It's harder than ever for young researchers to get initial grants.
The pay is seriously lagging industry. In many cases, the resources at your disposal are substantially larger in industry as well.
Meanwhile, universities are increasingly run by administrators. Faculty have more service requirements and less autonomy than in the past. Overhead expenses are higher than ever, as well.
Furthermore! Tenured faculty are hard to fire, or even force into retirement. They draw large resources even after they retire in pensions and emeritus status. So open faculty positions are constantly hard to come by.
Last year I made a move to industry, from a research position at a well regarded program. I multiplied my salary by a nice integer, and I had multiple job offers from fortune 500 tech companies and a few of the HFT hedge funds that users are familiar with on this website. I wouldn't have had a shot at a faculty position at anything that I would have considered a tier-1 research organization.
Don't get me wrong, I loved my time in academia and I was very well treated, relatively speaking. But I was absolutely at a point of diminishing returns where I would have floundered around like so many of my incredibly talented and hard working friends who are still postdocs/non-permanent staff at these institutions.
>> ...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 contract, which has yet to be sent to me. I taught the first class on my laptop wired (hdmi) to the projector and tethered to my phone. Too many people being paid to creating silly rules and pointless systems.
I'm starting a new job in another city next month (government). After explaining to my students that a different prof will cover the last half of the course they couldn't care less about the subject of my lecture. They wanted to hear about how I actually "got a real job". Interview processes and resume writing are more important to them than actual knowledge.
> Interview processes and resume writing are more important to them than actual knowledge.
This should be unsurprising. For many, many jobs, the actual knowledge requirements are dwarfed by the importance placed on interview skills and a polished resume.
Id say that these forums are dominated by people with too much time on thier hands, a group where the underemployed are probably overly represented.
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.
Your last point reminded me of some old days for me. I too taught as an adjunct when I was younger. I would try to bring industry insiders to visit for the Software Design course. Students loved these as well as sessions on how to get a real job. I was a bit surprised too.
There's a massive brain drain to look forward to in the next couple decades, especially in the US. Pretty much none of my best peers went in to a PhD program for many of the reasons you described. One of my roommates got his PhD in optical physics and is essentially living the life of a monk. Its so much easier to cash out for a pretty basic engineering role and get a lifetime (hopefully) of easy, stable income. Many skilled jobs are leaving the US (ie CGI leaving Hollywood for Canada and elsewhere) and political instability (ie immigration) is cutting out a big chunk of the upper quartile as well.
In addition, the average individual has most of their life decisions made for them via simple, accessible tools and the lower half has a fraction of the competence of their predecessors. I'd guess maybe 5% of my friends/peers spend any time reading. Maybe 60% over my friends outside of tech are seriously struggling financially.
Almost all of my coworkers are immigrants on O-1 visas and there's really nothing here for them long term, especially if they feel unwelcome. The moment another country provides a better offer, I bet 95% of them will go there instead. Probably many that are here now will go too.
On the other hand, the research salaries some of my friends are pulling in at the big companies are substantial. And everyone on this site knows what some of the premier software devs are pulling in. Similar dictomy in law, and I suspect many other fields.
This is why I'm currently obsessed with cyberpunk. There is a massive bifurcation happening in society right now. Haves and have-nots. Some who are reaping massive gains, and many who are barely getting by.
CGI, like the rest of the film/tv industry, will go where the money is best. There is nothing in film/tv production that cannot be loaded into a truck and shipped elsewhere overnight ... people included. Work is moving to canada for the tax credits but you'd be surprised at how many "canadian" productions are actually filmed overseas. TheBorgias was canadian. Versailles, filmed in france with brit actors, is supported by the canadian government and RBC (my bank) no doubt for some tax advantage. Even the first season of the Doctor Who reboot in 2005 was a joint production with the CBC. Check the credits. No matter where it is filmed, canada supports it.
> There is nothing in film/tv production that cannot be loaded into a truck and shipped elsewhere overnight ... people included.
Once you include people, how many other industries would be any different? Mining, tourism, oil drilling seem tied to a set location, but assembling something? Tech or not, seems you could just ship the people and parts anywhere.
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.
Space launch is positioned first on the basis of local infrastructure. It requires massive local manufacturing facilities and extensive range equipment. If orbital mechanics was the primary driver every pad would be on the equator and russia wouldnt launch much of anything.
Yes, but my point is, there are already many different launch sites around the world, many of them outside the US. The US does not have anything approaching a monopoly on space launches.
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.
India & China, where else? Here's a personal anecdote: my graduate supervisor retired a few years ago, and there was a reunion. His first students did extremely well, they were at places like Dow their whole lives. It went downhill from there, except for his last graduate student, who returned to China and started a contract research organization over there. The government with all its wisdom wouldn't issue him a visa, though.
The more I think about it, the more I come to the realization that academia isn't really a great place to be. Thankfully I'm at the start of my PhD and don't have a MS (I can drop out with the MS), so I'm not exactly stuck for the long run.
The thing is, I'd really like the option to "retire" as a college professor after a decade or so in industry. Having a PhD in hand from early on in my career will make that much, much easier.
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!
That is, of course, a very silly cultural thing they'd be better off without. My supervisor spent a decade in industry before returning to academia, and he's a pure mathematician/logician.
From my perspective as someone who's moved from academia (mathematics) to industry (driverless taxis) to startup founder (Overleaf), it felt to me like all of my transitions were one way only. Whilst I admit I'm not at the point of looking to go back into academia yet, I can't honestly see a path back.
Don't let me totally discourage you! Far from it, just be sure to have realistic expectations.
