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Goodbye Academia

anothersb.blogspot.co.uk

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Re: Goodbye Academia

#131

Post by pseut »

santaclaus wrote: post #75
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!…

Pay raises after tenure are nowhere near what you see in the private sector. And people who get tenure at Cal or UT are exceptional. Do you think the smartest 30-40yos in Austin outside UT are only making 500k?

Re: Goodbye Academia

#132

Post by ThePhysicist »

I'm an (ex-)academic myself and can really understand the author's position and concerns, but I wonder if this situation has been so much different in the past. Academia has always been a highly competitive field with a high workload and comparatively low salaries as compared to industry, so it obviously is not for everyone. I think though that the article omits many of the benefits of positions in science, so I want to list a few (of course not all of these apply to all positions in science):

-You don't have a boss that yells at you and tells you what to do.

-You can work on your own projects and ideas (if you're capable of developing such).

-You can't get fired , or at least the likelihood of you being fired is pretty low.

-You can do a lot of traveling (conferences, summer schools, workshops, exchange visits)

-You can work with very intelligent and motivated people.

-You can work on hard, interesting and (sometimes) important problems.

Personally, what I miss most since leaving science is the possibility to work on really interesting, hard problems, because although most companies will tell job applicants that they're working on really cool and important stuff, most of the work consists of pretty boring, uninspiring things (this is not necessarily different in science, but at least there there are some really cool things mixed in between the boring parts). As one of my colleagues once put it, "the problems are hard and complex in an uninteresting way".

So, I think if people would have the choice between a well-paying position in industry and a position as a research scientist, many would choose the latter even if it meant a lower income and a higher workload. The author is of course absolutely right about the fact that there are not enough "B-level" positions in science (i.e. permanent researcher positions situated somewhere between post-docs and professors), which really has to change in my opinion. Personally, it makes me sad to see so many brillant PhDs leave university and work e.g. as data scientists in companies where they basically try to make people "click more on stuff".

Re: Goodbye Academia

#133

Post by bduerst »

ry0ohki wrote: post #63
bduerst wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only on cash dividends, selling equity, income on shorting, etc, right? The actual transfer of equity isn't taxed, at least until they try to pull cash out.

Without knowing the exact split of stock/cash that's difficult to answer, but we can at least say the cash portion is taxed at capital gains rates.

Facebook only had 3.3 billion in cash, and I seriously doubt they spent more than a billion on this deal.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#134

Post by gammarator »

eranki wrote: post #34

Trying to become a successful academic seems about as insane as trying to become a rock star. Here's Peter Higgs on the subject of how academics today compares to the past: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-b... Most people I know who went down the academic route have left the world or are seriously thinking about leaving. I know a couple people with positions at top universities, and around…

Here's a contrary point of view: by his own admission in that article, Higgs has published "fewer than 10" papers in the last 50 years! What has he been doing since 1964?

Raw metrics like papers and citations are easily gamed, and not great ways to evaluate productivity, but surely there are limits...

(And before you say, "but he gave us the Higgs!", several other researchers did closely related work at the same time [1], so humanity would still know about a mass-producing scalar boson.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_pap...

Re: Goodbye Academia

#135

Post by altyus »

I stopped reading at the first paragraph. What an inflated sense of self to think that ones' own feelings after leaving academia imply a dire situation for all of academia.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#136

Post by altyus »

I stopped reading at the first paragraph. What an inflated sense of self to think that ones' own feelings after leaving academia imply a dire situation for all of academia.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#137

Post by _delirium »

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…

It depends what you want out of it, but the thing keeping me from going to industry is that none of the people I know who've made the transition are allowed to publish most of the interesting stuff they do. I don't have to ask anybody's permission to write a blog post, publish a detailed technical paper, publish a high-level overview paper, or anything else.

I know there are places that are more open-minded towards publishing your results in the open literature, but the majority of companies seem to put roadblocks in the way. I know some people who have done very interesting work (one at Exxon, for example) and will never be allowed to talk publicly about it, because it's their company's trade secret now.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#138

Post by _delirium »

jseliger wrote: post #53
shas3 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Underlying your comment is the assumption that every one wants the hedge fund (or other) job. One of the allures of academia is the prospect of doing fundamental research. Y…

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 problem is that fundamental research requires funding

In biology, yeah, although I think what a lot of people here are doing is reading stories about high-capital-cost fields (experimental physics, biochem, etc.) and then applying it to their own field, which on HN is mostly computer science. CS research really does not require a lot of funding, outside of specific areas (mostly hardware and robotics stuff). Also, because of a robust industry hiring many people away, the supply/demand situation in CS academia is not as bad, and you can always join them and go to Google/Palantir/Microsoft/whatever if things don't work out. I don't bring in much in the way of grants and I get by just fine, because computers don't cost a lot in 2014, and I don't do the kind of research that requires armies of minions. If I need a 10-computer cluster to run something computationally intensive for a few days, cloud costs are so low nowadays that I can just pay for that out of pocket, never mind trying to figure out how to get it paid by a grant.

Getting a decent job in CS academia where you have some time and freedom to actually pursue research is not at all like winning the lottery. Especially if your focus is not just the top 20 universities and being a famous MIT professor with a big lab. There are many, many places with small to medium-sized CS departments, which will pay you a modest salary and let you do whatever you want.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#139

Post by santaclaus »

pseut wrote: post #131
santaclaus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!…

Pay raises after tenure are nowhere near what you see in the private sector. And people who get tenure at Cal or UT are exceptional. Do you think the smartest 30-40yos in Austin outside UT are only making 500k?

So let's pick a mid-range public research university with mandatory salary reporting. I'm going to go with bio medical engineering at UNC Chapel Hill [1]. These cats are breaking 100k at associate professor. This is also just salary. Most profs I know take in another 30-40k a year between consulting, testifying as experts in court, etc. While 130 +/- 30k a year isn't going to catapult you into the upper echelons of the American elite, a guaranteed gig for life at six figures with benefits is hardly a bad way to live. Could these guys make more money in private sector? Sure. But they certainly aren't hurting either.

[1] http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/02/24/1011452/university-em...

Re: Goodbye Academia

#140

Post by rwallace »

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…

There's a point beyond which "systematic hard work" becomes allocation by sacrifice, which is one of the most stupidly wasteful and destructive things an institution can do. If society is unwilling to adequately fund science - a very unwise decision - then it should at least allocate by random lottery instead of sacrifice and cut down on the waste of life.

As an individual, if you find yourself in an institution that's using allocation by sacrifice, get out. "I will work harder" a la Boxer from Animal Farm makes things worse not better.

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