Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by dagw » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 1:38 PM UTC

rahimnathwani wrote: post #117

hyperbovine wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... you work 80 hours per week and make less than ... I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry. To answer your (friends') question, because the work is more interesting and I make plenty of money as it st…

I met an amateur comedian recently who mentioned he's almost done with his PhD, but will never make back the lost earnings from the time he's invested. Whilst he talked, part of me was thinking 'man, if only your PhD were in machine learning'. I didn't say it out loud, though. It turned out he's about to complete a PhD in machine learning, but doesn't want to work in Silicon Valley, or for a big company, or in financ…

Lots of other areas where people are interested in machine learning and willing to pay good money. Biotech, pharma and medical, and oil/geology are just a few areas off the top of my head.

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

#132

Post by dagw » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 1:40 PM UTC

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.

Some of the hardest working people I know are tenured professors. Managing international research projects is no walk in the park.

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

#133

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 1:40 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#134

Post by onan_barbarian » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 1:40 PM UTC

fergie wrote: post #54

Its a bit unfair for professional football to be portrayed as an unreasonable aspiration pursued by naive working class kids. In actual fact the UK currently has around 4000 professional footballers, many of whom will play for a couple of years before moving on, and some of whom will play for a couple of decades. The UK currently has 14,000 professors the vast majority of whom will fight tooth and claw to hang on to…

I'm going to guess that the logic behind your 'relatively attainable goal' here is 90% dependent on the fact that far more people can aspire to be a footballer than a professor, due to the general requirement for a PhD. I would think the pool of people aspiring to be footballers is orders of magnitude larger.

They've also been weeding themselves out from doing something that's pretty much exactly the task ("playing football at a slightly younger age against somewhat less good players") for a while - while future-professor-types may well have been doing a range of activities only weakly correlating to future success in the academy.

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

#135

Post by omginternets » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 1:43 PM UTC

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.

In my experience, the exact opposite is overwhelmingly true.

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

#136

Post by emodendroket » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 1:47 PM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #123

loarake wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-Working for a big tech company: you're writing code to deliver more ads to more people so the company can grow and deliver even more ads to even more people -Being a truck driver: you're moving boxes around -Being a professional hockey player: you and your team are moving really fast with a disk shaped object trying to put it in a net while people try to prevent you from doing it -Being a stock trader: making money…

Baker/cook: you're making food for people, either to nourish them or give them joy. Farmer: you're making food for people. Construction worker: you're making buildings for people to live or work or play in. I think the problem is that many of our jobs are crappy, not that almost every human endeavor is equivalent to pushing paper around. Nurses, doctors, etc, are doing important work as well. The bad part is when it'…

Curiously none of the jobs you mentioned are well paid (well, I guess it depends on who you mean to include, since owning a farm or being Mario Batali probably isn't bad). But besides that I think we could do the same thing, really. A cynic could say a farmer just grows surplus corn to collect subsidies on ethanol.

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

#137

Post by BearGoesChirp » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 1:54 PM UTC

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.

I think you are mixing up the amount of work a tenured professor has to do with the amount of work they do do.

A tenured professor has to do very little. The idea (even if not the reality) is that a tenured professor has proven themselves enough that the one employing them is willing to ease back any rules so the professor can do science like they want to.

The end result should be (and I think is, but I don't have any hard data at the moment) is that tenured professor do a far larger amount of work than they have to, and are comparable if not even greater than other professions with similar salaries. In large part because they are doing what they love.

Consider a programmer who loves programming and does it at home and at work. A professor is similar, except since they get to pick the topic they work on (to some extent), they are working on the same project both at home and at work.

The last tenured professor I worked under put in a lot more than 40 hours, and he was high up enough to not have any classes to teach (I think he periodically taught a grad class, but it wasn't ever semester).

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

#138

Post by awelkie » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:00 PM UTC

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…

Wow. I'm a few months into a PhD after having worked at a startup for a number of years, I just completed my first project, and just a few weeks ago my advisor had the "you need to stop thinking like you're building a product" talk with me. It's definitely tough to make that mindset change.

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

#139

Post by bpicolo » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:05 PM UTC

wiz21c wrote: post #56

yannis7 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it will definitely be fun, both being a student + working on your own project. From my experience, for some reason PhD advisors tend to work well/really like mature students. No hard data on this, just an empirical observation across 3-4 labs I've worked in before I left academia. With regards to career prospects (outside academia ofc), you definitely gain respect but anything more than that largely depends on your a…

I'm looking at anything involving computational geometry; and if I have spare time, ethics :-)

Have you considered bootstrapping the field of computation ethics ;)

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

#140

Post by fhood » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:15 PM UTC

ptero wrote: post #101

hyperbovine wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... you work 80 hours per week and make less than ... I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry. To answer your (friends') question, because the work is more interesting and I make plenty of money as it st…

I think work hours and salary have a bimodal distribution, driven by tenured / non-tenured status. My experience is in theoretical math/physics -- I got my PhD but decided not to stay in academia; there are pros and cons to both options. IME most tenured professors have to work significantly less than others for the same salary (those who work more mostly do it because they like working with grad students, not becaus…

I happen to be extremely well acquainted with one tenured professor of biological oceanography, and one tenure track professor of physical oceanography, and I can't say I agree with your observation. My experience has been that tenure or not, the amount of work that these individuals have on their plate is essentially endless. Grants are extremely difficult to come by these days, although its getting better, and it is worth noting both of these individuals must pay a significant chunk of their salaries from grants. Not to mention that the pressure to keep publishing is essentially unending. Also, sabatical is not code for vacation. The system is the same, if you don't publish it's hard to get funding, and if you don't get funding you don't get your full salary.

That said, my experience in this is only with Oceanography professors who are research professors first and teachers a distant second.