Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 292 posts

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#121

Post by fergie »

arethuza wrote: post #69
fergie wrote: post #54

Its a bit unfair for professional football to be portrayed as an unreasonable aspiration pursued by naive working class kids. In actual fact the UK currently has around 4000 professional footballers, many of whom will play for a couple of years before moving on, and some of whom will play for a couple of decades. The UK currently has 14,000 professors the vast majority of whom will fight tooth and claw to hang on to…

Is that the UK or US definition of "Professor" though? I've noticed some UK universities have started using additional titles of Assistant/Associate Professor as well as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader.

If that is the case, I have over-represented the pool of professors, which strengthens the point

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#122

Post by VLM »

michaelt wrote: post #71
fergie wrote: post #54

Its a bit unfair for professional football to be portrayed as an unreasonable aspiration pursued by naive working class kids. In actual fact the UK currently has around 4000 professional footballers, many of whom will play for a couple of years before moving on, and some of whom will play for a couple of decades. The UK currently has 14,000 professors the vast majority of whom will fight tooth and claw to hang on to…

If you're pursuing pro football, don't you have to neglect your schooling to compete with the other players? If so, doesn't that close more doors than the academic route, where you can take your degree/masters/phd to industry any time you like?

There's always tradeoffs; serious academic pursuit means neglecting physical fitness and life goals (relationships and fun and such). Its easier to recover from time lost on the sportsball path than time lost on the academic path.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#123

Post by Robotbeat »

loarake wrote: post #98
yannis7 wrote: post #22

Academia nowadays is a high-tech bureaucracy; you are forced to churn out documents (papers) that need to cite other documents, and you're evaluated based on your position in the inter-document citation network. Then you have to write other documents (grant proposals) to grab money to write more documents (papers) by gaming the inner mechanics of some comittee. If partner-track investment bankers are overworked, depr…

-Working for a big tech company: you're writing code to deliver more ads to more people so the company can grow and deliver even more ads to even more people -Being a truck driver: you're moving boxes around -Being a professional hockey player: you and your team are moving really fast with a disk shaped object trying to put it in a net while people try to prevent you from doing it -Being a stock trader: making money…

Baker/cook: you're making food for people, either to nourish them or give them joy.

Farmer: you're making food for people.

Construction worker: you're making buildings for people to live or work or play in.

I think the problem is that many of our jobs are crappy, not that almost every human endeavor is equivalent to pushing paper around. Nurses, doctors, etc, are doing important work as well. The bad part is when it's 90% paper (common in healthcare in the US).

Find you a tech company that is actually building something physical, not just selling ads.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#125

Post by VLM »

The "STEM shortage" phrase means pay is too high for the very few STEM jobs; it means a shortage of income equality, not a shortage of warm bodies. There are obviously far too many warm bodies in STEM fields.

There is also a peculiar birth-death problem in academia where over the lifetime career of a professor, that prof should birth exactly one new qualified student to replace that prof. Otherwise we're dealing with a pyramid scheme. And one of the metrics of "success" of profs is how many qualified grad students they're birthing to provide short term cheap labor and long term hyper over supply of qualified candidates to be profs. We're merely seeing the breakdown of a pyramid scheme. One way to fix it is ban grad student labor. The undergrads, most of whom are going in to industry anyway, can be the lab rats. Or the prof can hire more postdocs.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#126

Post by turk184 »

yannis7 wrote: post #22

Academia nowadays is a high-tech bureaucracy; you are forced to churn out documents (papers) that need to cite other documents, and you're evaluated based on your position in the inter-document citation network. Then you have to write other documents (grant proposals) to grab money to write more documents (papers) by gaming the inner mechanics of some comittee. If partner-track investment bankers are overworked, depr…

I will state, however, that I did make some interesting contributions to knowledge and even helped invent some things we all see every day in modern web browsers. Unfortunately, my university never backed my group to patent any of those inventions and so the most we got out of them was conference talks and a few papers while others adopted the ideas we gave away for free and made a lot of money off of them. Not that I'm cynical, but damn I ate a lot of crappy food and even had $0 tax returns a couple of years there.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#127

Post by Cyph0n »

IanCal wrote: post #115
Cyph0n wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shows who did the most work in an unambiguous way. If you have never collaborated on a paper, you'll probably think this is not important, but in reality it is. Interestingly, some fields where alphabetical order is used have started adding a note that explicitly shows who did how much work.

I think the problem is that it's really not that unambiguous. There are general rules to the order but it's not explicit, and being second author doesn't explain in any kind of detail what was done. I'm quite a fan of explicitly tagging authors for what they did. That way you avoid deciding whether the person who did the stats did "more work" than the person who did the code, etc.

Explicit tagging is the best option, yes, but contribution-based is significantly better than just alphabetical.

Typically, the first author did most of the intellectual work. Rarely if ever would the first author be a person who did a lot of practical work but little to no intellectual work.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#128

Post by IanCal »

Cyph0n wrote: post #127
IanCal wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is that it's really not that unambiguous. There are general rules to the order but it's not explicit, and being second author doesn't explain in any kind of detail what was done. I'm quite a fan of explicitly tagging authors for what they did. That way you avoid deciding whether the person who did the stats did "more work" than the person who did the code, etc.

Explicit tagging is the best option, yes, but contribution-based is significantly better than just alphabetical. Typically, the first author did most of the intellectual work. Rarely if ever would the first author be a person who did a lot of practical work but little to no intellectual work.

I agree it's largely better than nothing, though there was that paper recently that got pulled because the authors couldn't agree on the ordering of the names.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#129

Post by aswanson »

ptero wrote: post #101
hyperbovine wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... you work 80 hours per week and make less than ... I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry. To answer your (friends') question, because the work is more interesting and I make plenty of money as it st…

I think work hours and salary have a bimodal distribution, driven by tenured / non-tenured status. My experience is in theoretical math/physics -- I got my PhD but decided not to stay in academia; there are pros and cons to both options. IME most tenured professors have to work significantly less than others for the same salary (those who work more mostly do it because they like working with grad students, not becaus…

Was your original plan to become a professor? If so, why did you change course?

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#130

Post by ska »

disinterred wrote: post #29
chriskanan wrote: post #6

The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years. When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wan…

When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all. I knew a history professor that would come into the university for his 1 or 2 classes per week and then would go home for the rest of the day…

    When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.
This is just laughably untrue. Sure, we may be able to dig out examples of tenured professors doing the minimum they can get by with. But you can find rare examples in pretty much any profession - the point is that they are rare.

Pretty much all the tenured professors I know well work their asses off - and due to area of expertise, many of them could make 2x - 5x salary in industry but aren't interested.

Post reply on HN