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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

#141

Post by plaguepilled »

adam_arthur wrote: post #67
xphilter wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, people getting jobs is what caused inflation. Not the trillions printed and given to scammy upper classes through fraudulent PPP loans and artificially low interest rates.

It's both. Do you think nominal wage gains coupled with real wage declines makes people happy? Check consumer sentiment polling which just hit an all time low, why don't you? It's funny to see society broadly reject the impact of covid era policy, yet some advocate to do more and more of it. Fed kept rates low in pursuit of unsustainably low unemployment, by the way, motivated by pressure from progressives

Wait, but consumer polling proves the point though? People are miserable BECAUSE their dollar buys less. The benefactors of such a policy are those with diversified assets.

Wages should increase in response, not decrease. Inflation hits different sectors differently, and I'm OK with a PS5 inflating 300% if it means that a person on a minimum wage can have food security.

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

#143

Post by arethuza »

feet wrote: post #97
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…

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

I'm not saying that people shouldn't do basic research, far from it, more that I learned that given the way basic research actually works then I had relatively little interest in actually doing it myself.

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

#144

Post by atrettel »

__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.

My take is that statements like "there are no jobs available" and "employers cannot find enough workers" can be both true at the same time. My best guess right now is that employers want to hire a lot of low-skill workers in general (warehouses, retail, hospitality, etc.) but only want to hire high-skilled workers with a decade or more of experience, so workers "in the middle" (junior developers, engineers, and scientists) are left out to dry.

I see a similar dynamic for postdocs, but with a slight difference. I believe the PIs in the article when they say that they are having trouble hiring postdocs. As a former postdoc myself, it pays poorly and has no job security. You take those jobs mostly because you like the work, and right now many people have better options available. That is part of the reason I left my postdoc, but the other part is that there are just so few research jobs in my field (postdoc or otherwise) at the moment. Some fields seem to be flush with money right now and unable to hire enough people to meet demand, while others are barely hiring at all. My field appears to be barely hiring at all. And that is why I think that statements like "there are no jobs available" and "employers cannot find enough workers" can be both true at the same time, since it really depends on the field and what kind of work is being funded at the moment.

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

#145

Post by adam_arthur »

plaguepilled wrote: post #141
adam_arthur wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both. Do you think nominal wage gains coupled with real wage declines makes people happy? Check consumer sentiment polling which just hit an all time low, why don't you? It's funny to see society broadly reject the impact of covid era policy, yet some advocate to do more and more of it. Fed kept rates low in pursuit of unsustainably low unemployment, by the way, motivated by pressure from progressives

Wait, but consumer polling proves the point though? People are miserable BECAUSE their dollar buys less. The benefactors of such a policy are those with diversified assets. Wages should increase in response, not decrease. Inflation hits different sectors differently, and I'm OK with a PS5 inflating 300% if it means that a person on a minimum wage can have food security.

Advocating for higher wages to fight inflation is non-sensical. It just exacerbates inflation and requires even further wage gains to keep even.

There is a wealth of economic history that shows this.

The stimulus checks and co were the primary driver of inflation. Handing people more money is not the answer

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

#146

Post by jboggan »

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…

Absolutely true. I saw this play out in my lab where we had 1-2 PhD students (including myself) and about 12-16 rotating postdocs. They worked insane hours for very little pay, no benefits, and produced 95% of the output of the lab. Our professor was definitely the "wrong" kind of professor, as about 50% of them left academia entirely and not by choice after being wrung dry of all productive output and then discarded. The professor also only hired visa applicants to have extra leverage over them. I know that isn't the case everywhere in American universities, but it was common enough that no one cared or thought it was extraordinary.

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

#148

Post by balanoceous »

I am a post-doc in one of the ivory towers. I've been in the system a long time (technician, MD, PhD, residency, fellowship, now post doc). Jeez!

I am a computational immunologist who studies cancer immunotherapy, if it matters. I am not independently wealthy or blah blah. I am a normal everyday person.

I agree academia is nonsensical for the many reasons that are frequently discussed in HN.

Mine is not a perspective I see represented here often: I absolutely love my job as a post doc. Everyone is different - I get a lot of joy from my work. Most of my friends in science at different stages feel more or less the same (albeit everyone complains).

I could get paid 10x more or work half as much, maybe both at the same time. So to answer the question here, why do people do this? Cuz I like it. Don't make everything so complicated (as an academic, that is my job).

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

#149

Post by randomsearch »

feet wrote: post #97
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…

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

This is definitely false in many cases.

Source: I’ve worked on both.

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

#150

Post by dagw »

pacbard wrote: post #129
dagw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to buy something like a tissue sample for an experiment in a lab then you pay the market price Academic researchers often pay either zero or get a massive discount on all kinds of stuff (hardware, software, data, samples etc.) for their research that people in private sector pay a huge premium for.

> Academic researchers often pay either zero... Not completely accurate. Every time you get a grant, your institution get a percentage of it to pay for indirect costs. These costs include office space, office personnel, and other expenses that the grant doesn't pay for directly. So, if you are getting "free" stuff from the department closest, it is very likely that your (or some else's) indirect expenses are paying f…

I was more referring to how Academic licensing is often cheap or free. For example a certain data set I'm working with right now is made available to us for free as researchers, but costs on the order of $200k to access if you're a commercial entity.
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