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Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

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Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#21

Post by ModernMech »

frakt0x90 wrote: post #7
xyzelement wrote: post #3

The story resonates but the conclusion doesn't. As an immigrant, I relate to what she says: feel pressure to work hard -> work hard -> achieve results -> benefit from those results. As far as I can tell, the system works. She got an opportunity, worked her ass off, produced a lot, and attained a great position/life as consequence. Those who chose an easier path, perhaps were less stressed but also didn't do or get as…

To some extent. My wife is about to finish her PhD. She's not even a top-level publishing academic and the amount of work she's had to put in for next to no pay (sometimes literally no pay) is insane. Hard work is great and but there is such a thing as too hard and I would argue academia takes advantage of some of the hardest working and most qualified people in the country (I'm in the US).

I don't know, it's a little bit different from the other side of the lectern. As a professor, I am mindful of keeping a work-life balance in my classroom. I try not to over-assign homework, and I'm mindful that students have lives outside of the classroom, so I'm flexible with deadlines and other minutia.

Even still, I'll have students emailing me for more work. They want to do research, get involved in competitions, write a paper, do independent studies. Every semester I have to approve overloads for students who want to take more classes. Individual institutions aren't forcing these students (who are often the most qualified of the qualified) to take on all this extra work. It's more like, the whole system is a race to the top for them. It's hard to disentangle that drive from industry and the economic system and blame it just on academia. After all, why do they want to take these extra classes? To be better job applicants.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#22

Post by [deleted] »

Swizec wrote: post #8
xyzelement wrote: post #3

The story resonates but the conclusion doesn't. As an immigrant, I relate to what she says: feel pressure to work hard -> work hard -> achieve results -> benefit from those results. As far as I can tell, the system works. She got an opportunity, worked her ass off, produced a lot, and attained a great position/life as consequence. Those who chose an easier path, perhaps were less stressed but also didn't do or get as…

As a fellow immigrant, can confirm, hard work works. That’s the main reason I came to USA – hard work didn’t feel like it would work back home. Nothing nefarious, just tall poppy syndrome and general environmental influence or multiplicative factor. In America, with a bit of luck, it feels like 1x hard work produces 2x result. 3x if you’re privileged. At home, it felt like 1x hard work would get 1.3x result. BUT! It…

[deleted]

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#23

Post by sircastor »

hourago wrote: post #10
CraigRo wrote: post #5

That's the tradeoff -- lifetime employment doing what you love should only go to those who are supremely dedicated and won't abuse the privilege. Part of her issue though is that academic research and academic writing are two different skills, and being a productive researcher essentially requires you to spend a lot of time writing papers. I would think that a grant that allowed scientists (especially) to hire dedica…

> lifetime employment doing what you love should only go to those who are supremely dedicated Should people give their lives for a profession? That seems prone to create unhealthy societies prone to conflict and cheating. In my experience self described meritocratic societies usually are just cynic nepotist societies. The children of the poor have to work their asses off to get much less that what the children of the…

>Should people give their lives for a profession?

I have recently begun to appreciate how much (in the US) we structure our entire existence around our jobs, and how we earn money. The puritan work ethic, extrapolated out across BS jobs encourages so many of us to identify as our jobs, and make that our sense of self.

It's ridiculous.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#24

Post by xyzelement »

bbor wrote: post #12
xyzelement wrote: post #3

The story resonates but the conclusion doesn't. As an immigrant, I relate to what she says: feel pressure to work hard -> work hard -> achieve results -> benefit from those results. As far as I can tell, the system works. She got an opportunity, worked her ass off, produced a lot, and attained a great position/life as consequence. Those who chose an easier path, perhaps were less stressed but also didn't do or get as…

If academia had a better effort/reward ratio pre-“X-level”, wouldn’t society reap the benefits of increased interest in those careers?

Maybe. But also it seems like there's some exponential benefits too. Who can produce the next earth shattering discovery: a 1000 researches who've only done one study, or one researcher who has done a 1000 studies? All that experience and context matters.

