Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles, with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role? Moreso, post doc'ing for the wrong professor can ruin your career, why risk that either?
If the pay isn't good, the culture and work should be. In academia, that's almost never true. I couldn't support my family, nor ironically pay my families student loan payments as a post-doc, the decision was an easy one to make... But if I were really doing it for the love, the love isn't there.
You might think "oh here's an industry person who doesn't like academia", wrong. I loved research, writing papers, teaching people stuff, forming collaborations, etc. Just can't make it survivable financially or psychologically.
Very understandable. I worked as a post doc for 8 years, with a paltry salary, I must say I had excellent advisors, so the experience was professionally enjoyable and I had the opportunity to sharpen my skills, travel the world for work, and have fun in general.
But in spite of an excellent CV, with the caveat that I had no affiliations with top schools and was not part of any in-group--I did not know how important both would be for an academic career, I though my many well-cited publications and clear and long-term research plans would have been enough.
Over the years, I applied for at least 70 tenure-track positions for which I felt I had a good chance of making at least the shortlist of 20 viable candidates. I was called for just one preliminary phone interview.
I started applying for industrial positions in Machine Learning and, after receiving a few offers, took a job that paid 5 times my last postdoc salary (my last contract was 6 months, so it would have been 10 times). It has been a fulfilling, very well paid, and fun career so far.
I always recommend that not-too-promising postdocs consider a career in the private sector early on, especially in technology or related fields. They rarely listen, think or led to believe they are different. They aren't.
> But in spite of an excellent CV, with the caveat that I had no affiliations with top schools and was not part of any in-group--I did not know how important both would be for an academic career, I though my many well-cited publications and clear and long-term research plans would have been enough.
Even those are not enough. I had all of those (great undergrad and grad school pedigree, postdoc with a novel laureate, publications...) You need to have a final boss who will go to bat for you, unfortunately the Nobel laureate was 84 and more into playing slots at the Indian casino/fucking around in the lab than he was in advocating for my career.
>You need to have a final boss who will go to bat for you, unfortunately the Nobel laureate was 84 and more into playing slots at the Indian casino/fucking around in the lab than he was in advocating for my career.
This is one of the things I like about industry jobs. Your career at a company might grow or be derailed by one person, but it's just that particular company. If it's a big company, it's just that particular org. In academia a single person can derail your entire career. As you've pointed out, sometimes it's not even malice. They just aren't interested in doing what they need to support you.
At one point my skip-level was a VP at a software company who loved to push people into doing things by saying "Think about your career. If you do things right you will be set for life." Outside of his tiny universe at that company, nobody even knew he existed. I burned some bridges with that person and some of his sycophants, but I just moved on to a different company with zero ramifications.
It's liberating to be able to just say F-it and move on.
It is true that you can change companies and rapidly leave behind all the problems and conflicts and issues you had in your previous jobs.
In academia, first, it is very challenging to move to another institution after you start your tenure track position (few jobs available, students need to be taken care of, it is at least a 2-year move), second if you have "issues" with other people in the field, and especially when they are more powerful than you (better known, better network, better financing), you have a miserable professional life in front of you. I see many an academic living on the verge of psychological collapse.
Freedom has no price, for all the rest there is money in the bank account.
Absolutely true. I saw this play out in my lab where we had 1-2 PhD students (including myself) and about 12-16 rotating postdocs. They worked insane hours for very little pay, no benefits, and produced 95% of the output of the lab. Our professor was definitely the "wrong" kind of professor, as about 50% of them left academia entirely and not by choice after being wrung dry of all productive output and then discarded. The professor also only hired visa applicants to have extra leverage over them. I know that isn't the case everywhere in American universities, but it was common enough that no one cared or thought it was extraordinary.
> The professor also only hired visa applicants to have extra leverage over them.
For any postdoc that thinks the university has leverage for this reason, if you are able to get a H1B, you can switch employers easily. You are not stuck at whichever company sponsored you.
* My understanding is that universities prefer J-1 visas in almost all cases [1][2], and such visas are not portable.
* H-1B is more flexible than J-1, but still not as flexible compared to a green card. In particular, the new employer has to fill out a new application, pay the fees, etc. Also, universities are exempt from the H-1B cap, but other employers may not be.
False. H1B visas given to work for a university are "cap exempt." They allow to work for universities and other nonprofits only. H1B visas to work for a for-profit company can only be obtained through a lottery.
There's more nuance here. There're ways to "port" your H1B to another company (incl. while working part-time with one leg at a non-profit and another at a startup), but few want to go that route because of all the other bullshit we already had to go through.
I don't think we are in disagreement here. My main point is that many feel "pressure" from their employer. Knowing and keeping your options open and ready to act on them, even at other universities, empower all workers.
I think every single person in my lab was on a J-1. This was in the 2006-2010 timeframe, the H1B process for post-docs may be different now. I can think of one case where a researcher burned out on 80 hour weeks, got divorced, and was asked to leave after their productivity dropped. They didn't have much choice other than to go home to their home country immediately.
We also had an untenured research scientist who did all of the PI's work and grant writing. After two 110+ hour weeks getting three grants written for several million dollars they went home to enjoy the weekend and dropped dead of a heart attack at 42. I miss him.
>If the pay isn't good, the culture and work should be. In academia, that's almost never true
When I think back to my thought process when I was applying for academic and research jobs after my PhD, there's one thing I remember that always keeps me from ever second guessing my decision to move to the private sector.
At least in my field, so many people in academia and research had big egos and were a-holes. Some of them were brilliant, many of them just thought they were. It was so easy to end up in a toxic mess. You know that interviewer who makes you feel small because they knew some random minutiae that you didn't know? There are plenty of those in academia and you'll be answerable to them.
I've worked for a bunch of big companies and there's less acceptance of a-holes. If nothing else, your colleagues will acknowledge they are a-holes and validate how you feel. Even if somebody is a brilliant 10X a-hole, a decent management layer will put walls around them to minimize their damage. And if you find yourself stuck working with or for an a-hole, you have more options to switch because there are more jobs.
The closer I got to my PIs and their friends/enemies in various academic departments, the more I realized that university departmental politics are more stereotypically 'high school drama' than anything I actually experienced in high school! My god, professors can be so petty.
Don't consult a self-perceived expert on a field on a project you're considering? Uninvited from their July 4th BBQ.
Standing up for a junior tenure-track faculty who a senior person doesn't like? Have fun getting work done while scheduled to teach the 800 person remedial chemistry class, disparagingly called 'chemistry for artists.'
Need some equipment but you forgot to wish me happy birthday? Sorry, unforeseen maintenance lol. Oh please.
My friend who is a professor at a university aiming for tenure put it succinctly: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
As whymauri has illustrated, there's a ton of pettiness that goes on between tenured professors and outside of anything to do with the tenure process. It's nothing but people with big egos being a small fish in a small pond and then stomping around like toddlers to make sure everybody knows they are there.
I still have memories of wanting to tell some of my tenured professors that they needed to grow up and find bigger things to cry about. I was in my 20s, they were all 40+.
At least IME, the younger non-tenured professors were less likely to engage in this pettiness because they had, as you have pointed out, a lot more to lose.
I mean the perceived viciousness mostly stems from power imbalance (when it’s between tenured and untenured) and having a lot to lose. Two tenured assholes clashing is at best unpleasant.
Ehh, I’m old enough now that I can LinkedIn/Facebook search my old classmates and see how the crème of my crop turned out. Everyone was smart but the genuine honest-to-god genius from our class is a research chemist at MIT. The richest is a former childrens’ toy maker (STEM-education startup exit).
AFIAK, the leaders in almost every field are in academia, where they have the independence to do research, not earn profits, and where their research has the greatest impact because their employer doesn't hide it from the world as long as possible.
Are you saying that there is pressure on academic researchers to earn profits?
I noticed a major university announcing some new center to nurture businesses to monetize IP. I remember when universities tried to generate knowledge and value for society.
The ones I talk to all complain about the poor pay, relative to how much people make in industry. A few make the jump, especially those whose discipline allow them to transition easily to industry.
But try to be a tenure-track professor in biology at a mid academic institution. You are fed up, you want more money, money you think you deserve. Where do you go at, say, fifty years old?
Fermat's last theorem has been solved back in the 90s. But it's obviously just one example to illustrate the main point, it's not about whether it specifically has been solved or not.
A professor who had also worked in the private sector told me: In academia, everyone is smart and some of them are nice. In the private sector, everyone is nice and some of them are smart.
I don't think they meant it literally, but more in the sense of different places on the trade-off continuum: E.g., academia is willing to tolerate more bad behavior but less lack-of-smarts.
There's some nuance here because the reason this logic works is that labor is special (to me at least) because measures to forcibly reduce the cost of labor increase human suffering. But for basically every other good prices being driven well beyond the norm (during normalish market conditions) is basically the definition of a shortage. It doesn't really matter if it's a "luxary" good or not (since that category is ill-defined anyway grumble grumble tampons).
If the price of milk shot up from $2/gal to $20/gal that's a shortage.
> If the price of milk shot up from $2/gal to $20/gal that's a shortage.
Erm, exactly?
If there were a real shortage, salaries would be going up. The fact that salaries aren't going up to counteract that "shortage" tells me that there really isn't one.
I think the comment was comparing good post-doc researchers to Lamborghinis. Makes sense as the academic are not offering enough ($4000) for it to make sense.
In this metaphor, the postdoc is the Lamborghini, the speaker is the employer bemoaning the difficulty of acquiring a postdoc/Lamborghini for an unreasonable price point, and the $4000 is the unreasonable price point.
Both my parents went to graduate school. One of them loved the academic setting and went through with the postdoc and then found a tenure track job, the other decided it wasn't for them. I talked to them recently and the one still teaching said they would never choose that path if they were coming out of college now.
It can take 5-10 years to find a tenure track job now because professors don't retire. I've seen 90+ year olds walking around departments, and 70 year olds are common. All the low hanging fruit is gone, so projects and problems take longer and longer. Together, it means that whatever semblance of academic integrity and honor is gone. There's too much pressure to produce something big that you'll hide data or even steal it. Even collaborations don't mean you'll see your name on a paper. My partner got their research scooped by former collaborators!! And your recourse for blatant plagiarism? Nothing! No institution will fight for you because your career doesn't matter to them. There's a huge pool of postdocs they can pick from if you give up. Most of the professors still pretend that they can talk things out and share data, or blame you for not anticipating the issues.
