As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
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Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#2"I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination."
- Freeman Dyson
https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/95;jsessioni...
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#3I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high.
Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since.
Is casual coding more interesting than research/teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me.
I also still find how to get some of the joys of academia in industry, namely, mentoring/holding workshops/writing design specs/turning the cluttered documentation into a nicely flowing coherent one~
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#4If you pay much lower than the industry and only give people temporary positions, it's not surprising people go elsewhere when they can. The solution is also quite obvious...
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#5I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high. Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since. Is casual coding more interesting than research/teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me. I also sti…
I stopped doing a PhD after about 5 years - I was a Research Associate in a UK university so I actually got a salary which wasn't too bad but quite a bit below the going rate (I had a few job offers during that time).
I left to co-found a start-up - never regretted it as I was "hyper cynical" (a direct quote from a colleague) about the whole academic world and how easy it was to play the "publish or perish" game.
I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#6Now would be a good time to donate all of the money spent on the administration instead on to paying postdocs well?
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#7I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high. Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since. Is casual coding more interesting than research/teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me. I also sti…
If you did a full PhD in what sense did you 'scrap' it? You just didn't do the defence?
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#8I never know what to think about reports on labour demand anymore, I have heard "there are no jobs", "there are lots of jobs", "noone is working", simultaneously all year.
I guess it all comes down to who is saying it. I guess most of the time it's the fact that the jobs are crap, but employers don't want to shift the social contract that creates the apparent contradiction, but who knows.
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#9> Postdocs in general aren’t paid well
Sounds like everyone understands the issue... so why don't they respond by meeting the market price?
If you want to buy something like a tissue sample for an experiment in a lab then you pay the market price. You wouldn't think to offer 20% of the market price and then be puzzled when nobody will sell it to you - you just pay the going price, and it's part of the cost of doing research.
Why don't people apply that logic when it comes to costs for hiring people? Why is it such a barrier to see that that's just how much a person costs?
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#10Supply and demand. We produce more PhDs than needed by either academia or industry.
Hence, the burden of post-docs just grow (I was talking to a biology PhD who said 5-6 years of post-doc was typical, for chemistry I've seen people do 2).