10 ms·

The Jobless Ph.D. Generation

86 points by jzila 13y ago

analog31 13y ago
When I was finishing my PhD in 1993, I told my advisor that I had received an industry job offer. I also mentioned this at interviews for two academic positions. The response of my advisor, and of interviewers, was along the lines of: "If you've got an industry job offer in this climate, why would you even consider applying for academic jobs?"
- Fomite 13y ago
  I've met at least two Ecology professors who bring up the idea that, for a population at replacement rate, there's only one new faculty job for each current faculty member's students. One. I've been in several departments that are very welcoming to industry and non-profits. What they tend not to be welcoming toward is the idea that, because you're not headed to academia, you can either half-ass or rush your research.
  - ryguytilidie 13y ago
    I would actually argue that for each current faculty members job, there are <1 jobs, because many of these jobs will be cut completely by next generation.
    - Fomite 13y ago
      Hence the "at replacement" assumption. They usually also point out that even if the field is doubling in size, that only moves up the number to 2.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
ChristianMarks 13y ago
Articles like this are almost enough motivation to start a movement that I would call Technologists Against Academia. The premise is that since technologists are generally second-class citizens in academia, they should not support the work and unattainable careers of its first class citizens.
- _delirium 13y ago
  In what sense are technologists second-class citizens in academia? Anything to do with computing is the best part of academia to be in at the moment, from compilers to systems to machine learning to AI. Relatively high salaries, more funding than just about anywhere except physics and medicine, good consulting prospects if you want to do that in addition to or instead of academia, quite a few faculty openings if that's your thing, many full-time researchy industry jobs if that's your thing, etc.
  - ChristianMarks 13y ago
    My reply is elsewhere on this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6701769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6701769 EDIT: I cannot reply inline to dinkumthinkum's naive mischaracterization of my remarks, and the unhelpful and the misleading question he asks, but my remarks were certainly not confined to "IT admin stuff." They included scientific programming and substantive intellectual contributions to published research. Of course "IT admin stuff" isn't that valued in industry--one of the points was that it is even less so in academia, which is a strong reason to avoid doing it. It is an occupational hazard to take a research position only to be steered into it when one's superiors cannot or choose not to distinguish between "IT admin stuff," scientific programming and substantive contribution to published research.
    - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
      That response to me is very naive. Do you really think IT admin stuff is really so valued in industry? ... wow I have news for you ... I almost taken aback by this.
- Fomite 13y ago
  Everywhere I've been, good technologists - right alongside good lab managers - are universally well regarded, and many professors I know will insulate their techs jobs from the vagaries of grant funding as best they can. And when labs do hit rocky periods, its usually the techs they worry about the most.
jds375 13y ago
Speaking as en ex-physics major and student with their heart previously set on a Ph.D. and academic career, I can relate to the sentiment at the end of this article. Many of my peers (undergraduate and graduate researchers) looked down on non-academic jobs. This is a sentiment that definitely needs to change. It'll make everyone happier.
HarryHirsch 13y ago
This is a weak piece, it overlooks many things. First, there seems to be the idea that a PhD's place is in academia. Where is this idea even coming from? Back in a different time I got a degree in chemistry in Germany, and the idea was that you would sign up with one if the chemical companies. The degree program was very thorough and broad and lasted five years, and you would start work, be given a mentor, and do anything chemical. Your degree equipped you to do that, it was very broad, if it was chemistry you had heard of it. A PhD was required, chemical technicians would be trained on the job. The lesson here is that a broad degree makes you more employable, but you cannot sell this idea when students have to raise their own funds to pay for their degree and when state and federal funding lines for universities keep shrinking. But what happened was several things: the great monoliths that in Germany had a standing like Microsoft or Google were broken up and sold off (except the BASF), and the perennial pharmco crisis started. There is another lesson, I think: deep science requires deep pockets that only a large, established company can provide. Startups are no solution: it seems that the big pharmcos are now turning into brokers that acquire startups, in-house projects aren't done any longer, instead you acquire a startup, and testing is contracted out abroad. Another problem: no one cooks up their own