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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

#21

Post by Spooky23 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #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 r…

Typically there’s a pipeline between academia and industry. A pharmaceutical company doesn’t want to train chemists.

Whatever the current problems are, they are likely the predictable outcome of policy changes made 5-10 years ago. The 20 years of war is largely over, immigration policies discourage some folks, and the educational sector as a whole is very sick.

Society is different too. I was giving talks at high schools as part of an outreach/mentorship program, and science was rarely mentioned by anyone as what they wanted to be when they grew up. A shocking number of kids wanted to be investment bankers.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#22

Post by jonsen »

chrisseaton wrote: post #11
refurb wrote: post #10

Supply 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).

> We produce more PhDs than needed by either academia or industry. I don't think so - industry can't hire enough PhDs. In my field (programming languages) shortage of qualified people is a bit of a problem at the moment! We wish there were more being produced.

Shortage of qualified people does not imply shortage of PhDs.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#23

Post by vaylian »

chrisseaton wrote: post #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 r…

Postdocs outside of academia can be paid well. But inside academia: You are dealing with the public sector which has different market dynamics.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#24

Post by jcelerier »

chrisseaton wrote: post #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 r…

> Sounds like everyone understands the issue... so why don't they respond by meeting the market price?

it's not just the postdoc, it's the whole thing. I make a bit more as a 29 years old very occasional freelance than the highest possible grade for university professor reachable only after 30 years or so of work and something like 6 years in "difficult conditions" in my country.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#25

Post by quantum_magpie »

chrisseaton wrote: post #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 r…

The ones in control of money and the ones in charge of running their lab and hiring postdocs are not the same people. If you can't hire a postdoc for shitty salary, then that shitty salary can be repurposed for something else. The former won't ever budge for the latter until the whole system collapses. And even then, I dread that they will just leave it in ruins.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#26

Post by cs137 »

__jambo wrote: post #8

I 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.

The jobs are crap, and the pay is low.

Postdocs used to be an exception, something prestigious you did before settling into a permanent role that might be a lower-ranked university. If you were really good, you might do 2 years at IAS or MIT before taking the position at a place like UCLA or Michigan (which are still excellent, just not as highly ranked). Then it became something you had to do, before getting any job--mandatory low-wage labor, another rung on the ladder. Now, it seems to be going out of fashion, as the prize loses its appeal.

I'm surprised this didn't happen 10 years ago. The academic job market has been a toilet for 30+ years--and this change is a good thing, by the way--and I had expected bimodalization to come much quicker.

You're absolutely right on the "labor shortage" bullshit. There isn't one. The working class has been fully depleted and there isn't any more give. People are shutting down. Workers who can't afford gas are forced to live off other people (either through illegitimate labor or by dependency.) This is the turtle at the bottom burping. About fucking time.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#27

Post by cs137 »

adam_arthur wrote: post #17
__jambo wrote: post #8

I 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.

Job openings vs labor supply tells you most of what you need to know. Job openings exceed job seekers by a record amount. Unemployment is close to a record low.

In other words, the dysfunction (unemployment) on which capitalists rely, because it scares people into taking shitty deals, is a bit less of a problem... but it's also causing other dysfunctions, because it turns out that this is a shitty system.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#28

Post by chrisseaton »

jonsen wrote: post #22
chrisseaton wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We produce more PhDs than needed by either academia or industry. I don't think so - industry can't hire enough PhDs. In my field (programming languages) shortage of qualified people is a bit of a problem at the moment! We wish there were more being produced.

Shortage of qualified people does not imply shortage of PhDs.

A PhD is the most common way to gain the experience and context needed to work professionally on compilers. If there aren't many PhDs, then the supply of people with the experience needed in practice is going to be low, even if there are also people without PhDs who can do it.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#29

Post by maxerickson »

sseagull wrote: post #12
microtonal wrote: post #4

If 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...

I hate the trivialization of this. The solution is not obvious. Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? At least in my areas of science (chemistry), most of this money comes from grants, which comes from the NIH, DOE, or NSF depending on the project. Ultimately it comes from taxpayers, and portioned out by Congress. So the solution is either to get Congress to really care about this (…

The fact that stakeholders don't like the solution doesn't make it complicated.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#30

Post by mizzao »

arethuza wrote: post #5
baka367 wrote: post #3

I 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 l…

> I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.

I had the same feeling!

And as it turns out, many of the skills are transferable: https://twitter.com/mizzao/status/1505529213612609536

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