Sample of one: No regrets. It was a tough regimen and I got filtered out of academia. But, I grew immensely throughout the path and got to be around some exceptional minds. I shoulda/coulda have worked harder and been more daring.
I think that's generally true but I've noticed that there are a couple of people in every cohort who have the right stuff. They're good and everyone knows it, including themselves.
Glad this post was revived after being dead for some reason.
That's true if the cohort is MIT grad students. It's probably not true if the cohort is Random Western State Institute of Technology. On the other hand the relatively high percentage of postdocs who survive according to the cited article probably reflects that in the analogy many of the hiring institutions are closer to second division clubs than to first division ones. The analogy breaks at this point because salary structures are quite different. The marginal difference between working at Research I and Research II is not so great, while the marginal salary difference between playing in Division I and Division II is huge.
I would have expected a higher percentage. Few openings and a high bar for whatever there is. It was tough to get an assistant professor job 30 years ago and I can't imagine what it must be like now.
This. A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate.
> A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate
Academia's current structure rewards behaviors that don't necessarily create value. The "publish or perish" mentality encourages quantity over quality, leading to the replication crisis where many published findings can't be reproduced. The system tends to reward those who conform to existing academic paradigms while marginalizing innovative outsider perspectives that might bring valuable real-world insights.
When academics move directly from being students to faculty without external experience, it creates an echo chamber. This isolation from practical applications and market forces risks turning academic pursuit into a self-referential game - where success is measured by metrics like publication count and citation numbers rather than actual contribution to human knowledge or societal progress.
This separation from real-world feedback mechanisms means we may be investing significant human capital into activities that optimize for academic metrics rather than meaningful outcomes. The challenge isn't just about individual careers, but about ensuring our research institutions remain connected to the practical problems they're meant to help solve.
"Publish or perish" is fundamentally a wrong diagnosis. Publishing is generally the good part of the academia. If you are interested in your work, you obviously want to tell about it to other people in the field. Some specific publication venues are tedious and bureaucratic, but the pressure to publish is generally internal, not external.
Moving directly from being students to faculty is rare. It mostly happens in fields where the demand for PhDs is unusually high. Because universities can't compete with salaries, they have to offer positions people may not be ready for if they want to attract top candidates.
The norm is doing PhD, postdoc, and the first faculty position in different institutes – precisely to avoid the echo chamber effect. And unless you are from a particularly large country, you are expected to do at least one of them outside your home country.
Success measures are what they are for two reasons: competition and long-term focus. Academic research is fundamentally interesting, and there are far more competent people trying to do it than funding. And because people can't afford to wait for decades to measure the real-world impact, the academia must base career progression on something that can be determined quickly enough. If you are doing the kind of research where practical applications can be expected in a few years, the industry is a better place for you. They have a lot more resources for research than the academia.
I'm currently doing research on a topic I started working on ~15 years ago. In that time, the topic has progressed from something interesting and potentially valuable to a mainstream idea with plenty of research funding. If the work is successful, we may start seeing measurable real-world impact in 5-10 years.
ML papers by Western universities barely touch on the problems that practitioners face.
The only papers I see that are routinely useful have half the authors having a .in or .cn email at the end with the rest having Indian and Chinese names in US institutions.
The only western papers which aren't extended advertisements for their company are from people who are making something for themselves.
For example the best paper on image classification I've ever seen was posted on a private discord and was about better labeling the parts of a vagina as part of a stable diffusion training pipeline.
I used the methods without change and got better than state of the art for document segmentation.
Certainly, some countries have a more engineering-focused academic style. Western academia has always been more about advancing knowledge, which IMO is academia's mission.
> Western academia has always been more about advancing knowledge, which IMO is academia's mission.
You can advance knowledge in ways that are aligned with the nation's strategic needs. That would imply the career path of researchers would be oriented towards industry instead of pie in the sky projects.
I fail to see why universities should align on their country's strategic interests. Universities are not political nor military entities. Additionally, pie in the sky projects is what's needed to advance science, which is very distinct from advancing technology (industry).
Yeah. Practical working implementations of the latest in ML image classification technologies are a rapidly changing incremental improvement problem that industry is already all over, so not really surprising that this isn't a major focus for US university research: if PhDs or even potential PhDs want to do that they can get a much higher rate of pay at a private company.
> I fail to see why universities should align on their country's strategic interests.
In the UK, the industrial and military research labs have been closed, there is nothing being done except in universities. The university projects are really specific and don't join up in any way. There is no equivalent of DARPA guiding
research proposals to be useful but Governments still think that the universites will define the next generation of industrial products.
Source: my own area of trying to use computers for Materials Science.
All the foundational work that has lead up to the current practices in ML was done at universities. It's not like Google invented the transformer from scratch completely over night.
I couldn't read the whole article due to the paywall. I wonder (now that my knee has stopped jerking) whether they consider non-tenure-ladder professorial positions at universities as 'academia'. e.g. adjuncts, lecturers, staff or contract researchers, lab administrators, ...
Keep in mind that this is a postdoc. The thing you do after you complete a PhD, and for most of history, something you only did after you started working as a professor.
The question is: How many decide against doing a post doc, while considering it for some time during the PhD time. When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network, you have a good topic to work on.
Not necessarily. A three or four year PhD in Europe is a short time to acquire a solid network (a lot of time is spent in training, unless the student is very proactive) and not all PhDs broaden their horizon to have a well differentiated topic to pursue after the degree. I would argue that true independence is actually acquired in the early postdoc years, but it requires a lot of work and a lot of luck.
TBH, 40% attrition rate is less I expected. Since each academic can train more than one PhD and postdoc every few years, which is the case, some attrition is required because the system cannot grow exponentially. The desired outcome in this context is that this talent incorporates to industry or other sectors where this expertise or problem solving skills are not wasted.
> When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network
I wouldn't agree to those. I was perhaps overly supported during my PhD, not preparing me for the reality of being abandoned/expected to be totally independent in the postdoc
Does anyone have a link to the actual study? The linked DOI is a 404, and I'm confused by the phrasing of "more than 40%". Does the study not have a more exact number (with error)?
I'm not sure about the situation elsewhere, but in Lithuania, it feels like professors produce articles or tackle topics solely to check a box. Most of the content generated by universities here seems completely irrelevant and ends up being discarded after completion. The courses are very bland and uninformative too.
I sometimes just wonder, a lot of professors are bad at teaching because they don't have to be good at it. Is it the same for universities? It feels like reputation for universities are quite detached from the courses they have or teaching quality. Rankings focus a lot on quantitative measures, but teaching quality is hard to measure quantitatively. The output of universities, i.e. the quality of their students, depend on both the teaching quality and "IQ" of their students before admission, which is mostly a feedback loop because universities with good reputation get the best students... Optimizing for teaching quality also means that professors spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output and reduce the ranking, which has a more immediate effect on the reputation than teaching quality.
Teaching is not really relevant in the hiring process of professors.
I saw several committees for prof position and teaching is treated like a checkmark. You should done it and provide a small sample lecture (which you prepare much more than your average lecture) and don't have to suck at it. After this checkbox, the differentiating factors are about citations and how much grant money you can/could/do have... (Western Europe, maybe somewhere else it's different).
I feel terrible for the idea of jugding academics based on the amount of grant money they can get... It feels like encouraging a lot of smart people to find ways to waste money, even when they know that they don't really need that much for their project.
