Nice list, I think it lays out the problem with the current system in fine details. I'm surprised that it seems to be as bad as where I live in the UK, too.
I call myself a Senior Research Fellow, but in the end I'm just a postdoc in the late 40s who has almost no chances to get full tenure and has messed up his life for good.
Before anyone blames me, think twice. I've got new contracts offered with almost no effort on my behalf over the years, and all my positions where pure research with no teaching duties. It's not easy to turn down such seemingly generous offers and try to make a living in another way (with a background in linguistics & philosophy!), even when you know these contracts won't last and only delay the inevitable.
It doesn't seem like you have messed up your life. If you have made it that far in the humanities, then I think you're the type that can figure out how to keep going.
They’re almost 50 and don’t have a full time job with pension. That is not a good position to be in unless you come from money, are married to someone who does, or has a solid professional career or gold plated benefits and a permanent job.
I don't know the specific detail of OP's position, but (all?) post-docs in the UK are members of the same pension scheme as all other academics in their institution. Your fundamental point is quite right--short-term contracts are a lousy and difficult game to play into middle-age.
They spent 30 years "working" on their research interest instead of at the beck of bosses and clients. Even if they spend retirement stuck as a grocery clerk, they'll have a better life (more funded free time to pursue their personal interests) than almost everyone.
I was in a similar situation ( in early 30s) , however ,I moved to industry when I realised that even banks dont trust these contracts for long term financing.
I'm a "Staff Scientist" in the US which is basically the same thing. But I don't think that's a bad thing. I get to do science. Professors/PIs mostly spend their research time writing grant proposals and managing their staff, not actually spending much (or any) time doing experiments themselves or analyzing the data.
> Of course, the more candidates there are, the more competition for the jobs. But it doesn't follow that the jobs' terms will become increasingly exploitative, such as being offered in shorter term, with less pay, lower status and fewer benefits. That requires a separate decision to degrade the offering. [...] Anyone who tries to explain it purely as supply and demand, or even “nature”, is either ignorant or is trying to sell you something.
It can do, but it's not a given. Universities can decide not to race to the bottom, but instead choose the best candidates and keep remuneration reasonable.
The author is in the UK where nearly all universities are public, and due in no small part to the efforts of the University and College Union (UCU), most Higher Education staff (including "postdocs") are paid according to a national (published) salary system:
Universities of course have maneuverability in the specific spine point they pay people for different positions based on experience or demand, but in the grand sceheme of things specific roles are paid specific amounts of money.
At the author's current university, for example, the national pay scale is split up into different pay grades (each of which includes a contiguous range of spine points) for different roles, e.g. Research Assistant, Research Associate, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, etc.
Even when you have fixed salaries for job titles, employers can't escape market forces - just instead of raising the salary until they fill the post, they have to increase the title too.
That's why you can be a 'senior software engineer' 2 years out of college :)
Yes, and by removing the ability of university to set a lower price in monetary terms, this system simply encourages them to extract more value per pound in other ways, such as the lower status and fewer benefits mentioned in the post. This seems unlikely to benefit academics overall.
Maybe the oversupply could be addressed by encouraging students to wait until their 50s to pursue PhDs and research work, i.e. shrinking the supply by reducing the number of years between getting a degree and retirement. With more students coming from a position of financial stability after decades of work, more of them would be able to decline exploitative opportunities as well.
Moreover a later start would also mitigate the tension between starting a family and pursuing academic interests, since the offspring would be out of the house (or well on the way) by the time the academic career begins.
Cognitive abilities, energy, stamina, singular focus on something (or someone) tend to decline with age. Apart from being unenforceable, "encouraging students to wait until their 50s to pursue PhDs and research work" makes as much sense as encouraging people to wait until they are in their 50s to start playing sports professionally.
Good article, but I must misunderstand, how do the suggestions at the bottom overcome the issues/myths listed, particularly "postdocs formally [don't] exist" which seems to be the issue at the root of all problems.
