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A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

theguardian.com

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Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#151

Post by Jach »

brailsafe wrote: post #145
Jach wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use the odd-even number question in my phone screen. The primary purpose I use it for is to filter out people who can't program at all, my secondary purpose is to see if they can think of using a bitwise operator when prompted for an alternate solution(s). I don't think it's worthwhile to ask for more complicated problem implementations (at least at the phone screen level) since complicated algorithms aren't w…

I hope the people who don't think of using a bitwise operator still get through. I've been programming for ~9 years and have never thought to use it.

Yeah it's secondary so I don't hold it against the ones that didn't come up with it (one person came up with an idea I hadn't considered, I like that a person can think of different ways at all, which was casting the int to string and then checking the last character), it's a minor piece of information. All else being equal I'd like to see knowledge of bitwise operations demonstrated (and I'm sad to say that at my work we occasionally have to deal with bit-level concerns thanks to some legacy database decisions...) but things are typically unequal in more important matters.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#152

Post by analog31 »

sjg007 wrote: post #129
analog31 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, my parents put me through college, and I finished grad school with money in the bank thanks to the NSF. At the time, the conventional wisdom was: Don't get a graduate degree unless somebody else is paying for it, or you are in a job that guarantees a salary bump for doing it. I don't think that's changed.

Unless you live in a high COL area where even NSF grant money isn’t enough.

The NSF grant money wasn't paid directly to students. The departments still set the pay scale, and had to deal with COL disparities like all employers do. And if your prof couldn't support you, then you didn't work for that prof, or you got a teaching assistantship.

At least in my field, physics, lack of sufficient funding meant you didn't get students.

This whole business wasn't risk free. There were students who dropped out because their prof lost funding. In my view, the risk of not finishing at all is a bigger cost of graduate education than the pay scale.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#153

Post by dagw »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #130
troupe wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interview questions don't sound particularly rigorous, but asking someone to pick a programming language and do something simple with it sounds like a good way to make sure that they at least have actually done programmed before. If the job involved any type of programming, this would seem to strongly correlate with success. What do you think would be better?

It sounds like a good way? Yes, I agree intuitively it sounds reasonable, but that alone is not considered a best practice. Why do we all work so hard to go by good data in our real work, but when it comes to interviewing someone we’re encouraged to just wing it, or use our best judgement? Careers can be affected with this stuff, and bad hiring decisions in either direction can hurt an organization. There is research…

not gotcha trick puzzle questions.

In what world is testing if a number is even or odd a gotcha trick puzzle question?

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#154

Post by dekhn »

dabockster wrote: post #102
WhitneyLand wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your interview questions sound like bullshit. What are these interviews for, how did you arrive at those questions, and what leads you to believe they have a strong correlation with success?

This. I haven't even heard the word palindrome outside of either college or outsourced coding challenges (further driving home the bullshit point).

Weird. I grew up with palindromes. They were a common concept in writing. A man, a plan, a canal. Panama!

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#155

Post by porter »

analog31 wrote: post #75

If you are taking a PhD, especially in the sciences, look away now. It may be stale news but I’ve just seen a graph from a 2010 Royal Society report suggesting that of every 200 people completing a PhD, only seven will get a permanent academic post. Only one will become a professor. Stale, as in, 70+ years old. I got my PhD in physics, in 1993. At that time, science students were talking about something that we refer…

Doesn't that assume zero student population growth?

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#156

Post by dekhn »

I worked with a japanese postdoc who, when he finished up, said he was returning to Japan. I asked him if he was going to get a job as a professor and he said "no, I have to wait for my current advisor to die before I can be a professor".

I used to think that was just Japan, but then I tried to become a professor (during the post-NIH-training exponential burst of the early 2000s) and found that it's basically the same in the US now.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#157

Post by sjg007 »

analog31 wrote: post #152
sjg007 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you live in a high COL area where even NSF grant money isn’t enough.

The NSF grant money wasn't paid directly to students. The departments still set the pay scale, and had to deal with COL disparities like all employers do. And if your prof couldn't support you, then you didn't work for that prof, or you got a teaching assistantship. At least in my field, physics, lack of sufficient funding meant you didn't get students. This whole business wasn't risk free. There were students who dr…

Lol.. UCLA pays grad students 18k ish. Barely enough to survive. Yes not finishing is a real risk but it’s not true that students can generally survive on that without loans or savings. In other lower cost areas, they can. MIT, Columbia and other schools also have better financial packages / housing options.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#158

Post by analog31 »

porter wrote: post #155
analog31 wrote: post #75

If you are taking a PhD, especially in the sciences, look away now. It may be stale news but I’ve just seen a graph from a 2010 Royal Society report suggesting that of every 200 people completing a PhD, only seven will get a permanent academic post. Only one will become a professor. Stale, as in, 70+ years old. I got my PhD in physics, in 1993. At that time, science students were talking about something that we refer…

Doesn't that assume zero student population growth?

Indeed, but even a moderate growth model still has a birth control problem, with a different threshold.

On the other hand, it's also offset by the decline of tenured faculty in college teaching.

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#159

Post by dabockster »

twblalock wrote: post #132
dabockster wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I haven't even heard the word palindrome outside of either college or outsourced coding challenges (further driving home the bullshit point).

It only takes a few seconds to explain what a palindrome is. It's a very simple concept. A candidate who can't figure out how to tell if a string is a palindrome in the normal amount of time allocated for an interview is probably not a very good programmer, even if the candidate has never heard of palindromes before.

Are you saying I'm a bad programmer because I can't recite the palindrome algorithm from memory?

Re: A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

#160

Post by analog31 »

sjg007 wrote: post #157
analog31 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NSF grant money wasn't paid directly to students. The departments still set the pay scale, and had to deal with COL disparities like all employers do. And if your prof couldn't support you, then you didn't work for that prof, or you got a teaching assistantship. At least in my field, physics, lack of sufficient funding meant you didn't get students. This whole business wasn't risk free. There were students who dr…

Lol.. UCLA pays grad students 18k ish. Barely enough to survive. Yes not finishing is a real risk but it’s not true that students can generally survive on that without loans or savings. In other lower cost areas, they can. MIT, Columbia and other schools also have better financial packages / housing options.

I remember even in the 1980s, there were schools where the pay packages didn't look all that competitive. It's possible that there are grad students who have family support.
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