It does distract from the process of actually doing research, but I will point out that funding agencies take past productivity into account, so you can’t do literally nothing with the money and expect a grant to get renewed.
Can confirm this. Teaching is a pass / fail grade for new professors to get tenure in most places. Your ability to get grant funding and publish highly cited papers are astronomically more important to the university than your teaching abilities.
I was told by a seminar speaker one time about a pre-tenure professor who was awarded his University's highest teaching award one day. The very next day he was denied tenure because he didn't publish enough.
I recommend reading the book "Tenure Hacks" [1] to anyone interested in pursuing a career as a tenured professor. I don't agree with all of the points in the book, but it is an important and eye-opening alternative perspective to the typical narrative surrounding academic positions.
I would say teaching is not that relevant specifically for most tenure-track positions at big research universities. It is absolutely something you need to demonstrate some actual experience and proficiency with if you get a position at a small liberal arts college or a community college, where tuition is basically how they keep the lights on.
I’d also say that even at an R1, teaching volume at an acceptable quality is sometimes rewarded if your college within the university is very undergrad-heavy, because it can be part of how the university apportions funds to departments. So, it wouldn’t matter at a med school, but potentially a little in arts and sciences, though still in distant second to research.
There are also a small but increasing number of tenure track teaching-focused positions at big research universities. These folks typically help design and teach the biggest intro lectures and/or other very time- and labor-intensive courses. There are fewer of these positions than I’d like to see in an ideal world, but not zero.
I think it doesn't really enter the equation. The single worst lecturer I've had at university is now a professor. I don't enough about tenure tracks and we also call them differently (not adjunct, associate, etc) - but he's still there, 20y later, teaching (I think he just had gotten his PhD back then). I can only hope he has improved from "open script, read one page at a time, close script, dismiss".
> spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output
It's ironic that universities are primarily judged by their research output rather than their teaching, even though their original purpose was to share and preserve knowledge.
I'm shocked it's that low. I suppose, it's limited by the number and motivations of people who apply for postdocs, but the amount of soul crushing disappointment and borderline abuse of postdocs is legendary.
- Many people who did a PhD and didn't want to do research don't do a postdoc
- I would say, "40% have left so far'. Following the same cohort for a few years might yield even higher numbers (because as long you haven't made your mind about quitting research, you are still a postdoc and not accounted for leaving, even it's your 10th year...).
Had a friend once who wanted to do research in an urgently necessary direction. Didn't get the money or academic support.
Couple years later she told me that happens a lot but one is so focused on their work and the illusion that "once I'm there ..." so strong, that one ignores the hard evidence and much debated proof, despite, well, one's own training.
how many transfer into a tenure track position? There must be a large contribution from people becoming 'research scientists' who are not tenure track professors but remaining in academia, at a subservient position, permanently.
Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning.
A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the pecularities of academia, you instead get extreme competition and little to no innovation really. You do get a lot of following and hyping trends for grant money. I'm not sure what the solution is.
No, only if you have a narrow definition of innovation. Producing something actually new and actionable isn't always aligned with doing something that gets citations.
It depends on incentives. From what I can see in CS, a lot of young researchers are focused on short-term projects, disconnected from actual problems, and spend lots of effort to package the result to increase the chance of getting a paper in top conferences/journals, because they need this for their career. They will be forced to leave academia if they don't have enough results in time, from what I know. And even for established researchers, they have to do something similar, so their students can have enough results. And they need to try really hard to get funding, because institutions want researchers that can get lots of funding, so institutions can get money from that.
This is probably not the complete story, and probably a bit too pessimistic, but I think this is true...
In the end my take is that there is too much supply for research for the funding that exist. So lot of it focuses on wrong metrics and as thus is somewhat wasted. Or energy is spend on wrong things like chasing that funding.
I am not sure if we can afford more funding, so maybe amount of research should be cut in some way...
It has to be a combination of competition and opportunity. If you take away the opportunity then it's just a middle school field day all day, nobody making it to play college ball let alone the pros.
It all depends on the metric you are optimizing for. In academia, the metric would be grant money, directly influenced by number of published articles and citations.
From that perspective, the system works. We are making more articles, in more journals, there is also plenty of money thrown around. Unfortunately, there is no incentive for correctness, novelty or usefulness in this system.
Falsification of results, especially in the soft sciences, is relatively easy. Verification of results, doesn't give you any credit. So you can have people producing articles with blatantly misleading or false results for decades, all without any repercussion.
And it's not much better in the hard sciences either. Because verification of results there, is even more difficult and costly. And again, we are not incentivizing verification.
Up to certain point. Beyond that there is lot of waste.
Say you have 20 competing products that want to get noticed or know to sell. Obvious solution for them is to pour more and more resources in advertising. Eventually this advertising takes away from actual product as more time and money is spend on it instead on the product.
Advertising in academia is publications but also applications for funding.
As a former postdoc in the physical sciences (who is now out of academia mostly for family reasons), I don't like the constant argument I hear about whether competition is good or bad in research and especially academic research. I think it is the wrong question. Competition is inherently good in that whatever researchers are competing over will be optimized in the long run.
We wish that we were optimizing for new/great ideas, but we aren't. In our current academic system, we are optimizing for number of papers and number of quick citations on papers (where quick = within 2-5 years). The reason these incentives are present is because they are largely deterministic in the outcomes of academic hiring, tenure decisions, and funding proposals. It seems to me that everyone discusses academic hiring and tenure ad infinitum, but less so for the details of the academic research funding system.
For most academic research, when a professor submits a proposal for funding, it is tied very closely to work on one particular idea or group of ideas. The funding cannot be used for research outside of the proposal area. Furthermore one must achieve results within the confines and time period (a few years) of that grant if one hopes to receive more funding in the future. So when a new idea comes along during the process of working on a grant, you either a) do your best to spin the new idea as related to the current grant in some unnatural way and proceed or b) wait until you can get funding for the new idea explicitly. This is the system within which the professors must work. They are laser-focused on achieving results within the constraints of their existing grant proposals. And some of these are great research ideas. But after a while, most people tend to stick with the same old ideas and pursue smaller and smaller ideas within the same area. This is why old professors are still pursuing the same overdone research they did when they were younger. You need new, young people to give an influx of new/bold/crazy ideas to pursue.
Now, the graduate student or postdoc must also work within this system, except that they have no say over the research directions. They must work on the professor's research ideas, not their own. There's fundamentally nothing wrong with that because it is the classic master/apprentice relationship which is generally a good thing. (After all, you can't have well-formed ideas until you know what you're doing, and that takes time. Without this type of system, you get outlandish crackpot ideas that are worse than wrong - they are useless.) But over the years of training, the grad student/post doc probably has a few good ideas. But what do they do with those ideas? Generally...statistically...the answer is nothing. These good ideas die with the grad student/post doc's unrealized academic career, since by far most have to leave academia before they can work on their own ideas (and there's simply no place outside of academia to work on your own ideas).
You would hope that there would be an outlet for good new ideas from grad students and post docs, but there isn't. People learn from mistakes quickly that graduate school and postdoc is no time to be putting your ideas out there. You won't get to work on them yourself and they will be taken from you, period. Let's say you, as a grad student, propose something new and great to your professor, and ask if you can work on it. Chances are that the prof will say no because it isn't funded, or because you're already busy with their currently funded ideas that they must execute on quickly in order to get more funding, or the worst one (which I have seen many many times) is when the professor says "well that's more of this other postdoc's specialty - I'll let them work on it." Sometimes you could propose something and the prof says no, but then 5 years later they are now funded for it. And none if this is caused by malicious inten...
