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What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

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Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#51

Post by tschwimmer »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #27
shmageggy wrote: post #4

Coming from another field, 23 years as a post-doc seems insane to me. Is this common in some fields? I never thought of post-docs as (semi-) permanent positions or something one would spend a major chunk of a career doing. I always thought of it as a transitional position, something people did while they worked on getting their own funding or transition to industry. Am I wrong or are there different standards in diff…

There's a huge glut of PhDs and postdocs in the life sciences compared to the number of jobs available. 8K new biology PhDs each year compared to maybe 2K in CS in the US; probably 25-30K biology postdocs today compared to 1-1.5K CS postdocs. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37 Big pharma is cutting R&D left and right, and there aren't enough small companies to provide jobs for all these scientists. There…

Why is big pharma cutting R&D?

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#52

Post by musicale »

Wow, lots of harsh comments on this page.

Academia is kind of a pyramid scheme and there is a huge mismatch between the number of graduates and academic jobs. Moreover, universities are turning increasingly to adjunct faculty rather than adding tenure track positions.

Fortunately in the sciences and engineering you can work in industry or government labs; it's a lot harder for people in the humanities and social sciences.

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#53

Post by azhenley »

mattkrause wrote: post #50
Fomite wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a couple issues: 1) As postdocs get more experienced, their pay usually goes up. 2) As mentioned in the article, it's possible to "age out" of a lot of fellowships, which have limits like "5 years since your last degree" requirements. Which means the burden then falls on the PI of the lab to support them as essentially a staff scientist. If I pay a postdoc $60,000 a year, at 10% pay lines (which is not unreasonabl…

The NIH scale doesn't rise that fast. A brand-new postdoc costs about $50k on NIH pay scales. There is often also an assumption that more senior people will also bring on money, either completely by themselves or by enabling more projects. The (completely idiotic, IMHO) 2 or 5-year cutoffs on some fellowships makes this somewhat more difficult. I also think experience is weirdly undervalued in academia. I would bet t…

1 skilled research staff will out produce even 5 early PhD students, no doubt.

But I would be inclined to hire the students. There are more funding opportunities for them (NSF prioritizes students and departments fund TAs) and I’m expected to graduate students. In my field (CS), research staff and postdocs disappear too quickly anyway.

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#54

Post by jchallis »

tschwimmer wrote: post #51
aaavl2821 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge glut of PhDs and postdocs in the life sciences compared to the number of jobs available. 8K new biology PhDs each year compared to maybe 2K in CS in the US; probably 25-30K biology postdocs today compared to 1-1.5K CS postdocs. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37 Big pharma is cutting R&D left and right, and there aren't enough small companies to provide jobs for all these scientists. There…

Why is big pharma cutting R&D?

The past decade of commercial research has failed to deliver the market successes needed to justify the premium. If you look at the biggest winners for pharmaceutical companies over the last decade (immunotherapy is the poster child), most of the research happened in academic labs. Cheaper to license the winners than do basic research yourself.

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#55

Post by jayalpha »

They guy may have been a low performer or not. But the whole system is very very broken.

"My take-away from the careers aspect of the book is that if you (1) love competition, (2) have a huge appetite for risk, (3) don’t mind working long hours for a minimum of 27 years until getting that first grant, and (4) are mostly indifferent to money, pursuing a physics PhD and an academic job might be a reasonable plan. You’ll get to work with a lot of smart people, for sure, but, as the book notes, quite of few of them may be planning to stab you in the back when it comes time to assign credit for a Nobel-worthy discovery. It is not like most other fields of human endeavor where there is room for everyone to excel in his or her own way."

https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/06/14/losing-the-nobe...

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#56

Post by aaavl2821 »

jchallis wrote: post #54
tschwimmer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is big pharma cutting R&D?

The past decade of commercial research has failed to deliver the market successes needed to justify the premium. If you look at the biggest winners for pharmaceutical companies over the last decade (immunotherapy is the poster child), most of the research happened in academic labs. Cheaper to license the winners than do basic research yourself.