The pay is secondary for most people who made it through grad school. They generally _want_ to do research. But when the pay is less for a more toxic environment, it's a no brainer. And somehow the professors are confused why no one wants to stay...
> a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role
Where do you get these numbers from? This is not at all like that in Europe. A postdoc gets (say, in France) 30k per year, doing a calm, interesting job and paid travel to a couple of conferences per year, with almost total freedom to choose their daily schedule. This is not a high salary, but it is certainly livable and quite above the median of the country. A 150k salary is nearly out of reach for even quite senior developers, and nonsensical for "junior python developer roles".
I'm a PhD student in CS in the USA. At my school in Boston, we are paid a ~40K USD/yr stipend. My friends in industry make a _minimum_ of 120k/yr, and some make considerably more than that (think 200k+), in junior / "entry-level" positions.
When I complete the PhD, if I go to industry in the USA, my income will probably be similar to that of my friends who will have been in industry the entire time (and gotten steady wage increases throughout).
It's important to note also cost of living. 40k/yr might sound like a lot, but in Boston, rent is >1k/month even with roommates, we don't have dental care, our health insurance is imperfect, groceries are expensive, etc. etc. Meanwhile in Tucson Arizona or Bloomington Indiana the stipend is something like 22-28K/yr, as cost of living is lower.
Generally speaking it's reasonable to say that completing a PhD in computer science is not a financial investment, but rather, something I am doing because I want to do it. I am very unlikely to literally "profit" (compared to, if I had gone straight to industry instead).
A friend of mine got a phd and he told me the main benefit was that he had lots more opportunities. He was always called back for job interviews and had lots more positions available. His wife, a nurse, basically supported him while he was getting the degree.
This is still an opportunity cost scenario. Would your friend get called back for job interviews if he had just spent that time in industry and had ~3yr experience on their resume (My experience is yes).
Yes, but in the time it takes to complete a PhD, the junior engineer can usually get promoted at least once. So you both end up in the same place, but the guy who went straight to industry was making 3x more than the PhD in the meantime.
Don't forget that a PhD makes it more difficult to get some kinds of jobs. An intermediate or low level developer job may pay more, but if you have a PhD the interviewers are going to question why you are applying for a low level job and be worried how long you will stay. So in some respects a PhD reduces your employability (though you can always lie and say you never got the PhD, though it is kind of hard to hide on a resume without leaving a time gap, which makes you seem even less employable.)
I did my last postdoc in another European country more or less 8 years ago and my salary was 1700 euros per month (after taxes). Very limited funds for traveling or going to conferences.
That was barely livable, considering it is temporary money, you cannot ask for any mortgage, cannot plan any future and you are often starting to have gray hair (or a full head of gray hair).
I think this is very much a uniquely American article and comment. I believe in many other nations the situation is different on both sides. Postdocs are treated different and get more pay, junior developers get paid less.
I agree with you. I don't know why but the most disfunctional labs I know about are all in the US (Prof putting meetings on sat morning so everyone comes in to work on weekends...), although I know of some pretty bad places in Switzerland as well. You're also correct postdoc salaries higher in Europe (and developer ones are lower). However, there is definitely a problem finding postdocs also here. I should say that this seems to be not just academia, all my industry colleagues are desperate for applicants.
In the US (at least for now) it's fairly easy for a Senior Engineer to get 250k TC, and if income is your goal and you want put the energy towards a FAANG, not that hard to get up to 400-500k. In 2019 the median postdoc salary in the US was ~50k [0].
The work/life balance part is a bit trickier to quantify. Anecdotally US postdocs work pretty hard, but my experience is that highly paid engineers at FAANG-style companies also work pretty hard. If you don't want work to be your life as a SWE $250k seems to be the easiest achievable comp while meeting those requirements.
My experience as a senior engineer at G was that most of my peers and I were working about 20-30 hours/week and collecting 300-500k TC. Some senior SWEs worked long hours, but they weren't rewarded for it, and many quickly adopt the ~30 hour/week lifestyle.
When I was a postdoc 10 years ago in the US I brought home about $2200/month. My health insurance deductible was $5000/year. I paid $1800/month in student loans. My family had to move into my parent's basement, and every credit card was maxed, every bank account overdrawn, major food anxiety, etc.
It is astonishing how poorly academia pays the people who actually do the research; extreme financial stress is a nightmare that can really wreck your life.
It's probably in the US. A friend of mine was physical chemist and was paid in the 20k range per year several years ago and it was barely livable. It's not surprising that a junior developer getting paid 5 times of that.
In the US, a postdoc at a top CS school makes like $60-80k and works 60-80hrs a week, whereas a new grad of the same caliber with just a bachelors (think top 10% of graduating class) can reasonably expect to make >$200k working 40 hours a week at a FAANG. Meanwhile, Research Scientist roles (the common alternative to doing a postdoc in CS) recently cracked $400k starting. These are numbers I have personally experienced. (Verifiable on aipaygrad.es and levels.fyi).
CS is certainly an outlier in terms of salaries, but ANY person capable of landing a postdoc in a STEM field at a competitive school in the US is capable of figuring out a way to get a job as a software engineer in Big Tech (the grind of leet code is nothing compared to the grind of doing a PhD, full stop). This is why >60% of PhD grads in CS across top schools are ending up in industry, and I knew a TON of PhDs from physics, math, chemistry, etc. who left research immediately after graduating and are now SWE.
I was an industry person who wanted to transition to academia. I just decided against it obviously. I liked all the aspects you pointed out above. The one thing that is missed is that most places are publishing sweatshops where the pay and work conditions are horrible. The “boss” or the PI has unlimited control and can destroy your career.
The problems are also way out of the ordinary. I’d like to draw a parallel with medicine. Most researchers are doctors who interact and treat patients. In contrast - I think a lot of engineering post docs or phds may not be working on stuff the industry cares about.
Private sector pay is much better and working conditions are also on average much better. You have professional management and HR functions and one manager can’t destroy your career. More importantly the exit options are better. The relative power imbalances lead to people being treated differently.
I was responding purely to your point about working conditions. Obviously if you come from money, have a partner who does, come from a country that’s substantially poorer than most of the first world or want to do science more than you want to have a non long distance relationship or make a professional class income doing a PhD/postdoc looks great.
For all the sarcasm, there is more to it and many people choose and and have chosen it. My point it, just because you see it that way doesn't make it "obvious"; it's just your point of view.
Is the whole patent clerk discovering stuff in their free time still possible? I know people say do what you love etc but I’ve found something I kinda like as a day job but I’d rather be doing astronomy.
yup. deeply regret my time as a postdoc. especially the last few years in the pandemic have been the absolute worst work experience in terms of culture and job satisfaction. it's killed the passion for research i had at the start.
the worst part is that i think this experience has completely tanked my confidence.
I think the core problem is lack of a intermediate default path, besides rockstar or nobody. In some places being a high school teacher was a reasonable, and even quite prestigious intermediate path. Some researchers even did significant contributions to science while in such roles, like Hermann Grassmann. But today being a teacher is a ugly duckling between professions that require higher education, overworked and with worse pay nearly everywhere. In some places they even have to worry about shootouts at work.
I've posted on this before but I make twice as much, more, as an industry pro than in my work as a non-tenured academic. I've been offered tenure and turned it down, because if I took it, my family would starve. It needs to change.
But imagine the displacement of those ivory-tower academic greybeards who will suddenly have to compete with actual professionals? They're still teaching HTML/CSS in my university, for example; cloud is largely pooh-poohed; AI and ML are barely on the curriculum, and sub-par at that; more interesting subjects, like e.g. computational neuroscience, or any software engineering that isn't Python, simply doesn't feature. They'll be out on their ear.
Plain HTML/CSS is still relevant today. Not everything needs to be an SPA. I also don't understand how one would write SPAs with React/Vue/whatever other framework without first having at least some understanding of HTML and CSS.
Agree with the cloud being poo-pooed.
Don't agree with barely any classes in ML. Grant money in ML has been hot, which means academic hiring in ML has been hot, and a good number of those hires are teaching classes. Basically every major CS department has a broad selection of ML courses or even ML concentrations and minors. Most smaller departments seem to have at least one or two courses to choose from.
I've never seen Python used to teach software engineering. Java is the classic language for that, even today. Although I suspect that we may have different definitions of software engineering.
I would even say this goes down further - the motivation to even finish a PhD program may disappear entirely after hearing piles and piles of such stories in the first few years. The lack of sufficient funding from above combined with oversaturation of the industry with PhDs has a long-lasting and chilling effect on the entire academia, and possibly the industry itself too.
Who needs a PhD for a "junior python developer role". Is it really necessary. This "python developer" idea sounds like it only applies to a small slice of PhD programs, notably the ones focused solely on computers. For example, what percentage of PhDs in molecular biology choose to become "junior python developer". When someone who believes a computer performing pattern recognition equates to a child having feelings and sensations^1 can become a "senior software engineer" at Google,^2 why is a PhD needed.
People get PHD’s because they love the subject matter and can get loans etc. But they then have a PHD that might not actually be worth anything and still need to eat.
Assuming just because you have a PHD means you need to use it is a sunk cost fallacy. Starting over can be a completely rational choice.
Does sunk cost fallacy apply to an assumption that because one has an ability to program a computer one must use it, i.e., demand pay for time spent on programming, e.g., with the end goal of coercing people to surrender personal data and/or click on ads.
Perhaps the value of a PhD is not limited to its "market value". I hope that part of the intrinsic value of a degree is an ability to think critically, unlike the "senior software engineer" example I cited, for which the "market value" is probably quite high. Sometimes markets are not rational. Myself, I do not care what any job market suggests. To me, education has value, both for the individual and for society at large.
"Tech" companies are not well-known for fostering crtitical thinking ability. Most of the world is eating, and feeding families, without knowing how to program computers. It has been that way since the dawn of humankind.
