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

I graduated college in 2018, and, even though I majored in Neuroscience and wanted to do computational neuroscience research, that there was just no way I could accept the working conditions + cost of grad school, PhD, and postdoc life. It seemed like a terrible deal then, even as a young student who ONLY wanted to do research. Learning software engineering and breaking into the industry was SO much easier than continuing my education, and while I don't regret it, I have to imagine the deal has only gotten worse. The only people I still know doing research are fully funded by their parents, and even then most of them have dropped out for easier jobs. Cannot imagine the brain-drain that is happening across the US right now.

Just my personal observations:

Plain HTML/CSS is still relevant today. Not everything needs to be an SPA. I also don't understand how one would write SPAs with React/Vue/whatever other framework without first having at least some understanding of HTML and CSS.

Agree with the cloud being poo-pooed.

Don't agree with barely any classes in ML. Grant money in ML has been hot, which means academic hiring in ML has been hot, and a good number of those hires are teaching classes. Basically every major CS department has a broad selection of ML courses or even ML concentrations and minors. Most smaller departments seem to have at least one or two courses to choose from.

I've never seen Python used to teach software engineering. Java is the classic language for that, even today. Although I suspect that we may have different definitions of software engineering.

Design your letter in the most aseptic and unfunny way possible.

Extra points if is in a foreign language to show that you are cool people. The problem to solve is less important than all this marvelous crispy sounds when is spelled

Use a lot of trendy terms and fancy words. Your project to improve the texture of the mayonaise must sound like Bruce Willis in Armageddon. The more confusing, holistic and superfood, the better.

Stress that you want really motivated candidates. The job is boring as hell so they need to came yet motivated from home. They will not grow professionally here.

Assure that the job is available only in a narrow interval of time. Much better if is in the time when everybody is posting job offers and competing for your attention. Biology shows us that fishes in a school are safer from being noticed individually.

Reject people that stopped for three years working on science. They could need to spend an entire afternoon to read and understand everything that happened in their field in the last three years. Yup, the whole nine articles. You don't want to use their previous decades of experience and university classes.

For a better measure go to the corridor and run screaming "a gap!, a curriculum gap!" in terror

Use deadlines in your profit. Assure to email your job offer two or three days after the closing time has expired.

Don't be concise, your candidates love to spend ten minutes reading about vanity issues, the history of your building and why the bricks are violet.

Ask they to write an essay about how your project was their dream since school.

Put the salary hidden in a link. Better if this leads to twenty pages of bureaucracy before.

Use several categories for your job offer to reduce the probability of a match. Use fancy names like "Ramon y Cajal" position or "Juan de la Cierva" offer to made it seem more relevant. Then put your job only in one of them. Example: We look for a biochemist for a Sara Borrel thing, requisites: having less than 30 years, visited the Tibet in the last year and be a natural blonde more than 6 feet tall. Their field of research does not matter. "Oh, you studied exactly the same thing but you look more like a `Juan de la Cierva' to me. Maybe the next year".

Your job application must be a turning point in their life. Assure to ask the lab rats to spend all the day filling a job application so complex that would made Kafka proud. A real example: Looking for somebody to work in city X. Requisites. Can't live currently in city X (that would be so easy, and yes, is a real example from a real job offer).

Assure that your selection process to hire scientists has a 70% of questions related with laws, 10% about ideology, and the rest about the real work to do.

Is that correct? I am a postdoc at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and I'm at the TV-L 13 level, Stufe 3, which is ~3300 post tax.

Private sector pay is much better and working conditions are also on average much better. You have professional management and HR functions and one manager can’t destroy your career. More importantly the exit options are better. The relative power imbalances lead to people being treated differently.