compounds any longer, you contract out to a Chinese contract shop that employs PhDs from China. I'm not sure if this is cheaper or better (there is something to be said for short communication lines - just walk up a floor), but it is current practice. Also: at my second-tier state school the quality of applicants started really going up after 2009, when the crisis had settled in. To me this means that private jobs have disappeared, and universities aren't hiring much either. This is an economic problem, and I really can't see how turning universities into trade schools could be helpful to create jobs. Neither do I see how increased reliance on privately-funded research institutes would help - no matter how big their endowment they would still be competing for external funding, the biggest source of which is the NIH. But the NIH keeps getting its funding cut. There's the other problem: the government isn't funding science as much as it ought to.
- ChristianMarks 13y ago
  First, there seems the idea that a PhD's place is in academia. Where is this idea even coming from? It's in the air, in the environment. Perhaps your circumstances are different, but in the US the overproduction of Ph.D.s is sufficient to sustain at least one business: The Versatile Ph.D. http://versatilephd.com/ http://versatilephd.com/. The online blogging on the phenomenon is hard to miss.
infocollector 13y ago
Is there a graph like this per department somewhere? Also: Can a degree get you a job data (either industry/academia) would be very interesting to look at for Bachelor's and Master's per degree.
tedsanders 13y ago
I'm a PhD student, and pursing non-academic work after graduate school is totally normal and expected. Many of my advisor's former students have entered industry, so how could she not both expect and accept it? I wonder where this attitude is most prevalent. I imagine it varies across country, region, university, department, etc. Edit: That said, I don't think my advisor does a good job preparing us for industry.
- HarryHirsch 13y ago
  You don't need preparation for industry, you need a professor with connections into industry. If your PhD mentor cannot place students you are indeed in trouble.
impendia 13y ago
I am a math professor. My first Ph.D. student got a job outside of academia and I was happy to support him fully and unreservedly. But: >students still come out with a very narrow window of extremely specialized knowledge Duh. >Additional courses in broader topics such as writing and business would also be beneficial (6). Huh? This suggestion ignores the purpose of a Ph.D.: to produce a piece of original research, which is necessarily extremely specialized. (And for that matter, if students in my Ph.D. program want to enroll in courses in business, writing, or anything else, they can.) If students or employers want alternative degree programs, that is well and good, I encourage universities to begin offering them, and as a professor I would be quite happy to teach and advise such students. But I see no reason to dilute Ph.D. programs, which continue to serve the purpose for which they were created.
- fatjokes 13y ago
  May I ask what industry he went into? Was it finance?
  - psychometry 13y ago
    My observation is that math PhDs who don't go into academia end up at the NSA more often than any other public or private entity.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  > "(And for that matter, if students in my Ph.D. program want to enroll in courses in business, writing, or anything else, they can.)" Do they have the time? My undergrad program was extremely... focused (a word the administration would no doubt use to describe it). In my entire 4.5 years I had exactly two non-engineering electives, the rest of the schedule was a full stack of "core" courses. This was not atypical at my school. The result of which is that you create a bunch of people who are very narrowly educated. I dodged that bullet with a combination of suicidal course loads (e.g., taking a 7th course in a 6-core-course semester) and class-skipping. Neither were good solutions and I only made it out by the skin of my teeth. The problem here is that the definition of a Ph.D. for you is extremely different from the definition of Ph.D. for most of your students. I think there's next to no one whose primary objective with a Ph.D. is to produce a piece of original research - it is always a means to another end: usually career-oriented. There is a dramatic misalignment of what you think you're doing there and what your students think they're doing there.
tensor 13y ago
Here we go again. HN with the anti-academic stance. Almost every week now, we get something like this. Why is everyone here so insecure that they feel the need to beat up on those who choose knowledge instead of money? You don't go into a PhD to get rich. You do it to learn. If you want to learn, do science on your own. Let's see some detailed reports, complete with hypothesis, methods, data, and conclusions. Nothing is stopping you. As for these articles, they are not science. There are infinitely more of these than actual science by the HN crowd. That is because zero startup science articles come through here. The occasional industry science piece comes up, but even most of those are collaborations with academia. If you are truly so passionate about science, prove it with actions.
