Has anyone ever looked at how large some of these graduate STEM departments are by the number of students? When I decided to go back to grad school for maths, I realized that doing a Ph.D. would probably be fruitless. How did I determine this? I went to UC Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA, arguably the best math departments in the country based on the NRC rankings and AMS rankings, and counted up their graduate students. There were over 300 students. THREE HUNDRED. Three hundred brilliant minds with brilliant credentials with at least 300 other hundred brilliant competitors. That's not including the grad students at the other more mediocre schools in California like USC, UCSC, UCSB, UC Davis, UCI, UCR, and, god, I must be missing some. Oh yeah, UC San Diego. I was wondering, then, where are all these brilliant students going to go? Surely, there is not enough openings in academia, even at lower ranked institutions, for these guys. I went and checked for job openings in academia for math tenure tracked appts, and yes, there were only 10 jobs out there at the time. I then started piecing together things I saw in my own life's journey: brilliant mathematicians and scientists teaching and researching at second or third tier research universities. A lot teaching at teaching colleges (at my school, SJSU, there are several math professors from Stanford and Princeton teaching there).
It was then I realized that doing a Ph.D. in STEM is a pretty piss poor proposition. I would highly discourage most people from doing it, unless you really love research, don't care about job prospects or money, and that's all you want to do in life.
I was going for a PhD in Math and dropped out for pretty much the same reason. The field was so specialized that nobody really understands anyone else's research, which makes it mostly not-merit-based (politics) who gets hired where. Also, it really wasn't fun. I figured it would be easier to work as programmer and study Math (or other things) in my spare time.
It seems like a waste to spend 5+ years on a PhD and 3-5 years on postdocs just to get a tenured position at the #200 ranked university or to be a permanent-adjunct.
Number theory is an extremely broad field in itself. I'm pretty sure most of it is completely irrelevant to the NSA. If you do a PhD in any theoretical field you'll almost never find a job outside of academia that uses any of your work.
I've seen permanent adjuncts / post-docs. There was a guy at my old school who was there as a post doc. He did his PhD at UC Berkeley. I can't believe that he has been jumping around to different institutions as a post doc or lecturer for over 10 years. It's quite sad. My friend did his Ph.D at University of Oregon. It took him 6 years to finish it. Then he spent 2 years as a post doc at University of Toronto. He finally got a job back home at a small 4 year college. I guess he's doing what he set out to do: be a university math professor. But, I believe him being from Hawaii helped him land that gig. They prefer locals who want to go back home before considering others.
As an outsider I'm a bit frightened. I my (mostly estranged) cousin is a Maths researcher (from wikipedia it looks like he's at UCLA now). Once I was talking to a PhD student friend about him, and actually he had used my cousin's work in his field.
So I don't think there is no hope in research. Also I admit this whole citation, publication and plagiarism hunt is a toxic bullshit.
I was once a PhD student of math at UIUC - after some pains with job searching, I eventually landed in software engineering after teaching myself a lot. Graduate school fulfilled a special challenge for me, proving to myself that I had one of the brightest minds out there.
It turned out there were plenty of others smarter than me, but I held my own, which was enough for me. From what I can tell, smart PhD holders and/or dropouts (which I fall under the latter) can fall in many fields. My brother (a PhD graduate from Johns Hopkins in Chemistry) has been recruited for HR and data scientist positions. I have also been recruited for data scientist positions, especially once I proved my excellence in software engineering. I have also been recruited for sales positions in the past.
There are still some organizations/companies out there that recognize the value of pure intelligence over specialty. In some ways, I also look more favorably if someone shows great indicators of this when I am hiring.
Over on /r/math you hear this sentiment a lot from maths postgrads.
The recommendation you hear a lot on that board is that if you are doing a maths degree you should also study something else somewhat complementary (comp sci is a popular choice) and hope to find employment in that field. I had honestly at some point considered doing a Ph.D in Maths but upon further consideration - and realizing then that my future would likely involve low pay, excessive travel, low job stability, and a crushing amount of work - it just seemed like a very sad proposition.
Yeah, I'm also on r/math. The saddest thing to see is the periodic repost of jobs for math degrees. It really is sad to see, and it reminds me of why I was often depressed as an undergrad. It's hard enough that the courses are challenging, but wondering what all this hard work would lead made it even more depressing.
So did you end up getting the phd anyways? In your experience, did you feel the departments' agendas placed importance on the field or were they more interested in career aspirations or money? My personal experience is that mathematics comes second to research grants and ensuring prestige. I do want to hear from other people though since that was just my own.
No, I'm actually starting grad school next month. But, I decided against a PhD and will just do a masters in math with a concentration in statistics. My ultimate goal was to teach at the community colleges anyways. I really don't want to do research for the rest of my life.
I'm a-okay with my job, and it's great that you're not. That means one less person I'm competing against in the applicant pool. And that pool is already substantially limited by excluding non-citizens.
From what I've gathered, this has been the job outlook for academic positions for some time across most areas (not strictly STEM), hasn't it? The prospects for STEM phds in industry appears better (or at least as someone pursuing a math phd with plans to go into industry, I must tell myself that). I'm interested in what decision you made.
Yes to academia. Academia is hard to break into, and from what I gather from talking to a lot of math professors, it seems to have been this way since the 50's.