Thanks for sharing this. I basically agree, and have a lot to say about the neither-black-nor-white state of academia but have never managed to communicate my thoughts as well as you did here.
Whoever is funding projects are probably also interested in results over beaurocracy and it's not immediately clear how they are at all locked into this system.
They got the money, they set the rules of the game.
The fact that this isn't solves tells me that it's difficult or impossible to actually recognize promising ideas except to go by track record which leads to the problems you mentioned.
However, the same point could also apply to both tenure decisions and academic hiring...in other words, it is difficult or impossible to tell who is the most promising young researcher. Therefore, rather than do real assessments (and be ok with getting it wrong sometimes), we use citations, journal impact factor, and h-index as proxies. These proxies are alluring because they feel quantitative and objective, and they somewhat remove blame from decision makers. However, as it has often been pointed out, these metrics would have passed over some of the most prominent researchers in science (whose names we all know) and very possibly would have relegated them to obscurity.
And along these lines, I would also point out that it is likely far easier to judge whether or not an idea is promising rather than a person who may or may not have had an opportunity to shine yet. In the case of a person, past performance is certainly not always indicative of future results. And this is especially skewed in the case of a person without previous good performance who may be well-capable of great work in the right environment. However, in the case of ideas, one has the ability to at least assess whether an idea makes some sense given the laws of nature, and also one has some ability to assess potential impact of an idea.
Now, none of that is to say it is easy to assess promising ideas. It is really hard, and the point is well taken. I agree with the point in that I don't think there is an easy solution here because assessment is difficult, yet we have to do some kind of assessment.
All I'm saying is that we are currently missing a lot of good people/ideas. Although, to be fair, it could also be the case that modern academia missing less good people/ideas than we ever have before - it is difficult to know.
Competition leads to innovation when the definition of success and its metrics are set correctly. A big chunk of "success" in academia is the number of publications, and funding often depends on that exact metric. As a result, competition in academia is very good for innovation in the field of producing papers and winning grants. I'm not saying the respective scientific research is wrong or doesn't exist, I'm just saying the system is skewed towards this one metric in an unhealthy way.
It's similar to competition in tech products not leading to innovation. The important metric there is financial growth and stock value, and there are ways to increase those metrics without really focusing on true innovation in the core domain.
I would guess that if there are economies of scale, concentrating production lowers the average unit cost and thus lead to more profits and thus more capacity for investment into R&D.
If, say, all steel production was done by 1-employee companies competing against each other, I don't think any one would be able to afford any serious investement.
From your strawman example, 1-employee companies wouldn't be competitive and even a small team would be able to offer more value than anybody else competing for funding due to deficiencies of scale.
The peacock is a product of competition. Of course the competition was for passing on genes, not survival, so the peacock developed a massive tail which is a huge waste of resources and attracts predators. But surviving with such a handicap is super sexy to other peacocks.
Competition is great at meeting the criteria of the competition. If the competition values anything other than innovation, like say grant money awarded or social standing, it is suboptimal for promoting innovation.
I think maybe it suffers from the same problem of the video game industry, that being that there's a never ending supply of people trying to get into the industry that has only the slightest relationship to the demand for such roles.
In the videogame industry, this mostly led to a bunch of low paying, long hour, lousy jobs with high turnover. Why pay more for a low level employee if you can get a new hire for cheaper? In academia, money is a little less hierarchical, so it led to a madcap fight for grants with all of the related downsides.
Really interesting to think about what an ideal academia would look like. I think a lot of us have an idea of 'pure science' which has never really existed (by which I mean, since the industrial revolution science and academia has been tied to industry).
In terms of conditions, I think this issue is solved elsewhere by unions (there are always people wanting to be hollywood script writers, but the writers guild of America does a good job of maintaining decent conditions despite this). I don't know how that could even come close to applying in something like academia though.
Yet, the ideas that have thrown incredible amounts of money against them on the open market all have been developed in academia. The current AI craze, the internet, the physics required for chip production, encryption, etc.
Academia works on nearly everything, so it's no surprise that successes come out of it. Especially if you are willing to squint your eyes a little and describe something which has a few elements of the final useful innovation (but noticeably not the secret sauce) a precursor then anything can be traced back.
That does not mean academia, nonetheless academia in its current form, is the optimal system for producing innovations. How much effort is being wasted on things that will never pan out? How many great potential innovations are not being researched right now because the system does not prioritize them? How many needed to start in academia vs how many just happened to?
Paying people to leave academia does not seem like a major endorsement of the academic system. No one is arguing that intelligent people who have spent years working in a field aren't valuable, just that they might not be reaching their full potential under the current conditions.
Further, I would recommend very strongly against using big companies as the gold standard of innovation, especially not efficient innovation.
Then I wonder who you think does the most efficient innovations. Apparently it's not universities like MIT. It's not big companies with research institutes like Bell Labs. The military? Please don't say VC funded startups.
As someone who has worked in academia for more than 20 years, in four countries, (and now is a professor in a top 3 world institution) I can tell you that it very much depends on where you work. Working conditions depend on the larger and smaller culture. It is a mistake to assume that everyone is living the same experience.
Kindly, given your credentials, it does sound like your situation is a bit biased. That said, of course let me know where you are so I too can enjoy your luck.
I am in London at the moment but I worked in Italy, Austria, USA before. I would never, for any kind of money, go back to academia to the USA for the reasons you listed.
more experts would be a good thing, if there was money for them. no point in producing phds if they don't get the resources to do research (including a respectable salary)... as it stands now academia is almost a scam (phd+ level)
Not surprising. I quit after about a year. I could have stayed on but I realized that it just wasn't right for me. By then I had figured out that most research is done by post docs and phd students and it doesn't pay very well. Not that I cared about the money but I started thinking about what is next and did not like the perspective.
Professors are basically there to manage the process and haggle for funding. They tend to not be very hands-on with research for the simple reason that that's not their main job. They mostly delegate that to people in their team.
And you can only become a professor by doing post docs, landing some tenured position and then maybe they'll make you a professor somewhere. It's a long, uncertain process and the failure modes are basically ending up with a teaching position or being otherwise stuck in some faculty mostly not doing research. Nothing wrong with that. But not what I was after. And a lot of teachers in university are basically people that dropped out of the process somehow.
Anyway, the whole management thing had no appeal to me: I did not want to be a manager managing other people doing all the fun stuff (research) while basically dealing with a lot of bureaucratic shit. Not my idea of fun, at least.
So, I left. It was the only logical thing to do. I worked for Nokia Research for a while after that. But the career paths there weren't a whole lot different there. And the whole thing started imploding a bit after the iphone launch.
These days I do startups and a bit of consulting. Mostly as a CTO, and I'm very hands on which is just how I like it. Inevitably, there's a bit of management involved as well. But I like what I do.
sometimes I read posts like this and am awed. it feels like something out of a book to me
never had a chance to go to college, no family, no friends, no social skills, mostly dumb except for basic computer skills
my life except for like 1-2 years has been fighting to survive in horribly abusive situations currently unable to work with my own SSN being messed with by a bunch of human traffickers
but I love computers my dream in life is to learn about them and built an integrated app kind of like the M1 but for software and I probably will die or be killed way before that happens but its cool to see there are people way smarter that care about building as much out there and computers will get better
Hmm this doesn't sound like what I experienced a professor doing... But this probably depends on the location and the discipline... Or well at least here in Germany you can more or less pick what you want to do: more being a people / project manager or more own research, or a mix of that... The uncertainty/low chances of getting a tenured position are not different though... And though it might suck, this is something you know, at the latest, after your PhD.
Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry [1].
And it's not like universities don't know this, people have been complaining about it for forever. They know if they were to just hire a person with a relevant PhD to do work, they'd ask for a good wage, so instead they dangle this "maybe you'll qualify for a tenured professor job eventually if you do underpaid labor for us for N years..."
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My relationship with academia is...complicated. I dropped out of college in 2012, worked as an engineer for awhile, did a brief stint as a researchey-person at NYU, got laid-off from there, worked in industry for another several years, tried school again in 2018 and dropped out again in 2019, finally finished my degree in 2021, and started a PhD in 2022, and did an adjunct lecturer thing from second-half of 2022 to first-half 2023.
Since I was working full time (and couldn't pay my mortgage on academic wages), I was doing a PhD at University of York part-time remotely. It was fun, but I wasn't just paid poorly, I had to pay them! About $15,000-$16,000/year American [2]! Even though I was doing work for the school, writing code for them that's not categorically different than the code I got paid yuppie engineer salary for, I was losing money in this prospect (and not just the normal opportunity cost kind).
I did it for two years, but I dropped it in November of last year because it was an expensive thing that I wasn't convinced was actually going to pay off for me. The PhD was already pretty self-guided, I could still research the topics I was interested in for free, academia's pace is glacial-at-best, and I didn't burn any bridges so I could go back later if I really wanted.
I might still publish a paper with my advisor in this next year (that's still pending), but of course since I'm not enrolled-in and paying-money-to the school, it won't count towards any credential. I think I'm ok with that.
[1] There might be exception to this but I can't think of many.
> Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry
Be careful: many people who are great postdocs are rather overqualified (and thus rather not suitable) for many jobs in industry.
Getting well-payed in industry requires in my opinion skills that are opposite to those that make you a great postdoc:
In industry you must not be a truth-seeker who can deeply absorb himself in problems. Being a truth-seeker makes you an insanely fit in the brutal office politics.
Also, while I do insist that in graduate school you actually learn a lot about leadership (in the sense of being able to push people to do great things), the abrasive and highly demanding leadership style in graduate school and academia is commonly very undesired in industry (but in my opinion not bad: a very particular kind of people (who will love graduate school) flourishes in such an environment).
It’s not exactly overqualification, more misqualification. If all you have to say for yourself is “I have completed 23rd grade, look at all these papers I wrote,” your skills and experience, no matter how deep, have diverged from the needs of almost any conceivable employer. I strongly encourage anybody thinking of doing a PhD to get a job in industry first, even if just for a year.
I've found STEM research to be different than that. Lots of opportunities to build and design whilst growing understandimg. Work with diverse teams and students of multiple levels. Communicate, work with, and network with industry individuals.
That depends entirely on the company. Where I am, what you say is mostly nonsense. Postdocs usually end up being the people leading (head down focused design or management) new projects that are directly or indirectly related to their research.
At least in computer science, postdocs have other benefits:
1) they can be well paid, like high five to very low six figures;
2) they can be an extra year or two to figure out your own research direction with some help but not much oversight;
3) they can be much easier to get than industry positions -- sometimes requiring little more than a solid publication record and advisor recommendation;
4) if you've been in a university environment for ~a decades and liked it, it might strike you as an easy path to keep doing that (this is probably the worst reason, though).
This is skewed by computer science postdocs at highly ranked schools, though. Yes, people taking these positions face opportunity costs, but the actual experience can be pretty nice.
This shift from hands on research to project management is pretty similar in industry from what I have seen. All of our principal applied scientists basically do the same thing. They don't really spend any time actually getting their hands dirty. Maybe other companies are different?
Many of them never wanted to be in academia in the first place, or at least shouldn't have wanted it. If you're in a class full of people who want to teach this same class, you might be questioning why you're there.
Yes, I expected the 40% to be much higher too. I guess once you go from PhD to postdoc it changes a bit, but again just looking at the numbers the pipeline gets a lot narrower at each transition.
Hi - please don't assume that retirements become job postings. Tenure lines have to be granted in many cases; if a dean is told by the provost to trim, then tenure lines are not granted after a retirement. My department has not matched its attrition rate for some time now.
I thought the 40% number seemed lower than my experiences suggest. But this is a solid point that suggests that even 84% is too low. I guess it could be as high as 90%.
Sounds like a lot more than I'd expect, especially considering ~50% of those 57000 doctorates probably don't even want to continue in academia. It's starting to look like the odds of landing a tenured position are quite good.
Perhaps too simplistic since tenure is not the only way to “make it” in academia. Many people have academic careers without making tenure. You’ve also excluded people who publish impactful work, spend time teaching, and leave before seeking tenure. It might be fair to say 84% of graduating PhDs don’t make tenure, it’s just jumping to conclusions to say they don’t make it in academia.
Also don’t forget there’s a large time lag between graduating PhDs and when they get tenure, so today’s 270k graduates might be shooting for the next decade’s 15k or 20k tenure spots. Or… who knows they might be shooting for the future 5k spots if the rumors about colleges trying to reduce their use of tenure are true.
“Non-tenure-track faculty account for about half of all faculty appointments in American higher education.” … “About 90 percent of all full-time lecturers and nearly 50 percent of all full-time instructors are nontenure track.” https://www.aaup.org/report/status-non-tenure-track-faculty
My spouse is a molecular biologist pursuing her PhD in RNA therapy. She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do, with only a third of the yield. You can only sustain that for so long. She's in academia solely because she's good at it. However, there are a few things I've observed from the sidelines:
- PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
- The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
- A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
- Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
- Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
- PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
- It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living. She plans to leave academia as soon as possible.
With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company. And with the exception of irrelevant papers, a friend of mine went through all of those at a startup she joined after her PhD.
I am doing a postdoc now - the pay sucks (still good compared to non-tech salaries) but I like what I do, I can choose my own tools, and I'm not longer contractually obligated to put my name in papers I don't like.
The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family, but it can also be very rewarding.
> With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company.
Same here. I've worked at grindy startups that made me want to leave the profession altogether—everything from gaslighting by small shop CEOs to firing threats, and even firing a colleague just to show "who's in charge."
But switching companies is always an option, as is switching domains. I did that multiple times without much trouble.
> The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family.
I thought stability was one of the reasons people choose academia. By stability, I mean a supervisor or program that guarantees a steady influx of cash for a certain period of time.
Yeah, but it comes down to what gives you fulfillment. For me, I need challenging work with a reward in pay that matches the effort and academia doesn't seem to fit that curve.
Is short term stability, really stability? I think it's pretty rare to get post-doc contracts longer than 3 years, renewal after that is unlikely especially for a long period of time. You can't really be a post-doc long term and it can easily have you bouncing across the country/countries following funding. It's more stable than freelancing perhaps or maybe a startup.
There's stability in academia as tenured professor but outside that, there really isn't.
I've worked in academia for almost all of my adult life, although in CS/LangSci not in molecular biology. Either I got lucky or it is some other reason, but I have not had the same experience.