The majority of programmers work outside of the personal data collection and or clicking on ads sides of things. Advertising supported businesses are a fairly trivial slice of the economy, as should be obvious because it’s ultimately dependent on advertising spend from other companies.
I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high.
Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since.
Is casual coding more interesting than research/teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me.
I also still find how to get some of the joys of academia in industry, namely, mentoring/holding workshops/writing design specs/turning the cluttered documentation into a nicely flowing coherent one~
I stopped doing a PhD after about 5 years - I was a Research Associate in a UK university so I actually got a salary which wasn't too bad but quite a bit below the going rate (I had a few job offers during that time).
I left to co-found a start-up - never regretted it as I was "hyper cynical" (a direct quote from a colleague) about the whole academic world and how easy it was to play the "publish or perish" game.
I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.
> I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.
Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn't very interested, since I wanted to make things people will actually use. His response was there was a team in Utah that helped make part of the USB spec the decade previous. I was attending the University of Minnesota.
I think this is a short sighted perspective. Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app. Just because you don't see immediate impact doesn't mean it isn't there
I'm not saying that people shouldn't do basic research, far from it, more that I learned that given the way basic research actually works then I had relatively little interest in actually doing it myself.
That particular argument also falls flat, at least with the given information, since there have been plenty of industry partners in defining the USB specs.
My guess is that if you want to be paid full-time to work on USB, you'll probably find more (and better-paid) positions in industry.
Yeah, but outside a borderline prodigy or no lifing to get the knowlegde and experience or a lucky recruitment at some university event, I doubt the industry was letting fresh new grads work on something like the USB spec.
There may have been junior people on the teams at the various companies like Intel that developed and implemented the spec. No, those junior people probably weren't really developing the spec. (The person at Intel who is most credited for the spec with his team was already pretty senior and later became an Intel Fellow.) I also sort of doubt a university group in Utah was a major contributor--although I could be wrong.
I admit I might've got the details wrong. The gist of the anecdote is the best response he had to me wanting to do impactful work was, "some people who didn't even go to this school were a part of something you've heard of ten years ago," which I didn't find terribly compelling.
Arethuza, I'm a bit confused by this comment. PhDs in the UK don't last over 4 years. Would you mind clarifying?
From a personal perspective I don't regret my PhD, though it was charity funded so it was topped up to be around £20 000 instead of the usual £14000ish per year. It was an opportunity to engage with a small group of experts in research that was engaging and of use to the wider world, and present it internationally. I also tried to start a start-up during this time, but the underlying idea failed to pass preliminary trials (I work in healthcare). So the two are not mutually exclusive.
People's experience tends to vary. I think a lot depends on how much you research the group and supervisors you will be working with beforehand, and how much you engage them in the research you do.
A PhD can mean a lot of different things. Personally, I'm employed as a research associate while doing a PhD, which in theory means I should do the PhD as part of my job. In practice, I do not get to do any actual research during the job and the PhD is relegated to weekends.
What I find curious: I get paid to do lots of things which are clearly complete nonsense, but the funding comes with the requirement that these specific nonsensical things must be done. I could do lots of useful things, but I do not get paid for those.
I'm far enough into the process that I've decided to just collect the stupid credential before I move on. Which is funny because I did not get into this for the credentials, but dropping out at this point would just look weird on my CV.
For example solving specific problems in a data-driven way when there is no data and there never will be any data.
Developing all sorts of platforms that will theoretically benefit the public / researchers / whoever, but in actuality will never be used by anyone and in fact will be shut down as soon as the corresponding project ends.
Those are the two generic examples I can think of, for everything else I'd have to give too much context.
Yeah, I quit after my Masters. I do miss the challenge, the feeling of achievement when you crack something, just the whole feeling of being close to the edge of human knowledge, it's all so much more exciting than development where you know your answer is basically already out there.
But yeah, you gotta do what pays the bills. I'm not making triple figures in dollars, but in my country it's six times what I would get during a PhD program.
Almost the same experience, 4 years. I've even stayed after it for another ~3 years because it was ~3x pay as a tech for doing less restricted stuff (no need to convince my committee what I do is important) and learning to run essentially a mini-startup within a lab, while being restricted in my portability due to visa policies.
In the US, PhDs can take 6-8+ years. There are some shitty advisors who delay their students' graduations to get additional low-wage labor. Also, the academic job market is terrible and has been for 30+ years, so it takes a full year just to do the search.
Expanding the acronym for non-academia, ABD is "all but dissertation". After the first 2-3 years of a PhD program, the coursework is finished, you're into mostly independent research, and so you've completed "all but dissertation". This is a nebulous time that could be as short as 1-2 years, and could be as long as 5-10 years. The shorter durations tend to be in the sciences, and the longer durations in the humanities.
Because the duration is so dependent on the program, and the only end is when the advisor agrees that sufficient work has been done to merit a PhD, it can stretch on without much hope in sight.
Isn't ABD status the time from successfully proposing a dissertation to a specific committee until successfully defending that dissertation in front of that committee?
The former step is intended to clearly define what is sufficient work. In effect, it is the contract that eliminates some of the risk of the advisor's whim.
Some people say ABD is 'all but defended' as in you wrote your thesis you just didn't do a defence, some people say ABD is 'all but dissertation' in that you didn't get the point of writing the thesis. That's a pretty big difference. The former is you basically did your entire PhD, the latter is you didn't really start it.
That seems unfair. By the time many people get started on their dissertation they have often done years of research and have gotten several papers published. Starting your dissertation basically means that you're 'done' with your PhD and ready to summerize what you've discovered.
There's also a difference in US and Europe conventions. In Europe, there's typically a 2-year MS followed by a 3-6 year PhD. In the US, these are typically combined into a single 5-8 year PhD program. So an "all but dissertation" phase in Europe is the entirety of the program, it's only the second (and most important) part in a US program.
In practice in the U.S. the early part of a PhD program can be very similar to a master's. It's relatively common for people who leave PhD programs to walk away with a master's degree they didn't intend to get. It's called "mastering out."
I though dissertation referred to the final written document you had to produce to get your PhD. Most people I know with PhDs stared writing that during the last year of the PhD program.
In my university the first part ("successfully proposing a dissertation to a specific committee") was called the preliminary exam ("prelim"). In principle, you should do this decently early in your thesis. In practice, many advisors would tell their students "Go do 90% of the research and when you're close to defending, do the prelim". They didn't want to commit to a project and later fail to achieve it.
So with those advisors, it was normal for people to graduate six months after the prelim (because the department required a minimum of 6 months between the prelim and the defense).
> Because the duration is so dependent on the program, and the only end is when the advisor agrees that sufficient work has been done to merit a PhD, it can stretch on without much hope in sight.
At least one world famous research university has a fix for this problem of "... when the advisor agrees":
The official statement of the university is that the Ph.D. student must submit "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication".
So, if a student believes that they have done such work, then they are free to, and maybe should, submit it for publication. When the work is accepted for publication, the student can then so announce to the professor, department school, and university.
> The official statement of the university is that the Ph.D. student must submit "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication".
> So, if a student believes that they have done such work, then they are free to, and maybe should, submit it for publication. When the work is accepted for publication, the student can then so announce to the professor, department school, and university.
For many fields, this would not work. My advisor required a journal publication to get the Master's degree, and several to get the PhD. He (and many others) would have failed any candidate's defense if they had just one paper if they were in their committee.
The quote from a prof upset that they only received 28 applicants in about 6 months is pretty rich to read, as someone who is in currently a PhD student. They should be delighted so many people want a job with indefinite length, uncertain prospects, and very little pay.
I just recently got a post doc offer from someone, which I will almost certainly turn down because I know the reality: academia sucks, science is great. For years, people have put up with the former to enjoy the latter, but I think we are hitting a threshold.
Yes, the whole article is sort of tone deaf: it's like they see a problem but not the actual problem. It's very typical of the whole thing: complaints without actually doing the painful work of restructuring things, because that would cause too much inconvenience for the people who have benefited.
So we have these discussions about pay and supply and demand, which is part of it, but not the nature of the positions themselves, the ponzi funding scheme underlying it, the status hierarchies, none of it. No one wants to cut or line-item justify indirect funds, or turn those postdocs into faculty positions.
The last place I was at this issue came up about being able to have grad students without funding: the argument was if you can't fund them off of grants you shouldn't have them. On the surface, this sounds great, pretty reasonable, until you realize that now you're incentivizing taking grad students to support grants, rather than as an end in itself. Basically you're incentivizing a permanent student culture, because the expected lifecycle of the researcher is maybe 30 years, whereas the student is expected to only be there maybe 5 in theory.
It's so hard for me to wrap my head around it it: the best analogy maybe really is a ponzi scheme. The desired product is the input. It's so broken in so many ways. It's like no one is actually paying for research, they're paying for attracting students, attracting the money to pay for the research, the trappings of research, etc. That actual useful research gets done is a convenient side effect.
I think what really changed is that people who have a PhD nowadays certainly also have great coding skills and the latter is so much more attractive job wise
Fair number of the CS PhD students I knew while I was there were not good coders, with professors being even worse at it. There's no incentive to write good code, just that it "functions".
I would always dread new teammates that were 100% academia with no industry experience or real project experience. More often than not if you leave them alone for a bit you come back to functions with several dozen one character parameters or something equally odd. Really uncertain why this is, but this has consistently happened multiple times and it's always this type of situation.
I never know what to think about reports on labour demand anymore, I have heard "there are no jobs", "there are lots of jobs", "noone is working", simultaneously all year.
I guess it all comes down to who is saying it. I guess most of the time it's the fact that the jobs are crap, but employers don't want to shift the social contract that creates the apparent contradiction, but who knows.
Postdocs used to be an exception, something prestigious you did before settling into a permanent role that might be a lower-ranked university. If you were really good, you might do 2 years at IAS or MIT before taking the position at a place like UCLA or Michigan (which are still excellent, just not as highly ranked). Then it became something you had to do, before getting any job--mandatory low-wage labor, another rung on the ladder. Now, it seems to be going out of fashion, as the prize loses its appeal.
I'm surprised this didn't happen 10 years ago. The academic job market has been a toilet for 30+ years--and this change is a good thing, by the way--and I had expected bimodalization to come much quicker.
