Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010) • Hacker News Board

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#81

Post by abecedarius » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 6:27 AM UTC

pjlegato wrote: post #31

The root problem is shown in this graph[1]. Simply put, since the 1960s, expanded funding for higher education in the US has vastly increased the supply of PhDs, while the number of job positions open for professors has not significantly increased. "PhDs issued" grows exponentially (since each professor can issue PhDs to multiple students), but "job offers" grows only linearly. This supply and demand imbalance tilts…

I don't know, but I wonder if having so many students here on a visa and hoping to immigrate is one of the main factors. (I'm not against immigration, I'm saying the visa can create a nasty power imbalance against the worker.)

After all, a near-steady-state academic job market is not new these last decades, labor markets should equilibrate unless there's some kind of barrier, grad students are heavily foreign-born https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_born_scientists_and_en..., and many of them hope to immigrate (same source). What changes to the rules would improve the bargaining position of both native and foreign-born workers? (At the expense of employers like this one.)

An alternative factor is people gambling they'll make it big, like musicians and athletes. This must be part of it, though professors aren't rock stars or drug dealers.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#82

Post by icebraining » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 7:24 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #76

anbende wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it is in no way involuntary. It's never against your will, and its generally not for no pay. It's just long hours for low pay. It's hard to see what you mean by involuntary here. It's a work for education arrangement, and the amount of work is large, but people are free to leave. It's a bad deal in a bad system, but its hardly involuntary.

There's another term for it: wage slavery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

Wage slavery is about all waged labour, not just those which involve low pay for long hours.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#83

Post by tigershark » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 8:10 AM UTC

throw_away_777 wrote: post #80

projektir wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. We have lots of discussions in other places about how passion may not be all that valuable. There are people who are very well suited towards a field but not terribly passionate. What exactly justifies this obsession with passion? Is it about passion being necessary, or are passionate people just that much easier to exploit? 2. I'm sure they said that about rocket science, too. Of course, SpaceX is repeating all t…

> It doesn't matter what people think they're motivated by. This is a capitalist economy. If you don't care about money, then you don't care about the reality you live in, and, sadly, that's true for a lot of day-dreamy scientists. How money flows is important, and people being exploited is a form of malfunction of such an economy that should always be mitigated. This isn't really true - there are things other than m…

I really can't see how working 14 hours a day and over the weekend can make anyone happy. Apart from the doctors that will be paid very good money to help these poor guys to recover from the extreme burnout obviously..

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#84

Post by bobsil1 » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 11:59 AM UTC

sseagull wrote: post #56

yomly wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10/10 times I would rather scientists conducting nebulous research than crunching spreadsheets for a bank. The point is you have a pool of people who are talented and can do things that other people can't, they're contributing more to society than most and they're expected to do this for free.

I've always thought of it as the economy will always take advantage of people who enjoy doing something like this. Ie, If you love science, you may be willing to take a lower wage. Eventually, it becomes very exploitative, with long hours and lower wages "just because" it's something you enjoy (even though it is quite beneficial to society). I wonder if there is a term/concept for this in economics or sociology. I've…

Also true in gaming salaries. Psychic/compensatory rewards?

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#85

Post by x1798DE » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 7:56 PM UTC

sseagull wrote: post #26

x1798DE wrote: post #6

From what I can tell, this is much more common in synthetic labs than physical or analytical labs. I think most of the physical chemists I knew in two different universities worked fairly normal hours, the labs were mostly empty on nights and weekends.

Computational chemist here: I agree. I still put in long hours sometimes, but my "lab" is just one ssh away, so hours actually in the office are a bit flexible.

That may certainly be true, but I wasn't just talking about in-office hours - the labs I'm talking about were hardware type labs (instrumentation, laser labs, that sort of thing). It's possible everyone was just going home to do data processing, but I got the impression that people worked maybe 40-60 hours/week mostly depending on what their teaching load was like and whether there were unusal time-sensitive demands on their experiments.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#86

Post by dnautics » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 8:38 PM UTC

sndean wrote: post #66

dnautics wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life. I actually think that is an incorrect myth. You can have a social life, you just have to pick social activities that are compatible with the grueling schedule. For example, I took up social dancing, which meets with a regular weekly pattern, and I was able to plan my experiments around it. If you expect to have nonscientist friends that want to improm…

> You can have a social life, you just have to pick social activities that are compatible with the grueling schedule. This was something I was never able to find. Maybe it was just me trying to justify my social anxiety, but the alternative to being in the lab always seemed to be all-night benders or similar. Envious you were able to find something. I should've been more proactive.