No on industry. I'm on other math forums, and judging by the constant reposts of "Finding a job with a math degree", I really believe that it's tough finding a job in private industry as well.
Personally, I decided not to do a pure maths degree but instead concentrate on statistics. The job prospects in industry are much better in that field. And, my goal was to teach at community colleges. From my discussion with CC faculty, their most popular math courses are statistics. So, they often look for people who have strong stats backgrounds. My plan is to find work as a statistician and work as an adjunct until I can land a permanent TT job at the community colleges. I just got certified as a SAS programmer, and there are lots of jobs at there I can do remotely.
The PHD in academia has never been about getting good a good job or getting value out of your time though it's about pursuing personal knowledge and projects. If you don't find any value in that than a PHD will not and never has been a good proposition.
> I realized that doing a Ph.D. would probably be fruitless. How did I determine this?
Well clearly it takes someone going to the best math departments in order to realize that within a hierarchical organizations wherein tenured employees can supervise a lot of grad students in the span of their career, only a few of those grad students can really get a job similar to their supervisor. Was this really a revelation?
> at my school, SJSU, there are several math professors from Stanford and Princeton teaching there
You were bashing on schools like, "USC, UCSC, UCSB, UC Davis, UCI, UCR, and, god, I must be missing some. Oh yeah, UC San Diego." and calling the mediocre? HA!
You go to SJSU and are calling those UC's mediocre?? I don't know how you got to the top of HN, but you need a HUGE perspective change dude...
A big employer for chemistry PhDs that no one in the West has heard of is Wuxi Pharmatech, a contract research outfit in Shanghai. They do everything, synthesis, discovery, lead optimization, clinical testing, process development, formulation, the whole pipeline. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies stateside have turned into IP brokerages, if you think you have a promising target you buy a startup that has a compound for that and hand it off to your offshore contract firm.
Research, where you need PhDs, has been cut savagely, because of the short time horizon Wall Street demands that is totally incompatible with the realities of research.
This is a great point, employment stats are not the same across all PhDs.
Back in the early 2000's organic chemistry PhDs were in very high demand. Salaries went from ~$70K/yr to start to over $100K/yr by 2005 or so.
Since 2005 two things have happened: (1) as mentioned above, a lot of off-shoring of basic research has happened, particularly to China and India (not saying this is good or bad) and (2) a shift by the biotech industry away from small molecule drugs to biologic drugs (antibodies and other proteins).
The result is that organic chemistry PhDs have been hit pretty hard while PhDs with knowledge areas that support biologic drug development have done pretty well.
That kind of offshoring is definitely bad, IMO. We aren't talking about outsourced PHP web development sweatshops, but incredibly high-tech research. As one poster below mentioned, you are losing institutional knowledge & traditions. That has to have a negative long term effect on your economy.
I don't think it's really all that avoidable. If you can outsource high tech work for less, why wouldn't you?
That being said, I've heard that wages for PhDs in China and India have gone up from 30% of that in the US to 70-80%. Combine that with the hassle of outsourcing (knowledge transfer, etc) it's become less advantageous than it was 10 years ago.
Companies that sacrifice long term for short term profits will, assuredly, do poorly long term. Their stock price will decline. Investors will see this and will short the stock. The stock will have low P/E ratios.
On the other hand, companies that sacrifice for the short term and invest for the long term will see high P/E ratios, as investors see that and go long on the stock. Amazon is a prime example.
I don't believe that investors (Wall Street) are too dumb to know the difference.
Companies that sacrifice long term for short term profits will, assuredly, do poorly long term. Their stock price will decline. Investors will see this and will short the stock. The stock will have low P/E ratios.
We see this play out right now. Facebook and Google offer faster return on investment than Merck and Pfizer, and that's why stock prices are where they are.
But when you shut down a research facility you instantly lose decades of institutional knowledge, something that you can't buy for all the money in the world. At some point society has to ask what it wants: more targeted advertising, or antibiotics that actually work.
Few comments have made me want to downvote as much as this one. I still have another hundred or so points to go until I am allowed so I'll have to settle for explaining to you how much I disagree.
Your argument is a logical fallacy that I see a lot, but doesn't have a fancy Latin name. It is a combination of appeal to authority and circular reasoning so I'll give it a name right now: the Authority Circle. It has the form of:
"I believe X person/company/country is doing something dumb/bad/foolish."
"If it wasn't a good idea, they wouldn't be doing it."
This assumes that person X is smarter than you, therefore the fact that they are choosing to take an action is evidence that it is good. This is a lazy and unconstructive argument and you should be ashamed of yourself. (Unless you are a Wall Street shill doing PR spin. In that case, well done.)
So logically your argument is not well formed; what about factually? The behavior we see in investors is incredibly focused on short term gains and why not? There is no benefit to long term success to a public investor. Once the company (a small percentage of) their money is invested in flames out, they can simply invest in another company and drain them dry until it is time to bleed another one. (Hopefully unloading their stock to chumps along the way at the right time, before anyone realizes they are being sold a sick cow.) We know from history that unless government regulates the stock market, it is a short matter of time until the house of cards collapses. Today, the most long-lived publicly-held corporations are the ones where the CEO has the power to say "no" to intense investor demand for short-term gain. (We are waiting to see how long Apple can survive this now that Jobs is gone.) Everything we know tells us "yes, investors are indeed that stupid."
