Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board • Hacker News Board

Re: Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board

#71

Post by Dewie » Sun, Jul 27, 2014, 11:53 PM UTC

mililani wrote: post #26

Has anyone ever looked at how large some of these graduate STEM departments are by the number of students? When I decided to go back to grad school for maths, I realized that doing a Ph.D. would probably be fruitless. How did I determine this? I went to UC Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA, arguably the best math departments in the country based on the NRC rankings and AMS rankings, and counted up their graduate students.…

> I realized that doing a Ph.D. would probably be fruitless. How did I determine this?

Well clearly it takes someone going to the best math departments in order to realize that within a hierarchical organizations wherein tenured employees can supervise a lot of grad students in the span of their career, only a few of those grad students can really get a job similar to their supervisor. Was this really a revelation?

Re: Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board

#72

Post by smeyer » Sun, Jul 27, 2014, 11:55 PM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #68

Estragon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you making that bet?

I could go to MBA school, become a McKinsey-type douchebag, and join the top VC firms at high levels. I'm 40 IQ points smarter than them. But I don't. Instead, I'm studying Haskell. On a Sunday night. Including all the random stuff I read just because I'm passionate about technology, I probably work 70 hours per week. (Much of that's self-directed and career-oriented; working more than 30-40 without a career payoff i…

I'm sure you're a great guy and just coming across negatively in this one comment, but you sound less pleasant than the vast majority of McKinsey people I've ever met. It's a bit odd in a comment complaining about consulting douchebags.

Re: Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board

#73

Post by smeyer » Sun, Jul 27, 2014, 11:58 PM UTC

munin wrote: post #58

nagrom wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A PhD in math does, however, require a motivated and interested supervisor. A supervisor who can tach you how to write papers, how to get them published, to tell you where you are wasting your time and to help you over the humps that may otherwise stop you. It needs a supervisor who can introduce you to others in the field, even if they live in other countries or on other continents! That may exist as a culture in Op…

> If the government decided to fund maths PhDs directly, they'd need a ready-made corpus of people who could decide who gets funding. They'd need people who have published and who have proved that they know what they're talking about. Government research grants already fund maths PhDs and this process (a corpus of people who decide who gets funding) is how NSF, DARPA, IARPA, etc hand out grant money. One problem is t…

>What for? I dunno, many places, the football team, padding the endowment, building new B-school buildings, hiring an army of mid-level administrators.

Are there really schools where the B-school is a net cost center rather than profit center? I thought it was more standard for the business school to be subsidizing other parts of the university.

Re: Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board

#74

Post by yen223 » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:17 AM UTC

iak8god wrote: post #17

Does anyone know what happened in Physics in the early 2000s? The number "Employed" spikes from ~30% to ~40% in a very short time span and then falls rapidly to ~20: http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/business/mon...

Speculation: Dot-com boom, followed by the dot-com crash affected everyone, including academia.

Re: Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board

#75

Post by michaelochurch » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:32 AM UTC

smeyer wrote: post #72

michaelochurch wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could go to MBA school, become a McKinsey-type douchebag, and join the top VC firms at high levels. I'm 40 IQ points smarter than them. But I don't. Instead, I'm studying Haskell. On a Sunday night. Including all the random stuff I read just because I'm passionate about technology, I probably work 70 hours per week. (Much of that's self-directed and career-oriented; working more than 30-40 without a career payoff i…

I'm sure you're a great guy and just coming across negatively in this one comment, but you sound less pleasant than the vast majority of McKinsey people I've ever met. It's a bit odd in a comment complaining about consulting douchebags.

I'm honest about what I am. I don't live to screw people over, in the way that management consultants do. (They invented the stack-ranking practices that destroyed a great number of technology companies, and that are directly responsible for the Enron calamity.) I'm also not trying to maximize my Niceness Score. The world is on fire and I'm not afraid if other people get soaked in the process of saving the damn thing.

Re: Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board

#76

Post by nsainsbury » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:36 AM UTC

mililani wrote: post #26

Has anyone ever looked at how large some of these graduate STEM departments are by the number of students? When I decided to go back to grad school for maths, I realized that doing a Ph.D. would probably be fruitless. How did I determine this? I went to UC Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA, arguably the best math departments in the country based on the NRC rankings and AMS rankings, and counted up their graduate students.…

Over on /r/math you hear this sentiment a lot from maths postgrads.

The recommendation you hear a lot on that board is that if you are doing a maths degree you should also study something else somewhat complementary (comp sci is a popular choice) and hope to find employment in that field. I had honestly at some point considered doing a Ph.D in Maths but upon further consideration - and realizing then that my future would likely involve low pay, excessive travel, low job stability, and a crushing amount of work - it just seemed like a very sad proposition.

Re: Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board

#77

Post by protonfish » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:54 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #22

HarryHirsch wrote: post #6

A big employer for chemistry PhDs that no one in the West has heard of is Wuxi Pharmatech, a contract research outfit in Shanghai. They do everything, synthesis, discovery, lead optimization, clinical testing, process development, formulation, the whole pipeline. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies stateside have turned into IP brokerages, if you think you have a promising target you buy a startup that has a compound…

> the short time horizon Wall Street demands Companies that sacrifice long term for short term profits will, assuredly, do poorly long term. Their stock price will decline. Investors will see this and will short the stock. The stock will have low P/E ratios. On the other hand, companies that sacrifice for the short term and invest for the long term will see high P/E ratios, as investors see that and go long on the st…

Few comments have made me want to downvote as much as this one. I still have another hundred or so points to go until I am allowed so I'll have to settle for explaining to you how much I disagree.