You're absolutely right on the "labor shortage" bullshit. There isn't one. The working class has been fully depleted and there isn't any more give. People are shutting down. Workers who can't afford gas are forced to live off other people (either through illegitimate labor or by dependency.) This is the turtle at the bottom burping. About fucking time.
I'm not surprised this didn't happen earlier. The pandemic disrupted everything and gave people a good reason to rethink their life choices. Industry salaries grew faster than academic salaries. Teaching became more stressful and less rewarding. Instead of being in the same place with other people with similar interests, you had to do research remotely from your tiny apartment. And because you were probably far away from home, travel restrictions often prevented you from seeing your friends and family. The academia started looking much worse, and getting a job where you can choose where you live became even more attractive.
My take is that statements like "there are no jobs available" and "employers cannot find enough workers" can be both true at the same time. My best guess right now is that employers want to hire a lot of low-skill workers in general (warehouses, retail, hospitality, etc.) but only want to hire high-skilled workers with a decade or more of experience, so workers "in the middle" (junior developers, engineers, and scientists) are left out to dry.
I see a similar dynamic for postdocs, but with a slight difference. I believe the PIs in the article when they say that they are having trouble hiring postdocs. As a former postdoc myself, it pays poorly and has no job security. You take those jobs mostly because you like the work, and right now many people have better options available. That is part of the reason I left my postdoc, but the other part is that there are just so few research jobs in my field (postdoc or otherwise) at the moment. Some fields seem to be flush with money right now and unable to hire enough people to meet demand, while others are barely hiring at all. My field appears to be barely hiring at all. And that is why I think that statements like "there are no jobs available" and "employers cannot find enough workers" can be both true at the same time, since it really depends on the field and what kind of work is being funded at the moment.
In other words, the dysfunction (unemployment) on which capitalists rely, because it scares people into taking shitty deals, is a bit less of a problem... but it's also causing other dysfunctions, because it turns out that this is a shitty system.
Well, if you want uncontrolled inflation, keep advocating for policies that push unemployment below the rate of sustainable full employment. It seems to be making people happy, after all.
Not like there are hundreds of years of economic history to learn from...
Ah yes, people getting jobs is what caused inflation. Not the trillions printed and given to scammy upper classes through fraudulent PPP loans and artificially low interest rates.
Do you think nominal wage gains coupled with real wage declines makes people happy? Check consumer sentiment polling which just hit an all time low, why don't you?
It's funny to see society broadly reject the impact of covid era policy, yet some advocate to do more and more of it.
Fed kept rates low in pursuit of unsustainably low unemployment, by the way, motivated by pressure from progressives
Wait, but consumer polling proves the point though? People are miserable BECAUSE their dollar buys less. The benefactors of such a policy are those with diversified assets.
Wages should increase in response, not decrease. Inflation hits different sectors differently, and I'm OK with a PS5 inflating 300% if it means that a person on a minimum wage can have food security.
> Advocating for higher wages to fight inflation is non-sensical. It just exacerbates inflation and requires even further wage gains to keep even.
By exacerbate I suppose you're imagining a cycle where higher wages result in higher prices which result in higher wages and so on. However wages are just another price in the market and it's not clear why the cycle needs to be broken after all prices have gone up except wages. We don't need to let workers end up holding the bag yet again.
I disagree, and I'm afraid you've made a slight error in categorisation there.
You are referred to the PPP loans that the US gov delivered to businesses. I agree that these contribute to inflation, but note: these loans went to businesses to secure the individuals paycheques, not individuals directly, and indeed the wages were not affected. Thus, we have inflation as you describe, and the claim that increasing wages could help in an economic downfall is safe, for now.
However, the PPP is not what I am advocating for, and most people serious about the topic agree there were far more efficient stimulus models that the Biden gov could have explored. If you somehow got the impression I am advocating for the PPP, my apologies.
For an example of what I do advocate, I refer you to the stimulus packages provided by the Australian government during the GFC. There were two significant differences to the US govs and Australia's stimuli: for one, the Australian stimulus was delivered to individuals (increasing purchasing power of the individuals and stimulating further purchases) and secondly, it was done as a single lump sum early on in the crisis, and was done to promote spending rather than to replace income.
This allowed Australia to then leave the GFC with relatively little damage (it can be shown that Australian debt soared afterwards, though it is widely agreed that the cause of that debt was the successor governments misspending rather than the GFC debt).
To summarise, I reject your assertion that higher wages exacerbates inflation. If you have the 'wealth of economic history' to support your claim, please feel free to specify.
(Side note: SBA.gov states that this was actually a Trump administration bill, not a 'progressive' bill, but that is irrelevant for the broader point I am making)
People getting jobs (and raises in those jobs) is absolutely what's causing main street, non-asset inflation.
Wages growing results in prices growing. This is still beneficial for the people whose wages are growing. (Which, in the past year, have mostly been lower class workers. Gas going up in price sucks, but an extra two dollars an hour more than offsets it.)
Sorry to sound elitist, but no reasonable phd graduate that wants to pursue academia would ever want to do their PhD at Clemson university. Only possible exception would be that PI has done Nobel prize level work or the candidate has personal reasons to be in South Carolina.
For perspective postdocs, it’s not about money, job security, or job environment . It’s first and foremost potential to be a leader in their field.
Plenty of phd graduates are willing to postdoc at MIT or work with a Nobel laureate for starvation wages and intense work environments.
This is "saying the quiet part out loud" in academia. For engineering undergrad, your in-state university (ABET accredited) will usually be your best cost/benefit option (unless you're going to MIT, Stanford, or, for CS only, CMU). For grad school, I believe you'd want to think very carefully about the opportunity cost (and what you want your PhD for) before going anywhere outside of the top 20 (or even top 15) schools in your program. For a postdoc, where your opportunity cost is even higher, I think you need to be in the top 10 (or top 5) for it to be worth it.
There's no reason to do a postdoc at any school outside of the top 10 in your field unless, as you point out, you're working for an exceptionally well-regarded PI who is particularly going to be able to move your career in your desired path.
The people who do postdocs at these institutions are usually foreign, for whom a US postdoc is gold. Come to think of it, I can't recall ever interacting with a university postdoc who was a US citizen -- I've only worked for one "PI-generating PI", who happens to not like hiring postdocs.
Academia beyond postdoc is so competitive that even being in top 5 school is not enough information to decide whether it is a good idea.
Even within Harvard, the percentage of postdocs getting faculty positions is low.
One needs to calculate essentially how likely you will get a top publication in that lab.
The arithmetic is something like for a research group, what is the average number of top publications per year per postdoc. Many top labs at Harvard don’t do well with this metric because they have like 20 postdocs and 1 top paper a year.
Another metric is what fraction of postdocs end up in good faculty jobs.
Postdocs are sometimes used as a mechanism to play games with tenure rather than getting the an academic job. You get a publication “head start” without invoking the countdown, and you already often have a future job in hand early.
You’re not the elitist, unfortunately you’re stating the truth and its academic hiring committees that are elitist.
Research backs up the idea that there is a small clique of “elite” universities that exclusively hire from each other. Also, the only direction of mobility is downwards, it’s rare to get hired at a more prestigious university than your postdoc institution.
I am a post-doc in one of the ivory towers. I've been in the system a long time (technician, MD, PhD, residency, fellowship, now post doc). Jeez!
I am a computational immunologist who studies cancer immunotherapy, if it matters. I am not independently wealthy or blah blah. I am a normal everyday person.
I agree academia is nonsensical for the many reasons that are frequently discussed in HN.
Mine is not a perspective I see represented here often: I absolutely love my job as a post doc. Everyone is different - I get a lot of joy from my work. Most of my friends in science at different stages feel more or less the same (albeit everyone complains).
I could get paid 10x more or work half as much, maybe both at the same time. So to answer the question here, why do people do this? Cuz I like it. Don't make everything so complicated (as an academic, that is my job).
If you pay much lower than the industry and only give people temporary positions, it's not surprising people go elsewhere when they can. The solution is also quite obvious...
I hate the trivialization of this. The solution is not obvious. Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from?
At least in my areas of science (chemistry), most of this money comes from grants, which comes from the NIH, DOE, or NSF depending on the project. Ultimately it comes from taxpayers, and portioned out by Congress.
So the solution is either to get Congress to really care about this (ha!) or re-architecture funding of all of higher education.
I hate the helplessness of this. You have agency. You also have responsibility.
You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed.
I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had the moral stomach requires to convince highly educated broke 30 year olds to give me hundreds of thousands of dollars in free labor. But I don't.
So instead I turned down TT offers and went to industry where I spend a lot of time convincing people with the money to actually pay living wages with good benefits to people who can work on slightly different things. I don't have a lab with my name on it. I don't have an office. I will never have tenure. No on calls me Professor or even Doctor. But I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. My post-docs are paid $100k-$200k.
Stop relying on broke kids to fund your dreams. Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. Or stay in academia and don't hire people to help you unless you can pay them even close to what they're worth.
> Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work.
This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector.
I worked for a large company once that in the past had large labs for researching charge transfer and other fundamental physics. When I toured those labs, they were all empty, with broken and unused machines.
I know this site focuses on computers and tech. But there is a large world of scientific disciplines out there that just aren’t useful to business. But useful to society as a whole.
Lastly, postdocs typically make ~50-55kk in my neck of the woods. Underpaid, maybe depending on the field. But far from “broke”. Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions.
> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector.
More helplessness.
My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I still do the most important bits of pushing advances in my field, but there's a lot of auxiliary work that has immediate value as well.
It's less fun, it's CERTAINLY more humbling, and it's a lot more labor. But it provides both short-term and long-term value.
BTW: if you want to do work no one will fund, that's fine. Just at least acknowledge that your largest funding source is the massively under-paid labor of 20-35 year olds.
> Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions.
Your post-docs are >= 28, have graduate degrees, and have several years of research experience. Also, "teachers and many other professions" almost NEVER sign fixed term contracts that require them to move all over the country/world.
BTW, what is your university's pension plan like? Many teachers have great pension plans (that actually make sense to use since they have jobs that last more than 2-3 years). If comparing to industry, what's your 401K match and stock purchase program?