> She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do
Now, I don't know how long you work but most academics I've met do it because they love it. Mind you, it's not like there is no pressure to stay on top of your game, and endless administration tasks do eat up a lot of your time that you would like to spend otherwise. But I know a lot of people who work at the weekends not to make up for lost time, but because their work is their passion.
> - PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
That is true, although you can also have awful superiors in a regular job. And it's not easy to just switch jobs for a lot of people when that happens. Also, I've personally never had any issues whatsoever with my PIs, so the opposite can also be true: PIs can be very supportive and interested.
> - The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.
> - A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
In all my many years, there was never any case where the author issue has ever come up. Also, perhaps I was lucky (again), but I've almost only experienced collegiality across groups in the places I worked. I wouldn't say that "internal politics" is a bigger issue in academia than in industry.
> - Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
The pressure to publish is real, but irrelevant papers do not really help you a lot. Your time is better spent doing work that can make an impact. That said, not all ideas that you pursue lead to amazing output, and you cannot afford to let half a year of work go to complete waste. So, yeah, if worst comes to worst, you might opt for a lower-tier conference and squeeze at least some insight out of your failed work, but it is not common to specifically try to create irrelevant papers.
Also, over the years, the acceptance rate for main conferences has become increasingly hard to get over, as competetion is ever increasing. So, you do want your work to be relevant, or else it's not much you'll get out of it.
> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real. However, I cannot personally attest this, as my work places have always been different.
> - PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
Not true in my experience, I and my colleagues, including PI, have always tried treating students and other group members respectfully. There is, of course, a certain expectation regarding your work ethics, but for the most part, I've never heard of anyone demanding from subordinates to forego vacations.
The only thing I can think of is when the deadline for an important conference comes up and everyone's really trying to get some final experiments done in time. Then it could happen that you're asking someone if they could do it, but I've also been in situation where the answer was "no" and that was, of course, accepted.
> - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
Probably true.
> It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living.
> Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.
This could also depend on location, but from what I’ve seen, postdoc CS pay in most places is less than what you can earn as an entry-level frontend engineer at a medium-sized scale-up.
This may be true - and I wasn't trying to claim that you can make as much money in academia than in the industry, I'm arguing that you often get paid a quite decent salary that allows you to live very comfortably.
Could you make more somewhere else. Quite certainly! But ask any Humanities grad what they're making in their first job outside academia.
>> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
> I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real.
My experience as a PhD student in France circa 2016: a professor comes into our office one morning, tells me "your work is completely stupid, irrelevant and useless anyways, you should just stop" and then leaves
Lmao when I was in a PhD program, my French advisor told me something pretty similar. I dropped out, but maybe that is a French thing instead of an academic thing.
A PhD is one thing, but doing it in Europe is a double whammy. People there, in general, love to use culture as an excuse to be rude for no reason. Germans and the French seem to take the crown in that regard.
Poor pay is an understatement. Back in 2010’s when I graduated, I was making USD$21K per year! If you calculate the hourly rate it is probably close to $3/hour given that PhDs work every day, and specially in the holidays that the advisor has more free time.
We were jokingly say that they don’t dare to call it a salary, that is why they call it a stipend.
are you in the US? that's surprisingly low as by the mid/late 2010's PhD students in stem fields were averaging 30k. for the many postdocs on nih-supported grants i seem to remember ~60k being standard at that time. eg https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipen... .
That’s exactly how much I was making in 2010 when I graduated. It’s even much worse than that because the benefits sucked and the school took back about about 1/3rd in the form of outrageous parking fees and outrageous student fees that required us to pay for tickets to every sports game we couldn’t even attend. Add overpriced books to that too.
It took a PhD to figure out how not to accumulate any new debt for those 6 years. I would have been first in line for food stamps, if they were available to us. I literally couldn’t afford to stay in student housing.
For readers still in a position to make a choice: interviewing and carefully selecting the lab / professor that you attach yourself to for the PhD is really a good idea!
Unfortunately, a lot of people enter the pipeline (in the US) not yet equipped to evaluate the possibilities.
If that’s you, get the masters degree that gives you enough knowledge to make an informed choice, then move if necessary.
I’m surprised the number is as low as 40%. You can’t help but question your existence when you, always the top of your class growing up and graduated college with distinctions, are making $50k a year (that was the postdoc salary at my very prestigious department at Princeton less than a decade ago) at a ripe old age of almost 30 and eyeing yet another term of postdoc.
my point is "it"s definition is harmful and exclusionary. "it" could be broader, more decentralized and we should consider acadamia as well beyond funded institions.
Hard work, poor pay, known perverse incentives, and awareness of the probably replication crisis in your field == burnout and tears.
Half my friends are postdocs or associate professors (including my wife) at top universities and none of them are happy with how it’s going. Most apply for jobs every now and then to imagine escaping. And they’re the ones doing well in the system!
I think it is in a way, since postdocs are often bad preparation for industry. Postdocs usually learn skills that are useful in academia, not the skills that are useful in industry. And the knowledge they focus on is often hyperspecialised, and not necessarily valuable in industry (though that does vary by field).
Essentially, postdocs can be a good way to waste the most valuable years of highly intelligent people...
Comments like these make me want to vomit with how out of touch industry people are. No, fiddling with AWS or writing some simple Go code is not beyond the capabilities of a postdoc... You really are not doing anything that complicated. Switch the roles and you would be completely useless.
Hmm, I'm not a coder. In my field you do need some specialised knowledge you generally get through experience. And then you have the soft skills, like being able to work in a team, being able to run projects, understanding business needs vs doing what's technically interesting, etc. Postdocs do have some of those skills, but there is not much you get through a postdoc specifically vs doing a PhD or spending 7-10 years in an industry role. And, to be honest, your attitude is part of the problem - I sure wouldn't hire someone who will look down on the job or think they are too smart to do it, and neither should someone with 10 years experience be happy getting a job writing simple AWS code.
The point I'm trying to make is more about the opportunity cost, not the skills you get out at the end.
Sorry Sarcasm aside: considering the never ending list of unsolved problems, it should.
Sadly, more money seems to get spend on games, ads and stupid juice presses than anything really helpful.
More anecdotal evidence: while writing my Master's thesis it became clear that my advisor (the dept. head) was quite interested in the subject matter, and repeatedly asked me to shelve it, do a quick-and-dirty thesis to graduate and return to working on my original draft during a PhD. I was very open to the idea, since I was in love with research ever since childhood.
We sat down and talked about what this meant in particular, the workload, compensation, options after graduating from the PhD program.
It broke my heart, but I had to turn him down. It felt like everybody who wanted to have a shot at having a career in academia needed to put an insane (read: literally destructive) amount of effort into it, all while accepting that it was extremely easy to get stuck for good. There is extreme pressure on postdocs to produce results, with institutions and labs becoming very cautious about working with people in their 2nd or 3rd postdocs if they hadn't published in high-impact journals until then. Also, good luck finding any sort of tenured positions, with more and more universities switching to freelance "collaborators".
I was not going to spend 80 hours a week investing in something where all odds are stacked against me. I was not going to put years of my life into a thing that can go 'poof' just because your stars didn't align, or because the faculty decided instead of hiring you on a professorship track, they would rather extort some more money and "let the contracts expire" when it was no longer convenient to have you there.
As they should. More often then not, going into academia means horrible working conditions and horrible pay... and there's job satisfaction when your instead of doing things you like or ones enrich society, you spend most of your time in a never ending fight for grant money.
