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Goodbye Academia

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141–150 of 217 posts

Re: Goodbye Academia

#141
post #92

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!…

Nobody gets tenure anymore. Most stay as associate professors, and make 60-70k.

It's usually a big deal when a professor fails to make tenure at a respectable university. I can think of multiple case studies at MIT and Stanford. Departments look bad when they are forced to drop promising talent.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#142
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>Could these guys make more money in private sector?

Yes, maybe 5-7 times as much. The people you're talking about are exceptional. (How is UNC mid-range?)

Re: Goodbye Academia

#143
post #88

My brother is leaving industry and going into the ivory tower later this year. He says that it's not just the DoD or the academy, its all government funding. He says the PhD is like a union card now. Lockheed just fired 4000 people[0] and NASA's average age is about 53 [1]. The entire DoD is aging and about to retire, with no-one in the 25-50 year old range, effectively. You'd think that they would then start hiring…

Um, FedGov tax revenue continually increases in current dollars, short downturns caused by the stock and housing bubbles notwithstanding. Tax revenue for 2013 is expected to be over 50% higher than 2003, for instance: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...

And tax revenue for 2018 is expected to be nearly 50% higher than 2013. The idea that tax revenue has somehow "decreased" is folly. It's just not being spent on what this particular special interest group (academics in science-related disciplines, it seems) would prefer.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#145
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 work." Agree (in that what you are saying makes sense. I don't have unfortunately (or maybe I should say fortunately) have personal experience in those particular job markets.) In any case they appear to be pyramid type systems of success [1](and for that matter athletics are…

It's called the tournament model. Big law firms are the classic example. A related theory is that technology and globalization has, and will, make more and more industries 'winner take all'.

I wonder if there are high-profile areas that don't follow that model currently? Given that we're on HN, startups are another example that comes to mind, with the entire VC industry based around trying to hit those rare 100x (or 1000x) exits, and plenty of people happily willing to work towards the small odds of being the one.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#146
post #108

My girlfriend right now is trying to figure out her postdoc in neuroscience. While I fully support her passion, the industry of academia seems completely irrational from almost every sense and full of traps. While the end goal of a tenured professor is exceedingly stable, getting there requires heroic acts of risk, going with the flow and instability that even when compared with the world of startups seems insane. Af…

> While I fully support her passion

This is not a criticism of you; I understand you're trying to do your best for someone you care about, which is laudable in itself; but there is something I think needs to be pointed out.

You did not say "I fully support her rational and well-informed career choice". Probably you would love to be able to say that but, well, it wouldn't be true.

There is a meme floating around at the moment that passion should be the deciding factor in career choice. Every society has its characteristic errors, and this seems to be one of the more harmful ones of 21st-century Western society. In reality, emotion should be an input, yes, but not the only or necessarily decisive one; our emotions evolved in a very different environment, after all, and they don't actually know very much about what's going on today so it's hardly surprising that they often make bad decisions.

Another common wording of this meme is "do what you love". Put that way, it's easier to see why it's bad advice for most people. If you love doing something, probably lots of other people do too, and they'll bid down income and working conditions in that field until your life degenerates into miserable slog.

The obvious reply is that if you end up in a job you hate, your life will also degenerate into miserable slog, which is true. You don't want to end up in a job you hate if you can avoid it.

The best career choice is usually somewhere in the middle: try for something you don't mind doing that will pay a decent wage for no more than forty hours a week without unreasonable demands. If your passion doesn't offer a realistic prospect of that, then it's probably time for reason to overrule passion.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#147
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wish we would stop referring to doing a PhD as "school" and the people doing it as "students". Call it what it is. They're junior researchers. I get that doing a PhD is also meant to be a training process, but working in industry also involves training and learning.

Kind of like "student" athletes, with presumably the same outcomes?

Re: Goodbye Academia

#148
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>Could these guys make more money in private sector? Yes, maybe 5-7 times as much. The people you're talking about are exceptional. (How is UNC mid-range?)

> Yes, maybe 5-7 times as much.

I do not think we are arguing here. My point is that good professors and good universities have a solid quality of life. Whether this reward system is the best for society in the long term is another question.

> How is UNC mid-range?

It ain't no Ivy.

Re: Goodbye Academia

#149

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 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). Al…

The financial situation in CS is not at all typical of academia. I'm not sure what your point is. Surely you're not suggesting that all academics should become CS academics?

Re: Goodbye Academia

#150

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…

The medical / pharma industry is not interested in cures for diseases; they only want lifelong treatments. True capitalists, seeking maximum profit.
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