- aortega 13y ago
  IMHO Academia is the anti-startup. It's in direct competition with angel-investors. Let's see, the path of academia is: 1) Finish college 2) Do PhD 3) Get funding from gov. to do startup or academic project. Angel investor path is: 1) Drop from college 2) Get funding from investor. Investors don't want 30 year old PhDs. They want 20 year old dropouts that will work 22 hs per day. It makes economic sense.
  - ivanca 13y ago
    They also don't want people who prefers to learn & discover something than build & sell something.
    - igravious 13y ago
      False dichotomy. A lot of learning and discovering involves building.
  - tensor 13y ago
    Yes, and none of this has anything to do with science, which is the point of a PhD. It is not a path to a startup. Startups and businesses are completely irrelevant to academia, as they should be. A PhD is about science and learning. If you don't do science, or cannot do science, then your opinion about the academic system is irrelevant. Having gone through it myself I will be the first to tell you of it's problems. But to compare it to the non-science world is a complete joke. Want to make a difference to science? Demonstrate an alternative implementation. Beyond that, if you went into it for the money, it's your own mistake that you need to take responsibility for. Don't try to paint yourself as the victim. You were never promised riches, only knowledge in a subject of your own choosing.
streptomycin 13y ago
After entering a Ph.D. program, it quickly became obvious that when in academia, the only respectable job is considered to be, you guessed it, academia. The whole article relies on that sentence, but it's not supported by anything but an anecdote. Certainly that was not my experience. Although I did pick an advisor who was very practical and worked in industry before coming back to academia, I don't recall any of my friends feeling like they were being pressured towards academia (this is across many departments at many schools). Similarly, I'm not worried about jobless PhDs. If you're smart enough to get a technical PhD, you're smart enough to do many things (check the unemployment rate by degree level if you don't believe me). Friends who have gone the postdoc path typically chose that over more lucrative and stable job offers from industry, and with full knowledge that it could very likely lead them nowhere in their career. You might be ignorant of the harsh realities of becoming a tenured professor when you start your PhD, but you certainly aren't by the time you finish. Of course, these are just my anecdotes... but I guess my point is that I probably wouldn't submit my anecdotes to HN without something more meaningful backing them.
- mjn 13y ago
  Yeah, that doesn't fit my experience either. I meet plenty of people with PhDs who aren't in academia but who are perfectly well respected by academics. Many of them still do research and come to conferences, too, because in CS many industry labs also publish research papers [1]. Some of those jobs are more respected than academic positions are, even among academics. For example, Pixar employees are bigger big-shots at SIGGRAPH than just about any academics are. [1] Example: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html
MatthiasP 13y ago
Too many students see a PhD as potential career and income booster instead of what it really is, the first step in becoming a scientist.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  "Scientist" is a career.
jccalhoun 13y ago
I did my dissertation in the humanities (and since I don't have a job I'm putting off actual graduation as long as I can which is only until may...) and I would love to get a job as a professor but at this point any job that would let me use my skills would be something i would jump at.
okadaka 13y ago
I think you generalized some odd cases. I know a few CS and physics professors as friends. Every reasonable professor knows that there are way fewer academic jobs than PhD graduates. To expect all your students to go to academia is silly & is not the norm among professors. Surely, a professor should strive to have his/her students graduate with sufficient publication record to be suitable for an academic job. Not everyone will have it upon graduation. And it is not the sole point that you must go to academia! In some fields, there are research jobs outside of academia (eg in CS, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Intel). And in most fields, if you go to industry you make way more money. You just don't get tenure, sabbatical and as much freedom, but it is hardly a failure.
auctiontheory 13y ago
The otherwise well-written article omits to mention that most current PhD students should have thought a few moves ahead and not matriculated in the first place. That's the real problem. PhD programs should no more need to teach "how to be a consultant" than BA programs should need to teach remedial algebra and writing.
mdda 13y ago
There's also a completely mundane/political explanation (which would apply to industry too). If you're really good, you're an asset to your boss, and your success reflects well on them. So leaving is a backward step as far as they are selfishly concerned. (Imagine your start-up's CTO left for a "better opportunity"...)