I was lucky enough to a postdoc pull me aside and say, "look you need to not be that guy" and pointed to another postdoc that was... embarassing. Scared the shit out of me. Up till that point in my life all of my social engagements had been handed to me on a platter (high school, and esp. college), and although I'm a social person, it was very good rude awakening to tell me that I had to work for what I wanted in life.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#87

Post by dnautics » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 8:42 PM UTC

projektir wrote: post #67

dnautics wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, when you do that, the second post-doc does the enzyme work, and doesn't notice one little thing that the first post-doc does that messes up the experiment, 30% of the time. It's like why do hospitals make doctors and nurses pull long shifts? One of the major sources of errors is handoff error, where passing a patient from continuous care by one person to another results in loss of experiential knowledge accumul…

Yet we have a movement toward shorter hours for hospital staff right now due to all the errors committed by overworked people and burnout issues. Expecting mere humans to keep track of logistical things is already a mistake - use computers, use checklists, etc., medical issues due to expecting a human to remember things is already a problem. It's not like these policies are chosen by nurses themselves, they're chosen…

16 hours is shorter than the past. I mean your exploitation rhetoric is very facile. For what it's worth, I think there are more postdocs exploiting the system than get exploited by the system. My personal feeling is that the median postdoc is worth negative science.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#88

Post by dnautics » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 8:46 PM UTC

projektir wrote: post #68

dnautics wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say nobody can do that is overgeneralization. Some people can (A surprising number of scientists are ultramarathon runners). But also, a lot of people going through the scientists do wind up mentally damaged, and many of them become PIs.

I believe it's extremely harmful for science to assume that the only people who can contribute meaningful science are those that a) put up with awful work conditions and b) can be ultramarathon runners. You don't see a problem with that selection process? Does that correlation not alarm you? May want to consider how many people would not have survived that kind of environment.

I think you're missing the deep cynicism there. I don't think the stress or long hours can be done away with, but there are ways that the reward can be made worth it. I don't think that the monetary situation can be changed by fiat. The problem there is that there is an oversupply of labor, and trying to wave a magic wand to fix (monetary) compensation without recognizing the supply/demand curve is going to cause problems: Namely, that the demand for scientists will go down, and the promotion of scientists will become increasingly arbitrary. Instead of getting better scientists, we'll be paying a smaller number of bad scientists more money.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#89

Post by cshimmin » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 10:44 PM UTC

tigershark wrote: post #83

throw_away_777 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't matter what people think they're motivated by. This is a capitalist economy. If you don't care about money, then you don't care about the reality you live in, and, sadly, that's true for a lot of day-dreamy scientists. How money flows is important, and people being exploited is a form of malfunction of such an economy that should always be mitigated. This isn't really true - there are things other than m…

I really can't see how working 14 hours a day and over the weekend can make anyone happy. Apart from the doctors that will be paid very good money to help these poor guys to recover from the extreme burnout obviously..

Just take the amount of time you spend per week on hobbies (whether that's reading hn, watching TV, whatever) and add that the the amount of hours you work at your "normal" job. Then you'll understand how (many) scientists can be pretty happy working 12-14 hours a day.

Re: Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)

#90

Post by projektir » Sun, Oct 02, 2016, 10:56 PM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #88

projektir wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's extremely harmful for science to assume that the only people who can contribute meaningful science are those that a) put up with awful work conditions and b) can be ultramarathon runners. You don't see a problem with that selection process? Does that correlation not alarm you? May want to consider how many people would not have survived that kind of environment.

I think you're missing the deep cynicism there. I don't think the stress or long hours can be done away with, but there are ways that the reward can be made worth it. I don't think that the monetary situation can be changed by fiat . The problem there is that there is an oversupply of labor, and trying to wave a magic wand to fix (monetary) compensation without recognizing the supply/demand curve is going to cause pr…

I'm just suspicious, because I've seen the "we NEED to work this many hours" argument so many times, in so many different fields, in so many different situations that I generally suspect it to be a reflexive response rather than a real reason. There's a giant propaganda machine out there running right now to convince everyone that hard work is the purpose of mankind.

The only situations I've seen where this was actually true is some extremely esoteric ones like certain military occupations and some emergency services. Even then, a lot of the time you can still use shifts, or reorganize the system entirely.

In fact, an oversupply of labor should have made the time problem evaporate. I've seen what some students waste their time on sometimes and it made me seriously scratch my head. I think part of the problem is that nobody is really looking for good labor, which is why there's so much for it. You're not going to get "special forces" people here, like Musk likes to pretend, because that number is so low they have other things to attract them. You'll get people who lost their self-respect somewhere and who will sit pointlessly for too long before they realize how much time they're wasting, burn out, and leave. They're often looking for people who will agree to sit there 24/7 and be the professor's little servants, rather than actually trying to screen for scientific ability. People who are actually as amazingly good as everyone claims scientists should be prefer to work on their own terms, they would never allow someone to boss them around and put time constraints.

There's an oversupply of labor, but I think that oversupply is already not very high quality at this point due to the fact that you are treated better and paid more in private industries. So, I disagree with you, treating people better would actually result in better people going back in and some work actually getting done, and treating people better, as in, paying them more and being more cognizant of their time, would also put an incentive on the payers to be careful with what they throw their money on so they're not going to think it's OK to waste a PhD's time to go grocery shopping (professional housekeeping is a thing, if you want some of that, maybe hire some. Oh, too expensive? Yeah, that's how much you're underpaying the PhD).