I'm in the UK and am a PDRA in polymer chemistry. Desperate to get out. Would like to transfer to some type of coding. Pay and job security is far better. Just trying to work if I can manage with pay cut to a more junior role. It's not that I'm unsuccessful, I published plenty and work at a top institute. It's just that the jump from PDRA to permanent is impossible and I'm not interested in industrial chemistry
As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
131–140 of 332 posts
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#132PhD student looking forward to graduate and move on. I think one can make a decent living with a German salary, which is still 50% lower than an industry position, the reason why I want to leave is the insane competitiveness and inherent up-or-out structure of academia. If I could have a permanent position with the same salary I currently get I would seriously consider staying.
I'm currently a postdoc in Germany, to be honest, it seems that only people who can't find a job in the industry are staying in academia. I've never met a postdoc who was happy about what they are doing, everyone one is thinking of an escape plan.
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#133Make 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…
> a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role Where do you get these numbers from? This is not at all like that in Europe. A postdoc gets (say, in France) 30k per year, doing a calm, interesting job and paid travel to a couple of conferences per year, with almost total freedom to choose their daily schedule. This is not a high salary, but it is c…
It's probably in the US. A friend of mine was physical chemist and was paid in the 20k range per year several years ago and it was barely livable. It's not surprising that a junior developer getting paid 5 times of that.
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#134I 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…
It’s academia chicken/extended dare- who is willing to grit n+1 postdocs out to show that they’re committed
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Well that’s choosing to not hire people without a PhD, not that the work actually requires it. Also most people hiring compiler people aren’t doing it with an open application system. It’s a lot of word-of-mouth.
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
"There's a shortage of Lamborghinis!" "Oh? At which price point?" "At the $4000 price point! It's a travesty!"
That is a perverse misreading of the original comment. Calling a livable wage and fair working conditions a Lamborghini is not applicable.
I think the comment was comparing good post-doc researchers to Lamborghinis. Makes sense as the academic are not offering enough ($4000) for it to make sense.
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#137Welcome to the results of Leftists taking over the Academia. Coming soon to the whole country. And then - civil war, of course. As EVERY time.
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#138Earlier 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…
I think this is a short sighted perspective. Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app. Just because you don't see immediate impact doesn't mean it isn't there
> Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app.
Those aren't the only two options and even they were, it isn't always true.
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#139In CS right now, people with a very strong PhD can go straight to the tenure track.
I took a postdoc because my PhD is solid but I jumped around topics a lot, so it's not quite coherent enough. My postdoc is also at a more prestigious institute.
I'm rolling the dice that it might be enough to get that tenure track job. But I also have no dependents and don't care about material possessions very much. If my situation were a little bit different, it would be foolish to do what I'm doing.
Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
#140I'm in the UK and am a PDRA in polymer chemistry. Desperate to get out. Would like to transfer to some type of coding. Pay and job security is far better. Just trying to work if I can manage with pay cut to a more junior role. It's not that I'm unsuccessful, I published plenty and work at a top institute. It's just that the jump from PDRA to permanent is impossible and I'm not interested in industrial chemistry
I've worked with a few chemists turned engineers, for some reason you lot always take to coding fantastically well. I suspect any pay cut you take would be quite temporary.