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Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

yangxiao.cs.ua.edu

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Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#101

Post by eirikbakke »

williamDafoe wrote: post #28
nritchie wrote: post #23

What he says is still correct for academics. There are too many candidates for too few positions. The pay is lousy. The hours are long. You don't really get to follow you best creative instincts. You spend an inordinate amount of time writing grants. Teaching, particularly pre-meds, can suck. Now with Trump, the problem has only been compounded. That isn't to say that there are no non-academic jobs for PhDs that can…

The oversupply has extended from phds down to bachelor's degrees. With 37% of Americans getting bachelor's degrees it doesn't mean anything anymore and is wasteful overtraining. I'm no Trumper but somebody has to stop the greedy life-wasting that academics have created by overfunding a lot of stupid duplicate research and excessive college educations by people who never have an impact...

Nations with high GDP tend to be service economies. Service professions tend to require good reading and writing skills, and often a college-level specialization. (No need for PhDs, though, except for scientists.)

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#103

Post by monkeyelite »

cryptography wrote: post #84

Here's what nobody talks about: the author was RIGHT about the structural problems. But completely wrong about the solution. The PhD glut? Real. The postdoc treadmill? Absolutely real. The funding crisis? Still here. But here's what changed: The same skills that make you survive a PhD—deep research, systems thinking, hypothesis testing, data analysis—became the EXACT skills the market desperately needs. 2025 reality:…

This is absolutely true. And the mistake I see from PhDs who want to switch into industry, is looking for work around the exact subject they did their research on. Rather they need to identify a useful industry area and demonstrate how their research skills give them an edge in that new area

It’s not hard to do but you have to let go.

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#104

Post by phillipharris »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #93
TrackerFF wrote: post #82

Looking back, we only had two guys in our class that went for Ph.D - both ended up doing a Ph.D in ML, coming from electrical engineering. This was back when ImageNet changed the scene. Both were extremely sharp. One of them ended up leaving for industry after 5 years postdoc, the other publishes like a machine, had stints at some really prestigious schools (Stanford, CMU) - but as far as I can find, still postdoc 10…

> still postdoc 10 years after getting his Ph.D I think this is just a matter of what position you want. A classmate of mine wrote one paper on machine learning (he basically barely know how to run the Python to train some ancient neural net), did a short 1 year postdoc with his advisor and got a job as a professor at some no-name university in Japan. I'm sure your classmate could get a professorship somewhere if he…

Was he Japanese, or fluent in Japanese?

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#105

Post by phillipharris »

cryptography wrote: post #84

Here's what nobody talks about: the author was RIGHT about the structural problems. But completely wrong about the solution. The PhD glut? Real. The postdoc treadmill? Absolutely real. The funding crisis? Still here. But here's what changed: The same skills that make you survive a PhD—deep research, systems thinking, hypothesis testing, data analysis—became the EXACT skills the market desperately needs. 2025 reality:…

Is this LLM written?

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#106

Post by throwaway173738 »

binary132 wrote: post #50
harimau777 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democratic socialism, also called social democracy, has been dramatically more effective than America's late stage capitalism. The heavily unionized capitalism that we had in the decades after WW2 also worked much better than our present system.

Someone should do the super duper hard work of figuring out what it was exactly that changed and made that stop working.

Read my lips: no more taxes!

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#107

Post by cozzyd »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #78

I did my Ph. D. between 1998 and 2003. I did not regret doing that but after one year as a post doc I left the academic world for one simple reason: I realized the career paths were limited to two options I did not like: option 1) try to shoot for a tenure position somewhere via a long series of post doc positions. Expect to be mostly busy managing postdocs and researchers and lobbying for funding by the time you get…

There are other paths, though they are somewhat more narrow and precarious. I'm research faculty at a University, for example. I am dependent on getting enough grants to pay my (increasingly expensive, though not by silicon valley standards) salary, which is a bit scary, especially in the current funding enivironment, but I don't teach (though I do work with students doing research) and spent most of my time doing research. (Yes, I have to apply for and manage grants too, but that doesn't take THAT much time, as much as it is annoying). There are also national labs in various disciplines in many countries (e.g. in Germany you have DESY and various MPI's, in the NL there is ASTRON and NIKHEF and probably others I don't know about because I only know about my narrow field...).

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#109

Post by williamDafoe »

jltsiren wrote: post #77
prerok wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industries that want PhDs are quite limited IME. Very few companies are running their own research labs. I guess pharma would but in CS? Not one company in my country. I also don't remember seeing PhD requirement/advantage in who's hiring on HN. There may be, but they are for sure rare. In my country, in some job positions, a company is also required to give higher salaries to PhDs, so they reject such candidates bec…

CS is an outlier, as most software jobs require relatively little formal education. STEM in general is not as forgiving. In many sciences, your primary job options are teaching and research. And if you are going to do research, employers generally expect a PhD. Physics is probably the most extreme case, as it's common to see physics departments award one PhD for every three bachelor's degrees.

When last I looked there were three physics faculty in the United States for every two PhD students. That's because there just aren't any industry jobs for physics PhDs. Assuming a 40-year career, that means one job every 13 years for those two PhDs (one graduating every 3 years) to compete for - so a 1 in 4 chance of getting any physics job! Which is completely insane it's a lucky thing there are trillions of computer science jobs for these unemployed physicists to take - and take them they sure do!

Re: Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

#110

Post by paloblanco »

As someone who is 12 years out from completing a PHD in chemical engineering, this hurts to read today. Because it's so true.

I was a great student who became a middling researcher. I come from a privileged background - my younger sibling has already achieved greater success than I ever will, largely from choosing to follow the family business. I've poured tons of extra time outside work into honing my software and ml skills. While I do like what I do, and I am respected at work, that doesn't translate into promotions, success, or justification for dragging my poor wife all over the country. What a fool I was.

Ugh. I didn't need to read this today.

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