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

Yes, the whole article is sort of tone deaf: it's like they see a problem but not the actual problem. It's very typical of the whole thing: complaints without actually doing the painful work of restructuring things, because that would cause too much inconvenience for the people who have benefited.

So we have these discussions about pay and supply and demand, which is part of it, but not the nature of the positions themselves, the ponzi funding scheme underlying it, the status hierarchies, none of it. No one wants to cut or line-item justify indirect funds, or turn those postdocs into faculty positions.

The last place I was at this issue came up about being able to have grad students without funding: the argument was if you can't fund them off of grants you shouldn't have them. On the surface, this sounds great, pretty reasonable, until you realize that now you're incentivizing taking grad students to support grants, rather than as an end in itself. Basically you're incentivizing a permanent student culture, because the expected lifecycle of the researcher is maybe 30 years, whereas the student is expected to only be there maybe 5 in theory.

It's so hard for me to wrap my head around it it: the best analogy maybe really is a ponzi scheme. The desired product is the input. It's so broken in so many ways. It's like no one is actually paying for research, they're paying for attracting students, attracting the money to pay for the research, the trappings of research, etc. That actual useful research gets done is a convenient side effect.

Well part of it is fields not meant to have post docs use them as a way to avoid hiring tenure track folks. Post-docs are meant for the physical sciences, where you can need a few years to learn the physical mechanics of research in a field like biology, chemistry, physics, or other "hard" sciences.

But as a side effect of decisions folks were coerced into making during the last recession, many fields like CS which require very little physical labor now also use post-docs.

Often a post doc is just something given to a sub par PhD student who coasted on the work of others graduates from a "prestigous" program until they can author a few papers ACTUALLY on their own.

On my end, I deeply regret not backpacking around SE Asia doing English lessons the past ten years -- I'd probably be happier, healthier, and have a bigger bank account than the path I took instead. (Aborted PhD -> terrible NGO -> terrible nonprofit -> piecemeal consulting paired with a Bellingcat certification)

If I were going to attempt a PhD a second time, I'd probaby do it in the EU where they clearly define success criteria from the outset, and I'd probably do it after obtaining an EU passport.

(I should not have to consider getting a second passport to find work with my skillset, but people sometimes are stupid enough to interview me, refuse to take my advice, then get butthurt when the Russians skullfuck their servers or their bank goes out of business because they decided to be cute and treat an interview as a free consulting session, but not actually listen to anything I said.)

The thing is, almost all postdocs start on J1 visas, not H1b. Most schools hold out the possibility of moving you over to an H1b as an incentive after a few years. It's also complicated by many J1s come with the rider that they must return to their home country for two years and cannot shift to an H1b. There is a pathway to apply for a waiver from the State Department, but I'm told these days the process takes about 18 months to get the waiver - BEFORE you can be eligible to apply for an H1b.

This is "saying the quiet part out loud" in academia. For engineering undergrad, your in-state university (ABET accredited) will usually be your best cost/benefit option (unless you're going to MIT, Stanford, or, for CS only, CMU). For grad school, I believe you'd want to think very carefully about the opportunity cost (and what you want your PhD for) before going anywhere outside of the top 20 (or even top 15) schools in your program. For a postdoc, where your opportunity cost is even higher, I think you need to be in the top 10 (or top 5) for it to be worth it.

There's no reason to do a postdoc at any school outside of the top 10 in your field unless, as you point out, you're working for an exceptionally well-regarded PI who is particularly going to be able to move your career in your desired path.

The people who do postdocs at these institutions are usually foreign, for whom a US postdoc is gold. Come to think of it, I can't recall ever interacting with a university postdoc who was a US citizen -- I've only worked for one "PI-generating PI", who happens to not like hiring postdocs.

Postdocs are sometimes used as a mechanism to play games with tenure rather than getting the an academic job. You get a publication “head start” without invoking the countdown, and you already often have a future job in hand early.