The tenuous employment status of postdocs seems to be a choice made at an institutional level, although seemingly across every institution in the world. I'm not aware of any funding stipulations that prevent institutions from giving postdocs proper employment status/permanent contracts. Sure, a new project might require a postdoc and might have funds allocated for this, but why can't unis use their already-existing projections for incoming funds and allocate jobs (i.e. permanent postdoc positions), just as private companies hire staff on the basis of cash flow/revenue projections?
They can do that with people who will be teaching, since that is bringing funding in for the university. But they don't do it for Research Assistants, because once the funding for the project the Research Assistant is paid from (usually a fixed term grant of a 2-3 years) runs out, then the university would have no income to match the cost of the salary. As there may be hundreds or thousands of such salaries, this would result in a funding shortfall of something of the order of $100m a year (including overheads). And that is to say nothing of the expensive equipment such employees might need to continue their work.
Project centred research does not bring in income for universities on an ongoing basis, which is what the argument about core funding is all about. If more funding were core funding, not tied to a specific project, then it would be possible for universities to do the right thing and provide career paths for Research Assistants.
Please note: I'm not arguing that universities in the UK are doing the right thing. I used to work as a postdoc there and understand very well what the author of the Postdoc Myths list is talking about. I'm simply answering the question as to why universities can't just do the right thing.
Oh well I understand that funds are allocated for a project. But in my experience, postdocs who are coming to the end of the funding for one project tend to be moved to another incoming one. I.e. they're essentially permanent staff anyway. I know of people who've gone on like this for 10+ years.
"Revenue generating" centres within unis have targets and projections (e.g. commercialization teams) so they DO have an idea of what funds they'll have in the medium term, even though it's on a project by project basis. I don't see how this is any different from any company that needs revenue in order to keep staff, but yet companies manage to keep staff permanently. In fact, even universities seem to be able to keep staff permanently, unless they're researchers.
>Myth: postdocs formally exist. In almost all universities I know, formally there is no such thing as a postdoc. In research councils' view of the world, it's the same: there are no postdocs, only “Research Assistants” and “academic staff (lecturer or equivalent)”.
As someone who is (formally) a postdoc it seems that the points raised in this article seem to apply mostly to postdocs who are not (formally) postdocs.
That is, indeed, there is no such thing as a "post-doc". But in most academic institutions, there are non-tenured researcher positions - fixed-period or otherwise - which have a Ph.D. as a requirement. They may called something like "Researcher", "Research Engineer" or "Research Staff Member" (as opposed to "Academic Staff Member").
I see those positions as "Researcher", "Research Fellow", "Associate"(-member of the academic staff) etc.
They add the term "post-doctoral" to indicate that you need to have completed a Doctorate. Or if you wish - to indicate that the conditions will be poor :-(
The titles for these roles are not "postdoc" though, that's his point no? The role "postdoc" doesn't exist, at least in any institutions I know. Of course there are postdocs in the world, but the actual payscale that you're on may be one that a person without a PhD can be hired on, e.g. research assistant. They then call this a "postdoc" position to indicate that you need a PhD to be hired, but the contracts and conditions do not specifically cater towards people pursuing careers in academia.
Not too long ago, my official title was postdoctoral scholar and I was at UC Berkeley. A little while before that, I was a PhD student working with a couple of "postdocs" whose title was postdoctoral research associate. I submit that I do exist as did my co-authors (who have since stopped being postdocs, but continue to exist as researchers.)
This was at another well-known US school. Perhaps thing are different in Britain, but I am not aware of any R1 university in the US where postdocs "do not exist."
I don't know about those places in particular, but it's quite common (especially in Europe) to see people described as "postdoctoral researcher" or "postdoc research associate" on their staff pages, website, email sig etc, while in the official HR scheme and on payroll those titles only exist without the word "postdoctoral".
Even so, why does the specific title matter ? Ultimately, all these are non tenured positions. I don't see how creating an official title would solve any problems. As others mentioned, some places also have official post-doc titles.
My view is that there is a problem in academia where people in non tenured positions are being taken advantage of. However, most of these people do not actually have "postdoc" in their title. Positions with postdoc in the title are typically reserved for people who just received their PhD. It is fairly difficult to get a tenure track position directly from a PhD program, so (most) professors were (formally) a postdoc at some point in their career, and it is an important training step for applying for tenure track. (I hope this clarifies my above point, sorry if it was unclear).