Leaving is completely logical for anyone that wants to actually do impactful research, or wants to make a living wage, and wants sane hours and sane management.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadGlad this post was revived after being dead for some reason.
This. A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate.
Why?
When academics move directly from being students to faculty without external experience, it creates an echo chamber. This isolation from practical applications and market forces risks turning academic pursuit into a self-referential game - where success is measured by metrics like publication count and citation numbers rather than actual contribution to human knowledge or societal progress.
This separation from real-world feedback mechanisms means we may be investing significant human capital into activities that optimize for academic metrics rather than meaningful outcomes. The challenge isn't just about individual careers, but about ensuring our research institutions remain connected to the practical problems they're meant to help solve.
Moving directly from being students to faculty is rare. It mostly happens in fields where the demand for PhDs is unusually high. Because universities can't compete with salaries, they have to offer positions people may not be ready for if they want to attract top candidates.
The norm is doing PhD, postdoc, and the first faculty position in different institutes – precisely to avoid the echo chamber effect. And unless you are from a particularly large country, you are expected to do at least one of them outside your home country.
Success measures are what they are for two reasons: competition and long-term focus. Academic research is fundamentally interesting, and there are far more competent people trying to do it than funding. And because people can't afford to wait for decades to measure the real-world impact, the academia must base career progression on something that can be determined quickly enough. If you are doing the kind of research where practical applications can be expected in a few years, the industry is a better place for you. They have a lot more resources for research than the academia.
I'm currently doing research on a topic I started working on ~15 years ago. In that time, the topic has progressed from something interesting and potentially valuable to a mainstream idea with plenty of research funding. If the work is successful, we may start seeing measurable real-world impact in 5-10 years.
The only papers I see that are routinely useful have half the authors having a .in or .cn email at the end with the rest having Indian and Chinese names in US institutions.
The only western papers which aren't extended advertisements for their company are from people who are making something for themselves.
For example the best paper on image classification I've ever seen was posted on a private discord and was about better labeling the parts of a vagina as part of a stable diffusion training pipeline.
I used the methods without change and got better than state of the art for document segmentation.
You can advance knowledge in ways that are aligned with the nation's strategic needs. That would imply the career path of researchers would be oriented towards industry instead of pie in the sky projects.
In the UK, the industrial and military research labs have been closed, there is nothing being done except in universities. The university projects are really specific and don't join up in any way. There is no equivalent of DARPA guiding research proposals to be useful but Governments still think that the universites will define the next generation of industrial products.
Source: my own area of trying to use computers for Materials Science.
You're posting that sort of message in a startup-oriented online forum.
There was a point in time where Google was lauded by it's success story as progress originating in investments in academia.
TBH, 40% attrition rate is less I expected. Since each academic can train more than one PhD and postdoc every few years, which is the case, some attrition is required because the system cannot grow exponentially. The desired outcome in this context is that this talent incorporates to industry or other sectors where this expertise or problem solving skills are not wasted.
I wouldn't agree to those. I was perhaps overly supported during my PhD, not preparing me for the reality of being abandoned/expected to be totally independent in the postdoc
https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03938
System behaves as designed. Situation normal: all fucked up.
I saw several committees for prof position and teaching is treated like a checkmark. You should done it and provide a small sample lecture (which you prepare much more than your average lecture) and don't have to suck at it. After this checkbox, the differentiating factors are about citations and how much grant money you can/could/do have... (Western Europe, maybe somewhere else it's different).
I was told by a seminar speaker one time about a pre-tenure professor who was awarded his University's highest teaching award one day. The very next day he was denied tenure because he didn't publish enough.
I recommend reading the book "Tenure Hacks" [1] to anyone interested in pursuing a career as a tenured professor. I don't agree with all of the points in the book, but it is an important and eye-opening alternative perspective to the typical narrative surrounding academic positions.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Tenure-hacks-secrets-making-tenure/dp...
I’d also say that even at an R1, teaching volume at an acceptable quality is sometimes rewarded if your college within the university is very undergrad-heavy, because it can be part of how the university apportions funds to departments. So, it wouldn’t matter at a med school, but potentially a little in arts and sciences, though still in distant second to research.
There are also a small but increasing number of tenure track teaching-focused positions at big research universities. These folks typically help design and teach the biggest intro lectures and/or other very time- and labor-intensive courses. There are fewer of these positions than I’d like to see in an ideal world, but not zero.
It's ironic that universities are primarily judged by their research output rather than their teaching, even though their original purpose was to share and preserve knowledge.
But the academic paper printer goes brrrr!
- Many people who did a PhD and didn't want to do research don't do a postdoc
- I would say, "40% have left so far'. Following the same cohort for a few years might yield even higher numbers (because as long you haven't made your mind about quitting research, you are still a postdoc and not accounted for leaving, even it's your 10th year...).
Couple years later she told me that happens a lot but one is so focused on their work and the illusion that "once I'm there ..." so strong, that one ignores the hard evidence and much debated proof, despite, well, one's own training.
A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the pecularities of academia, you instead get extreme competition and little to no innovation really. You do get a lot of following and hyping trends for grant money. I'm not sure what the solution is.
This is probably not the complete story, and probably a bit too pessimistic, but I think this is true...
I am not sure if we can afford more funding, so maybe amount of research should be cut in some way...
From that perspective, the system works. We are making more articles, in more journals, there is also plenty of money thrown around. Unfortunately, there is no incentive for correctness, novelty or usefulness in this system.
Falsification of results, especially in the soft sciences, is relatively easy. Verification of results, doesn't give you any credit. So you can have people producing articles with blatantly misleading or false results for decades, all without any repercussion.
And it's not much better in the hard sciences either. Because verification of results there, is even more difficult and costly. And again, we are not incentivizing verification.
Say you have 20 competing products that want to get noticed or know to sell. Obvious solution for them is to pour more and more resources in advertising. Eventually this advertising takes away from actual product as more time and money is spend on it instead on the product.
Advertising in academia is publications but also applications for funding.
We wish that we were optimizing for new/great ideas, but we aren't. In our current academic system, we are optimizing for number of papers and number of quick citations on papers (where quick = within 2-5 years). The reason these incentives are present is because they are largely deterministic in the outcomes of academic hiring, tenure decisions, and funding proposals. It seems to me that everyone discusses academic hiring and tenure ad infinitum, but less so for the details of the academic research funding system.
For most academic research, when a professor submits a proposal for funding, it is tied very closely to work on one particular idea or group of ideas. The funding cannot be used for research outside of the proposal area. Furthermore one must achieve results within the confines and time period (a few years) of that grant if one hopes to receive more funding in the future. So when a new idea comes along during the process of working on a grant, you either a) do your best to spin the new idea as related to the current grant in some unnatural way and proceed or b) wait until you can get funding for the new idea explicitly. This is the system within which the professors must work. They are laser-focused on achieving results within the constraints of their existing grant proposals. And some of these are great research ideas. But after a while, most people tend to stick with the same old ideas and pursue smaller and smaller ideas within the same area. This is why old professors are still pursuing the same overdone research they did when they were younger. You need new, young people to give an influx of new/bold/crazy ideas to pursue.
