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A mental health crisis in science

nature.com

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Re: A mental health crisis in science

#181

Post by refurb »

harimau777 wrote: post #60
refurb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the CEO is going to make 100X as much as me, I’m going to do my best to work 100X less than they do. You realized CEO's make that much money after a long career where they were busting their asses as juniors. You basically made the same argument the grandparent is criticizing.

Ya, but there are many more people who spend years busting their asses in menial jobs who are never rewarded for it. I have no problem with CEOs making lots of money. I have a problem with them making 100x more than their median employee; especially when their poorest employees aren't making a living wage.

Ya, but there are many more people who spend years busting their asses in menial jobs who are never rewarded for it.

But that's true for any job, not just CEOs. Plenty of people bust their ass and never make $250,000 like many FAANG employees. Should we cap the pay of FAANG employees to the lowest paid tech worker?

I have a problem with them making 100x more than their median employee

Why? What should the maximum multiple be? Should a CEO only make 20x the median employee? What if the company only has 10 employees? What if it has 200,000 employees, should it still be 20x?

I'm not sure I understand why a CEO's pay should be solely linked to the median wage of the employees. What's the logic behind it?

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#182

Post by kevviiinn »

ke88y wrote: post #176
kevviiinn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my PhD program I don't see that at all, in fact our program recently paid for students to attend a multiple day seminar about how to get jobs outside academia. I'm not sure where you get that impression from

> in fact our program recently paid for students to attend a multiple day seminar about how to get jobs outside academia. Consider that preparing you for jobs outside of university should be the goal of your education , not relegated to a two-day seminar. And also consider how relatively fucked it is that such a seminar is actually quite necessary due to the fact that the vast majority of your faculty haven't spent m…

The goal of a PhD education is to learn how to do research, first and foremost. That is the entire point of a PhD

If you want to do anything else just get a masters

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#183

Post by david38 »

currymj wrote: post #52
dbcooper wrote: post #33

A part of this is that in academia there are often few positive career rewards. You're under pressure to publish frequently, in high impact factor journals, and that is to keep your job. You don't get pay rises or bonuses, or any other career improvements, and job security can be until your next contract, at best. If you don't make it to tenured professor, and have good grant funding, then you are staring down the ba…

This would help on some level, although it would definitely make the stress on applicants much higher. E.g. there’s increasingly an expectation that students should come into a PhD program with one or more publications already under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it’s more important each year). So you better get a good research assistant job as a…

These are regular market forces. More people fighting for a few slots. If people weren’t so desperate to be professors this wouldn’t happen. Pretty sure actors and models go through something parallel.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#184

Post by MichaelZuo »

bumby wrote: post #156
tptacek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard a lot of complaints from a lot of different people working in lab science (in my case, my interest was in bio & chem) and none of them were about "tightly walled journals" (working academic researchers generally have institutional access, and when the logins are annoying to manage they just sci-hub like everyone else) or IRBs. Rather, it was very basic stuff, like being told to come in at 5:30AM to feed a…

A lot of this seems to be poor leadership ability. Unfortunately, it seems like in the sciences you can get get promoted because you’re really good technically, but these skills don’t mean you can manage a hill of beans. Rather than treating the whole system down, maybe we need to look to promote those who can manage teams rather than just those who are “merely” technically bright.

Hiring boards at major universities know leadership ability is valuable, it's just that there are very few people with the skills, the credible track record, the leadership/teaching ability, and willing to apply, that they have to settle for less. And it so happens that this is where it's easiest to justify settling.

A lot of folks talk about how hard it is to find a tenure track job but it's actually trivial for anyone in the 99th percentile of all 3 categories.

But for anyone with that combination of talents, they can easily make 7 figures in a comfortable job outside of academia so not many of them apply even at the Stanfords and Harvards of the world.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#185

Post by sacnoradhq »

High school-to-college pipelines need to be improved in many areas. The undergraduate pipeline is failing in gender overall: ~60% women + ~40% men. Universities that gender rebalance effectively make it harder for women to get in and easier for men. STEM (except biology and nursing) is bad at attracting women, with computer science and electrical engineering being possibly the most imbalanced fields compared to psychology and nursing at the other extremes. There's nothing wrong with individual major overall preferences but there is a problem when 2x the number of women are being educated than men. That's a strategic human capital loss and likely signals future underemployment. Phil Zimbardo (Stanford Prison Experiment and community college lecturer by telecourses broadcasted by KCSM) wrote a number of books and gives a TED talk on this subject.