The University of California definitely has "Postdoctoral Fellow" titles. The "Research Scientist" titles are better paid/more permanent. "Lecturer" titles usually come with minimal research and mostly teaching obligations (the former two don't).
as a part-time postdoc out of choice, i also see EU grants being used mainly as a way to prevent unemployment for highly skilled people. If the public knew where this money is going i doubt there would be much support for these grants. Tons of bureaucracy, travel and 'disemmination' spending, a system designed to enrich established PIs, a culture of "apply for grants or perish" , and the instagrammification of academic CVs make this academic culture unattractive, and in anyway there is too few positions for all these people. It very rare to meet a 'weird' academic anymore.
These grants tend to require industry partners and matched funds, so the value for money with regard to public funds is probably far higher now than the "weird" era you're talking about.
> enrich established PIs
Nobody stays in academia to be "rich", and in general they could earn far more and be far less stressed by working in industry.
Semi-related anecdote: when I was choosing between several grad school offers in math and physics, I visited a couple of top institutions, and at one math department I told the department chair about my dilemma of whether to continue in (pure) math or theoretical physics. I was basically told: look, if you graduate with a math PhD you'll likely find an assistant professor position right away, whereas if you graduate with a theoretical physics PhD you'll likely be looking at at least two terms of postdoc (assuming you're successful in both cases, that is). (I chose physics in the end.) There was one of the first instances of ideal clashing with reality for me.
> Unless you are a superstar, there is no way you get a TT job without a postdoc in math.
Seeing that my institution and lots more do have assistant professorships for new PhDs in math, and I even have friends who have attained such positions, this is very much true. Of course one needs to be relatively successful.
Edit: Okay, it appears that some people consider those positions “postdoc in disguise”.
This is exactly one of the points raised in the text. Non-TT assistant professorships are indeed postdocs, which often come with more teaching load than other fellowship-based postdocs. This is for example the case of the "Hills Assistant professorship" at Rutgers
I was in a similar position with Physics and did several years of postdoc, toward the end doing some teaching too as it promised a better chance of a TT position. In the end, got the position but got disillusioned with the horrible politics along the way, I'd moved research area toward computational biology meanwhile and found that politics in Biology was way, way worse than I could cope with. Moved to industry with some collaborations still going on low key, onlly regret being that I didn't switch to industry sooner.
My experience in the U.S. academic market has been that postdoc positions vary widely based on your field of study.
In areas with relatively good job markets, such as CS/Stats/Economics/Finance, Postdocs are often quite prestigious and are marketed by top schools as a way to attract promising young scholars and give them time to research without the pressures of teaching/service. In areas with very bad job markets, such as the humanities, they are also seen as prestigious because any academic position after the Ph.D. is extremely difficult to come by.
For the lab sciences, my understanding is that a postdoc actually is more similiar to doing a doctorate in another domain. Experiments are too expensive and time consuming to let a Ph.D. student design and develop a line of research on their own. Instead, that's what the postdocs do. Also, it is not an option. You must do a postdoc (often a long one, and often multiple) in order to have the experience needed for a TT job.
For mathematics and much of the social sciences postdocs are awkardly in-between all of these. They are increasingly common and almost required and increasingly long. Yet, there's no good place for them in the current system, where they are technically fully-credentially academics but treated like overgrown students.
In my experience with pure mathematics, it was much closer to your description of CS/Stats. The standard path is to spend 4-7 years doing the PhD, then another 4-6 or so doing postdocs under various guises ("research fellow", "visiting researcher", "<non-TT identifier> assistant professor"). Most American mathematicians I've met followed this path, including profs at teaching-focused institutions as well as Fields medalists.
Yes, that’s actually my understanding as well of pure mathematics. What I was trying to say is that in Stats (my field) and CS its quite common to go straight into a TT job, and a postdoc is often a sign of particular prestige. In mathematics a postdoc is the standard post-Ph.D. route; of course some positions are very well regarded and others less so, but having a postdoc itself is just the status-quo for an aspiring academic at that point.