You have offered no new or useful facts or reasoning to this discussion. I give your comment a 0/10 for your unhelpful waste of everyone's time.
My post is not the conventional wisdom, hence I expect the downvotes. But hear me out.
I said investors, not an individual. There are a lot of professional investors who full time investigate a company, in fact Wall Street is full of them. Do I really believe that you (or I) am better informed about a company's future prospects? Why do you believe you are smarter than they are?
Consider (again) Amazon. Why does it have such a high P/E? That is hardly evidence of short term thinking. Why did Microsoft, for the last 10 years, have increasing profits and a shrinking P/E? I submit that investors were pricing the stock based on their estimation of the long term value of the stock.
A CEO once told me he was organizing his company around short term results, because "that's what Wall Street wants". The stock cratered shortly afterwards. He fooled nobody but himself.
Let's put it this way. Give us a list of stocks you believe are overvalued because foolish investors have bid the price up because of long term sacrifice for short term results. Eventually, the chickens must come to roost and the stock must collapse. So I must ask, have you shorted those stocks? Are you willing to bet your own money on being smarter than Wall Street?
You open by claiming that you are being downvoted because you are such a free-thinking maverick that you lost the popularity contest with the stodgy conservatives at HN instead being due to any shortcomings in your argument. That's adorable.
Your second paragraph sticks with the same nonsense as your previous post i.e. investors are smarter than us so they have to be right.
Now you try some new stuff so thanks for that. You made a good example of Amazon but since I already claimed that strong CEOs can resist short-term investor pressures and Bezos clearly falls into this category I invalidated this argument before you even wrote it down. It makes me think you aren't really paying attention.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make with the next paragraph but whatever it is there is not enough information there to draw any sort of conclusion. Stocks tank for many reasons including bad luck so one tale of a data point isn't useful.
Your last paragraph is well done. Unlike your other points it took a little thought to deduce why it is incorrect. I do believe there are many overvalued stocks but I am not going to short them. Bubbles can live a very, very long time and shorting them is a bet on when the bubble will pop, not on how big the bubble is, and I claim no special insight or information on the exact time any particular ponzi pyramid will inevitably implode.
Much improved: 2/10 (earned in the last paragraph only.)
> CEOs can resist short-term investor pressures and Bezos clearly falls into this category
Amazon's P/E is currently 503. The P/E for the S&P 500 is around 19. The "investor pressures" are strongly supporting Bezos.
I'm one of them. I'm long on AMZN, with my own money on the line, and it's done well for me. I plan on staying pat.
Whether I'm right or wrong about AMZN's future is irrelevant - what is relevant is that a high P/E is a sure sign of investors betting on the long term future of a company, and not being obsessed with the next quarter. The CEO doesn't set the P/E, the investors do.
If short term companies will kill their long term competitors in short term, i.e. now, long term may never come and global trend won't care about the future. Isn't that a danger?
The economist types who ceaselessly churn out these doom-and-gloom articles about the PhD job market just kill me. Almost every single one unblinkingly equates success with salary. In my field postdocs pay 2-3x what you make as a grad student, while still giving you almost total flexibility to work on the things that interest you, with very little oversight. To a certain subset of people, this is far more attractive than making $150k figuring out how to make people click on ads, or some multiple of that selling your soul to a hedge fund.
Do postdocs ever end in your field, or can you build an entire forty-year career out of a succession of three-year postdoctoral appointments?
If you can work as a postdoc forever, can you do this with confidence? Which is to say, what are the odds that you'll wind up washed up at age 34, or 44, or 54, driving the mid-21st-century equivalent of a taxicab, after your PI's grants dry up and you can't find any other PIs who need your possibly-quite-esoteric research skills?
Tenure would help, of course. What's the ratio of assistant-professor openings to Ph.D.-level graduates in your field?
Getting your own grants might help. In your field, do people who have done, say, five postdocs in a row routinely get awarded grants in their own names?
(Full disclosure: I did a postdoc for fun, once. It was fun. There are many worse ways to spend three years of your life. But it was an expensive detour from my eventual career.)
That's a cute strawman of what people in the industry do. It's similar to saying that all post-docs do is resubmit the same paper to conferences/journals for an entire year until one barely accepts it, at which point they are so disgusted with their own work that they hate to even talk about it.
I love having postdocs too, but what after that? I run out of postdocs. At some point people are going to stop considering you for math postdocs because you've been out of the PhD too long. And while it's great to make 40-50K and think about math all the time, the cost in stability of moving a family around every two years is ridiculous and unsustainable. Ok, now you've moved your family around for 6 years or done the long-distance thing and no one will hire you for a postdoc anymore and no one will hire you for a faculty job. What then? Perma-adjuncthood. Now you get to go back to 30k a year and still have no job security, and less time for research. So what was the point of that sacrifice?
If you want to do research in a field like math and you can't get a professorship, you need to have an outside income that still allows 30 hours a week to think. If you want to do research in math and you can get a professorship, you need to protect your time fiercely even if you're at a research school and you're close to doomed if you are teaching 3-3 or 4-4. (I've seen some people do it.) So that dream of working on things that interest you with very little oversight is temporary pretty much no matter what.
In my field (life sciences), postdocs get paid about 40% more than grad students, and are required to pay into their benefits as they become official "employees" and not students. This, at least initially, puts them back close to the graduate salary.