The woman who wrote the article is sought after today not because what she's produced over the past years, but because of what those efforts enable her to do next.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#25

Post by thwayunion »

cma wrote: post #16
thwayunion wrote: post #4

The author is too optimistic. There are going to be continuous waves of mass firings of tenured faculty in the 2030s and 2040s. The overwork and stress culture are going to get much worse over the next quarter century. The problem is structural, not cultural, and there isn't much that academics are going to be able to do in order to combat the problem. Specific to the USA, but also true in much of the west: 1. Revenu…

Why will academic R&D begin falling below the rate of inflation? I get that it can't outpace it forever without overtaking the economy.

> Why will academic R&D begin falling below the rate of inflation?

Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments. Academic R&D just doesn't have the constituency needed to save it from cuts.

I will be a bit astounded if NSF/NIH don't take nominal cuts during the debt ceiling negotiations, and they certainly won't get budget increases to keep up with inflation. Even defense spending, a massive sacred cow, might take a cut. There is just no way that base closures happen without DARPA et al. also taking it on the chin.

There may be one-time infusions into critical sectors here and there (CHIPS, probably energy, etc) and the STEM fields may benefit from a systematic defunding of humanities departments in certain states, but it's not enough to make up for secular headwinds.

The only saving grace for budgets might be if universities could create and capture the value that their R&D spend generates. But most research doesn't provide any value to society, and for the research that does capturing that value is often harder than creating the value in the first place. And even in that case, the change in management culture and workforce dynamics mean that the "relaxed tenured professor" is quickly going extinct.

The only thing academic hustle will get you in the 2030s and 2040s is a relatively low-paying job that requires even more hustle.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#27

Post by subroutine »

The only way to undo the culture of overwork for academic professors, is to increase bottleneck somewhere upstream (e.g. cut the number of PhD students in half). Any time you have a situation where 300 people are applying for the same job (as is common for ladder rank professorships at research universities), the people who end up getting those jobs will inevitably have been overworked. Imagine if less than 10% of people who went to med school ended up landing a job as a physician - that's basically the situation with professorships.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#28

Post by photochemsyn »

noorkersz wrote: post #17
xyzelement wrote: post #3

The story resonates but the conclusion doesn't. As an immigrant, I relate to what she says: feel pressure to work hard -> work hard -> achieve results -> benefit from those results. As far as I can tell, the system works. She got an opportunity, worked her ass off, produced a lot, and attained a great position/life as consequence. Those who chose an easier path, perhaps were less stressed but also didn't do or get as…

I think about this as another of those "industries" in which a lot people want to get into. Similar to art, animation, acting, screen writing, recording artist music; I suppose any creative industries will be like this. All these 'industries' become exploitative (possibly capitalism has something to do with how this happens. but let's stay on topic) So then, I consider this pattern of exploitation -- of "put up with…

Academic institutions are loaded up with people who are skilled at political manipulation and bureaucratic infighting, and who often have little real interest in their supposed field of research. For these types it's basically a game of getting in with the reviewers of grant proposals, rubbing elbows at scientific conferences, hiring technicians and postdocs and maybe some pHD students to generate a steady stream of papers, cozying up to university administration, attending dinners and so on.

It's gotten even worse since the corporations started getting exclusive licenses to university patents, now there's all the secrecy in those fields as well as the PIs start salivating about the possibility of getting a small percentage of the royalties on those patents.

Trofim Lysenko would have recognized the system, it's similar to the one he ran in the Soviet Union for decades.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#29

Post by Ultimatt »

photochemsyn wrote: post #19

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their en…

Plenty of research doesn't need millions to do. If you're a mathematician or almost any kind of theoretician or computational scientist you need a laptop maybe the odd bit of cloud time on a bigger blob of compute, in the case of mathematicians you might need chalk. The millions you do need to spend though are on private per-paper viewing of literature, thats the real mind killer. If universities just had alumni access to literature they would rapidly just become subscription library services for theory people! I can work like 3 months a year and finance literally the rest of my time on theoretical work. But only if I don't have to pay £60 to read enough of a paper to realise its a worthless piece of crap.

Re: Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it

#30

Post by fallingknife »

photochemsyn wrote: post #19

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their en…

Yeah, you have to either do work that other people are willing to pay you for or pay to have it done yourself. I'm not seeing a problem here.
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