Ed Fitchen, department head of Physics told me that there was a big difference between a good postdoctoral that can set up to produce and get a professorship and some other postdocs that are a dead end.
There is nothing wrong with the good postdocs, it's the bad ones that are the problem.
1) a postdoctoral that doesn’t lead to a professorship is one where they are looking for someone to do work independently without being trained. Basically, a very senior grad student. You largely follow the law ultimes of grants written by the PI.
2) a postdoc leading to a position is one where you are trained in developing a research program, writing grants, giving career talks, etc.
The easiest way to make sure your postdoc falls in the latter category is to find an advisor with a track record of past postdoc a getting professor positions. If someone has been a professor for two-four decades and has few former postdocs who became professors, you are unlikely to get training to become a professor.
This is slightly off topic but I think post-docs need to be better protected by their institutions.
When I was a post-doc I learned that we have essentially zero protections at least in North America. Most institutions hire post-docs as contract workers and can be fired at the drop of a pin with minimal severance. Disagree with your supervisor about the direction of your project or how your work should be published? Threaten to fire them or fire them and they have essentially zero recourse. Their work is owned by their institute and they essentially leave with nothing. This is particularly problematic for international post-docs.
I was a postdoc or I was employed in similar roles (Research Fellow, Reseach Scholar) for close to 10 years before moving into tech.
Although I overall enjoyed my postdoc years – in particular, I enjoyed doing research, writing papers, and having the freedom to explore and travel – I kinda regret not having been more pro-active during those years in terms of looking for what was next. I sent ~ 70 job applications for TT jobs that I believed were within my reach (I had > 25-30 publications with me as a first author, some of them published in prestigious journals, and a research plan that I had the belief was forward-looking, and novel and solid at the same time), but I was not called even for a phone interview by any of the committees. I have a few clues about why that happened, but it is not relevant here.
What I recommend to postdocs of Ph.D. students when they reach out to me asking for some advice on what to do in their career, I always recommend not to pursue a second postdoc. One can be fine and fun, you become basically a senior researcher in a field you feel some passion for, and you do not have the stress of completing and defending 5+ years of work (my Ph.D. actually lasted less than 3 years). But by starting your second postdoc, with no solid chances of landing a TT position at a good research institution (I assume that it is what most people continuing their postdoc career are looking forward to getting), you get deeper and deeper into a maze from which it becomes more and more difficult to find a way out; you start to become too old and credentialed for junior or mid-level positions, people in tech (or industry more in general) identify you as an academic – which is always a bad thing if you are not a renowned academic in a particular niche of current interest, say NLP, Computer Vision –, you lose your confidence in being able to change your career.
However, the story does not have a happy ending. Very rarely, these postdocs listen to me; they prefer to succumb to the authoritarian voices of their advisors and peers, who more often than not say that if they do good work, they will find a TT position soon, maybe they just need another publication, a little grant, or some luck.
> sent ~ 70 job applications for TT jobs that I believed were within my reach ... but I was not called even for a phone interview by any of the committees.
If there are around 500 applicants per position, presumably you would need to apply to around 500 positions.
If you assume the probability of getting a position is uniformly distributed over the applicants. If you think about it for 10 seconds, you can agree with me it is a spherical-cow assumption.
It sounds pretty odd that you didn't get any responses. As someone in a similar job situation, it would be interesting to know what you think the reason was? Did one of your references work against you?
Not really odd, generally speaking. Only a small proportion of postdocs (<10% in my field is my estimate) get a TT position. Nobody in my Ph.D. cohort got any and we are all well beyond our academic expiration date.
The main reasons for my lack of success were: a Ph.D. from a foreign country; a prestigious fellowship from a foreign institution; a non-US model system I used for my research; the wrong gender. They all made me and my advisors/sponsors (those who dedicated more than one minute to think about my career) overestimate my chances of landing a TT position at a research university.
In any case, I have been very happy with my career change. What I do now is much more aligned with my personality and I now know I would have not been happy in a TT position. In particular, since myself and long-term commitment took divergent roads many years ago, the difficulties in changing institution after starting TT would have put me in a pretty bad mental place.