Prescriptive formulas at the point of college entrance isn't the correct place to apply pressures. Mentoring, programs, resources, and subject public relations need to happen where there is great need and especially in areas with fewer resources.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#186

Post by pfannkuchen »

vkou wrote: post #131
qazpot wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the part about "unrealistic goals" is applicable to a lot of spheres of life and exacerbated by the social media. Social media after all inflicts high expectations and pressure to convert your life into a performance on everyone irrespective of profession, culture, age, country. And ofcourse the Titans of social media - zuckerberg, chamath, tiktok and 1000s of engineers, PMs will not pay for the harm their en…

Blaming social media for this is shooting the messenger. You don't need Facebook or the Gram to be keenly aware that all your university buddies who went into tech are going on vacations to Maui and buying their second homes, while you're still grinding your life away for nothing in a university lab. In fact, all you need to do be aware of this is to show up to your friends' bi-weekly happy hour at the local.

I don’t disagree, but in person people do I think tend to avoid discussing in detail money-associated things with people who can’t afford the same. Like they’re not going to avoid it entirely, but a lot of points might be glossed over, the conversation may be changed quickly, etc. Whereas on social media there is more detail out in the open regardless of social context. That context ignoring part is kind of new.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#187

Post by mnky9800n »

ke88y wrote: post #175
mnky9800n wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand this mentality either. I left academia to work in a company where my job is still doing research and writing papers but I get paid more money. I even write grants! And I get treated way better by the system in place, I have private health insurance, I get a performance bonus, I even get a company paid ski week! There's a regular story told in physics departments that if you leave you can't g…

> There's a regular story told in physics departments that if you leave you can't get back in. At least in CS, becoming a Professor of Practice is both higher prestige and a much lower barrier to entry than becoming an Associate Professor with Tenure. The job security of the Professor of Practice is de jure weaker but de facto much stronger. (Tenure doesn't mean shit these days, especially in the USA.) > But in my ex…

We even have the opportunity to have PhD students in the company and we pay them a decent salary!

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#188

Post by _Wintermute »

PaulHoule wrote: post #19
oaiey wrote: post #13

What I found interesting of this article is that most of it is also applicable to a many tech sector jobs. High pressure to deliver something (because we squeeze the last of people), hire-and-fire practices everywhere, politics and toxic environments (because that is what people do and what is the current social perspective on what is okay). Developers, like scientists, are very outcome driven (number of lines, numbe…

Tech job hunts are easy in good times. (e.g. leave one employer, take a day off, interview at another employer the day after that, start working the week after) Academic jobs are nothing like that.

There's actually a huge shortage of postdocs at the moment, if you're remotely qualified and a somewhat normal human being you can easily get a job. The problem is that the job is awful, stressful, temporary, and poorly paid - hence the shortage of candidates willing to apply for them.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#189

Post by a_bonobo »

I quit my research career for exactly this; I was close to burnout. I left the academic sector because I realised it's internationally toxic; there's no solidarity among academics. They'll can your grant application, they'll trash your paper during peer review, for absolutely zero personal gain.

Every aspect of research work is awful: ridiculously little funding, a parasitic publishing system outsourcing all of its labor to us (unpaid), overloaded teaching, universities' ballooning middle management inventing new hoops every week, endless unpaid labor in the name of 'academic service', low salary, endless pressure.

Burn it all down.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#190

Post by currymj »

sage76 wrote: post #178
currymj wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would help on some level, although it would definitely make the stress on applicants much higher. E.g. there’s increasingly an expectation that students should come into a PhD program with one or more publications already under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it’s more important each year). So you better get a good research assistant job as a…

> there’s increasingly an expectation that students should come into a PhD program with one or more publications already under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it’s more important each year). This is something I discovered pretty late in my life. The web pages maintained by profs barely have any info. I have come to hate the whole "everybody looks…

at least in computer science, this document is from CMU and tended to get circulated pretty widely, although probably not widely enough. every field ought to have something like it.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf

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