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Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

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Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

#21

Post by spamizbad »

Genuinely shocked that graduate programs remain stuffed to the gills.

You live off a meager stipend for about a decade and then, in your mid-30s, you go on the job market for the first time. Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field, you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you. Big dreams of teaching in the Pacific Northwest? Too bad, the only place that wants you is a state school in the middle-of-nowhere Arkansas. Once you start, you're now going to spend the next 4 years grinding and busting your ass to make sure you actually get tenure.

Meanwhile your peers are well established in their careers, have families, making 2-3x as much as you.

But they don't get to be Dr. So-and-so, so there's that.

Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

#22

Post by neuromantik8086 »

1996 wrote: post #8

Not the same thing- I dropped out of because lack of money, because the work environment providing the funding let me go, because I called them out for doing things that broke the law and were morally very wrong. I didn't even bother to claim the alternative diploma I had the credits for. Now I work with finance and blockchain people, and it's a saner and more honest world. Crazy, I know!

> Now I work with finance and blockchain people, and it's a saner and more honest world. Crazy, I know!

You're not alone:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12807488

Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

#23

Post by _delirium »

brightball wrote: post #13
gww wrote: post #11

A few of my colleagues with bio PhD's have started microbreweries with various levels of success. They seem to be much happier than my colleagues and myself who have chosen the post-doc route. This is a bit of a tangent but it seems to be a common trend now among labs to arrest trainees (particularly phd students and post-docs) in their positions as long as possible. For example, the institute I am at has recently ex…

In my opinion, that’s what needs to happen. Thin out the ranks of professors as they move to greener pastures in the workforce and eventually you’ll see schools get in a position where they have to work harder to recruit. Better pay, benefits, support, etc.

That's pretty much happening in computer science in the US. Pay for CS faculty members has been rising significantly faster than inflation, and faster than other fields, although still not nearly as fast as in industry. A brain-drain of people at all levels of seniority to high-paid tech jobs is a big part of it, although increase in demand is another part of it (the number of incoming freshmen declaring a CS major is exploding, driving lots of places to expand their departments).

The same effects have also made long postdocs less common, and it's even possible to jump directly to a tenure-track faculty job from a PhD with no postdoc in between. Alternately, people seem to be doing a kind of "industry postdoc". You get an industry job, but one that lets you publish (DeepMind, Facebook Research, some startups, etc.), and after a year or two you either find you like it and stay, or you use that as a springboard to apply for faculty jobs, treating it as having been basically a high-paid postdoc.

Still plenty of stuff to complain about, but the job market looks far different than in the natural sciences or humanities.

Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

#24

Post by geebee »

luizfzs wrote: post #4

I have a master's degree and I learned early that getting a PhD was not for me. The way things worked at the university made me not stand to be in that environment anymore. This thing that is ridiculous in my opinion is that the advisor would say: "there is this conference coming and we will send a manuscript. We can try this and that to see if it is publishable.". Why the hell should I research for publishing? One s…

I have a masters degree, bailed on a phD, and even then I didn't realize it quite quickly enough. My MS program at Berkeley was quite flexible, and it was easy enough to get the requisite math. I dropped courses like Intellectual Property (cross listed with the law school), Product Development (cross listed with the business school), courses I was enjoying and would have done quite well in, to take classes like "advanced nonlinear optimization", which were a bad match for me.

Yes, nonlinear optimization will help you understand how neural nets work, but trust me, you don't need to take an advanced graduate class full of PhD students on the topic. If you have the prerequisites to the prerequisites, you understand math well enough to read about gradient descent on your own.

To be clear, there are people who belonged in this class, I just wasn't one of them.

For a lot of people, the sooner you realize a PhD isn't a good match for you, the better. The problem is, the sort of person who has the grades, test scores, and academic mindset to get into a top PhD program is almost certain to be slow to realize (and accept!) this. Add in the fact that PhD programs have astoundingly high attrition rates compared to professional doctoral programs (atrition at UCSF's med school is below 0.5%, whereas many PhD programs have attrition rates about 50% - yes, literally 100 times higher!) and you start to get a sense of why a lot of seemingly smart people get kind of snookered on PhD programs.

One big difference here is that people who masters out of STEM PhD programs can often still have a career in this field, perhaps a better renumerated one anyway. Though from what I've seen, getting a PhD in lit isn't necessarily a good path for someone who loves literature or theater, either.

Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

#25

Post by neuromantik8086 »

gww wrote: post #11

A few of my colleagues with bio PhD's have started microbreweries with various levels of success. They seem to be much happier than my colleagues and myself who have chosen the post-doc route. This is a bit of a tangent but it seems to be a common trend now among labs to arrest trainees (particularly phd students and post-docs) in their positions as long as possible. For example, the institute I am at has recently ex…

> This is a bit of a tangent but it seems to be a common trend now among labs to arrest trainees (particularly phd students and post-docs) in their positions as long as possible

I've witnessed this as well. One of the worst offenses I saw was a master's student in a 1-year master's program (basically supposed to be a post-bac / used for switching fields) who spent around 4 years in the same lab instead.

Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

#26

Post by aswanson »

spamizbad wrote: post #21

Genuinely shocked that graduate programs remain stuffed to the gills. You live off a meager stipend for about a decade and then, in your mid-30s, you go on the job market for the first time. Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field, you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you. Big dreams of teaching in the Pacific Northwest? Too bad, the only plac…

I dunno. I went back to my alma mater recently to drop my son of at a robotics summer program. I saw energy, ideas, new projects...as I scuttled back to an office doing the same lowbrow stuff I've been doing since graduation.

Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

#28

Post by neuromantik8086 »

izzydata wrote: post #5
shoguning wrote: post #3

Interesting to see people picking up on this trend. Just saw on linkedin a former PhD classmate of mine who is now a wine harvester.

Somehow I read that has Harvey Weinstein and was very confused for a few moments.

Probably not far from the truth (see comment above; URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17594196).

Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

#29

Post by coldtea »

shiado wrote: post #18

I find articles such as this one to be absolutely fascinating. It seems that people like those in this article appear to be trying to gentrify what is mostly unskilled labour, adding some sort of intellectual doublethink that they pulled off from the chip on their shoulder which comes from not fulfilling their path to become a certified academic intellectual. Based on the title of 'owner' of these ventures I am quite…

>I find articles such as this one to be absolutely fascinating. It seems that people like those in this article appear to be trying to gentrify what is mostly unskilled labour, adding some sort of intellectual doublethink that they pulled off from the chip on their shoulder which comes from not fulfilling their path to become a certified academic intellectual. Based on the title of 'owner' of these ventures I am quite curious how they financed these businesses.

You might be projecting too much of your own biases. At least in my country (in Europe) I know lots of people with academic degrees which turned into "mostly unskilled labor".

In fact it was even quite fashionable in the 70s to early 80s, and it's alluring again with the new generation.

And, at least back then, when the economy was booming and degrees where still scarce, it wasn't for lack of opportunities to become a "certified academic intellectual".

Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs

#30

Post by syntaxing »

I have a masters in Mechanical Engineering and I always wanted to get a PhD. But it's unfortunate that it makes no financial sense. I make a meager (relative compared to full wage) 25K to 30K for about 5 years (and this is on the high side!). When I finish school and decide not to go the academic route, I make maybe a little more than my counter parts that have been working for 5 years...Also, I find anecdotally that people with a MSc has a higher probability of management roles compared to PhD.
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