A lot of these problems postdocs are running seem to be the result of an inefficient allocation of talent by our current educational system.
All the smartest kids get tracked into getting math and physics PhDs and by the time they get to the postdoc stage it just becomes this insane impossible rat race tournament.
I saw the writing on the wall and got out of academia as soon as I defended my utterly mediocre PhD thesis in math.
I jumped on the data science wave in 2013 and all of a sudden everyone thought I was a genius for being able to run model.fit() and interpret the results.
These tracks that funnel you into cutthroat tournaments just seem like bad places to be.
Already data science is starting to become more of a commodity skill set.
Instead of trying to outcompete everyone I’m keeping my eyes open for my next big opportunity.
Why doesn't industry recruit postdocs more aggressively? It's a large pool of smart, hardworking people, most of whom don't have stable or well-paying jobs.
I work in a reasonably hot area (neuro/ML), have relevant skills (Python, C++), and a decent pedigree, but I think I've talked to ~3 recruiters ever—and two of them were introduced to me by a mutual friend.
I tried many unsuccessful times to convince recruiters at different companies to recruit postdocs, especially those coming from the more quantitative sciences that were not computer science or adjacent to computer science.
The main reasons are inertia (they never recruited postdocs before), aversion to risk (postdocs did not work in industry before), and a sprinkle of laziness here and there. They were much more open to interviewing postdocs that had spent a few weeks getting up to speed (or so recruiters and hiring managers thought) on industry practices in boot camps (such as Insight DS for my field).
Some forward-looking companies could organize one-month boot camps specifically for hired postdocs, but the interviews should also change (e.g., you cannot ask a postdoc on how to put a certain model in production, since they never did that before). And there is nothing more solidly written in stone than the way of interviewing for tech positions, apparently.
Not sure about recruiters specifically reaching out to individual postdocs, but in my experience quant trading firms seem to send recruiting emails all the time.
My guess is that it's mainly because postdocs are an unknown quantity without legible, interpretable experience, which greatly increases the risk of hiring them.
One of the main achievements of the Insight Data Science program (which I have participated in), is that it makes you produce output (a web app) that is legible to employers.
People are very risk-averse when making hiring decisions, and tend to hire people who know what they know.
What always strikes me about academia is the propensity for complaining. I only sort of mean that in a bad way. Maybe my experience is exceptional, but I have met quite a lot of people with PhDs. The vast majority of PhDs who went into industry afterwards viewed their PhD more as a rite of passage than actual valuable work. Every one of them has a story of their supervisor or some other academic putting them through random bullshit for no reason. The more experienced academics I've met are in two camps: the climbers- the small handful of academics who are more interested in becoming chief commissar of the faculty and get onto that gravy train. They're generally terrible people - the sort of person who complains that women simply aren't smart enough to do engineering. The other kind are the flagellators, people who will give you a dissertation in why their life sucks, and how the hoops of academia are so completely at odds with what real research requires.
It all leaves me at a loss as to why anyone would choose that life. There are bad things about life in industry, but no one I work with complains anything like that badly.
It is the result of the combination of path dependency and it-will-be-different-for-me syndrome.
Path dependency because many PhDs specialize in fields and skills that have little value outside of academia – think biology (e.g., all those researchers that spend years in the lab and their only marketable skills without further training lead them to a career as lab technicians; nothing wrong with that, but not what you expect after 5-7 years of Ph.D. studies), humanities, obscure areas of math etc. Then, academia is an environment that tends to infantilize people. And kids either want to become their parents (more frequently) or the opposite of their parents.
It-will-be-different-for-me is self-explanatory and particularly strong when there is some kind of emotional commitment to the cause. Another example is marriage.
In partial defense of "It-will-be-different-for-me" syndrome....
Most grad students and postdocs know that academia is competitive and tenure-track jobs are rare, and I bet many of them can quote the 1:9 statistic (or whatever applies to their field). However, that's just the prior. It's really hard to know your individual likelihood because it depends on a ton of factors that you don't--and sometimes can't--know or control. It really might be different this time.