Now, the graduate student or postdoc must also work within this system, except that they have no say over the research directions. They must work on the professor's research ideas, not their own. There's fundamentally nothing wrong with that because it is the classic master/apprentice relationship which is generally a good thing. (After all, you can't have well-formed ideas until you know what you're doing, and that takes time. Without this type of system, you get outlandish crackpot ideas that are worse than wrong - they are useless.) But over the years of training, the grad student/post doc probably has a few good ideas. But what do they do with those ideas? Generally...statistically...the answer is nothing. These good ideas die with the grad student/post doc's unrealized academic career, since by far most have to leave academia before they can work on their own ideas (and there's simply no place outside of academia to work on your own ideas).
You would hope that there would be an outlet for good new ideas from grad students and post docs, but there isn't. People learn from mistakes quickly that graduate school and postdoc is no time to be putting your ideas out there. You won't get to work on them yourself and they will be taken from you, period. Let's say you, as a grad student, propose something new and great to your professor, and ask if you can work on it. Chances are that the prof will say no because it isn't funded, or because you're already busy with their currently funded ideas that they must execute on quickly in order to get more funding, or the worst one (which I have seen many many times) is when the professor says "well that's more of this other postdoc's specialty - I'll let them work on it." Sometimes you could propose something and the prof says no, but then 5 years later they are now funded for it. And none if this is caused by malicious inten...
Thank you for taking the time to write this!
And therein lies the rub. Excellent post overall!
They got the money, they set the rules of the game.
The fact that this isn't solves tells me that it's difficult or impossible to actually recognize promising ideas except to go by track record which leads to the problems you mentioned.
However, the same point could also apply to both tenure decisions and academic hiring...in other words, it is difficult or impossible to tell who is the most promising young researcher. Therefore, rather than do real assessments (and be ok with getting it wrong sometimes), we use citations, journal impact factor, and h-index as proxies. These proxies are alluring because they feel quantitative and objective, and they somewhat remove blame from decision makers. However, as it has often been pointed out, these metrics would have passed over some of the most prominent researchers in science (whose names we all know) and very possibly would have relegated them to obscurity.
And along these lines, I would also point out that it is likely far easier to judge whether or not an idea is promising rather than a person who may or may not have had an opportunity to shine yet. In the case of a person, past performance is certainly not always indicative of future results. And this is especially skewed in the case of a person without previous good performance who may be well-capable of great work in the right environment. However, in the case of ideas, one has the ability to at least assess whether an idea makes some sense given the laws of nature, and also one has some ability to assess potential impact of an idea.
Now, none of that is to say it is easy to assess promising ideas. It is really hard, and the point is well taken. I agree with the point in that I don't think there is an easy solution here because assessment is difficult, yet we have to do some kind of assessment.
All I'm saying is that we are currently missing a lot of good people/ideas. Although, to be fair, it could also be the case that modern academia missing less good people/ideas than we ever have before - it is difficult to know.
It's similar to competition in tech products not leading to innovation. The important metric there is financial growth and stock value, and there are ways to increase those metrics without really focusing on true innovation in the core domain.
If, say, all steel production was done by 1-employee companies competing against each other, I don't think any one would be able to afford any serious investement.
Why doesn't this happen with research?
Competition is great at meeting the criteria of the competition. If the competition values anything other than innovation, like say grant money awarded or social standing, it is suboptimal for promoting innovation.
In the videogame industry, this mostly led to a bunch of low paying, long hour, lousy jobs with high turnover. Why pay more for a low level employee if you can get a new hire for cheaper? In academia, money is a little less hierarchical, so it led to a madcap fight for grants with all of the related downsides.
Really interesting to think about what an ideal academia would look like. I think a lot of us have an idea of 'pure science' which has never really existed (by which I mean, since the industrial revolution science and academia has been tied to industry).
In terms of conditions, I think this issue is solved elsewhere by unions (there are always people wanting to be hollywood script writers, but the writers guild of America does a good job of maintaining decent conditions despite this). I don't know how that could even come close to applying in something like academia though.
That does not mean academia, nonetheless academia in its current form, is the optimal system for producing innovations. How much effort is being wasted on things that will never pan out? How many great potential innovations are not being researched right now because the system does not prioritize them? How many needed to start in academia vs how many just happened to?
Further, I would recommend very strongly against using big companies as the gold standard of innovation, especially not efficient innovation.
Professors are basically there to manage the process and haggle for funding. They tend to not be very hands-on with research for the simple reason that that's not their main job. They mostly delegate that to people in their team.
And you can only become a professor by doing post docs, landing some tenured position and then maybe they'll make you a professor somewhere. It's a long, uncertain process and the failure modes are basically ending up with a teaching position or being otherwise stuck in some faculty mostly not doing research. Nothing wrong with that. But not what I was after. And a lot of teachers in university are basically people that dropped out of the process somehow.
Anyway, the whole management thing had no appeal to me: I did not want to be a manager managing other people doing all the fun stuff (research) while basically dealing with a lot of bureaucratic shit. Not my idea of fun, at least.
So, I left. It was the only logical thing to do. I worked for Nokia Research for a while after that. But the career paths there weren't a whole lot different there. And the whole thing started imploding a bit after the iphone launch.
These days I do startups and a bit of consulting. Mostly as a CTO, and I'm very hands on which is just how I like it. Inevitably, there's a bit of management involved as well. But I like what I do.
never had a chance to go to college, no family, no friends, no social skills, mostly dumb except for basic computer skills
my life except for like 1-2 years has been fighting to survive in horribly abusive situations currently unable to work with my own SSN being messed with by a bunch of human traffickers
but I love computers my dream in life is to learn about them and built an integrated app kind of like the M1 but for software and I probably will die or be killed way before that happens but its cool to see there are people way smarter that care about building as much out there and computers will get better
Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry [1].
And it's not like universities don't know this, people have been complaining about it for forever. They know if they were to just hire a person with a relevant PhD to do work, they'd ask for a good wage, so instead they dangle this "maybe you'll qualify for a tenured professor job eventually if you do underpaid labor for us for N years..."
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My relationship with academia is...complicated. I dropped out of college in 2012, worked as an engineer for awhile, did a brief stint as a researchey-person at NYU, got laid-off from there, worked in industry for another several years, tried school again in 2018 and dropped out again in 2019, finally finished my degree in 2021, and started a PhD in 2022, and did an adjunct lecturer thing from second-half of 2022 to first-half 2023.
Since I was working full time (and couldn't pay my mortgage on academic wages), I was doing a PhD at University of York part-time remotely. It was fun, but I wasn't just paid poorly, I had to pay them! About $15,000-$16,000/year American [2]! Even though I was doing work for the school, writing code for them that's not categorically different than the code I got paid yuppie engineer salary for, I was losing money in this prospect (and not just the normal opportunity cost kind).
I did it for two years, but I dropped it in November of last year because it was an expensive thing that I wasn't convinced was actually going to pay off for me. The PhD was already pretty self-guided, I could still research the topics I was interested in for free, academia's pace is glacial-at-best, and I didn't burn any bridges so I could go back later if I really wanted.
I might still publish a paper with my advisor in this next year (that's still pending), but of course since I'm not enrolled-in and paying-money-to the school, it won't count towards any credential. I think I'm ok with that.
[1] There might be exception to this but I can't think of many.
[2] depending on the dollar->pound exchange rate.
Be careful: many people who are great postdocs are rather overqualified (and thus rather not suitable) for many jobs in industry.