That's partially true (big pharma r&d has failed to deliver returns) but it is not true that most of the research happened in academic labs. Most of the research and early development happens in small companies. Most of the later stage development happens at big pharma companies

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#57

Post by frozenport »

dragonwriter wrote: post #26
Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote: post #12

23 years of post-doc with 5 first-authors? That's really all you need to know: that's a terrible publication record for someone looking at tenure-track. A decent target is an average of one first/last author paper a year. Two one year and zero the next isn't a problem, but one every five years certainly is. This doesn't even get into the 'careerism' of picking safe but dependable projects; anyone making reasonable ch…

> 23 years of post-doc with 5 first-authors? No, 12 years of post-doc with 5 first authors: “after working in several postdoctoral positions over the course of 12 years, I started applying for tenure-track and other permanent positions. At this point, I had 19 peer-reviewed publications, including 5 as first author” > Why didn’t anybody tell this guy to start his career in private industry 15 years ago? He did start…

To confirm. This is terrible. I had more after 5 years of PhD.

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#58

Post by Fomite »

mattkrause wrote: post #50
Fomite wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a couple issues: 1) As postdocs get more experienced, their pay usually goes up. 2) As mentioned in the article, it's possible to "age out" of a lot of fellowships, which have limits like "5 years since your last degree" requirements. Which means the burden then falls on the PI of the lab to support them as essentially a staff scientist. If I pay a postdoc $60,000 a year, at 10% pay lines (which is not unreasonabl…

The NIH scale doesn't rise that fast. A brand-new postdoc costs about $50k on NIH pay scales. There is often also an assumption that more senior people will also bring on money, either completely by themselves or by enabling more projects. The (completely idiotic, IMHO) 2 or 5-year cutoffs on some fellowships makes this somewhat more difficult. I also think experience is weirdly undervalued in academia. I would bet t…

A few things...

1) A brand new postdoc costs $48,432 on the NIH scale in 2018. This author of this article costs $59,736. Their benefits are also about $3800 more. It's not that fast.

2) I agree that experience is undervalued - and said staff scientist will almost certainly out produce them. But the burden often falls in different areas - I'm evaluated based on mentoring students for example, not staff scientists. Training grants exist. Etc. A senior staff scientist is always full freight born by the lab (barring like, really nice retention/recruitment packages).

But I think the real problem is the author isn't some sort of rockstar senior staff scientist (I've known some). Their productivity just isn't there enough to assume that they're 15 grand better than trying a new draw from the postdoc pool.

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#59

Post by Fomite »

azhenley wrote: post #53
mattkrause wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NIH scale doesn't rise that fast. A brand-new postdoc costs about $50k on NIH pay scales. There is often also an assumption that more senior people will also bring on money, either completely by themselves or by enabling more projects. The (completely idiotic, IMHO) 2 or 5-year cutoffs on some fellowships makes this somewhat more difficult. I also think experience is weirdly undervalued in academia. I would bet t…

1 skilled research staff will out produce even 5 early PhD students, no doubt. But I would be inclined to hire the students. There are more funding opportunities for them (NSF prioritizes students and departments fund TAs) and I’m expected to graduate students. In my field (CS), research staff and postdocs disappear too quickly anyway.

That's another aspect I didn't touch on, especially for the NSF - they're not terribly interested in funding staff scientists.

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#60

Post by Fomite »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #56
jchallis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The past decade of commercial research has failed to deliver the market successes needed to justify the premium. If you look at the biggest winners for pharmaceutical companies over the last decade (immunotherapy is the poster child), most of the research happened in academic labs. Cheaper to license the winners than do basic research yourself.

That's partially true (big pharma r&d has failed to deliver returns) but it is not true that most of the research happened in academic labs. Most of the research and early development happens in small companies. Most of the later stage development happens at big pharma companies

There's also a melding of those two - there's a big push for university researchers to do commercialization and start startups. Those small companies bear a lot of the risk of early stage development, and then get bought out when they get something promising.
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