For example, Cell/Nature/Science papers have a huge impact on hiring; a recent study suggested CNS authors are ~5x more likely to find a job. While you need to work hard to develop a good paper, you also need to be lucky in a lot of ways, ranging from the initial choice of topic to how well your write-up comports with 3 reviewers' whims.
It's also unclear how to weight many other factors. Is your advisor well-known? But what about the department's reputation? Is your sub-field trendy? How does your publication record stack up? I don't think anyone can confidently answer those questions and decide they're in the top 11%
I agree with your points, except for not knowing whether you have good chances or not of landing a TT position, say at a top R1 institution. The world is full of delusional people, and I have been among those a few times, but especially if you are doing your Ph.D. or a postdoc in a good lab, that is a lab that produces TT material, you know your chances. Then, life outcomes are probabilistic – looking back, my chances were at 5% (which does not mean that I have to apply to x positions to have > 50% probability of getting a TT position, it means that if we have 100 replicates of myself on the job market for 5 years, only 5 will get an offer).
My "it-will-be-different-for-me" syndrome was one of the reasons I found for why people still want to have an academic career when most academics are (quite vocally) miserable: burdened by endless bureaucratic work, often bullied by more powerful or astute colleagues, constantly receiving the complaints of students and committees, and brutally rejected on the regular by granting agencies, reviewers, and conference organizers. Most think or hope it will be different for them. But very likely, it won't be.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadI call myself a Senior Research Fellow, but in the end I'm just a postdoc in the late 40s who has almost no chances to get full tenure and has messed up his life for good.
Before anyone blames me, think twice. I've got new contracts offered with almost no effort on my behalf over the years, and all my positions where pure research with no teaching duties. It's not easy to turn down such seemingly generous offers and try to make a living in another way (with a background in linguistics & philosophy!), even when you know these contracts won't last and only delay the inevitable.
They spent 30 years "working" on their research interest instead of at the beck of bosses and clients. Even if they spend retirement stuck as a grocery clerk, they'll have a better life (more funded free time to pursue their personal interests) than almost everyone.
Higher supply does lead to lower price, though.
In lot of places (and companies too) there is increasingly policies to avoid that.
https://www.ucu.org.uk/payscales
Universities of course have maneuverability in the specific spine point they pay people for different positions based on experience or demand, but in the grand sceheme of things specific roles are paid specific amounts of money.
At the author's current university, for example, the national pay scale is split up into different pay grades (each of which includes a contiguous range of spine points) for different roles, e.g. Research Assistant, Research Associate, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, etc.
That's why you can be a 'senior software engineer' 2 years out of college :)
Moreover a later start would also mitigate the tension between starting a family and pursuing academic interests, since the offspring would be out of the house (or well on the way) by the time the academic career begins.
The tenuous employment status of postdocs seems to be a choice made at an institutional level, although seemingly across every institution in the world. I'm not aware of any funding stipulations that prevent institutions from giving postdocs proper employment status/permanent contracts. Sure, a new project might require a postdoc and might have funds allocated for this, but why can't unis use their already-existing projections for incoming funds and allocate jobs (i.e. permanent postdoc positions), just as private companies hire staff on the basis of cash flow/revenue projections?
Project centred research does not bring in income for universities on an ongoing basis, which is what the argument about core funding is all about. If more funding were core funding, not tied to a specific project, then it would be possible for universities to do the right thing and provide career paths for Research Assistants.
Please note: I'm not arguing that universities in the UK are doing the right thing. I used to work as a postdoc there and understand very well what the author of the Postdoc Myths list is talking about. I'm simply answering the question as to why universities can't just do the right thing.
"Revenue generating" centres within unis have targets and projections (e.g. commercialization teams) so they DO have an idea of what funds they'll have in the medium term, even though it's on a project by project basis. I don't see how this is any different from any company that needs revenue in order to keep staff, but yet companies manage to keep staff permanently. In fact, even universities seem to be able to keep staff permanently, unless they're researchers.
As someone who is (formally) a postdoc it seems that the points raised in this article seem to apply mostly to postdocs who are not (formally) postdocs.
