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As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

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Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#121

Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles, with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role? Moreso, post doc'ing for the wrong professor can ruin your career, why risk that eithe…

"There's a shortage of Lamborghinis!" "Oh? At which price point?" "At the $4000 price point! It's a travesty!"

That is a perverse misreading of the original comment.

Calling a livable wage and fair working conditions a Lamborghini is not applicable.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#122

If you pay much lower than the industry and only give people temporary positions, it's not surprising people go elsewhere when they can. The solution is also quite obvious...

I hate the trivialization of this. The solution is not obvious. Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? At least in my areas of science (chemistry), most of this money comes from grants, which comes from the NIH, DOE, or NSF depending on the project. Ultimately it comes from taxpayers, and portioned out by Congress. So the solution is either to get Congress to really care about this (…

The obvious solution is to have fewer graduate students. Why should one professor train N replacements, if the field isn't expanding?

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#123

> Postdocs in general aren’t paid well Sounds like everyone understands the issue... so why don't they respond by meeting the market price? If you want to buy something like a tissue sample for an experiment in a lab then you pay the market price. You wouldn't think to offer 20% of the market price and then be puzzled when nobody will sell it to you - you just pay the going price, and it's part of the cost of doing r…

The ones in control of money and the ones in charge of running their lab and hiring postdocs are not the same people. If you can't hire a postdoc for shitty salary, then that shitty salary can be repurposed for something else. The former won't ever budge for the latter until the whole system collapses. And even then, I dread that they will just leave it in ruins.

I don't think that is accurate.

Most post-doc are funded through soft money (i.e., grant money or other non-earmarked department money) to a principal investigator. The PI wrote the grant and budgeted for post docs. Meaning that they set the salary for the postdoc in advance at the time that they wrote the grant (most grant applications I was part of required approval from the University's finance office before submission). They can increase the postdoc salary if they want.

The problem is that if they pay more for a postdoc, that money will need to come out from something else and usually that's from other personnel expenses (as most funding agencies have set amounts that they will allocate to spending categories, so you cannot propose a grant with only personnel expenses for example). That means that increasing the postdoc pay will either (1) reduce the number of postdoc that can be hired on any specific grant or (2) reduce the amount of compensation that a PI will get from the grant. You can see how both of those option are a non-starter as (1) will reduce the manpower on the grant, leading to less productivity, and a reduction in likelihood of future funding and (2) is just a non-starter as most PIs feel like they should get something out from getting a grant (i.e., they don't do research just because is fun).

Plus, there is a close to infinite supply of recent PhDs in pretty much any field that cannot get a faculty position and that will apply for postdocs, so there is really no market incentive to increase base postdoc pay.

Note, I have only applied to NSF grants so other funding agencies (i.e., NIH) might have different budgetary requirements. Private foundations are the Wild West of funding and each one has its own requirements.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#124

Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles, with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role? Moreso, post doc'ing for the wrong professor can ruin your career, why risk that eithe…

> a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role

Where do you get these numbers from? This is not at all like that in Europe. A postdoc gets (say, in France) 30k per year, doing a calm, interesting job and paid travel to a couple of conferences per year, with almost total freedom to choose their daily schedule. This is not a high salary, but it is certainly livable and quite above the median of the country. A 150k salary is nearly out of reach for even quite senior developers, and nonsensical for "junior python developer roles".

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#125
post #41

PhD student looking forward to graduate and move on. I think one can make a decent living with a German salary, which is still 50% lower than an industry position, the reason why I want to leave is the insane competitiveness and inherent up-or-out structure of academia. If I could have a permanent position with the same salary I currently get I would seriously consider staying.

The lack of almost any permanent positions aside from full professorships in the German research landscape is truly ridiculous. What does that get you? A whole bunch of inexperienced PhD students with one professor at the top who cannot possibly find the time to adequately supervise them all / steer the research in useful directions.

Same in Switzerland. In the UK (where I did my PhD) it was quite a bit better imho.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#126

Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles, with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role? Moreso, post doc'ing for the wrong professor can ruin your career, why risk that eithe…

> a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role Where do you get these numbers from? This is not at all like that in Europe. A postdoc gets (say, in France) 30k per year, doing a calm, interesting job and paid travel to a couple of conferences per year, with almost total freedom to choose their daily schedule. This is not a high salary, but it is c…

I think this is very much a uniquely American article and comment. I believe in many other nations the situation is different on both sides. Postdocs are treated different and get more pay, junior developers get paid less.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#127

> Postdocs in general aren’t paid well Sounds like everyone understands the issue... so why don't they respond by meeting the market price? If you want to buy something like a tissue sample for an experiment in a lab then you pay the market price. You wouldn't think to offer 20% of the market price and then be puzzled when nobody will sell it to you - you just pay the going price, and it's part of the cost of doing r…

The ones in control of money and the ones in charge of running their lab and hiring postdocs are not the same people. If you can't hire a postdoc for shitty salary, then that shitty salary can be repurposed for something else. The former won't ever budge for the latter until the whole system collapses. And even then, I dread that they will just leave it in ruins.

One simple reform is to train fewer graduate students. Then the job prospects for post-docs will improve as the supply of potential professors is reduced.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#128
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That particular argument also falls flat, at least with the given information, since there have been plenty of industry partners in defining the USB specs. My guess is that if you want to be paid full-time to work on USB, you'll probably find more (and better-paid) positions in industry.

Yeah, but outside a borderline prodigy or no lifing to get the knowlegde and experience or a lucky recruitment at some university event, I doubt the industry was letting fresh new grads work on something like the USB spec.

There may have been junior people on the teams at the various companies like Intel that developed and implemented the spec. No, those junior people probably weren't really developing the spec. (The person at Intel who is most credited for the spec with his team was already pretty senior and later became an Intel Fellow.) I also sort of doubt a university group in Utah was a major contributor--although I could be wrong.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#129
post #19

> Postdocs in general aren’t paid well Sounds like everyone understands the issue... so why don't they respond by meeting the market price? If you want to buy something like a tissue sample for an experiment in a lab then you pay the market price. You wouldn't think to offer 20% of the market price and then be puzzled when nobody will sell it to you - you just pay the going price, and it's part of the cost of doing r…

If you want to buy something like a tissue sample for an experiment in a lab then you pay the market price Academic researchers often pay either zero or get a massive discount on all kinds of stuff (hardware, software, data, samples etc.) for their research that people in private sector pay a huge premium for.

> Academic researchers often pay either zero...

Not completely accurate. Every time you get a grant, your institution get a percentage of it to pay for indirect costs. These costs include office space, office personnel, and other expenses that the grant doesn't pay for directly. So, if you are getting "free" stuff from the department closest, it is very likely that your (or some else's) indirect expenses are paying for it.

Overhead percentages are set by each institution. My current one is set at 54%, meaning that for each $1 of award, I get to keep 64 cents and the university takes 36 cents (more or less).

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#130

Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles, with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role? Moreso, post doc'ing for the wrong professor can ruin your career, why risk that eithe…

> a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role Where do you get these numbers from? This is not at all like that in Europe. A postdoc gets (say, in France) 30k per year, doing a calm, interesting job and paid travel to a couple of conferences per year, with almost total freedom to choose their daily schedule. This is not a high salary, but it is c…

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