86 points by jzila 13y ago

When I was finishing my PhD in 1993, I told my advisor that I had received an industry job offer. I also mentioned this at interviews for two academic positions. The response of my advisor, and of interviewers, was along the lines of: "If you've got an industry job offer in this climate, why would you even consider applying for academic jobs?"

Fomite 13y ago
I've met at least two Ecology professors who bring up the idea that, for a population at replacement rate, there's only one new faculty job for each current faculty member's students. One. I've been in several departments that are very welcoming to industry and non-profits. What they tend not to be welcoming toward is the idea that, because you're not headed to academia, you can either half-ass or rush your research.
- ryguytilidie 13y ago
  I would actually argue that for each current faculty members job, there are <1 jobs, because many of these jobs will be cut completely by next generation.
  - Fomite 13y ago
    Hence the "at replacement" assumption. They usually also point out that even if the field is doubling in size, that only moves up the number to 2.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

ChristianMarks 13y ago

Articles like this are almost enough motivation to start a movement that I would call Technologists Against Academia. The premise is that since technologists are generally second-class citizens in academia, they should not support the work and unattainable careers of its first class citizens.

_delirium 13y ago
In what sense are technologists second-class citizens in academia? Anything to do with computing is the best part of academia to be in at the moment, from compilers to systems to machine learning to AI. Relatively high salaries, more funding than just about anywhere except physics and medicine, good consulting prospects if you want to do that in addition to or instead of academia, quite a few faculty openings if that's your thing, many full-time researchy industry jobs if that's your thing, etc.
- ChristianMarks 13y ago
  My reply is elsewhere on this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6701769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6701769 EDIT: I cannot reply inline to dinkumthinkum's naive mischaracterization of my remarks, and the unhelpful and the misleading question he asks, but my remarks were certainly not confined to "IT admin stuff." They included scientific programming and substantive intellectual contributions to published research. Of course "IT admin stuff" isn't that valued in industry--one of the points was that it is even less so in academia, which is a strong reason to avoid doing it. It is an occupational hazard to take a research position only to be steered into it when one's superiors cannot or choose not to distinguish between "IT admin stuff," scientific programming and substantive contribution to published research.
  - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
    That response to me is very naive. Do you really think IT admin stuff is really so valued in industry? ... wow I have news for you ... I almost taken aback by this.
Fomite 13y ago
Everywhere I've been, good technologists - right alongside good lab managers - are universally well regarded, and many professors I know will insulate their techs jobs from the vagaries of grant funding as best they can. And when labs do hit rocky periods, its usually the techs they worry about the most.

jds375 13y ago

Speaking as en ex-physics major and student with their heart previously set on a Ph.D. and academic career, I can relate to the sentiment at the end of this article. Many of my peers (undergraduate and graduate researchers) looked down on non-academic jobs. This is a sentiment that definitely needs to change. It'll make everyone happier.

HarryHirsch 13y ago

This is a weak piece, it overlooks many things. First, there seems to be the idea that a PhD's place is in academia. Where is this idea even coming from? Back in a different time I got a degree in chemistry in Germany, and the idea was that you would sign up with one if the chemical companies. The degree program was very thorough and broad and lasted five years, and you would start work, be given a mentor, and do anything chemical. Your degree equipped you to do that, it was very broad, if it was chemistry you had heard of it. A PhD was required, chemical technicians would be trained on the job. The lesson here is that a broad degree makes you more employable, but you cannot sell this idea when students have to raise their own funds to pay for their degree and when state and federal funding lines for universities keep shrinking. But what happened was several things: the great monoliths that in Germany had a standing like Microsoft or Google were broken up and sold off (except the BASF), and the perennial pharmco crisis started. There is another lesson, I think: deep science requires deep pockets that only a large, established company can provide. Startups are no solution: it seems that the big pharmcos are now turning into brokers that acquire startups, in-house projects aren't done any longer, instead you acquire a startup, and testing is contracted out abroad. Another problem: no one cooks up their own compounds any longer, you contract out to a Chinese contract shop that employs PhDs from China. I'm not sure if this is cheaper or better (there is something to be said for short communication lines - just walk up a floor), but it is current practice. Also: at my second-tier state school the quality of applicants started really going up after 2009, when the crisis had settled in. To me this means that private jobs have disappeared, and universities aren't hiring much either. This is an economic problem, and I really can't see how turning universities into trade schools could be helpful to create jobs. Neither do I see how increased reliance on privately-funded research institutes would help - no matter how big their endowment they would still be competing for external funding, the biggest source of which is the NIH. But the NIH keeps getting its funding cut. There's the other problem: the government isn't funding science as much as it ought to.