That is, indeed, there is no such thing as a "post-doc". But in most academic institutions, there are non-tenured researcher positions - fixed-period or otherwise - which have a Ph.D. as a requirement. They may called something like "Researcher", "Research Engineer" or "Research Staff Member" (as opposed to "Academic Staff Member").
Of course, my knowledge is as anecdotal as yours.
In my field (math) and country (USA) there are many postdocs.
Maybe you are in a different field or country?
(If you really don't believe me try search "postdoc" on math jobs https://www.mathjobs.org/jobs?joblist-0-0------
They add the term "post-doctoral" to indicate that you need to have completed a Doctorate. Or if you wish - to indicate that the conditions will be poor :-(
This was at another well-known US school. Perhaps thing are different in Britain, but I am not aware of any R1 university in the US where postdocs "do not exist."
My view is that there is a problem in academia where people in non tenured positions are being taken advantage of. However, most of these people do not actually have "postdoc" in their title. Positions with postdoc in the title are typically reserved for people who just received their PhD. It is fairly difficult to get a tenure track position directly from a PhD program, so (most) professors were (formally) a postdoc at some point in their career, and it is an important training step for applying for tenure track. (I hope this clarifies my above point, sorry if it was unclear).
> enrich established PIs
Nobody stays in academia to be "rich", and in general they could earn far more and be far less stressed by working in industry.
Seeing that my institution and lots more do have assistant professorships for new PhDs in math, and I even have friends who have attained such positions, this is very much true. Of course one needs to be relatively successful.
Edit: Okay, it appears that some people consider those positions “postdoc in disguise”.
In areas with relatively good job markets, such as CS/Stats/Economics/Finance, Postdocs are often quite prestigious and are marketed by top schools as a way to attract promising young scholars and give them time to research without the pressures of teaching/service. In areas with very bad job markets, such as the humanities, they are also seen as prestigious because any academic position after the Ph.D. is extremely difficult to come by.
For the lab sciences, my understanding is that a postdoc actually is more similiar to doing a doctorate in another domain. Experiments are too expensive and time consuming to let a Ph.D. student design and develop a line of research on their own. Instead, that's what the postdocs do. Also, it is not an option. You must do a postdoc (often a long one, and often multiple) in order to have the experience needed for a TT job.
For mathematics and much of the social sciences postdocs are awkardly in-between all of these. They are increasingly common and almost required and increasingly long. Yet, there's no good place for them in the current system, where they are technically fully-credentially academics but treated like overgrown students.
There is nothing wrong with the good postdocs, it's the bad ones that are the problem.
1) a postdoctoral that doesn’t lead to a professorship is one where they are looking for someone to do work independently without being trained. Basically, a very senior grad student. You largely follow the law ultimes of grants written by the PI.
2) a postdoc leading to a position is one where you are trained in developing a research program, writing grants, giving career talks, etc.
The easiest way to make sure your postdoc falls in the latter category is to find an advisor with a track record of past postdoc a getting professor positions. If someone has been a professor for two-four decades and has few former postdocs who became professors, you are unlikely to get training to become a professor.
When I was a post-doc I learned that we have essentially zero protections at least in North America. Most institutions hire post-docs as contract workers and can be fired at the drop of a pin with minimal severance. Disagree with your supervisor about the direction of your project or how your work should be published? Threaten to fire them or fire them and they have essentially zero recourse. Their work is owned by their institute and they essentially leave with nothing. This is particularly problematic for international post-docs.
What I recommend to postdocs of Ph.D. students when they reach out to me asking for some advice on what to do in their career, I always recommend not to pursue a second postdoc. One can be fine and fun, you become basically a senior researcher in a field you feel some passion for, and you do not have the stress of completing and defending 5+ years of work (my Ph.D. actually lasted less than 3 years). But by starting your second postdoc, with no solid chances of landing a TT position at a good research institution (I assume that it is what most people continuing their postdoc career are looking forward to getting), you get deeper and deeper into a maze from which it becomes more and more difficult to find a way out; you start to become too old and credentialed for junior or mid-level positions, people in tech (or industry more in general) identify you as an academic – which is always a bad thing if you are not a renowned academic in a particular niche of current interest, say NLP, Computer Vision –, you lose your confidence in being able to change your career. However, the story does not have a happy ending. Very rarely, these postdocs listen to me; they prefer to succumb to the authoritarian voices of their advisors and peers, who more often than not say that if they do good work, they will find a TT position soon, maybe they just need another publication, a little grant, or some luck.