I absolutely loved my PhD work and I'm happy I did it. But I'm also happy I was careful to consider how this degree might help my employment down the line. Which it did. I've got an absolutely amazing research position that is well supported in the research arm of a BigCo now. I wouldn't expect that the pay is optimal versus other paths, but I'm well compensated, the work is stimulating and I'm highly autonomous.
And as you implied, to is absolutely possible to come back to Academia after spending time in industry.
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.
This is probably one of those things that varies a lot based on what your field is and how close to academia you stay while in industry. It's going to be a lot harder to come back to doing experimental physics if you spent 5 years as a software engineer.
Right but someone who has a realistic chance at being hired as a professor won't be working as a commodity software engineer, they'll be in some sort of specialist/research role. Any of the job offers I've seriously considered leaving were to be a computer scientist.
Just one example: My PhD advisor went directly to industry after their PhD, stayed there for 10 years, and then went back to academia. Six years later they had tenure. "I got lucky" was frequently said, though.
I did it. I went straight from my PhD to industry (actually my own startup) and then 5 years later I went into academia and tenure. I left academia in 2012 back to industry. This is the biological sciences (Molecular Biology / Microbiology).
I should say I am the only person I have ever met in the biological sciences that has done this so it must be relatively rare.
I know that at Texas, in engineering (where I got my PhD) we had many, many professors with previous industry experience. I remembered thinking it was not nearly as terminal a decision as I had expected.
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 advance human knowledge and understanding.
I'm not saying that we haven't acheived mind blowing things in the past few centuries, or even that we won't continue to do the same in the coming decades. I simply mean we shouldn't avoid the hard, grueling work needed to make progress on some of the obvious problems.
We also shouldn't be afraid to be honest about the failings of current approaches and processes. Although, I suppose in some political climates that may be a little trickier, given the apparent propensity for damaging misinterpretations.
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 industrial R&D is the way to go, we just have to shift grant money there in the form of tax breaks in exchange for open access/patents that permit non-commercial use.
Algebraic geometry research doesn't need funding, it just needs some spare time for people who are interested in it. Black hole physics on the theoretical side is much the same. Astronomy on the other hand probably would get short shrift in an industry based science program, since it is expensive and the gain is pretty much entirely intellectual.
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.
What an unfortunately brief article. The reason seems clear to me[+]: there are plenty of science students but not enough entry level "professional" jobs. Hence the long post docs, the multiple post docs, until the poor candidate gives up. Either we need more research labs and universities or we need to age scientists out. I would prefer the former, but who knows?
It is interesting to note two commonly repeated facts about academia, one of which you mention:
1. It is very difficult to get rid of aging professors with a low output.
2. It is fairly easy to get postdoc positions (but hard to get a permanent position).
In a way, you can argue that point 2 is a solution for point 1 -- with two postdoc positions (two years each, which is common at least in computer science) and a 4-5 year long PhD, you get 8-9 years of work from a candidate who is in his prime at the start and around say 30-32 years old at the end. After that, if you hired the candidate, you would only risk point 1, so why do that?
(I agree that it's incredibly mean to take 9 best years of a scientist while they work for a small wage, and then throw them away unless they are a genius. I think it's also important to keep in mind that while postdoc researchers face an extremely difficult challenge of getting a permanent position, they likely enjoy their academic work quite a bit. Postdoc/PhD are not exactly a "drain" in the same way a factory job might be.)
My dad's one of them. He retired a few years ago. The way he puts it, electrical engineering research isn't what it used to be, because all of the "big" discoveries in that field have been made. So aside from a fraction of the researchers it's largely a technician's job.
At the same time, he says that if he had applied to the same school he studied at and worked at for all of his life, there's no way he'd beat the competition these days.
And that's before factoring in the cost of college now. No wonder.
Well, at least where I live the problem seems to be one of availability of positions.
Older scientists took all the positions and basically closed the doors to new entrants when it comes to any kind of contract (we work on scholarships), so most of us just changes jobs to industry (which is ratter easy) and don't pursue a scientific career.
Of course now that those older scientists should be retiring, there aren't enough younger scientists to do their work because they pushed so many of them away.
The compensation vs time/effort required getting a PhD must surely have a lot to do with this. Wasn't the hey day of US science during WW2 and the Cold War, when government funding was much higher?
> Wasn't the hey day of US science during WW2 and the Cold War, when government funding was much higher?
It's not so much about the funding as it is about a common, shared goal. Getting all the indians to shoot their arrows on the same target at the same time is quite powerful.
its bc these professors are tenured and get grants well into their 60s and 70s partly bc they are brilliant, and partly because they are well connected. peer review is in favor of its peers.
The pay is seriously lagging industry. In many cases, the resources at your disposal are substantially larger in industry as well.
Meanwhile, universities are increasingly run by administrators. Faculty have more service requirements and less autonomy than in the past. Overhead expenses are higher than ever, as well.
Furthermore! Tenured faculty are hard to fire, or even force into retirement. They draw large resources even after they retire in pensions and emeritus status. So open faculty positions are constantly hard to come by.
Last year I made a move to industry, from a research position at a well regarded program. I multiplied my salary by a nice integer, and I had multiple job offers from fortune 500 tech companies and a few of the HFT hedge funds that users are familiar with on this website. I wouldn't have had a shot at a faculty position at anything that I would have considered a tier-1 research organization.
Don't get me wrong, I loved my time in academia and I was very well treated, relatively speaking. But I was absolutely at a point of diminishing returns where I would have floundered around like so many of my incredibly talented and hard working friends who are still postdocs/non-permanent staff at these institutions.