101–110 of 116 posts
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.
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 yo…
> I recommend your spouse has a real job
It seems the spouse thing was what screwed it for you, not sure why you are suggesting it to others.
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I think this is a very simplistic view that only holds for a very few areas of study. The idea that computer simulation is an adequate substitute for scientific experimentation in the majority of the sciences is puzzling to me. Not that models don't help, but there's still far too much we either don't know how to model, or don't have the computational power to model (or we have both, but it would be more expensive th…
"The idea that computer simulation is an adequate substitute for scientific experimentation in the majority of the sciences is puzzling to me" Depends on the field. Even in natural sciences, there are several research areas not related directly with experimentation. I would say that, for a lot of areas, we have the bases covered, but what's needed are better tools to understand it. Protein folding is one area. The ph…
The barriers of entry to having information available are the lowest they've ever been and thus traditional models are being eaten by ad-hoc methods. And that is fine, requires reorientation though.
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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…
None of the management consultants I know live to screw people over either. It's worth noting, however, that many of them also believe that the world is on fire and they're not afraid if other people get soaked in the process of saving the damn thing. It's just that their solutions - like stack ranking, restructurings, org structures, etc. - tend to soak engineers like you, while your solutions - like open allocation…
Spot on! The reason for the angst is that typically management and consultants call the shots and the software developers are ignored.
It is incredibly frustrating when your company pulls in consultants, who have spent all of a week studying up on your company and industry, after ignoring staff who have been pointing out the key problems for months.
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Overhead, I'm on a fast-track 3yr EU PhD admittedly the US system is a different animal in this regard. Is it the only way to become an expert, of course not and I don't think anyone is making that argument. Yes I did read the article. So you're equating "job prospects" with "chance of being a tenured professor in a specific field", more usually it means the opportunity to enter a well-paying or otherwise respectable…
A fast track 3 yr phd would be really great and yes the US system would make that very difficult. I am equating those things under this context, if the majority of PhD grads are not becoming professors, I would like it if they "released" more of them sooner with something like your 3yr degree. I think I can somewhat quantify prestige if you look at where some CS professors got their PhD[1]. I do think science is meri…
I agree wrt differences between similarly ranked institutions. I'd say similarly that the variance within groups at a top 5 school is greater than the variance between groups when compared with slightly lower ranking institutes.
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None of the management consultants I know live to screw people over either. It's worth noting, however, that many of them also believe that the world is on fire and they're not afraid if other people get soaked in the process of saving the damn thing. It's just that their solutions - like stack ranking, restructurings, org structures, etc. - tend to soak engineers like you, while your solutions - like open allocation…
"It's just that their solutions - like stack ranking, restructurings, org structures, etc. - tend to soak engineers like you, while your solutions - like open allocation or programmer's unions - tend to soak managers and consultants like them." Spot on! The reason for the angst is that typically management and consultants call the shots and the software developers are ignored. It is incredibly frustrating when your c…
Anyways, the solution isn't to complain. It's to become CEO, or management, or wherever the decision-making power rests, and then listen better than average executive does. This is behind the "software is eating the world" thesis and many of the fortunes that have been made in the last 20 years; the extreme cluelessness of decision-makers has created a number of exploitable market opportunities that you can attack with persistence and better information.
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Another option, at least in the United States if you're a citizen, is to do contract work for the Department of Defense. Step 1: Acquire STEM Ph.D. Step 2: Get a job with a DoD contractor. Step 3: Profit! A short look at job options in academia disabused me of pursuing that option. Working twice as hard for half the pay? No thanks.
I think you forgot: Step 1.5: Drop ethics.
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It is basically impossible to do life sciences research outside of an academic or industry lab, and almost no academic lab will take on someone who is not a student or post-doc. An individual outside of academia would be unable to purchase supplies due to supplier restrictions, would lack access to journals without piracy, would have no access to expensive required analytical equipment, and would be unable to front t…
>While it's true that progress can be made from a simulation stand point, licenses to these software packages are enormously expensive. Can you specify which software you're referring to? For many life science sub-disciplines, there are an increasing number of either open source or low-cost competitors.
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>While it's true that progress can be made from a simulation stand point, licenses to these software packages are enormously expensive. Can you specify which software you're referring to? For many life science sub-disciplines, there are an increasing number of either open source or low-cost competitors.
We use finite element analysis suites in our lab such as Ansys for simulation, and the licenses run into the thousands of dollars per year.