Got pissed enough to log in.., I'll only discuss chemistry as that's where I live: 1) "science" != academia. There's a large albeit shrinking PhD employment

Got pissed enough to log in.., I'll only discuss chemistry as that's where I live: 1) "science" != academia. There's a large albeit shrinking PhD employment in Pharma and biotech. Probably larger than academia if teaching colleges are omitted. 2) there's NO shortages. We've got more candidates than positions and the layoffs over the last 5 years don't help. 20% out of Merck is the latest - might be 10's probably 100's of PhDs. 2b) PhDs enter the biz 27-32 and start having difficulties over 40. Narrow window, eh? 3) cultural and media depictions just suck. Employers are viewed as ogres, staff as tools or even participants in ogre-ness. Who the #!?%? wants to sign up for that? And there's no gates or zuck to counterbalance - who knows the players in the field outside the field? 4) investment takes a long time and ideas tend to not pan out. And it takes a whole lot of $$ to get to that failure. Look at the Alzheimer's or cancer fields. 5) biological systems are far messier than computational ones. Yeah, computers are basically free and the software environment is far better than it was but data is still a problem for model building and physics is a bear for complex simulations. I could go on (and on) but I wanted to end with a plea. If you've made it to the end please keep in mind that while the next social startup might be fun, there are a fair number of problems needing both algorithmic and implementation work. We'd greatly profit from young blood coming in and redoing computational modeling, harnessing cluster and cloud topologies (like the DoE challenges) for large-scale calculations, ... We have far too much left over from Vaxen. It holds us back and must be replaced.