Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Goodbye Academia

anothersb.blogspot.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 217 posts

Re: Goodbye Academia

#71

Post by burntsushi »

eykanal wrote: post #9

This is almost exactly my story as well. One point he doesn't mention is that there are many interesting problems in the "real world". Lots of academics just point to industry in general and say, "no freedom, no thanks." I've held a few jobs and all of them presented with unique, interesting, and challenging problems. I've had the freedom to choose my own approach to solving problems and met up with other academic-mi…

I'm currently in the middle of a PhD, and you've touched on the exact fear I have. I intend on finding a job in industry after I graduate, and the biggest fear I have is a restriction on freedom. I totally get that there are jobs out there that still give you some amount of freedom to pick your own tools and/or approach a problem in your own way.

Every now and then, I casually leaf through job ads and I have no idea how to tell which are which. I think that's what scares me. I get this feeling that when it comes time to join industry, it's just going to be a crapshoot---maybe I'll get lucky and maybe I won't.

(Note that this isn't a criticism lodged in comparison to academia. I've already made up my mind that I'll be leaving once I graduate.)

Re: Goodbye Academia

#72

Post by daniel_reetz »

newyorklenny wrote: post #10
gjuggler wrote: post #6

This is a really thoughtful post highlighting many of the deeply-rooted problems in securing funding as an early-stage academic. It's depressing for bright young scientists to be looking forward to lives as assistant professors submitting grant after grant with an expected ~10% success rate. But what surprised me most was that at the end of the essay, after having described his fear of facing such uncertainty in NIH…

Indeed, I left academia for a startup. Securing funding for ZappyLab is by no means easy ( http://anothersb.blogspot.com/2014/03/hello-startup-sequel-t... ) But as hard as it is, there are many VCs, angels, and there is crowd funding (we are running a Kickstarter campaign now). Certainly not easy, but there are more options. You run a genetics lab and lose your NIH grant - where do you go?

Wherever you go, whatever you do, do this: quadruple your effort and input into your relationship with your wife.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#73

Post by cabalamat »

bduerst wrote: post #61
cabalamat wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it wasn't for obscure scientific research, WhatsApp wouldn't exist.

Slippery Slope: If it wasn't for obscure scientific research, almost nothing we know would exist. It doesn't mean that obscure scientific research has the same market value as almost everything.

> It doesn't mean that obscure scientific research has the same market value as almost everything.

Of course not. Food, for example, has much more immediate use.

But it does mean that science is pretty valuable, and more valuable over longer periods.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#74

Post by pekk »

newaccountfool wrote: post #43
naterator wrote: post #4

These kinds of things are daily discussions in laboratories all over the world. Everyone knows there's no future in academia, and so everyone is looking for an exit plan. I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job. The…

I think you completely miss the point of why a lot of people do a PHD. The love of the subject. Also, the pay after gaining a PHD in a certain field is most certainly worth it.

People say this kind of thing when they don't have experience of what it's actually like.

A PhD is not a continuation of undergraduate or independent study in a subject. It is a career with the tedium of other careers, and then some because so many other people are trying to do the same thing you are. You may love the subject now, but that doesn't mean you are going to be able to do the research you want. At various points in your career you have to do what your adviser wants, manage departmental politics, get funding and crank out publications. Maybe love of the subject helps you stick to it, but more likely it doesn't make a lot of practical difference once it's a tedious job you do every day.

The pay after spending an equal amount of time in any other career with the same background is likely to be better.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#75

Post by santaclaus »

plg wrote: post #47

Yet another worrying sign is that at my university (and I've heard similar stories from colleagues at others) is now deciding that instead of hiring 2 or 3 junior faculty positions (new academics straight out of a postdoc into their first faculty job), instead the priority is to spend the same money on one mid-career "poach" from a competing institution. Double the salary, and bigger startup package. Their rationale…

That seems like an unusually low salary, then. Let's pick a major public research university in the US and a department, say Physics UT Austin (feel free to play the same game with data from another public and another department, like CS at UC Berkeley). Browsing through professor salaries [1], by the time Professors hit tenure they are approaching or breaking 100K a year. Five to seven times this is 500-700K a year!

[1] http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...

Re: Goodbye Academia

#76

Post by hatred »

simonw wrote: post #48
pyrrhotech wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny to me when people call companies like Twitter "tech companies". What technology has twitter invented? There are open source clones with 70% of the features in It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their…

"What technology has twitter invented?" http://twitter.github.io/ currently lists 101 public repositories. Highlights include a SPDY library for iOS, Zipkin (a distributed tracing system), flockdb (a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database), Finagle (their own highly concurrent RPC system)... a TON of stuff.

No offence meant but that is like saying "Kia is also a car, does the same work. Why the hell even BMW exists"

May be BMW is doing things on the back that make it a better choice. Same is the difference between twitter and its thousand clones.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#78

Post by HarryHirsch »

shas3 wrote: post #56
jseliger wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the allures of academia is the prospect of doing fundamental research It's also a false allure: the problem is that fundamental research requires funding, and the OP is pointing out that he can't get it. He'll be in essence locked out of research and not make a lot of money at it. This is like saying, "One of the allures of acting is the prospect of being famous and sleeping with lots of fans." On the one hand…

The analogy does not make sense. I know many colleagues who got into academia and were able to find plenty of funding. It wasn't a lucky break that helped them, but hard work and talent. The system is far from perfect, but it is not 'feudal', etc. as the parent comment claims. Systematic hard work can get you results in academia. From what I understand about show-biz, it requires a lot more than just talent and hard…

I know many colleagues who got into academia and were able to find plenty of funding.

Since the crisis struck in 2009 the quality of candidates that are being interviewed at my second-tier state school is just astounding. They are expected to bring funding in, or else they are out, but they will not manage, and considering the quality of graduate students there, they will not be able to be any productive.

Academia is in a state of transition, and it seems that no one knows what the endgame will look like. University presidents throughout the country are betting on growth as the way out of the crisis, more students means more tuition, and more professors means more grants. It doesn't look sustainable, and personally I see no way forward. It seems wise to stay away.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#79

Post by dredmorbius »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #30
6cxs2hd6 wrote: post #15

Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.

It's funny to me when people call companies like Twitter "tech companies". What technology has twitter invented? There are open source clones with 70% of the features in It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their…

As much as I find many of the past decade of Web / tech companies underwhelming, innovation can come from unusual places. Duff's Device, a method for unrolling loops in C for better performance, was created at Lucasfilm.

The challenges of scaling to very high levels has presented engineering challenges and solutions. I'm not sold that they're net beneficial in the greater order of things, but to say that there's been no significant innovation would be false.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#80

Post by selmnoo »

a3voices wrote: post #20
6cxs2hd6 wrote: post #15

Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.

I didn't downvote you, but WhatsApp affects more people than obscure scientific research.

I don't know about that. NIH's annual budget a few years ago was about 20 billion dollars. WhatsApp was sold for almost nearly 20 billion. The studies funded by NIH cured diseases, extended lifetimes, made lives better. Why don't we get 5 more WhatsApp so that existed postdocs are paid better, and those thinking of academia actually join it and make discoveries to make human lives even longer and healthier.
Post reply on HN