You can't even beat the working conditions and wages that mediocre 22 year olds can get right out of college in a famously under-compensated field. "My PhD employees would be substantially better off as secondary school teachers" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
Don't get me wrong, we are mostly on the same page w.r.t. salaries and what not.
> BTW, what is your university's pension plan like?
Postdocs get the same pension plan/401k plan as any other faculty (postdocs are indeed research faculty). You are also an employee of the state government, with reasonably good health insurance and other benefits. It can't compare to private sector (especially tech sector), but compared to a lot of other businesses, it's fairly good. (Also a downside - lots of bureaucracy from the state legislature).
EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5% match by the university.
My comment about school teachers was mostly about the salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just fine on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is an anomaly.
Now, again, don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of postdocs, academia is a mess, and I want it change. But I really just wanted to point out that the "simple" solutions are not "simple". They require coordinated action among many stakeholders, and lots of dealing with squishy humans and their emotions.
> Don't get me wrong, we are mostly on the same page w.r.t. salaries and what not.
That's fair. I do think managers have responsibility to their direct reports. The postdoc situation in th US isn't going to change as long as faculty and post-docs continue producing. So, quite seriously, the solution is for faculty and post-docs to collectively say "we can't get work done under these conditions". Otherwise things will just get worse.
> EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5% match by the university.
This is generous (but also fairly uncommon for post-docs). Good to hear that your uni provides retirement benefits.
> My comment about school teachers was mostly about the salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just fine on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is an anomaly.
The huge difference is that post-docs are transitory and require uprooting one's life. $50K with the knowledge that you can buy a starter home is very different from $50K and knowing that you cannot buy anything because you will likely move in 2 years. This also has real human cost. See articles like this: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/postdocs-dilemma-when-g...
Retirement plan sounds basically exactly the same as mine was as a postdoc (and it's probably actually a 403b, not that there's any real difference), though it only took effect after the first year and required you to stay long enough.
As a postdoc I also have the option of contributing to a 403B plan - but my school does NOT match our contributions (specifically for postdocs). For 'regular' employees they match upto 7.5%.
>> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector.
> My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing.
I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...
You left out ecology (again, which wouldn't be funded by business and I would consider important for society).
The NSF also gets somewhat close to the others via Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, which includes anthropology/archaeology and linguistics.
I am highly suspicious of the need for post-doctoral training in philosophy, ecology, or social history and even more skeptical of the ethics of using tax payer's money to fund those positions.
Ecology is a probably a field where the world would be better off if we re-appropriated post-doc funding to USFS and hired people with bs or even no degrees to do important work on the ground.
> This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector.
That's actually a really bad analysis and entirely misses the point.
Fundamentally (in the US) too many postdocs are being funded from a fixed grant pool NIH/NSF/etc. has to offer. Too many professors think their research is so much more important than anything else they hire postdocs for peanuts. Too few postdocs have a career path because so few faculty positions are available after completing their postdoc.
Yes, not all science is interesting to the private sector. But that doesn't mean that publicly-funded science has to proceed at its current rate with its unsustainable model of employing postdoctoral slaves.
> Too many professors think their research is so much more important than anything else they hire postdocs for peanuts.
Thanks. This is my point. If you want to manage a team of PhDs, especially in STEM, figure out a research agenda that allows you to do that in a fair and reasonable way.
If you want to do things that are uninteresting to anyone outside of one tiny (likely incestual) sphere of grant-committee-political-influence, then do those things with your own time. Don't drag others into it.
BTW: if no one wants to fund this work then what jobs are the post-docs being trained to do?! And if post-docs aren't being trained for useful jobs then why are we taxpayers funding these ostensibly trainee positions?
You know, I agree with 90 percent of what you're saying, but on this...
> I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds.
... I've got to say, you probably work for someone who is. It sounds like you're a decent human being and that's great--we need more of those--but the entire point of corporate capitalism (although this behavior exists in ostensibly noncapitalist organizations, too) is exploitation. Do you think CEOs care about whether they destroy the careers of people under them?
There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there's no ethical production either, but ultimately, we have to survive.
This is actually a very fair point, so I'm not sure why you are downvoted (perhaps the last sentence comes across as inviting trolling). But I take my responsibility for not doing so to people under me seriously.
>Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from?
Cut the number of postdoc positions in half, double the salaries of the remaining positions, and make it much more competitive to get a postdoc. The purpose of a postdoc is a final training step for someone to become faculty. Only people who are clearly faculty material after finishing their PhD should even attempt a postdoc. Unfortunately, many professors take on postdocs who have no shot of becoming faculty because their lab runs on the cheap, experienced labor they bring.
Remember, the replacement rate for academia is exactly 1 postdoc with faculty aspirations per lifetime of each professor. Anything >1 and academia must grow exponentially to accommodate every single postdoc who desires a faculty position. Most professors have >>1 postdoc over the course of their careers, which means there are way too many postdoc positions in the world.
Or train people to do research while in grad school. There are plenty of fields where people don't do post-docs before applying for faculty positions, e.g., all of the fields where there's no money for post-docs, and "hot" fields where people have better job prospects. I know two CS professors at a major research university, who went straight to faculty positions from their PhDs.
The current structure is a holding pattern for absorbing the large population of PhDs who can't get jobs.
Most professors do not have >>1 postdoc in their careers, because most of us teach at less research-intensive (or entirely teaching-focused) schools that have no postdocs at all. The way things work now, even to get a liberal arts school job requires you to do a postdoc first (at least in my corner of STEM). Anyway, professors at research-heavy postdoc-having schools could get away with more than one. But certainly the status quo is insane, you will hear no argument from me.
>even to get a liberal arts school job requires you to do a postdoc first
That’s a great point that I neglected to consider. Regardless, the overall point still holds—the production rate of postdocs is much greater than the replacement rate of professors (at all institutions).
We live in a very strange world where everybody has brain tattooed the idea that economy must grow a 5% each year, at any cost, but nobody claims that science should grow a 5% each year also.
Show me a single politic saying that science must grow, so we allocated more resources for it.
Academia is a pyramid, for every PhD position, there are fewer post-doc positions, far fewer permanent staff positions, and even fewer professorships.
For most people, an academic career is a dead end. So, reduce the number of PhD and post-doc positions and increase the wages.
Universities have been doing the opposite. E.g. some Dutch universities stopped offering relatively well-compensated employee PhD positions and replaced them by bursary positions with far lower compensations. The primary motivation was that they could hire more PhDs for the same money. That maybe works when there is a recession, but when there is an ample supply of jobs, many good candidates will just choose an industry position instead.
Besides that, universities have gained a lot of administrative staff over the past decades. Plus some universities spend hundreds of millions of Euros on fancy buildings. Sure, it looks nice in PR material, but they could've also built something functional and use the remaining money for better salaries.
You're correct. On the other hand, college tuitions are ridiculous, and the modern university is literally a billion-dollar corporation.
There's no excuse for the academic job market being this lousy when universities have so much money coming in from so many different sources.
The problem is that they spend it all on administration. Paying a "Dean of Multiple-Choice Quantum Intersectionality" $600,000/year is a way for rich white elitists to pretend they care about things they actually don't.
Oh you have absolutely zero argument from me. One problem is the “professionalization” of universities, who are now run by admin “professionals", which removes power from the faculty.
Although one part of this is regulatory burden by the state. This adds lots of overhead which the university would probably rather not have.
Administration. They've absorbed a big chunk of the academia's money. A simple law could fix it: expenses on admins can't exceed 5% of the budget, the chief admin's pay can't exceed 75%-tile of postdocs pay. Admins will scream, they will break walls and tables in fury, and they will quit, but it won't be a big loss for academia.
"longer" is comparatively easy: More staff scientists (moving from grant to grant within an institution but on open-ended contracts) and fewer postdocs. "Paying more" is harder, though one or more of reducing marginal grants and lowering the ceiling on institutional overhead on grants would seem a reasonable start.
I've recently finished four years as a postdoc (and now have a permanent academic job and am applying for grants). It's the precarity of it which is a bigger killer than just the crappy salary. Fighting huge numbers of applicants for the chance to uproot your life (again) and move around the country for a contract that may be as short as 9 months, with every move having a good chance of being the end of your career (which you've invested years in training for). It's a grim position to put people into.
> Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from?
From defunding shit research. And don't give me that crap, you know exactly what kind of research you could cut without anything of value being lost. Start there.
Higher education gets an absurd amount of funding. Entire generations are being saddled with lifelong, insurmountable debt because of how much universities are charging to get an education. The costs of tuition have skyrocketed at rates far above inflation. Many universities are sitting on massive piles of cash reserves. The problem is that most of that money is getting sucked up by non-academic sinks like administration.
They could also make job more attractive. I certainly know people who have the skills and passion to be attracted to the idea of a postdoc, many would even accept the pay they're currently offering. What they won't accept is being worked to death on bullshit tasks irrelevant to their research and being treated as free labor by their superiors.
Treat postdocs with respect, give them plenty of autonomy and freedom to focus on their research, don't make them work long hours or use them as servants, and you'll no doubt find many people willing to take the job without raising the pay.
In addition to terrible compensation, I think another common issue for a post-doc is that they are not afforded the same protections as a graduate student. In the places I have worked the grad students are usually protected by the university, their committees, etc.
Post-docs on the other hand are usually contract workers and they can be fired without any recourse. Usually with two to four weeks compensation. It gives their bosses tremendous power. I know post-docs who have been fired for questioning a PI or a paper they are part of. This can be devastating for a post-doc and their future career. They may have toiled years on a project and can have it taken away on a dime.
I think some places do have post doc unions and it is sometimes combined with graduate student unions. However, in the places I have been it sadly does not exist.
>Postdoc salaries are frequently based on what the U.S. National Institutes of Health sets as its standard, “and that’s pretty low,” says Daniel Wolf Savin, a physicist and senior research scientist at Columbia University who is currently struggling to fill five postdoc positions. When hiring, he competes with national labs that offer up to $20,000 more per year in salary. “If we put in a research grant with a postdoc salary that they pay at a national lab, the program office is going to look at it and say, ‘Look, I can’t give you this much money. It’s so out of line with what everyone else is asking for,’” he says.