ChristianMarks 13y ago
First, there seems the idea that a PhD's place is in academia. Where is this idea even coming from? It's in the air, in the environment. Perhaps your circumstances are different, but in the US the overproduction of Ph.D.s is sufficient to sustain at least one business: The Versatile Ph.D. http://versatilephd.com/ http://versatilephd.com/. The online blogging on the phenomenon is hard to miss.

infocollector 13y ago

Is there a graph like this per department somewhere? Also: Can a degree get you a job data (either industry/academia) would be very interesting to look at for Bachelor's and Master's per degree.

tedsanders 13y ago

I'm a PhD student, and pursing non-academic work after graduate school is totally normal and expected. Many of my advisor's former students have entered industry, so how could she not both expect and accept it? I wonder where this attitude is most prevalent. I imagine it varies across country, region, university, department, etc. Edit: That said, I don't think my advisor does a good job preparing us for industry.

HarryHirsch 13y ago
You don't need preparation for industry, you need a professor with connections into industry. If your PhD mentor cannot place students you are indeed in trouble.

impendia 13y ago

I am a math professor. My first Ph.D. student got a job outside of academia and I was happy to support him fully and unreservedly. But: >students still come out with a very narrow window of extremely specialized knowledge Duh. >Additional courses in broader topics such as writing and business would also be beneficial (6). Huh? This suggestion ignores the purpose of a Ph.D.: to produce a piece of original research, which is necessarily extremely specialized. (And for that matter, if students in my Ph.D. program want to enroll in courses in business, writing, or anything else, they can.) If students or employers want alternative degree programs, that is well and good, I encourage universities to begin offering them, and as a professor I would be quite happy to teach and advise such students. But I see no reason to dilute Ph.D. programs, which continue to serve the purpose for which they were created.

fatjokes 13y ago
May I ask what industry he went into? Was it finance?
- psychometry 13y ago
  My observation is that math PhDs who don't go into academia end up at the NSA more often than any other public or private entity.
potatolicious 13y ago
> "(And for that matter, if students in my Ph.D. program want to enroll in courses in business, writing, or anything else, they can.)" Do they have the time? My undergrad program was extremely... focused (a word the administration would no doubt use to describe it). In my entire 4.5 years I had exactly two non-engineering electives, the rest of the schedule was a full stack of "core" courses. This was not atypical at my school. The result of which is that you create a bunch of people who are very narrowly educated. I dodged that bullet with a combination of suicidal course loads (e.g., taking a 7th course in a 6-core-course semester) and class-skipping. Neither were good solutions and I only made it out by the skin of my teeth. The problem here is that the definition of a Ph.D. for you is extremely different from the definition of Ph.D. for most of your students. I think there's next to no one whose primary objective with a Ph.D. is to produce a piece of original research - it is always a means to another end: usually career-oriented. There is a dramatic misalignment of what you think you're doing there and what your students think they're doing there.

tensor 13y ago

Here we go again. HN with the anti-academic stance. Almost every week now, we get something like this. Why is everyone here so insecure that they feel the need to beat up on those who choose knowledge instead of money? You don't go into a PhD to get rich. You do it to learn. If you want to learn, do science on your own. Let's see some detailed reports, complete with hypothesis, methods, data, and conclusions. Nothing is stopping you. As for these articles, they are not science. There are infinitely more of these than actual science by the HN crowd. That is because zero startup science articles come through here. The occasional industry science piece comes up, but even most of those are collaborations with academia. If you are truly so passionate about science, prove it with actions.