Yes, it does increase over time, to about 2x salary. It also plateaus there quickly.
My question to you: assuming you are in this "certain subset of people," do you think that a string of postdocs is healthy for your career path? Of the dozen or so hiring managers and recruiters I've chatted with over the last year, any more than 2 podstdocs is a serious red flag.
It may not surprise you to learn that I don't spend all that much time worrying over my "career path", or "earning potential", or lose any sleep whatsoever over what some hiring manager or recruiter makes of me. Despite this, money and employment has never even remotely been a problem. My broader point is that obsessing over these career metrics subscribes to a very narrow worldview of what constitutes success, and there are a great many people in this world who exist outside this paradigm who lead rich and fulfilling lives. You certainly don't get any such notions from articles like this one.
I think it's great that you have found your version of success. I'm not sure I would say there are "a great many people" behind your cause, but if it works then I think that's fantastic.
But realistically, I'm not talking "earning potential", I'm talking about "spending your twenties making $10/hour as a graduate student and shafting yourself come retirement." Nobody becomes an academic to get rich, but I worry about the mid-life financial health of today's postdocs versus that of their mentors' at the same age.
I discovered while working as a research assistant that the post docs made about the same amount as I did and less than the secretaries (they had a union.) During my child support hearing the lady at friend of the court gave me the best unintentional advice I ever received while explaining why I had to pay my ex-wife more than I could possible afford on my salary. She said "You are making much less than someone of your skills and experience should."
And so I was forced to change careers. Doing research was fun, but if you want to do it (or make pottery or be in a band) professionally, then I recommend your spouse has a real job.
But neither is the pursuit of money any sort of notable goal. It's sort of like, "oh, well, get in line behind the other hoards of people who also want to be rich."
Nobody will care about what you do if this is your goal. On the other hand, if you can tell people "I want to make your life easier by: filling a market gap, changing an industry for the better, making X easier to use, making Y more affordable" then people will care. Thinking more about others than yourself is also probably a good way to actually find a good business!
Sorry, I did not mean to give offense, but the presumption that there's something wrong with not pursuing money is both a) irksome and b) at the root of a large number of ills in our society.
I equate success with a job. No scratch that: at this point I'd settle for a damn interview.
I have a Masters in Chemistry, my girlfriend has a PhD in Chemistry. Neither of us, for the past year, have come remotely close to gaining employment that uses those skills (in Australia).
As an Australian who didn't go to university, I had the warnings growing up that getting a piece of paper doesn't guarantee you a job but I didn't know things were that hard for someone holding a masters.
I've seen other stats that suggest PhDs (particularly in STEM) actually have the lowest unemployment rates (around 2.2%) compared to any other cohort arranged by degree attained: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm
Yeah, the article is a bit misleading in its focus on "employment rates". It's using employment rates on the day of graduation, i.e. people who have an offer lined up before graduating. People who graduate and then interview, starting sometime later, aren't counted as "employed" in these numbers. Ultimately almost all STEM PhDs do end up with a job within a year or so, as the article later acknowledges. Later in the article they quote the unemployment rate for STEM-doctoral holders as ~2%, as you found.
I don't think it's therefore a particularly useful analysis. There are a lot of issues with the STEM-PhD job market, but significant risk of unemployment isn't really one of them. Bigger issues are things like whether the opportunity cost is worth it, and the fact that people who go into a STEM PhD really wanting to do research are often disappointed (there are plenty of industry jobs, but many don't really involve scientific research).
The fact that Ph.D. holders have the lowest unemployment rate is not at all surprising, given that these people have all undergone extensive selection to be smart and hard-working. This would still be the case even if holding a Ph.D. were completely useless, so it’s not really clear how much the unemployment rate is decreased by actually holding the degree.
Ph.D. bigotry is an artifact of the bad job market, which has just been getting worse for the past 30 years.
There used to be BA-level research jobs. There still are. They're just now filled by PhDs. Basic research is pretty much gone.
Pedigree bigotry is the natural reaction of a society or subculture in decline. When the future is hopeless and the present is uninspiring, people obsess about the past. PhD Bigotry is a way for the brilliant but passed-over (through no fault of their own) to reminisce about the days when they were young and clueless and thought society-at-large gave a shit about anything other than crass commercialism.
Personally, I prefer to bet on the future. Simply due to resource limitations, we'll need to reinvest in basic research if we don't want human extinction (or at least the collapse of civilization). But that is a bet, and we're going to have to demolish some entrenched players in order to have one.
I agree, Academia is in decline. Sort of. It's in decline the way journalism is in decline, which is to say: there's more of it than ever, and the people who are Getting It Done are thriving in new, 21st century institutions. But people who just want a job "in the industry", whether it is journalism or academics, are going to have a bad time as vast swaths of "the industry" crumble in response to competition that actually embraces the new value system the internet is forcing on all industries.
Universities will continue to exist, and will do great research, along with being an excellent babysitter for 18-30 year olds who have the means to purchase a babysitter while they focus on their academics (or not). But more and more research will happen outside of the Academy, because research is useful. And for many kinds of research, there are easier ways to get it done than getting a PhD. And that trend will increase.
And the University will lose its place as the de-facto spot for kids and researchers to go.