I never understood why there are salary guidelines in the first place. Why should a lab with $200k/year to spend on postdoc salaries be unable to hire a single postdoc at $200k/year? Current guidelines stipulate the lab must instead hire 4 postdocs at $50k/year.
At the end of the day, research quality is what matters. The research output of a single excellent postdoc worth $200k/year could easily exceed the total output of four mediocre postdocs each worth $50k/year.
> Why should a lab with $200k/year to spend on postdoc salaries be unable to hire a single postdoc at $200k/year? Current guidelines stipulate the lab must instead hire 4 postdocs at $50k/year.
The article pretty much answers this. It's impossible to convince the program office that a postdoc is worth $200K/year - that's substantially more than the PI himself probably makes. In reality, the program office will majorly push back if you ask for 10k more than the going rate. You can swing $5k more for a postdoc with some years of postdoc experience, but not more than that.
Given the way the contractual relationship of postdocs are setup, it's actually hard to find mediocre postdocs that survive in the system. Mediocre postdocs would be fired soon enough and a bright fresh PhD from China or India would take their place who's willing to work at $50k/year. That bright Chinese or Indian postdoc cannot easily accept a better paying industry job due to the nature of work visas for those countries so will work as a postdoc for several years till they can finagle a green card.
Sounds like everyone understands the issue... so why don't they respond by meeting the market price?
If you want to buy something like a tissue sample for an experiment in a lab then you pay the market price. You wouldn't think to offer 20% of the market price and then be puzzled when nobody will sell it to you - you just pay the going price, and it's part of the cost of doing research.
Why don't people apply that logic when it comes to costs for hiring people? Why is it such a barrier to see that that's just how much a person costs?
The ones in control of money and the ones in charge of running their lab and hiring postdocs are not the same people. If you can't hire a postdoc for shitty salary, then that shitty salary can be repurposed for something else. The former won't ever budge for the latter until the whole system collapses. And even then, I dread that they will just leave it in ruins.
> The ones in control of money and the ones in charge of running their lab and hiring postdocs are not the same people.
Does this disconnect happen in other spending decisions?
For example does the maintenance department ask the administrators for money for new lightbulbs that cost $1 each and the administrators ask them to buy them for 25c instead, even if they aren't available for that price?
How can you even decide what to pay someone without looking at what the market says? Just pick a random number? If you're going to do that why not try to literally pay minimum wage?
With postdoc salaries the issue is that they are set by the governing bodies. I don't have my contract on hand ( I'm a research associate, but it's similar for postdocs), but it's set as some multiplier of minimum monthly wage.
The maintenance funds part is where it gets even worse actually! As an example when you write a grant proposal, they are usually for 2-3 years. You may want to buy some piece of equipment with those funds, and that's fine. However you can't earmark some if that money for future maintenance of that equipment after the grant period ends. Then, when you apply for the next grant, on most occasions, you can't ask money for maintenance of old equipment. And once it breaks, there's enormous hurdles to overcome to get money for repairs.
In the case of postdocs specifically, the PI's money comes from grants, which specify how much the postdocs can be paid. That's the limitation -- funding agencies, and the NIH pay guidelines in particular.
Most post-doc are funded through soft money (i.e., grant money or other non-earmarked department money) to a principal investigator. The PI wrote the grant and budgeted for post docs. Meaning that they set the salary for the postdoc in advance at the time that they wrote the grant (most grant applications I was part of required approval from the University's finance office before submission). They can increase the postdoc salary if they want.
The problem is that if they pay more for a postdoc, that money will need to come out from something else and usually that's from other personnel expenses (as most funding agencies have set amounts that they will allocate to spending categories, so you cannot propose a grant with only personnel expenses for example). That means that increasing the postdoc pay will either (1) reduce the number of postdoc that can be hired on any specific grant or (2) reduce the amount of compensation that a PI will get from the grant. You can see how both of those option are a non-starter as (1) will reduce the manpower on the grant, leading to less productivity, and a reduction in likelihood of future funding and (2) is just a non-starter as most PIs feel like they should get something out from getting a grant (i.e., they don't do research just because is fun).
Plus, there is a close to infinite supply of recent PhDs in pretty much any field that cannot get a faculty position and that will apply for postdocs, so there is really no market incentive to increase base postdoc pay.
Note, I have only applied to NSF grants so other funding agencies (i.e., NIH) might have different budgetary requirements. Private foundations are the Wild West of funding and each one has its own requirements.
> The PI wrote the grant and budgeted for post docs. Meaning that they set the salary for the postdoc in advance at the time that they wrote the grant (most grant applications I was part of required approval from the University's finance office before submission). They can increase the postdoc salary if they want.
This is often not true and the article addresses it: A PI needs the university's approval to increase salary, regardless of how much their funding is. It's usually set by the department. If a postdoc wanted more, they needed to apply for independent funding (e.g. a fellowship). These would have their own stipends defined, and the university could not take it away. Often, they're not even tied to a PI or even the university - if the postdoc decides to change institutions in the middle, he takes the money with him to the new institution.
One simple reform is to train fewer graduate students. Then the job prospects for post-docs will improve as the supply of potential professors is reduced.
> Sounds like everyone understands the issue... so why don't they respond by meeting the market price?
it's not just the postdoc, it's the whole thing. I make a bit more as a 29 years old very occasional freelance than the highest possible grade for university professor reachable only after 30 years or so of work and something like 6 years in "difficult conditions" in my country.
If you want to buy something like a tissue sample for an experiment in a lab then you pay the market price
Academic researchers often pay either zero or get a massive discount on all kinds of stuff (hardware, software, data, samples etc.) for their research that people in private sector pay a huge premium for.
Not completely accurate. Every time you get a grant, your institution get a percentage of it to pay for indirect costs. These costs include office space, office personnel, and other expenses that the grant doesn't pay for directly. So, if you are getting "free" stuff from the department closest, it is very likely that your (or some else's) indirect expenses are paying for it.
Overhead percentages are set by each institution. My current one is set at 54%, meaning that for each $1 of award, I get to keep 64 cents and the university takes 36 cents (more or less).
I was more referring to how Academic licensing is often cheap or free. For example a certain data set I'm working with right now is made available to us for free as researchers, but costs on the order of $200k to access if you're a commercial entity.
Typically there’s a pipeline between academia and industry. A pharmaceutical company doesn’t want to train chemists.
Whatever the current problems are, they are likely the predictable outcome of policy changes made 5-10 years ago. The 20 years of war is largely over, immigration policies discourage some folks, and the educational sector as a whole is very sick.
Society is different too. I was giving talks at high schools as part of an outreach/mentorship program, and science was rarely mentioned by anyone as what they wanted to be when they grew up. A shocking number of kids wanted to be investment bankers.
I'm in the UK and am a PDRA in polymer chemistry. Desperate to get out. Would like to transfer to some type of coding. Pay and job security is far better. Just trying to work if I can manage with pay cut to a more junior role. It's not that I'm unsuccessful, I published plenty and work at a top institute. It's just that the jump from PDRA to permanent is impossible and I'm not interested in industrial chemistry
I've worked with a few chemists turned engineers, for some reason you lot always take to coding fantastically well. I suspect any pay cut you take would be quite temporary.
Interesting observation. I wonder if it's because chemical reactions read a lot like function calls. Complex reactions look a lot like programs written in some arcane language
PhD student looking forward to graduate and move on. I think one can make a decent living with a German salary, which is still 50% lower than an industry position, the reason why I want to leave is the insane competitiveness and inherent up-or-out structure of academia. If I could have a permanent position with the same salary I currently get I would seriously consider staying.
The lack of almost any permanent positions aside from full professorships in the German research landscape is truly ridiculous. What does that get you? A whole bunch of inexperienced PhD students with one professor at the top who cannot possibly find the time to adequately supervise them all / steer the research in useful directions.
I'm currently a postdoc in Germany, to be honest, it seems that only people who can't find a job in the industry are staying in academia. I've never met a postdoc who was happy about what they are doing, everyone one is thinking of an escape plan.
Academia is a despotic, anachronistic system. There needs to be a movement to break education and research out of academic institutions. There are enough online resources to provide free education to anyone who wishes it, and nobody should have to pay for a degree (instead; students should be paid; it's in the interest of society). Funding and licensing of science needs to open up to anyone who desires it, in order to become productive again. The current system is optimized to create busybodies who oversell their work for a few years before dumping it and moving on to their next scam. Postdocs are victims of their own delusion that working in academia is somehow superior to working in any other way.
In CS right now, people with a very strong PhD can go straight to the tenure track.
I took a postdoc because my PhD is solid but I jumped around topics a lot, so it's not quite coherent enough. My postdoc is also at a more prestigious institute.
I'm rolling the dice that it might be enough to get that tenure track job. But I also have no dependents and don't care about material possessions very much. If my situation were a little bit different, it would be foolish to do what I'm doing.
“Money is just sitting there that isn’t being used … and there’s these projects that aren’t moving anywhere as a result,”
What money?!? Lol. Headline should read, “People with 10 years post-secondary education not applying to jobs paying less than corporate entry level jobs.”
I think Western academia is mostly reliant on immigration. Few natives would accept the low pay/high workload combination that is a postdoc, but for an immigrant from a third world country it might be an amazing opportunity. Same reason most fruit and berry pickers also are immigrants.
The thing is, almost all postdocs start on J1 visas, not H1b. Most schools hold out the possibility of moving you over to an H1b as an incentive after a few years. It's also complicated by many J1s come with the rider that they must return to their home country for two years and cannot shift to an H1b. There is a pathway to apply for a waiver from the State Department, but I'm told these days the process takes about 18 months to get the waiver - BEFORE you can be eligible to apply for an H1b.
"The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master’s programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association. In comparison, only about 9 percent of undergraduates in computer science were international students (perhaps, deans posit, because families are nervous about sending offspring who are barely adults across the ocean to study)."
Note that the definition of "international student" excludes those with permanent visas. The number of foreign born PhD students is therefore significantly higher than 64%. Don't know if there are any stats for citizen/non-citizen share of PhDs though.