Your argument is a logical fallacy that I see a lot, but doesn't have a fancy Latin name. It is a combination of appeal to authority and circular reasoning so I'll give it a name right now: the Authority Circle. It has the form of:

"I believe X person/company/country is doing something dumb/bad/foolish."

"If it wasn't a good idea, they wouldn't be doing it."

This assumes that person X is smarter than you, therefore the fact that they are choosing to take an action is evidence that it is good. This is a lazy and unconstructive argument and you should be ashamed of yourself. (Unless you are a Wall Street shill doing PR spin. In that case, well done.)

So logically your argument is not well formed; what about factually? The behavior we see in investors is incredibly focused on short term gains and why not? There is no benefit to long term success to a public investor. Once the company (a small percentage of) their money is invested in flames out, they can simply invest in another company and drain them dry until it is time to bleed another one. (Hopefully unloading their stock to chumps along the way at the right time, before anyone realizes they are being sold a sick cow.) We know from history that unless government regulates the stock market, it is a short matter of time until the house of cards collapses. Today, the most long-lived publicly-held corporations are the ones where the CEO has the power to say "no" to intense investor demand for short-term gain. (We are waiting to see how long Apple can survive this now that Jobs is gone.) Everything we know tells us "yes, investors are indeed that stupid."

You have offered no new or useful facts or reasoning to this discussion. I give your comment a 0/10 for your unhelpful waste of everyone's time.

Re: Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board

#78

Post by protonfish » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 1:07 AM UTC

hyperbovine wrote: post #46

The economist types who ceaselessly churn out these doom-and-gloom articles about the PhD job market just kill me. Almost every single one unblinkingly equates success with salary. In my field postdocs pay 2-3x what you make as a grad student, while still giving you almost total flexibility to work on the things that interest you, with very little oversight. To a certain subset of people, this is far more attractive…

I discovered while working as a research assistant that the post docs made about the same amount as I did and less than the secretaries (they had a union.) During my child support hearing the lady at friend of the court gave me the best unintentional advice I ever received while explaining why I had to pay my ex-wife more than I could possible afford on my salary. She said "You are making much less than someone of your skills and experience should."

And so I was forced to change careers. Doing research was fun, but if you want to do it (or make pottery or be in a band) professionally, then I recommend your spouse has a real job.

Re: Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board

#79

Post by hyperbovine » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 1:20 AM UTC

DaveWalk wrote: post #67

hyperbovine wrote: post #46

The economist types who ceaselessly churn out these doom-and-gloom articles about the PhD job market just kill me. Almost every single one unblinkingly equates success with salary. In my field postdocs pay 2-3x what you make as a grad student, while still giving you almost total flexibility to work on the things that interest you, with very little oversight. To a certain subset of people, this is far more attractive…

In my field (life sciences), postdocs get paid about 40% more than grad students, and are required to pay into their benefits as they become official "employees" and not students. This, at least initially, puts them back close to the graduate salary. Yes, it does increase over time, to about 2x salary. It also plateaus there quickly. My question to you: assuming you are in this "certain subset of people," do you thin…

It may not surprise you to learn that I don't spend all that much time worrying over my "career path", or "earning potential", or lose any sleep whatsoever over what some hiring manager or recruiter makes of me. Despite this, money and employment has never even remotely been a problem. My broader point is that obsessing over these career metrics subscribes to a very narrow worldview of what constitutes success, and there are a great many people in this world who exist outside this paradigm who lead rich and fulfilling lives. You certainly don't get any such notions from articles like this one.

Re: Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board

#80

Post by WalterBright » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 1:22 AM UTC

protonfish wrote: post #77

WalterBright wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the short time horizon Wall Street demands Companies that sacrifice long term for short term profits will, assuredly, do poorly long term. Their stock price will decline. Investors will see this and will short the stock. The stock will have low P/E ratios. On the other hand, companies that sacrifice for the short term and invest for the long term will see high P/E ratios, as investors see that and go long on the st…

Few comments have made me want to downvote as much as this one. I still have another hundred or so points to go until I am allowed so I'll have to settle for explaining to you how much I disagree. Your argument is a logical fallacy that I see a lot, but doesn't have a fancy Latin name. It is a combination of appeal to authority and circular reasoning so I'll give it a name right now: the Authority Circle. It has the…

My post is not the conventional wisdom, hence I expect the downvotes. But hear me out.

I said investors, not an individual. There are a lot of professional investors who full time investigate a company, in fact Wall Street is full of them. Do I really believe that you (or I) am better informed about a company's future prospects? Why do you believe you are smarter than they are?

Consider (again) Amazon. Why does it have such a high P/E? That is hardly evidence of short term thinking. Why did Microsoft, for the last 10 years, have increasing profits and a shrinking P/E? I submit that investors were pricing the stock based on their estimation of the long term value of the stock.

A CEO once told me he was organizing his company around short term results, because "that's what Wall Street wants". The stock cratered shortly afterwards. He fooled nobody but himself.

Let's put it this way. Give us a list of stocks you believe are overvalued because foolish investors have bid the price up because of long term sacrifice for short term results. Eventually, the chickens must come to roost and the stock must collapse. So I must ask, have you shorted those stocks? Are you willing to bet your own money on being smarter than Wall Street?