But people who just want a job "in the industry", whether it is journalism or academics, are going to have a bad time
Don't look down on those "just want a job" people. When you don't have an income, the need to get one consumes you. Working "for passion" is a luxury of trust-fund kids and people who pulled off their exits before the Valley became a scam.
The idea that it's dishonorable to work for money is classism. Most people have no other choice.
But more and more research will happen outside of the Academy, because research is useful.
Sadly, we see the opposite trend. Research inside and outside of academia is melting down. Companies use the results of R&D (open-source software is an R&D effort) and buy "innovation" out of a rigged R&D-ish system (the VC-funded Valley) but no one is paying for it, which means that very little of quality is being built at scale.
Something will bring it back, but it will probably start outside of the US. It will probably involve competition at an international level. I'd love to see it take a friendly form: an all-information-shared (the objective being prestige, not dominance over others) 21st-century moon-shot race between North America, Europe, and Asia on curing cancer. Sadly, history shows that it's just as likely to involve war, because humans are perilously stupid.
Until that happens, I feel like technical excellence is such a nonpriority in this country that it shouldn't surprise anyone that Stanford threw its weight behind Clinkle and Snapchat.
The prestige competition between universities may have had that effect at one time, but now they compete on stupid shit like pampering rich douchebags, overpaying top administrators, and funding idiotic startups like Clinkle as a way of selling "the experience" (your kid might be made founder of the next Snapchat!)
I might come a bit late to the party, but I should say not all hope is lost yet. I think there's a lot of inefficiency in the labour market. I'm currently in a really good university doing research, and all the software engineers & computer scientists hired in many labs I know tend to be quite awful, with some exceptions.
I wasn't distinguishing between those who need a job and those who want a job. I was distinguishing between those who want to do the work (no matter their motivation) and those who just want to have the position.
I was reading your post, about halfway through I started thinking 'hey this reads like a post by...' glances up at username 'oh look, it actually is' skips rest of post.
In any thread that is (remotely) about employers requiring degrees for software engineers, or anything that has to do with working at/for Google, he is (irrationally) vocal about the worthlessness of degrees, how much Google sucks, and in general how much software people are discriminates against / should be paid more. From a quick google it even seems he has a blog about this.
Look, I don't know the guy - apparently he worked for Google for a (very) short time, had a semi-public falling out with a bunch of people there, and since then got into a couple of nasty flamewars with Google'ers (and others, from what I can tell) here and elsewhere. I don't care one way or the other really, to me (and to many regulars here, methinks) he's like one of those street preachers wearing 'repent now' and 'the devil is amongst us' buttons; a part of the urban scenery that is best not engaged with, lest you'll spend the rest of your day going back-and-forth in an 'argument' that can't be 'won' (even for the most lenient definition of 'won').
But if I'm mistaking the GP for somebody else, my apologies.
I could go to MBA school, become a McKinsey-type douchebag, and join the top VC firms at high levels. I'm 40 IQ points smarter than them.
But I don't. Instead, I'm studying Haskell. On a Sunday night. Including all the random stuff I read just because I'm passionate about technology, I probably work 70 hours per week. (Much of that's self-directed and career-oriented; working more than 30-40 without a career payoff is a chump's game.)
Why is this? Why do I side with the team (technologists, as opposed to douchebags) that seems to be losing? Because I think the good guys are going to win, and that actual technical knowledge is going to become an important asset again. It might be 10 or 20 years from now, but I think it will happen.
I'm sure you're a great guy and just coming across negatively in this one comment, but you sound less pleasant than the vast majority of McKinsey people I've ever met. It's a bit odd in a comment complaining about consulting douchebags.
I'm honest about what I am. I don't live to screw people over, in the way that management consultants do. (They invented the stack-ranking practices that destroyed a great number of technology companies, and that are directly responsible for the Enron calamity.) I'm also not trying to maximize my Niceness Score. The world is on fire and I'm not afraid if other people get soaked in the process of saving the damn thing.
None of the management consultants I know live to screw people over either.
It's worth noting, however, that many of them also believe that the world is on fire and they're not afraid if other people get soaked in the process of saving the damn thing. It's just that their solutions - like stack ranking, restructurings, org structures, etc. - tend to soak engineers like you, while your solutions - like open allocation or programmer's unions - tend to soak managers and consultants like them.
"It's just that their solutions - like stack ranking, restructurings, org structures, etc. - tend to soak engineers like you, while your solutions - like open allocation or programmer's unions - tend to soak managers and consultants like them."
Spot on! The reason for the angst is that typically management and consultants call the shots and the software developers are ignored.
It is incredibly frustrating when your company pulls in consultants, who have spent all of a week studying up on your company and industry, after ignoring staff who have been pointing out the key problems for months.
Savvy consultants make a business model out of this: interview the line workers to figure out what the actual problems are, and then repeat their recommendations back to management. The line workers get listened to, the managers get solutions, and the consultants get paid. It's basically trust arbitrage, exploiting an inefficiency in manager's decision-making to turn superficial characteristics into money with very little effort required.
Anyways, the solution isn't to complain. It's to become CEO, or management, or wherever the decision-making power rests, and then listen better than average executive does. This is behind the "software is eating the world" thesis and many of the fortunes that have been made in the last 20 years; the extreme cluelessness of decision-makers has created a number of exploitable market opportunities that you can attack with persistence and better information.