If there are around 500 applicants per position, presumably you would need to apply to around 500 positions.
The main reasons for my lack of success were: a Ph.D. from a foreign country; a prestigious fellowship from a foreign institution; a non-US model system I used for my research; the wrong gender. They all made me and my advisors/sponsors (those who dedicated more than one minute to think about my career) overestimate my chances of landing a TT position at a research university.
In any case, I have been very happy with my career change. What I do now is much more aligned with my personality and I now know I would have not been happy in a TT position. In particular, since myself and long-term commitment took divergent roads many years ago, the difficulties in changing institution after starting TT would have put me in a pretty bad mental place.
All the smartest kids get tracked into getting math and physics PhDs and by the time they get to the postdoc stage it just becomes this insane impossible rat race tournament.
I saw the writing on the wall and got out of academia as soon as I defended my utterly mediocre PhD thesis in math.
I jumped on the data science wave in 2013 and all of a sudden everyone thought I was a genius for being able to run model.fit() and interpret the results.
These tracks that funnel you into cutthroat tournaments just seem like bad places to be.
Already data science is starting to become more of a commodity skill set.
Instead of trying to outcompete everyone I’m keeping my eyes open for my next big opportunity.
Why doesn't industry recruit postdocs more aggressively? It's a large pool of smart, hardworking people, most of whom don't have stable or well-paying jobs.
I work in a reasonably hot area (neuro/ML), have relevant skills (Python, C++), and a decent pedigree, but I think I've talked to ~3 recruiters ever—and two of them were introduced to me by a mutual friend.
The main reasons are inertia (they never recruited postdocs before), aversion to risk (postdocs did not work in industry before), and a sprinkle of laziness here and there. They were much more open to interviewing postdocs that had spent a few weeks getting up to speed (or so recruiters and hiring managers thought) on industry practices in boot camps (such as Insight DS for my field).
Some forward-looking companies could organize one-month boot camps specifically for hired postdocs, but the interviews should also change (e.g., you cannot ask a postdoc on how to put a certain model in production, since they never did that before). And there is nothing more solidly written in stone than the way of interviewing for tech positions, apparently.
One of the main achievements of the Insight Data Science program (which I have participated in), is that it makes you produce output (a web app) that is legible to employers.
People are very risk-averse when making hiring decisions, and tend to hire people who know what they know.
It all leaves me at a loss as to why anyone would choose that life. There are bad things about life in industry, but no one I work with complains anything like that badly.
It-will-be-different-for-me is self-explanatory and particularly strong when there is some kind of emotional commitment to the cause. Another example is marriage.
Most grad students and postdocs know that academia is competitive and tenure-track jobs are rare, and I bet many of them can quote the 1:9 statistic (or whatever applies to their field). However, that's just the prior. It's really hard to know your individual likelihood because it depends on a ton of factors that you don't--and sometimes can't--know or control. It really might be different this time.
For example, Cell/Nature/Science papers have a huge impact on hiring; a recent study suggested CNS authors are ~5x more likely to find a job. While you need to work hard to develop a good paper, you also need to be lucky in a lot of ways, ranging from the initial choice of topic to how well your write-up comports with 3 reviewers' whims.
It's also unclear how to weight many other factors. Is your advisor well-known? But what about the department's reputation? Is your sub-field trendy? How does your publication record stack up? I don't think anyone can confidently answer those questions and decide they're in the top 11%
My "it-will-be-different-for-me" syndrome was one of the reasons I found for why people still want to have an academic career when most academics are (quite vocally) miserable: burdened by endless bureaucratic work, often bullied by more powerful or astute colleagues, constantly receiving the complaints of students and committees, and brutally rejected on the regular by granting agencies, reviewers, and conference organizers. Most think or hope it will be different for them. But very likely, it won't be.