Getting well-payed in industry requires in my opinion skills that are opposite to those that make you a great postdoc:
In industry you must not be a truth-seeker who can deeply absorb himself in problems. Being a truth-seeker makes you an insanely fit in the brutal office politics.
Also, while I do insist that in graduate school you actually learn a lot about leadership (in the sense of being able to push people to do great things), the abrasive and highly demanding leadership style in graduate school and academia is commonly very undesired in industry (but in my opinion not bad: a very particular kind of people (who will love graduate school) flourishes in such an environment).
1) they can be well paid, like high five to very low six figures;
2) they can be an extra year or two to figure out your own research direction with some help but not much oversight;
3) they can be much easier to get than industry positions -- sometimes requiring little more than a solid publication record and advisor recommendation;
4) if you've been in a university environment for ~a decades and liked it, it might strike you as an easy path to keep doing that (this is probably the worst reason, though).
This is skewed by computer science postdocs at highly ranked schools, though. Yes, people taking these positions face opportunity costs, but the actual experience can be pretty nice.
Assuming a tenured professor holds that position from age 35 to age 65, that's 9000 tenured positions to be filled per year.
According to https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023 there are 57,000 research doctorates granted per year.
So 84% of people granted PhDs don't make it in academia.
Also don’t forget there’s a large time lag between graduating PhDs and when they get tenure, so today’s 270k graduates might be shooting for the next decade’s 15k or 20k tenure spots. Or… who knows they might be shooting for the future 5k spots if the rumors about colleges trying to reduce their use of tenure are true.
“Non-tenure-track faculty account for about half of all faculty appointments in American higher education.” … “About 90 percent of all full-time lecturers and nearly 50 percent of all full-time instructors are nontenure track.” https://www.aaup.org/report/status-non-tenure-track-faculty
I guess more leave between postdoc and phd.
- PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
- The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
- A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
- Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
- Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
- PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
- It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living. She plans to leave academia as soon as possible.
I am doing a postdoc now - the pay sucks (still good compared to non-tech salaries) but I like what I do, I can choose my own tools, and I'm not longer contractually obligated to put my name in papers I don't like.
The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family, but it can also be very rewarding.
Same here. I've worked at grindy startups that made me want to leave the profession altogether—everything from gaslighting by small shop CEOs to firing threats, and even firing a colleague just to show "who's in charge."
But switching companies is always an option, as is switching domains. I did that multiple times without much trouble.
> The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family.
I thought stability was one of the reasons people choose academia. By stability, I mean a supervisor or program that guarantees a steady influx of cash for a certain period of time.
Yeah, but it comes down to what gives you fulfillment. For me, I need challenging work with a reward in pay that matches the effort and academia doesn't seem to fit that curve.
There's stability in academia as tenured professor but outside that, there really isn't.
> She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do
Now, I don't know how long you work but most academics I've met do it because they love it. Mind you, it's not like there is no pressure to stay on top of your game, and endless administration tasks do eat up a lot of your time that you would like to spend otherwise. But I know a lot of people who work at the weekends not to make up for lost time, but because their work is their passion.
> - PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.
That is true, although you can also have awful superiors in a regular job. And it's not easy to just switch jobs for a lot of people when that happens. Also, I've personally never had any issues whatsoever with my PIs, so the opposite can also be true: PIs can be very supportive and interested.
> - The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.
Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.
> - A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.
In all my many years, there was never any case where the author issue has ever come up. Also, perhaps I was lucky (again), but I've almost only experienced collegiality across groups in the places I worked. I wouldn't say that "internal politics" is a bigger issue in academia than in industry.
> - Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.
The pressure to publish is real, but irrelevant papers do not really help you a lot. Your time is better spent doing work that can make an impact. That said, not all ideas that you pursue lead to amazing output, and you cannot afford to let half a year of work go to complete waste. So, yeah, if worst comes to worst, you might opt for a lower-tier conference and squeeze at least some insight out of your failed work, but it is not common to specifically try to create irrelevant papers.
Also, over the years, the acceptance rate for main conferences has become increasingly hard to get over, as competetion is ever increasing. So, you do want your work to be relevant, or else it's not much you'll get out of it.
> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.
I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real. However, I cannot personally attest this, as my work places have always been different.
> - PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.
Not true in my experience, I and my colleagues, including PI, have always tried treating students and other group members respectfully. There is, of course, a certain expectation regarding your work ethics, but for the most part, I've never heard of anyone demanding from subordinates to forego vacations.
The only thing I can think of is when the deadline for an important conference comes up and everyone's really trying to get some final experiments done in time. Then it could happen that you're asking someone if they could do it, but I've also been in situation where the answer was "no" and that was, of course, accepted.
> - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.
Probably true.
> It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living.
"Better" is completely subjective. I loved wor...
This could also depend on location, but from what I’ve seen, postdoc CS pay in most places is less than what you can earn as an entry-level frontend engineer at a medium-sized scale-up.
Could you make more somewhere else. Quite certainly! But ask any Humanities grad what they're making in their first job outside academia.
> I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real.
My experience as a PhD student in France circa 2016: a professor comes into our office one morning, tells me "your work is completely stupid, irrelevant and useless anyways, you should just stop" and then leaves
This is really the root of most other problems mentioned.
We were jokingly say that they don’t dare to call it a salary, that is why they call it a stipend.
I hated it every second of it too. 11 years later I still loath everything I did then.
It took a PhD to figure out how not to accumulate any new debt for those 6 years. I would have been first in line for food stamps, if they were available to us. I literally couldn’t afford to stay in student housing.
Rather: because they deeply love doing research.
Unfortunately, a lot of people enter the pipeline (in the US) not yet equipped to evaluate the possibilities.
If that’s you, get the masters degree that gives you enough knowledge to make an informed choice, then move if necessary.
Worth pointing out supply can be slim in narrower fields of research or for location requirements, like being close to a significant other.
Talk to the grad students of other professors
Why is that construed as a negative? Isn't it great that they are finding jobs and applying their disciplines in the industry?
Half my friends are postdocs or associate professors (including my wife) at top universities and none of them are happy with how it’s going. Most apply for jobs every now and then to imagine escaping. And they’re the ones doing well in the system!
Essentially, postdocs can be a good way to waste the most valuable years of highly intelligent people...
The point I'm trying to make is more about the opportunity cost, not the skills you get out at the end.
Sorry Sarcasm aside: considering the never ending list of unsolved problems, it should. Sadly, more money seems to get spend on games, ads and stupid juice presses than anything really helpful.
We sat down and talked about what this meant in particular, the workload, compensation, options after graduating from the PhD program.
It broke my heart, but I had to turn him down. It felt like everybody who wanted to have a shot at having a career in academia needed to put an insane (read: literally destructive) amount of effort into it, all while accepting that it was extremely easy to get stuck for good. There is extreme pressure on postdocs to produce results, with institutions and labs becoming very cautious about working with people in their 2nd or 3rd postdocs if they hadn't published in high-impact journals until then. Also, good luck finding any sort of tenured positions, with more and more universities switching to freelance "collaborators".
I was not going to spend 80 hours a week investing in something where all odds are stacked against me. I was not going to put years of my life into a thing that can go 'poof' just because your stars didn't align, or because the faculty decided instead of hiring you on a professorship track, they would rather extort some more money and "let the contracts expire" when it was no longer convenient to have you there.
Leaving is completely logical for anyone that wants to actually do impactful research, or wants to make a living wage, and wants sane hours and sane management.