> Note that the definition of "international student" excludes those with permanent visas. The number of foreign born PhD students is therefore significantly higher than 64%. Don't know if there are any stats for citizen/non-citizen share of PhDs though.
Why are you interested in the percentage of foreign born PhD students? You realize that a lot of Americans are "foreign born". It seems like an archaic way of thinking about things.
"International student" should indeed exclude those who are permanent residents. Which means they have been living here permanently before becoming a student, likely grew up in America, or just waiting for the citizenship, etc. "International student" means someone who moved here to study.
I'm assuming good intentions, but want to make sure we're not intentionally trying to gatekeep what it means to be an American.
Because the statement that was challenged was "I think Western academia is mostly reliant on immigration" and almost all people not born in the US but living in the US are immigrants.
We're talking about postdocs though, which is a completely different population than college students. I found this [1] which estimates that 51% of US postdocs are foreign-born as of 2018.
That is either for undergraduates or total enrollment. The percentages for international students in graduate schools basically range from 50% upwards, depending on the field.
"And even though they make up only 5% of the total student population, international students earned nearly half of all Master’s and Doctor’s STEM degrees awarded in 2019, a total of 117,000 degrees."
That's an interesting stat which might be the source of the parent post assertion.
Supply and demand. We produce more PhDs than needed by either academia or industry.
Hence, the burden of post-docs just grow (I was talking to a biology PhD who said 5-6 years of post-doc was typical, for chemistry I've seen people do 2).
> We produce more PhDs than needed by either academia or industry.
I don't think so - industry can't hire enough PhDs. In my field (programming languages) shortage of qualified people is a bit of a problem at the moment! We wish there were more being produced.
Most Ph.D.s are unemployable in the field that they did Ph.D. in. There is only say very small pool Ph.D. topics which are needed in industry like ML, distributed system, pharmacy etc. Most of the Ph.D. is in fields like humanities, psycology, physics etc. doesn't have many openings in industry.
Someone else mentioned something similar, but some of the Postdoc position are oddly specific.
Like I get the schooling you do prior is supposed to allow you to hyperfocus something, but at the same time, I've seen jobs asking for postdocs with experience in highly niche areas, often cross disciplinary. One I saw was looking for someone with encyclopedic knowledge of some crazy domain specific algorithm at the intersection of two sciences.
Wild guess, but I if I were to bet, I'd bet most people with a PhD or even professional experience in the filed would not have heard of this algorithm.
I guess I've seen similar software jobs, but at least with software I can usually afford the equipment to learn things myself.
This seems pretty off-base to me. A lot of folks with PhD's in physics are working in industry. And a lot of the folks working on distributed systems don't have PhD's in that field.
A PhD is the most common way to gain the experience and context needed to work professionally on compilers. If there aren't many PhDs, then the supply of people with the experience needed in practice is going to be low, even if there are also people without PhDs who can do it.
No university class teaches modern compilers and the state of the art is in open source projects. If someone is interested in compilers, they don’t need to get a PhD in order to learn. Many major companies that maintain programming languages do not require PhDs in order to work on their compiler teams; they are willing to train you on the job. The supply of people interested is just low in general, and if you are biased towards people with PhDs and preexisting experience for junior hires, of course you will find a shortage of workers.
Yeah... hence why you need a PhD. 90% of domain knowledge in this field isn't even written down - you have to sit down with a wide range of people to learn from them - which you get to do on a PhD.
> Many major companies that maintain programming languages do not require PhDs in order to work on their compiler teams
They don't require it... but look at who's actually there and how many of them in practice have a PhD.
> if you are biased towards people with PhDs and preexisting experience for junior hires
As I've said elsewhere I've taken on people with no high-school diploma and zero experience in the past - I'm not personally gatekeeping.
Do you think this shortage might be very recent/rather localized? It seems to me as if there are comparatively few places that hire PL folks.
I'm a (relatively early on) grad student at a chair that does PL and ML, and it's been pretty depressing to look up alumni or authors of papers more on the PL/FM side and seeing those that left academia at 'normal' jobs that seem unrelated to PL, whereas the vast majority of people more on the ML side work directly with it. I like PLT a lot, but especially if you're not at a top school it seems like quite a gamble.
I'm genuinely curious, does the work you are hiring for really require a PhD? To put it a different way, if you and the current employees in your job all started immediately after finishing your undergrad degree would you be any worse at your job?
It doesn't literally require a PhD (I'm not sure how that would even work - unless it was regulated by the government!) but it does require context on the state of the art in the field, and a network of peers to talk to. You get that from doing a PhD. If you can get it otherwise, then great, but that's pretty hard to do in practice.
I've worked with people without even a high-school diploma in my compilers team, so I'm not snobby, just realistic that to succeed you need things and that a PhD is a great way to get them.
Well that’s choosing to not hire people without a PhD, not that the work actually requires it. Also most people hiring compiler people aren’t doing it with an open application system. It’s a lot of word-of-mouth.
I think both are true. Academia is producing too many PhDs in fields that industry isn't interested in and too few with a background that industry wants/needs.
Honestly, there are just too many PhDs and too much glorification of PhDs. Academia is just far too inefficient as well. I have no idea where all the money that’s being moved around is going.
My other thought is that maybe companies that pay little taxes but hire a lot of PhDs should maybe be looked at. Corporations have been extremely successful in outsourcing training to higher education, online learning, and other learning avenues, all off of their books and timesheets.
My impression (from the inside of the university) is that academia is simply not a great employment option these days. There's an attitude on the inside that those who have academic jobs have won the lottery. No doubt, in a few fields that's still the case, but academic jobs are mostly bad working conditions and low pay combined with limited job security.
It was trending in that direction for many years, but the pandemic was a major structural change. You should consider any kind of academic job as a backup rather than a destination.
By now, the good students and post-docs know what is going on: The system is already so broken that there is a high chance that you end up with a PI who got his job because he/she/* is good in making friends with some VIPs. For the actual research, that is what you are hired for. Have fun turning the "great vision" of these PIs into something that makes at least a bit of sense. And only if you are as well the type to make friends with VIPs, you will have a chance to tenure-track.
Agree. I would also prefer if universities focused their funds into subjects that leads to long term benefits, whether that is economic growth, better social cohesion (less polarization), etc.
In other words:
- More funding to STEM, at least the profitable parts.
- More funding to the parts of humanities, socal science and law schools, who's work help bring the nation together, find common ground and reduce conflict.
- Partly cut funding to institutions that do not provide such benefits, and to institutions with too much administrative overhead.
- Completely cut funding to institutions that actively promote social conflicts.
To make it easier to reach these goals, without interpreting each goal in a politcal light, change the funding process as follows:
- Add an x% corporate tax, earmarked for science & education.
- Set up a board, where representatives chosen by those companies that pay the above tax (proportionally to the tax paid) make up 60%, former highly trusted academics 20% and representatives chosen by the sitting government 20%.
- Have this board govern the expenditure in the ways that maximize the benefits defined in the charter above, while having some checks and balances to prevent corruption.
- Encourage grants to be given in larger chunks than today. Direct grants to students should be the exception, and not something a student would apply for. Rather such grants should be awarded in a similar way to how the military grants medals for exceptional performance. When a research leader identifies a particularly deserving candidate, he/she can recommend that this candidate is granted a special individual scholarship, due to exceptional performance and ability. Leaders who repeatedly send spurious recommendations should be discouraged from doing so.
- Instead, institutions or high profile reasearch leaders should be given grants based on historical performance, and be trusted to be able to find the right students themselves. (Within some framework to prevent corruption.)
- Once granted, funds should only be revoked in the case of breech of confidence. Renewal should happen early enough to allow continuity.
The goal of the above proposals, would be:
- Prevent public money from being wasted on wasteful or destructive activities
- Reduce time spent on research grant applications, so that students and employees can focus on the actual science.
- Encourage academic freedom and promote integrity.
- Make sure institutions educate the kinds of students that are in demand in the job market, and the scientific results needed to promote economic growth as well as a more robust state.
I have always seen Postdocs as a 'desperation' position. The struggle to recruit post-docs might indicate healthier alternatives for phds instead of living life as white-collar slaves.
I am surprised that universities haven't created formal part-academia-part-industry partnerships with nearby companies just yet. Instead we are stuck with post-docs and adjunct roles, which get you the worst of both worlds.
>I am surprised that universities haven't created formal part-academia-part-industry partnerships with nearby companies just yet.
These do exist. I was offered to do a so-called 'Industrial PhD' at University of Copenhagen, where you get funded by a company, you do research split between university labs and the company labs, and work at the company at the same time. Should be noted that the time crunch is brutal, as you have the standard 3 years to complete it, but also have to work part time.
Current UK CompSci PostDoc here - and yeah, pretty much what everyone says here is correct. My contract is 'contingent on funding' (so casual/short-term by any other name, but 'perminant' so HR can fudge their short-term employment numbers down) and my pay is well below what I could get in the wider industry.
I stay because I'd like to think I can improve things (I'm very active in management talks, where I can be) but as we're now at 6 (? Maybe 7) years of below-inflation pay adjustments, and with no progression possible at my grade unless I make the leap to lecturer or equivalent I'm just stuck here and its getting tiresome, and every year I look at my bank and go 'why am I doing this?'.
One day I'll stop asking why and leave, but I like what I do - its just not economical.
... and for the curious, I've made the case for promotion and applied for it a number of times, but as no-one ever retires in the industry (profs forever?) the next grade up is stupidly over-subscribed, so my chances are extremely low.
Why would anybody want to become an academic? Low pay, crazy politics and bureaucracy, long hours, constantly chasing grants, the threat of lawsuits from students who might “feel violated” by something you say, the demand to increase your external funding every year, the routine science malpractice, the very low chance that anybody will actually read the papers you produce etc. etc.
> “Ph.D.s are looking at the labor market, seeing opportunities out there, and taking them,” she says. “Those skills that we teach our Ph.D. students are in demand.”
LoL.
Among all the stereotypes in academia perhaps the truest one is profs taking credit for what their students achieve.
Every post-doc I know is plotting an escape plan, some are learning web development, some are learning data science or system administration, heck, there is even special bootcamps now for postdocs evading academia
Here's another perspective from a physicist in one of the less popular sub-fields (IE not quantum computing, high energy, etc.).
