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Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

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Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#81

Post by simonbarker87 »

neel_k wrote: post #58
simonbarker87 wrote: post #5

When deciding to do my PhD I did so under the assumption that I wouldn't work in academia afterward. I evaluated it like a any other job offer at the time and decided that the tax free pay, coupled with the freedom to run my project how I wanted and work on what I wanted (within reason) for a fixed period of time was a better offer than a grad scheme with BAE, Nissan, Seimens etc. Doing a PhD built a large array of s…

This is basically the same thing I did, except that I worked as a programmer at a startup before going back to school for a PhD. It was better than doing a startup by a stupidly huge margin. Startups are all about risk-minimization and risk-mitigation, since risky things mostly fail, and so use up your runway without moving you closer to success. So in a startup you are highly incentivized not to take big risks -- an…

I'd never thought about it quite like that but that really matches my experience. Most of what I tried didn't work but I got to keep trying other ways without some yelling about why attempts 1, 2 and 3 failed. Great fun looking back, glad I'm not still in academia though.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#82

Post by foo101 »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #62
raister wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is changing, thankfully. First authors should be the ones leading the paper, according to contributions. Some journals are asking for the actual contributions performed by each author, which I think is very good. Alphabetical order should be banned, period.

You state your opinion, but don't justify it -- could you share why you think it is important we list first author by contribution? What does this accomplish? Obviously not everyone agrees (or you wouldn't have felt the need to post), so why not share why you think you're right, so we can discuss the issue? Edit: Well, we've proven that people feel very strongly about this, but I'm no closer to understanding why peop…

I don't publish papers, so I don't have a strong opinion about it. But like you, I am genuinely curious why alphabetical order was chosen as the convention rather than the amount of contributions (like GitHub does[1]).

If the answer is that contributions to scientific papers can be very fuzzy, e.g. it is hard to determine which contribution is more important than others, then I agree alphabetical order makes sense. But is it really so in most of the papers?

For example, in the RSA paper, Adleman clearly knew his contribution was less than Rivest and Shamir and he insisted that he put his name in the end. I believe, in most papers it would be obvious to the co-authors that someone's contribution is more significant than the others. If this is true, why do they still choose to follow the alphabetical order convention rather than the contribution order convention?

[1]: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/graphs/contributors (example)

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#83

Post by mooreds »

Realist1337 wrote: post #48
disinterred wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all. I knew a history professor that would come into the university for his 1 or 2 classes per week and then would go home for the rest of the day…

>> When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. There is another benefit (of course, understanding with all the dues you have to pay along the way.) JOB SECURITY While I make more than a professor, as with most tech jobs I can lose it anytime. When the economy is bad, even great job performance is no guarantee for continued empl…

Great point about job security being a valuable part of tenure. I read "Are you a stock or a bond" and the author (a professor, actually) recommended that folks treat their income stream (and the safety of that) in a similar manner to other investments. So if I have tenure, I can invest more in risky assets (possibly even on margin). If I am a software contractor, I should invest more in bonds because my income stream isn't stable.

Thought that was a great way to think about income stability in an actionable manner.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#84

Post by wolfgke »

hobofan wrote: post #2

> Permanent jobs in academia are scarce, and someone needs to let PhD students know. If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already, that's kinda on you.

> > Permanent jobs in academia are scarce, and someone needs to let PhD students know.

> If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already, that's kinda on you.

The problem rather is if you really are scientifically better than your peers - so from an "objective" perspective you should be really good enough to obtain such a position. But then you realize how much of a political game (it is much more about politics than scientific achievements) getting such a position is. And I know many great scientists who are bad politicians... They are often much better than the persons who got the tenured positions (the latter ones were great bootlickers and politicians).

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#85

Post by adekok »

mattkrause wrote: post #23
hobofan wrote: post #2

> Permanent jobs in academia are scarce, and someone needs to let PhD students know. If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already, that's kinda on you.

Someone posts this glib comment every time academic careers are discussed. It's true, and yet harder than you'd think. Suppose you know that only 1 in 10 PhDs in your field end up in a tenure track job. A decent fraction of your classmates are interested in industry--or never want to see the inside of a lab again. Maybe this reduces the competition down to one in six or seven. You're in a pretty good program, definit…

> Someone posts this glib comment every time academic careers are discussed. It's true, and yet harder than you'd think.

I asked around during my MSc (25 years ago), and got told this by everyone.

