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Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

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Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#31

Post by bumby »

photochemsyn wrote: post #19

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their en…

>rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research.

We probably should first acknowledge that the vast majority of research is incremental and not groundbreaking.

>not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about

Depending on your interest, this may be a case of expectation management. We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case. If it's wildly interesting, chances are lots of people are also interested and the competition drives down wages. If it's truly groundbreaking, there may not be a viable market for it so it likewise wouldn't have high wages (as wages tend to be commensurate with the differential contribution to the economy). If you are lucky to work in a field you love and are such an outlier technically that you can command high wages, you must by definition be a low probability case. So most people are left trying to find the balance of making money and doing something they are truly passionate about unless you happen to be passionate about something valuable that most people dislike.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#32

Post by Ultimatt »

xyzelement wrote: post #3

The story resonates but the conclusion doesn't. As an immigrant, I relate to what she says: feel pressure to work hard -> work hard -> achieve results -> benefit from those results. As far as I can tell, the system works. She got an opportunity, worked her ass off, produced a lot, and attained a great position/life as consequence. Those who chose an easier path, perhaps were less stressed but also didn't do or get as…

The point you missed is she got where she is with a very very large amount of luck too. Most grants have about 100+ equally high quality applicants at this point in history. If you dont make it 8 years out of PhD (which is a huge investment of your productive life) you get shit canned forever on funding and "early career" opportunities. The system is exploitative in the extreme.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#33

Post by cma »

thwayunion wrote: post #25
cma wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why will academic R&D begin falling below the rate of inflation? I get that it can't outpace it forever without overtaking the economy.

> Why will academic R&D begin falling below the rate of inflation? Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments. Academic R&D just doesn't have the constituency needed to save it from cuts. I will be a bit astounded if NSF/NIH don't take nominal cuts during the debt ceiling negotiations, and they certa…

> Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments. Academic R&D just doesn't have the constituency needed to save it from cuts.

Wouldn't this be a plausible story immediately post-WWII?

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#34

Post by monsieurbanana »

xyzelement wrote: post #18
neilv wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a fellow immigrant, can confirm, hard work works. You can confirm that hard work can work. Or seem to work.

Yup. We can also surmise that lack of hard work is guaranteed to not work. So if you need to grow hard work seems like the better option.

Lack of hard work definitely isn't an hindrance for grow. Having the right family name, pleasant facial structure or just being very likeable and sociable are all possible replacements for hard work.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#35

Post by bentt »

This just in - competitive people in competitive fields compete.

The only way to fix this is to make rules about how hard anyone is allowed to work. By definition this is a denial of freedom and stifles progress.

The real solution for an individual is to be satsfied with less. Just don’t expect that of anyone else lest you tread on the thin ice of communim, which is ironic considering the birthplace of the author.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#36

Post by [deleted] »

Ultimatt wrote: post #29
photochemsyn wrote: post #19

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their en…

Plenty of research doesn't need millions to do. If you're a mathematician or almost any kind of theoretician or computational scientist you need a laptop maybe the odd bit of cloud time on a bigger blob of compute, in the case of mathematicians you might need chalk. The millions you do need to spend though are on private per-paper viewing of literature, thats the real mind killer. If universities just had alumni acce…

[deleted]

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#37

Post by maximus-decimus »

subroutine wrote: post #27

The only way to undo the culture of overwork for academic professors, is to increase bottleneck somewhere upstream (e.g. cut the number of PhD students in half). Any time you have a situation where 300 people are applying for the same job (as is common for ladder rank professorships at research universities), the people who end up getting those jobs will inevitably have been overworked. Imagine if less than 10% of pe…

That would require them to say no to free labor.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#38

Post by Ultimatt »

Ultimatt wrote: post #29
photochemsyn wrote: post #19

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their en…

Plenty of research doesn't need millions to do. If you're a mathematician or almost any kind of theoretician or computational scientist you need a laptop maybe the odd bit of cloud time on a bigger blob of compute, in the case of mathematicians you might need chalk. The millions you do need to spend though are on private per-paper viewing of literature, thats the real mind killer. If universities just had alumni acce…

I should add those 3 months would also pay me about 2x better than a postdoc working fulltime in a university. Thats the level of pay disparity with industry, and the level of pointlessness of a university as an institution if you dont need a wet lab to work. A genuinely good business idea would be a virtual institution with library services.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#39

Post by thwayunion »

cma wrote: post #33
thwayunion wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why will academic R&D begin falling below the rate of inflation? Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments. Academic R&D just doesn't have the constituency needed to save it from cuts. I will be a bit astounded if NSF/NIH don't take nominal cuts during the debt ceiling negotiations, and they certa…

> Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments. Academic R&D just doesn't have the constituency needed to save it from cuts. Wouldn't this be a plausible story immediately post-WWII?

Perhaps, but couldn't be less comparable from the perspective of higher ed:

1. The budgetary context in that case was the end of total warfare. Debt was high, yes, but a TON of the war expenditures from the last half decade were being unwound. So the place that the cuts would come from was very obvious and directly related to the reason for the high expenditures in the first place. You could unwind deficits while simultaneously increasing spending on everything except total warfare. Cf now: the US isn't going to cut SS or Medicare, and cuts to Defense would hit university funding streams hard.

2. The political environment is radically different. The success of the Manhattan Project, RADAR, etc. created a political environment that was amenable to shifting spending from wartime manufacturing to peacetime R&D. Cf now: there is an enormous amount of political animosity toward the academy coming from the political coalition holding most of the structural advantages. Even through the Bush presidency, Science funding was largely bipartisan. That isn't true now. At all. I think many academics under-appreciate just how toxic NSF/NIH/etc have become to roughly half of this country.

3. The GI bill infused tons of demand (and money) into the academic system, and was followed by the Baby Boom. Cf now: there's a massive demographic collapse on the horizon and people are seeking out alternatives to university education due to the cost.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#40

Post by zdyn5 »

cma wrote: post #33
thwayunion wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why will academic R&D begin falling below the rate of inflation? Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments. Academic R&D just doesn't have the constituency needed to save it from cuts. I will be a bit astounded if NSF/NIH don't take nominal cuts during the debt ceiling negotiations, and they certa…

> Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments. Academic R&D just doesn't have the constituency needed to save it from cuts. Wouldn't this be a plausible story immediately post-WWII?

What was the scale of academic research post WW 2 compared to now? I’d imagine our research budgets are a significantly higher fraction of GDP now.
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