as Jane Jacobs (not a professional) is concerned, this is the hardest problem for any tribe of humans: how to survive as a culture? On values (some say fumes) or on money. Values vs value. Academia back in the days of Athena was a "solution" on the values end of the spectrum. Religion, too, until they figured out they could appeal to the "charity" of the spiritually hungry rich (& later, everyone) (I appreciate the Benedictine orders for limiting their offer of spiritual goods to some devilish brews )

soufron 1y ago

Leaving the science cult is indeed the right move in order to discover the reality of life.

Gooblebrai 1y ago
Which is...?
- soufron 1y ago
  Well... the cult of science :)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

paloblanco 1y ago

As someone who is 12 years out from completing a PHD in chemical engineering, this hurts to read today. Because it's so true. I was a great student who became a middling researcher. I come from a privileged background - my younger sibling has already achieved greater success than I ever will, largely from choosing to follow the family business. I've poured tons of extra time outside work into honing my software and ml skills. While I do like what I do, and I am respected at work, that doesn't translate into promotions, success, or justification for dragging my poor wife all over the country. What a fool I was. Ugh. I didn't need to read this today.