I am currently coming to the end of my PhD and want to end up in industry later. However, I am going to do a postdoc for at least a year for a few reasons.
Firstly, it is with a scientist that I work well with and is doing work that I believe in. They are a great boss and I take time off when I need it and without guilt. Second, the location is right and in an area I want to live in and eventually find jobs in. Lastly, the postdoc pays like $80k with benefits; less than I could make in ad-tech, etc. However, it is a decent amount to live well in the location. I'm also doing work on problems I choose and without a need to justify them. It's amazing to me that I can earn money doing this type of work at all.
Plus the postdoc is meant to be a job-hunting exercise. I basically am getting paid a salary to do interesting work and shop around for a job and live in the area I want a job in. It's a win-win. Even my most anti-academia friends in my PhD program are considering doing this for similar reasons.
I guess I am posting this because going through PhD I only ever heard complaints come through about the system (a lot of them valid IMHO). However, now that I'm making the decision it seems like I have a lot of great opportunities. Not that my field doesn't have its problems, but I wonder if the severe ones are concentrated elsewhere. I suppose there's hope out there if you're in the right field.
Ironically when I was a postdoc in Australia, where you get paid on the same (good) payscale as other academics (you could even be promoted to professor level on a non permanent "postdoc" position), industry managers (from collaborators) always complained about the high salaries, which made it less attractive for people to move to industry.
Since I moved to Sweden I see much more issues trying to recruit postdocs. We still get reasonable number of applicants, but they are very low quality. We have been hiring PhD instead, who are much better generally (most of the postdoc applicants for positions where we looked for both, wouldn't have made the cut amongst the PhDs).
I blame that on several factors,
1. We are in a research area where our PhDs can go to industry earning 6 figures (at least in the US) so many opportunities for them if they look around
2. An increasing percentage of funding comes from competitive grants, so there are lots of postdoc positions. So even if applicants want to stay in academia if they are good they can be very picky.
3. A more general frustration with funding processes and universities continuously increasing academic workload, which academics are more open about. So PhDs see the downsides of sticking around more clearly.
I should say that I agree with the article that all this is good because it might be the only way things will change
Well part of it is fields not meant to have post docs use them as a way to avoid hiring tenure track folks. Post-docs are meant for the physical sciences, where you can need a few years to learn the physical mechanics of research in a field like biology, chemistry, physics, or other "hard" sciences.
But as a side effect of decisions folks were coerced into making during the last recession, many fields like CS which require very little physical labor now also use post-docs.
Often a post doc is just something given to a sub par PhD student who coasted on the work of others graduates from a "prestigous" program until they can author a few papers ACTUALLY on their own.
On my end, I deeply regret not backpacking around SE Asia doing English lessons the past ten years -- I'd probably be happier, healthier, and have a bigger bank account than the path I took instead. (Aborted PhD -> terrible NGO -> terrible nonprofit -> piecemeal consulting paired with a Bellingcat certification)
If I were going to attempt a PhD a second time, I'd probaby do it in the EU where they clearly define success criteria from the outset, and I'd probably do it after obtaining an EU passport.
(I should not have to consider getting a second passport to find work with my skillset, but people sometimes are stupid enough to interview me, refuse to take my advice, then get butthurt when the Russians skullfuck their servers or their bank goes out of business because they decided to be cute and treat an interview as a free consulting session, but not actually listen to anything I said.)
My partner is a post doc with an Ivy League background. If I wasn’t in tech she would essentially be eating Ramen and living in a box to survive.
The structure is such bullshit. Incentive to get a postdoc is super low IMO. You make 50k after 10+ years of training and publications and are treated like a second class citizen. They need to offer more money and better benefits with an actual path for growth.
I think there are certain "fundings" that could be higher or lower depending on the project commensurate with hiring with high pay. Post-docs should be paid well in my opinion. They are our future leaders, educators, innovators, and to me, the ones who teach "how" to fish. The same goes for salary in certain fields in teaching.
Just a reflection of how desperate people are to get a shot at the final prize: tenured professor. You see this type of competition and desperation in a lot of fields with highly prized superstar occupations (successful musician, pro athlete, etc)
> Graduate students are also listening to postdocs, who in recent years have become increasingly vocal about the precarious nature of their positions and the challenges of getting by on a postdoc salary
This is exactly what saved me. I was an undergraduate research assistant and our postdoc warned me.
I graduated college in 2018, and, even though I majored in Neuroscience and wanted to do computational neuroscience research, that there was just no way I could accept the working conditions + cost of grad school, PhD, and postdoc life. It seemed like a terrible deal then, even as a young student who ONLY wanted to do research. Learning software engineering and breaking into the industry was SO much easier than continuing my education, and while I don't regret it, I have to imagine the deal has only gotten worse. The only people I still know doing research are fully funded by their parents, and even then most of them have dropped out for easier jobs. Cannot imagine the brain-drain that is happening across the US right now.
I did a postdoc at a top 5 institution and found it to be an ideal transition point into the startup world. I was pretty sure a few months into it that I would leave academia, and spent as much time as possible beefing up my coding skills and doing a startup on the side/finding a cofounder. I even hedged my bets and applied for tenure track jobs in the meantime. This may not work for everyone but it was definitely better than doing a full time industry job during those years which would have made any substantial entrepreneurial activities much harder to do on the side, and not nearly as good for networking.
I'm pretty sure that most of what's said in this article doesn't apply to "top 5" universities. There will always be people willing to put up with a couple years of shitty pay in exchange for being able to work with a Nobel laureate and put "MIT" on their resume.
Wages get set by supply and demand. In the past, there were still people lined up around the block for limited academic positions. Now thats not working, so something has to give if they want to fill those positions.
Where do they find these professors to give these statements? At the very least, ask when the professors were postdocs, were they happy with their salary and benefits?
Why would anybody postdoc in cs or anything software related if they weren’t interested in being a professor? It’s a field where people can literally come from nowhere and make a big impact. It’s not like chemistry or physics where labs are involved or have steep learning curves to be able to function.
Is this just being unwilling to engage? Why would people remain in a training role in todays environment?
Oh yeah, I wonder why people aren’t biting off the hand of academics for 6-12 month contracts with no control over what type of project you’d actually work on in many labs. And of course the salaries haven’t kept up with the rest of the job market.
The toxic divisive culture reported at most academic institution is suspiciously absent in this piece. Yet anecdotally it comes up a lot in talks about why people were not keen to stay in academia.
This really seems like a variant of "there is a huge labor shortage of highly qualified candidates willing to work for low pay in an awful environment with poor advancement opportunities."
This is always a problem when the economy is strong. Just wait for a recession next year and there will be long lines of people wanting to get into grad school.
lack of funding + way too many people doing phds = shitty job market. there is at least 10x more phds than the current system can comfortably sustain. i would love to see the budgets 10x and salaries 2x but since there is a fat chance of that happening i would recommend everyone to steer clear of academia...
Wait, so back in 1861 - the first and last time a civil war erupted in the US - it was due to Leftist taking over academia and then the whole country?
Interesting. Or maybe you are from Europe, where civil war has a long tradition.
But maybe you insist that it was "Leftists" back in 130 BCE in the Roman Empire.
The 8th century Chinese general An Lushan was a Leftist as well? Good to know.
The "Roundheads" in the English parliament back in 1642 were basically commies as well, whereas the royalists "Cavaliers" were the level-headed ones - I mean what's not to love about absolutism, "All hail the King!" and all that.
The Portuguese back in 1832 must have been Leftists as well; I just need to find out which of the royal brothers was the commie.
But yeah, sure. EVERY time with the god damned leftists!
Design your letter in the most aseptic and unfunny way possible.
Extra points if is in a foreign language to show that you are cool people. The problem to solve is less important than all this marvelous crispy sounds when is spelled
Use a lot of trendy terms and fancy words. Your project to improve the texture of the mayonaise must sound like Bruce Willis in Armageddon. The more confusing, holistic and superfood, the better.
Stress that you want really motivated candidates. The job is boring as hell so they need to came yet motivated from home. They will not grow professionally here.
Assure that the job is available only in a narrow interval of time. Much better if is in the time when everybody is posting job offers and competing for your attention. Biology shows us that fishes in a school are safer from being noticed individually.
Reject people that stopped for three years working on science. They could need to spend an entire afternoon to read and understand everything that happened in their field in the last three years. Yup, the whole nine articles. You don't want to use their previous decades of experience and university classes.
For a better measure go to the corridor and run screaming "a gap!, a curriculum gap!" in terror
Use deadlines in your profit. Assure to email your job offer two or three days after the closing time has expired.
Don't be concise, your candidates love to spend ten minutes reading about vanity issues, the history of your building and why the bricks are violet.
Ask they to write an essay about how your project was their dream since school.
Put the salary hidden in a link. Better if this leads to twenty pages of bureaucracy before.
Use several categories for your job offer to reduce the probability of a match. Use fancy names like "Ramon y Cajal" position or "Juan de la Cierva" offer to made it seem more relevant. Then put your job only in one of them. Example: We look for a biochemist for a Sara Borrel thing, requisites: having less than 30 years, visited the Tibet in the last year and be a natural blonde more than 6 feet tall. Their field of research does not matter. "Oh, you studied exactly the same thing but you look more like a `Juan de la Cierva' to me. Maybe the next year".
Your job application must be a turning point in their life. Assure to ask the lab rats to spend all the day filling a job application so complex that would made Kafka proud. A real example: Looking for somebody to work in city X. Requisites. Can't live currently in city X (that would be so easy, and yes, is a real example from a real job offer).
Assure that your selection process to hire scientists has a 70% of questions related with laws, 10% about ideology, and the rest about the real work to do.
If the pay isn't good, the culture and work should be. In academia, that's almost never true. I couldn't support my family, nor ironically pay my families student loan payments as a post-doc, the decision was an easy one to make... But if I were really doing it for the love, the love isn't there.
You might think "oh here's an industry person who doesn't like academia", wrong. I loved research, writing papers, teaching people stuff, forming collaborations, etc. Just can't make it survivable financially or psychologically.