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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

#111

Post by the_only_law »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #31
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.

Most Ph.D.s are unemployable in the field that they did Ph.D. in. There is only say very small pool Ph.D. topics which are needed in industry like ML, distributed system, pharmacy etc. Most of the Ph.D. is in fields like humanities, psycology, physics etc. doesn't have many openings in industry.

Someone else mentioned something similar, but some of the Postdoc position are oddly specific.

Like I get the schooling you do prior is supposed to allow you to hyperfocus something, but at the same time, I've seen jobs asking for postdocs with experience in highly niche areas, often cross disciplinary. One I saw was looking for someone with encyclopedic knowledge of some crazy domain specific algorithm at the intersection of two sciences.

Wild guess, but I if I were to bet, I'd bet most people with a PhD or even professional experience in the filed would not have heard of this algorithm.

I guess I've seen similar software jobs, but at least with software I can usually afford the equipment to learn things myself.

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

#112

Post by chrisseaton »

dagw wrote: post #109
chrisseaton wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and so if you skip the masters then day one of your PhD is the start of your dissertation.

I though dissertation referred to the final written document you had to produce to get your PhD. Most people I know with PhDs stared writing that during the last year of the PhD program.

When you're writing papers during your PhD you're basically writing chapters of your dissertation.

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

#113

Post by the_only_law »

ISL wrote: post #101
coldpie wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread. Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn't very interested, since I wanted to make things people will actually use. His response was there was a…

That particular argument also falls flat, at least with the given information, since there have been plenty of industry partners in defining the USB specs. My guess is that if you want to be paid full-time to work on USB, you'll probably find more (and better-paid) positions in industry.

Yeah, but outside a borderline prodigy or no lifing to get the knowlegde and experience or a lucky recruitment at some university event, I doubt the industry was letting fresh new grads work on something like the USB spec.

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

#114

Post by ellopoppit »

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.

Labor force participation is also at a record low

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

#115

Post by gww »

In addition to terrible compensation, I think another common issue for a post-doc is that they are not afforded the same protections as a graduate student. In the places I have worked the grad students are usually protected by the university, their committees, etc.

Post-docs on the other hand are usually contract workers and they can be fired without any recourse. Usually with two to four weeks compensation. It gives their bosses tremendous power. I know post-docs who have been fired for questioning a PI or a paper they are part of. This can be devastating for a post-doc and their future career. They may have toiled years on a project and can have it taken away on a dime.

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

#116

Post by the_only_law »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #98
amathres_info wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>even to get a liberal arts school job requires you to do a postdoc first That’s a great point that I neglected to consider. Regardless, the overall point still holds—the production rate of postdocs is much greater than the replacement rate of professors (at all institutions).

The research fields that seem require people to do many years of postdoc education also seem to be among the worst paying in industry.

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

#117

Post by adam_arthur »

ellopoppit wrote: post #114
adam_arthur wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Labor force participation is also at a record low

Because population is aging. E.g. the Japan problem, a few decades later

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

#118

Post by the_only_law »

chrisseaton wrote: post #64
thinkharderdev wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious, does the work you are hiring for really require a PhD? To put it a different way, if you and the current employees in your job all started immediately after finishing your undergrad degree would you be any worse at your job?

It doesn't literally require a PhD (I'm not sure how that would even work - unless it was regulated by the government!) but it does require context on the state of the art in the field, and a network of peers to talk to. You get that from doing a PhD. If you can get it otherwise, then great, but that's pretty hard to do in practice. I've worked with people without even a high-school diploma in my compilers team, so I…

> I'm not sure how that would even work - unless it was regulated by the government!

Easy, you just have your ATS automatically reject any resumes that don't appear to have a PhD

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

#119

Post by johnmyleswhite »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #31
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.

Most Ph.D.s are unemployable in the field that they did Ph.D. in. There is only say very small pool Ph.D. topics which are needed in industry like ML, distributed system, pharmacy etc. Most of the Ph.D. is in fields like humanities, psycology, physics etc. doesn't have many openings in industry.

This seems pretty off-base to me. A lot of folks with PhD's in physics are working in industry. And a lot of the folks working on distributed systems don't have PhD's in that field.

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

#120

Post by fullshark »

titaniumrain wrote: post #57

4,5 years as a PhD student, then 2,3 years as a postdoc then 5 more years to get tenured... modern slavery isn't it?

Just a reflection of how desperate people are to get a shot at the final prize: tenured professor. You see this type of competition and desperation in a lot of fields with highly prized superstar occupations (successful musician, pro athlete, etc)
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