I strongly support the michaelochurch's of the industry because if we actually saw the kind of changes they speak of on a large scale we would be decades ahead technologically and the vast majority of people would be better off.
However, people who complain "in the small" and do nothing about it are perpetuating the existing system.
E.g. If you know key decisions are made outside of and before meetings then work within that system to get what you want.
Or if people get hired based on who they know then spend a little bit of time each month networking. The number of chumps I know who complain about this but never network is insane.
Or if you have expert knowledge of a critical legacy system then make sure you are compensated appropriately. $500k/year is nothing compared to the cost of replacing you in the short term (4-5 years). Or you could leverage your expertise into a decent management role.
- You can deepen your studies and study the state of the art of a given area
- You can work in some area with all the support needed (equipment, etc)
- Networking
However, what's happening is:
- The latest journals are a click away
- A lot of experiments can be done in a computer setting nowadays
- Evolution in some areas do not depend anymore on experimentation, and/or the cost for it has gone down.
- Things are getting more complex and interdependent. To build the first integrated circuit you needed to know less about heat transfers and EM interference than today.
Hence, I believe even the Ph.D. model is getting challenged, as specialists in a very narrow thing won't take things very far as they once did.
I think this is a very simplistic view that only holds for a very few areas of study. The idea that computer simulation is an adequate substitute for scientific experimentation in the majority of the sciences is puzzling to me. Not that models don't help, but there's still far too much we either don't know how to model, or don't have the computational power to model (or we have both, but it would be more expensive than just testing it in a lab).
I also don't understand why your fourth point means that specialization is not necessary. Isn't it the opposite--that generalists with shallow knowledge of many fields no longer suffice? People must specialize because the level of complexity in newer technology is extremely high, and to get anywhere it is necessary to focus on a small but very detailed slice of the pie.
The only really valid point is that information formerly available in journals is now available online. But I cannot say that I have seen a noticeable uptick in research being done by non-Ph.D.s despite this widespread availability, so I think it's at least premature to conclude that you can develop the same level of expertise as an autodidact.
"The idea that computer simulation is an adequate substitute for scientific experimentation in the majority of the sciences is puzzling to me"
Depends on the field. Even in natural sciences, there are several research areas not related directly with experimentation.
I would say that, for a lot of areas, we have the bases covered, but what's needed are better tools to understand it.
Protein folding is one area. The physics are ok, what we don't know is how to make it work for several atoms at once.
Data transmission is another. The real changes behind 4G, 802.11N, etc, is not a better radio transmitter only, but better channel estimation, error correction and use of diversity.
"I also don't understand why your fourth point means that specialization is not necessary"
It is necessary, but not sufficient. If you only focus on one area but don't know how to interface with the necessary surroundings you won't get anywhere.
" so I think it's at least premature to conclude that you can develop the same level of expertise as an autodidact."
The application of new discoveries and techniques is important as well, and several companies and individuals are doing important work in this area. (Go, Rust, several machine learning libraries, etc)
I think saying specialization is necessary but not sufficient sums up the trends in many fields.
The barriers of entry to having information available are the lowest they've ever been and thus traditional models are being eaten by ad-hoc methods. And that is fine, requires reorientation though.
It is basically impossible to do life sciences research outside of an academic or industry lab, and almost no academic lab will take on someone who is not a student or post-doc.
An individual outside of academia would be unable to purchase supplies due to supplier restrictions, would lack access to journals without piracy, would have no access to expensive required analytical equipment, and would be unable to front the costs associated with regulatory compliance in a lab setting.
While it's true that progress can be made from a simulation stand point, licenses to these software packages are enormously expensive. Without a university appointment or a well established track record, no one is going to be willing to share clinical data with you. Moreover, without any ability to validate the findings from your simulations in a lab / clinical setting, any results would be of questionable value.
Most importantly, it would be extremely difficult for an individual not associated with a university or industry lab to publish their results in a top tier journal.
>While it's true that progress can be made from a simulation stand point, licenses to these software packages are enormously expensive.
Can you specify which software you're referring to? For many life science sub-disciplines, there are an increasing number of either open source or low-cost competitors.
That's because the financial services sector sucks all of the air out of the room. Look forward to dismal growth for the next two generations as universities and the people who pay for people to go to universities start to raise entrance standards and prices in order to cut down on the supply.
Higher education will get out of the reach of most people again, like it used to be.
edit: I think specific marketing/financial/information services oriented programming/engineering jobs will survive well during this period. Other sciences are going to have to rely on stock fads, bubbles and scams to get any investment.
edit2: It's sad that we're wasting our best performers and best minds like this. You can't have growth if you produce superior minds and squander their potential for making new discoveries or coming up with innovative designs or methods. China is run by engineers - just saying.
It seems like our conception of money has been damaged to a point where it's increasingly just a fictitious construct, rather than a means of transmitting value. Basically, money is now arbitrary number whose only purpose is to obtain an even larger arbitrary number at a later date. The way we treat currency is more and more decoupled from reality, and that's a pretty dangerous phenomenon. What's the evidence for this?
-insanely inflated valuations for startups that offer trivial services and no revenue
-a behemoth financial services industry that makes money off of money, while offering little tangible value
-businesses flocking to easy, safe investments that create little value
I would really like to see an alternative to going to grad school for a Ph.D. spring up for people who want to do research, particularly in math which doesn't require expensive labs. The overhead, the poor job prospects, the cost, the obsession with prestige all need to go.
