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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

#81

Post by chrisseaton »

quantumwannabe wrote: post #72
chrisseaton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No university class teaches modern compilers and the state of the art is in open source projects. If someone is interested in compilers, they don’t need to get a PhD in order to learn. Many major companies that maintain programming languages do not require PhDs in order to work on their compiler teams; they are willing to train you on the job. The supply of people interested is just low in general, and if you are bia…

> No university class teaches modern compilers

Yeah... hence why you need a PhD. 90% of domain knowledge in this field isn't even written down - you have to sit down with a wide range of people to learn from them - which you get to do on a PhD.

> Many major companies that maintain programming languages do not require PhDs in order to work on their compiler teams

They don't require it... but look at who's actually there and how many of them in practice have a PhD.

> if you are biased towards people with PhDs and preexisting experience for junior hires

As I've said elsewhere I've taken on people with no high-school diploma and zero experience in the past - I'm not personally gatekeeping.

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

#82

Post by snakeboy »

persedes wrote: post #62
bjourne wrote: post #55

I think Western academia is mostly reliant on immigration. Few natives would accept the low pay/high workload combination that is a postdoc, but for an immigrant from a third world country it might be an amazing opportunity. Same reason most fruit and berry pickers also are immigrants.

Don't even know where to begin...but according to this [1] less than 5% of students in the US are international students. 1 - https://www.fwd.us/news/international-students/

We're talking about postdocs though, which is a completely different population than college students. I found this [1] which estimates that 51% of US postdocs are foreign-born as of 2018.

[1] https://elifesciences.org/articles/40189

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

#83

Post by InefficientRed »

kaffee wrote: post #70
InefficientRed wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. More helplessness. My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I still do the most important bits of pushing advances in my field, but there's a lot of auxiliary work that has immediate value as well. It's less fun, it's CERTAINLY more humblin…

>> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. > My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...

> I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...

sseagull mentioned NSF, NIH and DOE. None of those funds ethnomusicology, philosophy, or social history.

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

#84

Post by bmitc »

Honestly, there are just too many PhDs and too much glorification of PhDs. Academia is just far too inefficient as well. I have no idea where all the money that’s being moved around is going.

My other thought is that maybe companies that pay little taxes but hire a lot of PhDs should maybe be looked at. Corporations have been extremely successful in outsourcing training to higher education, online learning, and other learning avenues, all off of their books and timesheets.

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

#85

Post by InefficientRed »

WkndTriathlete wrote: post #78
sseagull wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. I worked for a large company once that in the past had large labs for researching charge transfer and other fundamental physics. When I toured those labs, they were all empty, with broken and unused machines. I know this site focuses on computers and tech. But th…

> This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. That's actually a really bad analysis and entirely misses the point. Fundamentally (in the US) too many postdocs are being funded from a fixed grant pool NIH/NSF/etc. has to offer. Too many professors think their research is so much more important than anything else they hire postdocs for peanuts. Too few postdocs have a…

> Too many professors think their research is so much more important than anything else they hire postdocs for peanuts.

Thanks. This is my point. If you want to manage a team of PhDs, especially in STEM, figure out a research agenda that allows you to do that in a fair and reasonable way.

If you want to do things that are uninteresting to anyone outside of one tiny (likely incestual) sphere of grant-committee-political-influence, then do those things with your own time. Don't drag others into it.

BTW: if no one wants to fund this work then what jobs are the post-docs being trained to do?! And if post-docs aren't being trained for useful jobs then why are we taxpayers funding these ostensibly trainee positions?

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

#86

Post by amathres_info »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #53
sseagull wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

>Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? Cut the number of postdoc positions in half, double the salaries of the remaining positions, and make it much more competitive to get a postdoc. The purpose of a postdoc is a final training step for someone to become faculty. Only people who are clearly faculty material after finishing their PhD should even attempt a postdoc. Unfortunately, man…

Most professors do not have >>1 postdoc in their careers, because most of us teach at less research-intensive (or entirely teaching-focused) schools that have no postdocs at all. The way things work now, even to get a liberal arts school job requires you to do a postdoc first (at least in my corner of STEM). Anyway, professors at research-heavy postdoc-having schools could get away with more than one. But certainly the status quo is insane, you will hear no argument from me.

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

#87

Post by microtonal »

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 (…

Academia is a pyramid, for every PhD position, there are fewer post-doc positions, far fewer permanent staff positions, and even fewer professorships.

For most people, an academic career is a dead end. So, reduce the number of PhD and post-doc positions and increase the wages.

Universities have been doing the opposite. E.g. some Dutch universities stopped offering relatively well-compensated employee PhD positions and replaced them by bursary positions with far lower compensations. The primary motivation was that they could hire more PhDs for the same money. That maybe works when there is a recession, but when there is an ample supply of jobs, many good candidates will just choose an industry position instead.

Besides that, universities have gained a lot of administrative staff over the past decades. Plus some universities spend hundreds of millions of Euros on fancy buildings. Sure, it looks nice in PR material, but they could've also built something functional and use the remaining money for better salaries.

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

#88

Post by sseagull »

InefficientRed wrote: post #66
sseagull wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. I worked for a large company once that in the past had large labs for researching charge transfer and other fundamental physics. When I toured those labs, they were all empty, with broken and unused machines. I know this site focuses on computers and tech. But th…

> Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. More helplessness. My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I still do the most important bits of pushing advances in my field, but there's a lot of auxiliary work that has immediate value as well. It's less fun, it's CERTAINLY more humblin…

Don't get me wrong, we are mostly on the same page w.r.t. salaries and what not.

> BTW, what is your university's pension plan like?

Postdocs get the same pension plan/401k plan as any other faculty (postdocs are indeed research faculty). You are also an employee of the state government, with reasonably good health insurance and other benefits. It can't compare to private sector (especially tech sector), but compared to a lot of other businesses, it's fairly good. (Also a downside - lots of bureaucracy from the state legislature).

EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5% match by the university.

My comment about school teachers was mostly about the salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just fine on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is an anomaly.

Now, again, don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of postdocs, academia is a mess, and I want it change. But I really just wanted to point out that the "simple" solutions are not "simple". They require coordinated action among many stakeholders, and lots of dealing with squishy humans and their emotions.

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

#89

Post by OccamsRazr »

slurpmaker wrote: post #42

Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles, with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role? Moreso, post doc'ing for the wrong professor can ruin your career, why risk that eithe…

yup. deeply regret my time as a postdoc. especially the last few years in the pandemic have been the absolute worst work experience in terms of culture and job satisfaction. it's killed the passion for research i had at the start.

the worst part is that i think this experience has completely tanked my confidence.

now id take a jr python dev job in a second.

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

#90

Post by MontyCarloHall »

analog31 wrote: post #73
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? Cut the number of postdoc positions in half, double the salaries of the remaining positions, and make it much more competitive to get a postdoc. The purpose of a postdoc is a final training step for someone to become faculty. Only people who are clearly faculty material after finishing their PhD should even attempt a postdoc. Unfortunately, man…

Or train people to do research while in grad school. There are plenty of fields where people don't do post-docs before applying for faculty positions, e.g., all of the fields where there's no money for post-docs, and "hot" fields where people have better job prospects. I know two CS professors at a major research university, who went straight to faculty positions from their PhDs. The current structure is a holding pa…

>The current structure is a holding pattern for absorbing the large population of PhDs who can't get jobs.

Indeed. When I originally wrote my parent comment [0], it was about overproduction of PhDs.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25082474

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