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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

#161

Post by time_to_smile »

enriquto wrote: post #124
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…

> 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…

In the US (at least for now) it's fairly easy for a Senior Engineer to get 250k TC, and if income is your goal and you want put the energy towards a FAANG, not that hard to get up to 400-500k. In 2019 the median postdoc salary in the US was ~50k [0].

The work/life balance part is a bit trickier to quantify. Anecdotally US postdocs work pretty hard, but my experience is that highly paid engineers at FAANG-style companies also work pretty hard. If you don't want work to be your life as a SWE $250k seems to be the easiest achievable comp while meeting those requirements.

0. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00587-y

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

#162

Post by InefficientRed »

cs137 wrote: post #43
InefficientRed wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the helplessness of this. You have agency. You also have responsibility. You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed. I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had…

You know, I agree with 90 percent of what you're saying, but on this... > I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. ... I've got to say, you probably work for someone who is. It sounds like you're a decent human being and that's great--we need more of those--but the entire point of corporate capitalism (although this behavior exists in ostensibly noncapitalist organizations, too) is exploitation. Do yo…

> you probably work for someone who is.

This is actually a very fair point, so I'm not sure why you are downvoted (perhaps the last sentence comes across as inviting trolling). But I take my responsibility for not doing so to people under me seriously.

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

#163

Post by tonguez »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#164

Post by borroka »

enriquto wrote: post #124
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…

> 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…

I did my last postdoc in another European country more or less 8 years ago and my salary was 1700 euros per month (after taxes). Very limited funds for traveling or going to conferences. That was barely livable, considering it is temporary money, you cannot ask for any mortgage, cannot plan any future and you are often starting to have gray hair (or a full head of gray hair).

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

#165

Post by InefficientRed »

sseagull wrote: post #88
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…

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…

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

That's fair. I do think managers have responsibility to their direct reports. The postdoc situation in th US isn't going to change as long as faculty and post-docs continue producing. So, quite seriously, the solution is for faculty and post-docs to collectively say "we can't get work done under these conditions". Otherwise things will just get worse.

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

This is generous (but also fairly uncommon for post-docs). Good to hear that your uni provides retirement benefits.

> 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.

The huge difference is that post-docs are transitory and require uprooting one's life. $50K with the knowledge that you can buy a starter home is very different from $50K and knowing that you cannot buy anything because you will likely move in 2 years. This also has real human cost. See articles like this: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/postdocs-dilemma-when-g...

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

#166

Post by mvh »

enriquto wrote: post #124
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…

> 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…

I'm a PhD student in CS in the USA. At my school in Boston, we are paid a ~40K USD/yr stipend. My friends in industry make a _minimum_ of 120k/yr, and some make considerably more than that (think 200k+), in junior / "entry-level" positions.

When I complete the PhD, if I go to industry in the USA, my income will probably be similar to that of my friends who will have been in industry the entire time (and gotten steady wage increases throughout).

It's important to note also cost of living. 40k/yr might sound like a lot, but in Boston, rent is >1k/month even with roommates, we don't have dental care, our health insurance is imperfect, groceries are expensive, etc. etc. Meanwhile in Tucson Arizona or Bloomington Indiana the stipend is something like 22-28K/yr, as cost of living is lower.

Generally speaking it's reasonable to say that completing a PhD in computer science is not a financial investment, but rather, something I am doing because I want to do it. I am very unlikely to literally "profit" (compared to, if I had gone straight to industry instead).

I hope this information is useful/interesting!

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

#167

Post by ImageXav »

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…

Arethuza, I'm a bit confused by this comment. PhDs in the UK don't last over 4 years. Would you mind clarifying?

From a personal perspective I don't regret my PhD, though it was charity funded so it was topped up to be around £20 000 instead of the usual £14000ish per year. It was an opportunity to engage with a small group of experts in research that was engaging and of use to the wider world, and present it internationally. I also tried to start a start-up during this time, but the underlying idea failed to pass preliminary trials (I work in healthcare). So the two are not mutually exclusive.

People's experience tends to vary. I think a lot depends on how much you research the group and supervisors you will be working with beforehand, and how much you engage them in the research you do.

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

#169

Post by arethuza »

ImageXav wrote: post #167
arethuza wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Arethuza, I'm a bit confused by this comment. PhDs in the UK don't last over 4 years. Would you mind clarifying? From a personal perspective I don't regret my PhD, though it was charity funded so it was topped up to be around £20 000 instead of the usual £14000ish per year. It was an opportunity to engage with a small group of experts in research that was engaging and of use to the wider world, and present it interna…

Technically the PhD was part time although most people in my position took 4 to 5 years. This was also the early 90s so times may have changed..

I was lucky enough to get involved in the web very early (1992) and present papers at the first few web conferences - though that wasn’t my day job.

Edit: I worked on a couple of EU Esprit 2 projects.

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

#170

Post by katz_ »

katz_ wrote: post #155
InefficientRed wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the helplessness of this. You have agency. You also have responsibility. You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed. I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had…

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