A PhD in math does, however, require a motivated and interested supervisor. A supervisor who can tach you how to write papers, how to get them published, to tell you where you are wasting your time and to help you over the humps that may otherwise stop you. It needs a supervisor who can introduce you to others in the field, even if they live in other countries or on other continents!
That may exist as a culture in Open Source, but does not exist in Mathematics without universities - and I don't know how you make it exist for research that is hard (impossible?) to commercialise.
To do solid research requires a lot of time. Even if you don't need any expensive facilities, you still need a home and to eat, etc. If the government decided to fund maths PhDs directly, they'd need a ready-made corpus of people who could decide who gets funding. They'd need people who have published and who have proved that they know what they're talking about. These people would likely gather in central organisations where they could supervise their charges and collaborate on further publications to prove their bona fides. They may even teach lower level courses to bring in some extra money and share their administrative costs with similar worthies in other subjects...
You can rail against the cost, the prestige, and the lack of faculty positions all you like. Until your proposed solution is more than "do it at home and put it on the internet!", nothing will change.
> If the government decided to fund maths PhDs directly, they'd need a ready-made corpus of people who could decide who gets funding. They'd need people who have published and who have proved that they know what they're talking about.
Government research grants already fund maths PhDs and this process (a corpus of people who decide who gets funding) is how NSF, DARPA, IARPA, etc hand out grant money.
One problem is that the university takes a 60% cut off the the top of government grant awards. What for? I dunno, many places, the football team, padding the endowment, building new B-school buildings, hiring an army of mid-level administrators. It certainly isn't to pay for researcher (professor and postdoc) salaries, they are paid from other grants, again, from the government. It isn't to help with the grant award process, professors (and their students) write all their own grants.
The Academic tradition is alive, but the University has become a bloated beast siphoning life from the researchers and the government. What was a support infrastructure has a life of its own. It needs to be stopped.
>What for? I dunno, many places, the football team, padding the endowment, building new B-school buildings, hiring an army of mid-level administrators.
Are there really schools where the B-school is a net cost center rather than profit center? I thought it was more standard for the business school to be subsidizing other parts of the university.
I'm not saying you're wrong but it seems incredibly difficult. The problem is, how do you choose who to fund to go and do maths, how on earth you'd track their progress if any, and how do you achieve a return on your investment - even if 'you' means a sovereign nation and you have very general and long-term goals. If you can come up with something distinct from a university mathematics department to achieve this, it would be an achievement. I think we should count ourselves lucky that these departments have come to exist, and they provide such unreasonably useful output.
It might well be possible to use modern communications to distribute the work, improve efficiency and reduce overheads, basically turn all the world's maths departments into one big one - but I bet you still need something like the PhD thesis and viva.
I think what surprises me is the discrepancy between reading about mathematicians who worked with younger students out of seemingly altruistic motives (Kolmogorov and Erdos come to mind) and then a contemporary math department that might only accept 1% of applicants out of a pool of qualified people because of perhaps funding concerns or some interest in maintaining exclusivity. On top of that, there is a long history of mathematicians who worked on problems without any monetary compensation and perhaps without being associated with any university. Decartes and Fermat were both lawyers and even recently Yitang Zhang didn't seem to be paid to do research, and I don't count adjunct lecturer as a paid research job.
Given these, I don't see why an organization can't get together and simply agree to communicate, work together, somehow find a way to minimally provide access to journals for its members and dutifully train new students and grant them degrees. A Phd may or may not be optimal, perhaps something less stringent. A lot of people I know personally didn't get in to the field because they wanted to get rich, some sacrifice may be required but at least there is no denying a sort of "volunteerism" in mathematics.
This is more or less how the Royal Society started.
Academia should now be considered a conglomerate of business corporations, dedicated primarily to increasing profits and income and cutting costs.
Like other corps there's a trend towards increasing perceptions of value by marketing mediocre products and experiences to death, rather than providing actual social value with products and relationships that are truly inspiringly awesome.
So I don't think the current model is sustainable. It won't collapse next week, but I'd be surprised if we're still here twenty years from now.
As for PhDs - in my own area of interest the tenured people are pretty mediocre (believe me - I've worked through their papers) and most of the innovation and invention happens in industry.
So, there's no obvious benefit to spending the money. As it happens I earn enough to do research part time - no special resources needed in this field - and I'm getting a lot of satisfaction from making my own way for my own reasons.
overhead -> time taken and requirements to write and defend a thesis, in addition to teaching and writing papers with advisor. rhetorical question, is having a phd the only way to prove without a doubt that you are an expert in a field and know how to do research?
poor job prospects-> Did you read the article? How many tenure track positions do you think there are for someone who researches pure math?
cost-> are you paid as much as you could if you worked in industry? Are all costs monetary?
obsession with prestige -> Credentials are certainly something that people value in any field. Rankings are kept of the various departments. Of course people think about prestige, but should they? I do not believe people should worry about their own or their school's rank but simply do math if they like it but of course those thoughts occur.
Overhead, I'm on a fast-track 3yr EU PhD admittedly the US system is a different animal in this regard. Is it the only way to become an expert, of course not and I don't think anyone is making that argument.