> Very few grad students get any kind of personalized career advice or discussion of their prospects.

They're adults. No one else is responsible for their life. If they refuse to take responsibility for their life, that's their choice.

They can ask. It's not difficult.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#86

Post by jimhefferon »

disinterred wrote: post #29
chriskanan wrote: post #6

The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years. When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wan…

When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all. I knew a history professor that would come into the university for his 1 or 2 classes per week and then would go home for the rest of the day…

> When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

No. False.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#87

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

foo101 wrote: post #82
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You state your opinion, but don't justify it -- could you share why you think it is important we list first author by contribution? What does this accomplish? Obviously not everyone agrees (or you wouldn't have felt the need to post), so why not share why you think you're right, so we can discuss the issue? Edit: Well, we've proven that people feel very strongly about this, but I'm no closer to understanding why peop…

I don't publish papers, so I don't have a strong opinion about it. But like you, I am genuinely curious why alphabetical order was chosen as the convention rather than the amount of contributions (like GitHub does[1]). If the answer is that contributions to scientific papers can be very fuzzy, e.g. it is hard to determine which contribution is more important than others, then I agree alphabetical order makes sense. B…

> If the answer is that contributions to scientific papers can be very fuzzy, e.g. it is hard to determine which contribution is more important than others, then I agree alphabetical order makes sense. But is it really so in most of the papers?

I'm probably biased from being in industry, but even when people contribute unequal code to a module or writing in a report, we just list the authors alphabetically because it's obnoxious to do anything with the list otherwise and it stops a huge amount of politicking when the first three out of ten authors contribute equal amounts. At the end of the day, stable collaborations will outpace individual contributors -- so we should focus on what allows us to openly collaborate and tears down barriers to doing that.

But from my point of view, we have a lot of the same incentives between industry and academia:

1. If you want to get promoted, you need projects associated with you and to get noticed.

2. There needs to be some method to decide who gets what amount of bonuses.

3. Funding allocation is tied to past successes.

...and probably some more I'm forgetting.

So I think my experience isn't totally irrelevant -- you get enough signal out of the distribution of the person's name that the loss of whatever from not getting "first" information is eclipsed by the gains from less politics (and if you have a lot of documents, easier parsing).

Again, perhaps it's the industry talking, but I'd rather hire an author that contributed the third most to a large number of papers than someone who contributed first most to a few. One of them seems to be a "force multiplier" in that they're keeping several other ICs moving (and contributing on all those efforts), while one guy just seems a specialist in a particular work.

I don't think removing the "first" signal harms my ability to find those "force multipliers", because they'll still have the same markers (as they weren't showing up first under the other system anyway).

So perhaps I simply have different uses for the rankings than people who feel differently?

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#88

Post by tome »

foo101 wrote: post #82
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You state your opinion, but don't justify it -- could you share why you think it is important we list first author by contribution? What does this accomplish? Obviously not everyone agrees (or you wouldn't have felt the need to post), so why not share why you think you're right, so we can discuss the issue? Edit: Well, we've proven that people feel very strongly about this, but I'm no closer to understanding why peop…

I don't publish papers, so I don't have a strong opinion about it. But like you, I am genuinely curious why alphabetical order was chosen as the convention rather than the amount of contributions (like GitHub does[1]). If the answer is that contributions to scientific papers can be very fuzzy, e.g. it is hard to determine which contribution is more important than others, then I agree alphabetical order makes sense. B…

I would suggest you consider the emergent properties of these systems of attribution, rather than just the primary affect. Could there be a reason why theoretical fields have small numbers of authors given alphabetically, and experimental fields sometimes have ten or more authors, given in order of "contribution"?

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#89

Post by Cyph0n »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #62
raister wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is changing, thankfully. First authors should be the ones leading the paper, according to contributions. Some journals are asking for the actual contributions performed by each author, which I think is very good. Alphabetical order should be banned, period.

You state your opinion, but don't justify it -- could you share why you think it is important we list first author by contribution? What does this accomplish? Obviously not everyone agrees (or you wouldn't have felt the need to post), so why not share why you think you're right, so we can discuss the issue? Edit: Well, we've proven that people feel very strongly about this, but I'm no closer to understanding why peop…

It shows who did the most work in an unambiguous way. If you have never collaborated on a paper, you'll probably think this is not important, but in reality it is.

Interestingly, some fields where alphabetical order is used have started adding a note that explicitly shows who did how much work.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#90

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