aortega 13y ago
IMHO Academia is the anti-startup. It's in direct competition with angel-investors. Let's see, the path of academia is: 1) Finish college 2) Do PhD 3) Get funding from gov. to do startup or academic project. Angel investor path is: 1) Drop from college 2) Get funding from investor. Investors don't want 30 year old PhDs. They want 20 year old dropouts that will work 22 hs per day. It makes economic sense.
- ivanca 13y ago
  They also don't want people who prefers to learn & discover something than build & sell something.
  - igravious 13y ago
    False dichotomy. A lot of learning and discovering involves building.
- tensor 13y ago
  Yes, and none of this has anything to do with science, which is the point of a PhD. It is not a path to a startup. Startups and businesses are completely irrelevant to academia, as they should be. A PhD is about science and learning. If you don't do science, or cannot do science, then your opinion about the academic system is irrelevant. Having gone through it myself I will be the first to tell you of it's problems. But to compare it to the non-science world is a complete joke. Want to make a difference to science? Demonstrate an alternative implementation. Beyond that, if you went into it for the money, it's your own mistake that you need to take responsibility for. Don't try to paint yourself as the victim. You were never promised riches, only knowledge in a subject of your own choosing.

streptomycin 13y ago

After entering a Ph.D. program, it quickly became obvious that when in academia, the only respectable job is considered to be, you guessed it, academia. The whole article relies on that sentence, but it's not supported by anything but an anecdote. Certainly that was not my experience. Although I did pick an advisor who was very practical and worked in industry before coming back to academia, I don't recall any of my friends feeling like they were being pressured towards academia (this is across many departments at many schools). Similarly, I'm not worried about jobless PhDs. If you're smart enough to get a technical PhD, you're smart enough to do many things (check the unemployment rate by degree level if you don't believe me). Friends who have gone the postdoc path typically chose that over more lucrative and stable job offers from industry, and with full knowledge that it could very likely lead them nowhere in their career. You might be ignorant of the harsh realities of becoming a tenured professor when you start your PhD, but you certainly aren't by the time you finish. Of course, these are just my anecdotes... but I guess my point is that I probably wouldn't submit my anecdotes to HN without something more meaningful backing them.

mjn 13y ago
Yeah, that doesn't fit my experience either. I meet plenty of people with PhDs who aren't in academia but who are perfectly well respected by academics. Many of them still do research and come to conferences, too, because in CS many industry labs also publish research papers [1]. Some of those jobs are more respected than academic positions are, even among academics. For example, Pixar employees are bigger big-shots at SIGGRAPH than just about any academics are. [1] Example: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

MatthiasP 13y ago

Too many students see a PhD as potential career and income booster instead of what it really is, the first step in becoming a scientist.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
"Scientist" is a career.

jccalhoun 13y ago

I did my dissertation in the humanities (and since I don't have a job I'm putting off actual graduation as long as I can which is only until may...) and I would love to get a job as a professor but at this point any job that would let me use my skills would be something i would jump at.

okadaka 13y ago

I think you generalized some odd cases. I know a few CS and physics professors as friends. Every reasonable professor knows that there are way fewer academic jobs than PhD graduates. To expect all your students to go to academia is silly & is not the norm among professors. Surely, a professor should strive to have his/her students graduate with sufficient publication record to be suitable for an academic job. Not everyone will have it upon graduation. And it is not the sole point that you must go to academia! In some fields, there are research jobs outside of academia (eg in CS, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Intel). And in most fields, if you go to industry you make way more money. You just don't get tenure, sabbatical and as much freedom, but it is hardly a failure.

auctiontheory 13y ago

The otherwise well-written article omits to mention that most current PhD students should have thought a few moves ahead and not matriculated in the first place. That's the real problem. PhD programs should no more need to teach "how to be a consultant" than BA programs should need to teach remedial algebra and writing.

mdda 13y ago

There's also a completely mundane/political explanation (which would apply to industry too). If you're really good, you're an asset to your boss, and your success reflects well on them. So leaving is a backward step as far as they are selfishly concerned. (Imagine your start-up's CTO left for a "better opportunity"...)