61–70 of 74 posts
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> And that's before factoring in the cost of college now. Which brings us to the next question: can a modern college loan be repaid on typical academia pay?
No.
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All reasource extraction. Tourism. Financial services (tied to jurisdiction). Much of the defense industry. Health care. Live entertainment. Hospitality (hotels). Transport. Infrastructure construction and maintenance. Environmental services. Real estate. Space launch. Government. .... not everything fits into trucks.
Space launch can be done in many different places, but the higher the latitude the more fuel you have to burn. But even staying at the lower latitudes, there's still a bunch of popular launch locations to choose from. Real estate isn't worth much if your country's economy goes down the tubes.
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>> ...universities are increasingly run by administrators. Faculty have more service requirements and less autonomy than in the past. I teach one course at a local university. I have near-total academic autonomy but I also have six different bosses, none of which actually teach. A new term just started. I show up at the staff room to learn that I cannot get on the wifi or classroom podiums until I "accept" my latest…
> Interview processes and resume writing are more important to them than actual knowledge. No surprise there! Look how much content on these forums is about, implicitly or explicitly, gaming coding interviews.
Knowledge does count in a non-saturated market. Only where there are thousands of qualified applicants do the interviews count for so much. My new job required two interviews, and one of those was basically just about making sure i wasnt a felon. There were aptitude and medical checks, which took months, but none of the extensive "culture fit" sillyness.
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What's your field? In most hard science fields it's impossible to get a professorship if you take a break from academia. (Unless you were somewhere like Microsoft Research / IBM Research, which are basically parts of academia.)
Electrical engineering. It happens, especially if you worked in R&D and continued to publish over the years. One of the professors currently teaching me spent 5 years at a startup and came back to his alma mater as an assistant professor. He's an expert on botnets and quite active, so that might be an exception haha!
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Physical stuff needs transportation, rail, river, or ocean. Small, expensive, intensive things like processors Can be made wherever.
Well, after you invest the millions or billions to build the fabs and cleanrooms and other infrastructure needed to build them. That capital expenditure tends to location-lock that business pretty good.
And while it may be true that the investment in a fab locks that fab in place, the next fab can be again built wherever.
We need to experiment with different ways of organizing our scientific endeavors. Between postdocs forced to spin their wheels in the mud (or quit) for untold years, the replication crisis, generally misaligned incentives between doing the best work possible vs. advancing one's career, and of course, funding difficulties, I think it's clear that we aren't anywhere close to making the most of our opportunities to adva…
The current approach to science is pretty much screwed. In addition to the things you mention, everyone in academic science is silo'd and hyperspecialized, so there is very little cross pollination and new thought in a given domain. As a result, we're getting very good at picking apart the details of established domains, but very bad at coming up with big new hypotheses or different approaches. I really think industr…
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I'm trying to break away from commodity software dev roles for research positions. Is a MS/PhD advisable? Is this a better shot than trying to get people's attention via a neat project (is that even a thing)? Currently I'm working toward getting into an MS program for my own curiosity.
More than recommended, it is often required for research positions. Just be sure to pick a program that has a research topic that will be of interest. Easiest way to see if this is the case is by looking at previous students from that research group, and where they ended up.
Appreciate the advice.
When reading the title I interpreted this as being that scientists show signs of old age earlier. (aging faster). Due to stress or whatever it would have been. Quite the misinterpretation there :-)
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Electrical engineering. It happens, especially if you worked in R&D and continued to publish over the years. One of the professors currently teaching me spent 5 years at a startup and came back to his alma mater as an assistant professor. He's an expert on botnets and quite active, so that might be an exception haha!
Returning to alma mater and being an expert in a niche is an extreme exception, on the orders of magnitude down level.
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The current approach to science is pretty much screwed. In addition to the things you mention, everyone in academic science is silo'd and hyperspecialized, so there is very little cross pollination and new thought in a given domain. As a result, we're getting very good at picking apart the details of established domains, but very bad at coming up with big new hypotheses or different approaches. I really think industr…
All fine, but which industry would fund research in e.g algebraic geometry or black hole physics?