Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by mattkrause » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:20 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #120

mattkrause wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone posts this glib comment every time academic careers are discussed. It's true, and yet harder than you'd think. Suppose you know that only 1 in 10 PhDs in your field end up in a tenure track job. A decent fraction of your classmates are interested in industry--or never want to see the inside of a lab again. Maybe this reduces the competition down to one in six or seven. You're in a pretty good program, definit…

I enjoy providing mentorship and helping out younger developers, but I certainly don't have any responsibility to do so.

That seems a little different.

PhD programs are meant to be training programs and universities repeatedly have argued that it is not an employer-employee relationship, but a mentor-mentee one. If that's true, I think the mentors have a bit more responsibility even where it cuts against their own self-interests (e.g., tell someone that this is not the career for them and risk losing out on their labor).

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

#142

Post by jessriedel » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:27 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #125

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…

Why would we design a system where only eventual professors have PhDs?

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

#143

Post by BeetleB » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:30 PM UTC

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…

I don't know about theoretical physics, but math professors usually have almost no burden to produce grant money. My observation is the same - they are very relaxed.

In my school, the physics department was part of the College of Engineering. They had the usual 80 hour weeks because their evaluations depended on the amount of grant money they brought in.

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

#144

Post by BeetleB » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:34 PM UTC

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.

If you're in a decently good school, this is not true.

>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.

In both universities I went to, the only way to reduce teaching loads was to pay your way out of it. And the only way professors would do that would be to get grant money to supplement the lost income.

As for the history professor making $100K, what is the COL in that area? In my university, I just looked it up, and they average about $75K (which, to be frank, is decent for the little work they do).

In any case, most of the 80 hour/week work is in engineering and science...

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

#145

Post by at-fates-hands » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:36 PM UTC

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…

> I think work hours and salary have a bimodal distribution, driven by tenured / non-tenured status.

After I got my masters in Anthropology, I had been planning on a career in academia. At the time (early aughts), there was a huge backlash against tenure and there was a big movement trying to do away with it completely and it really turned me off. I subsequently left the field altogether in large part to the idea of having to "prove" my tenure, when, at the time, it was one of the few things which gave professors some stability in their role at a given university.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:41 PM UTC

rahimnathwani wrote: post #117

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 met an amateur comedian recently who mentioned he's almost done with his PhD, but will never make back the lost earnings from the time he's invested. Whilst he talked, part of me was thinking 'man, if only your PhD were in machine learning'. I didn't say it out loud, though. It turned out he's about to complete a PhD in machine learning, but doesn't want to work in Silicon Valley, or for a big company, or in financ…

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by wbl » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

raister wrote: post #51

chriskanan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other areas of computer science, first author counts for a lot. It indicates a person did the majority of the implementation work, probably wrote the first draft of the paper, etc. Typically the last author is the PI that came up with the idea, mentored the first author, and funded the work. The contributions of those in the middle are less well defined. In CS theory (and math), they go by alphabetical author orde…

This is changing, thankfully. First authors should be the ones leading the paper, according to contributions. Some journals are asking for the actual contributions performed by each author, which I think is very good. Alphabetical order should be banned, period.

Littlewood and Hardy disagree. Ranking/attributing contributions to a joint paper in mathematics is very hard especially when the results grow out of conversations between all of the authors.

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

#148

Post by ptero » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

aswanson wrote: post #129

ptero wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Absolutely, for the first 2 years. I suspect 3-6 years of postdoc plus 3-5 years at tenure track before getting tenure was a significant burden. And all that is not a guarantee of success. Maybe I was also tired at being inside academia and wanted to see what life outside was.

I am not sure, but I do know that at some time I knew I did not want to stay in academia. And when I understood this the first thought was "why did not I realize this a year ago"? Nothing wrong with academia, I just chose a different path.

EDIT: On some thought the mentality "if you did not stay in academia you are a loser" probably delayed the above realization. It was very prevalent.

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

#149

Post by mattkrause » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

hobofan wrote: post #40

mattkrause wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone posts this glib comment every time academic careers are discussed. It's true, and yet harder than you'd think. Suppose you know that only 1 in 10 PhDs in your field end up in a tenure track job. A decent fraction of your classmates are interested in industry--or never want to see the inside of a lab again. Maybe this reduces the competition down to one in six or seven. You're in a pretty good program, definit…

The average age of a PhD student is 33 years and even at normal speed, no breaks/hurdles and starting right out of high-school, you are 25(?). Something about applying this babysitting attitude of "somebody needs to tell them" to highly educated individuals of that age just doesn't sit right with me. If I were a PhD supervisor, I would probably find it ridiculous that one of my responsibilities would be "pointing peo…

That's not really what I meant.

While it would be nice to get more support finding non-academic jobs, you are right that 1) other resources exist and 2) they don't know much about it anyway.

However, a professor should be able to give a trainee an assessment of their own academic prospects: based on your current record, are you part of the 10% of people who land jobs right now? If not, what would help you get there, or is it more of an issue with your aptitude/temperament? Career Services can't do this: they don't know you from Adam and aren't career academics anyway.

You can certainly ask for this--and I did (with varying degrees of effectiveness), but I really feel that if you're (claiming to be training) someone, you owe them honest and regular feedback on how that training is going.

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

#150

Post by wiz21c » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:46 PM UTC

bpicolo wrote: post #139

wiz21c wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm looking at anything involving computational geometry; and if I have spare time, ethics :-)

Have you considered bootstrapping the field of computation ethics ;)

I guess it already exists a bit (Asimov's laws or robotics ?) but I'm afraid no one is interested.