Yes I did read the article. So you're equating "job prospects" with "chance of being a tenured professor in a specific field", more usually it means the opportunity to enter a well-paying or otherwise respectable career of any type.
Costs, sure I imagine I would earn more as a technician in industry with an MSc but if you're driven by immediate-term financial gain I'd agree a PhD is not for you.
Prestige, at PhD level it matters less about the institution than your specific advisor. Also I'd argue science is ahead of most careers in being a meritocracy, the quality of your publications should count for more than your institute's ranking. Should people care about the level of research of their institute as judged by an independent group of peers, probably yes.
A fast track 3 yr phd would be really great and yes the US system would make that very difficult.
I am equating those things under this context, if the majority of PhD grads are not becoming professors, I would like it if they "released" more of them sooner with something like your 3yr degree.
I think I can somewhat quantify prestige if you look at where some CS professors got their PhD[1]. I do think science is meritocratic but that doesn't mean all scientists are or statistics like these mean that all scientists won't experience self doubt or even get in to pissing contests with others about credentials. That sort of attitude really detracts from the altruistic community effort I imagine.
Can I ask where you are studying? I have genuine curiosity about the Euro grad schools.
edit: I should add that in no way am I saying these results prove prestige has influence or that things aren't meritocratic. But can you envision how someone might look at this and interpret it so it reinforces stereotypes or misconceptions? Spots for grad students shouldn't be zero-sum.
full disclaimer: I went to a university with a top 5 program in my field and I don't think there is a very large difference in research from these universities over time.
edit2: Another clarification, it shouldn't be that someone says "oh I didn't get in to XYZ U, I am a failure" nor should it be "oh I got in to XYZ U, I am superior". It should be, simply, "I got in to grad school, now I will study and perform research." The former attitudes are things I have encountered and find it distasteful.
Maybe too late to see this now but to answer your Q I'm at Edinburgh; IMO an ok university but not prestigious. Most EU PhDs are 3.5-4 years, I have a friend with dual US-UK citizenship that chose to do his PhD over here for this reason.
I agree wrt differences between similarly ranked institutions. I'd say similarly that the variance within groups at a top 5 school is greater than the variance between groups when compared with slightly lower ranking institutes.
the overall unemployment rate for doctoral holders is ~2%.
Remember that someone who would rather have a regular job but works one day a week at TGI Chillibees counts as employed for statistical purposes.
From anecdotal experience the underemployment rate is high - there are plenty of people that would like to have a full-time job but are making do as adjuncts.
The adjunct cancer has spread to places that you thought were immune. Look at Vassar College, it's a respectable place. In the Chemistry Department there are ten tenure-track professors, one full-time lecturer, and five adjuncts. Villanova, another respectable institution, is looking to fill three adjunct positions to teach graduate level courses. They do it because they can. There are sufficient pharmco refugee candidates around Philly and Boston from the last round of mergers and acquisitions for the model to work.
Does anyone know what happened in Physics in the early 2000s? The number "Employed" spikes from ~30% to ~40% in a very short time span and then falls rapidly to ~20:
I'd like to see those as absolute numbers, and preferably un-smoothed. The corresponding "dip" seems to be in post-docs.
I got my physics PhD in the late 90's. Anecdotally during that time period, morale about employment was pretty low. As I recall a handful of activist students got the American Physical Society to acknowledge the issue. Physics Today was starting to print articles about non-academic employment, though mostly speculative.
Possibly as a result, I saw what seemed like a real push among physics students to pursue industry options, including programming. Many of us were good programmers. My thesis project ran on thousands of lines of code that I wrote for hardware that I designed. And those years seemed pretty good for engineering employment.
My impression is that interest in joining the post doc cadre evaporated, and students with any sort of engineering ability grabbed whatever industry jobs they could get.
I wish they would draw those graphs in a more honest way. Now it looks like there's a very high time resolution when in fact there's one data point per year and they've done some spline fitting to them...
It looks like it's the 2001 data point that has a higher value. I'm not sure what happened in 2001, and without knowing if academic or industry jobs are responsible it's hard to guess, but it would be interesting to see if there was a corresponding uptick in funding for physics research grants at that time.
I feel like there's more to this story than what the article and charts show. For example, what's the total number of PhD students over time? Has there been an increase in PhD students relative to demand so that naturally there will be less PhD graduates without immediate employment?
Well, if by "demand" you mean tenure-track faculty jobs, there's a plot in the article of that. The answer, which as far as I know is applicable across all fields, is that the number of PhD graduates have risen dramatically while the amount of tenure-track jobs are flatlined or even dropping.
Unless job demand is driven by exponential growth (like physics during the Cold War), it's simple math to conclude that every professor can graduate one Ph.D. student during his entire career for the job situation to be sustainable. Most probably graduate an order of magnitude more than that. (This of course ignores non-academic jobs and the question whether getting a Ph.D. is a good investment for such jobs.)
It is worth noting that employment in Eng and CS is up about 5 percentage points from 2010 to 2012 (the last 2 years for which the article has data). Not a huge gain, but I would not consider a 5 percentage points increase (10% increase) to be stagnation.
It was then I realized that doing a Ph.D. in STEM is a pretty piss poor proposition. I would highly discourage most people from doing it, unless you really love research, don't care about job prospects or money, and that's all you want to do in life.