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Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

My question is why are people so insistent on following the academic route with all the sacrifices it sometimes entails. I know everyone has ideals of what they want to do in life some sometimes you have to adjust to the reality. Why not work in the non academic field in the same speciality if there are more opportunities and better pay? Maybe this will even help correct the supply/demand curve for professors in the long run.

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> if there are more opportunities and better pay?

Frequently there aren't. The subject of this article is an artist, so cue your STEM lord "do you want fries with that" jokes now.

However, this can occur even in fields like math and computer science. You graduate with a PhD in math and a specialization in topology. Who will hire you to do that? No-one. Plenty of people will hire you to do something you can do, but what if you really want to continue research in your specialty?

I'm working on a PhD in CS with a specialization in programming languages. Google came to do a PhD recruitment day and essentially asked "so what kind of PhD are you getting, machine learning or systems?" and we said "programming languages" and the reply was "wow what is that?"

So if you want to work in your own specialty, you might need to work in academia.

> I'm working on a PhD in CS with a specialization in programming languages. Google came to do a PhD recruitment day and essentially asked "so what kind of PhD are you getting, machine learning or systems?" and we said "programming languages" and the reply was "wow what is that?"

This explains Go. :-)

Is it me, or is there quite a delta between theoretical language specialists, and engineers that work with languages day to day (and thus who use it as a form of socialization with their peers, with all of the cognitive/psychological/epistemological fallout of this). Go-lang comes from people with experience developing systems in collaborative teams.

Go also comes from people who have been comfortably ensconced in research labs for their entire lives... which --if you've ever had to deal with the "completely reasonable" jury rigging found in every research lab ever-- explains a lot about why the authors think it's reasonable to expect the every user to re-write the same boiler plate crap until the end of time rather than just bite the bullet and write a more complicated compiler/OS/program.

There's not much difference between an academic language designer being a sourpuss that his ideas/language is not appreciated outside of his circle, and Rob Pike being a sourpuss that "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant"[1]. When you think about it.

[1] http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf

What are you doing with programming languages exactly??

Presumably working on their syntax and semantics. PL is a pretty broad field that encompasses proof theory, formal logic, language design, compiler design, etc.

Formal methods and verification, analysis, compiler technology, type systems, concurrency, and education. Why?

How about teaching K-12? Plenty of districts are experiencing teacher shortages.

I've investigated that. Two problems:

1. Your PhD is not a credential that will get you a K-12 teaching job. You need a certificate that usually accompanies a Masters program in K-12 education. That's right, it's back to grad school to earn a MA alongside your PhD

2. The pay is bad. Really, really bad. And the places where teachers are needed is not where you want to live (or where anyone wants to live) and the conditions are not "ideal" and absolutely no one wants you there: not the other teachers, not the administration, not the community, not the parents, and not the students

1. I don't believe this to be accurate in many states. In some states, you can access alternate route to certification programs that can put you in a classroom in as little as 2 months. There are organizations like Teach for America that will work to put you in a classroom. Lastly, some districts offer generous tuition reimbursement programs that can cover the full cost of tuition for that masters.

2. I guess bad is relative but if you wanted to make great money, why be an adjunct? I've spent most of my life in the northeast where teacher pay wasn't terrible. My wife taught in the inner city and she brought home a solid middle class paycheck in exchange for a day's work. Yes, things got tough sometimes. She also had the option of working summers, sports and after school programs for extra pay.

"The pay is bad. Really, really bad."

No, it isn't, or at least not everywhere. At one time teacher salaries were, in fact horrible. Now they mostly range from "meh" to "pretty good". They vary a lot from state to state, and from district to district within states.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/...

By comparison, the median income for a person with any bachelor's degree is about $50,000. Most of the teacher salaries shown are right in that neighborhood.

Teacher salaries do tend to be lower in places like (say) Mississippi than (say) California, but living in Mississippi is also a lot cheaper than living in California.

> By comparison, the median income for a person with any bachelor's degree is about $50,000

Yes, but if you have a PhD, in a field like CS (which is what we were talking about), these numbers are crazy. Why would I take a job teaching Trigonometry in rural Spotsylvania county (which Google wants to spell check to Transylvania and let me tell you, it is not that wrong) making $50k a year when I could be living in not-rural-the-South making five times that writing Javascript for whoever? The suggestion of K-12 ed is so close to "adjunct" that it might as well be the same.

The GP suggestion of doing K-12 ed with a PhD is still off the mark because you don't get a PhD because you want to lecture - you get it because you want to do research. The "teaching" that most PhDs value is mentoring junior researchers - you don't do this as an undergraduate lecturer, and you especially don't do this as an underpaid babysitter.

"The suggestion of K-12 ed is so close to "adjunct" that it might as well be the same."

No, it is not. K-12 pays a lot more than adjunct wages, and almost always has good health and retirement benefits.

Even if it did (which I don't think is true) you're still doing a radically different job with a radically different exit plan - as an adjunct, you have the sliver of hope that you can get out and get a job doing research. As a K-12 educator, you're never doing research again. You've effectively changed fields.

so cue your STEM lord...

The term is now "STEM Master Race" :)

Well put.

I think a lot of us think that we will beat the odds. We see people struggling to get tenure track jobs and say "well, that won't happen to me." Of course, now it has happened to me and my friends that have gotten tenure track jobs aren't happy. I'm giving it one more year to find a tenure track job before I give up. (Of course part of the problem is my degree is in the humanities so I don't really know what I'm qualified for...)

Pro tip for life: if you ever think you can beat the odds, you should take more math.

Pro tip for life: if you think math/science/tech jobs are immune to drastic layoffs and structural unemployment, you should take more history.

I like to think of this as the niche problem: people love specialization, but avoid getting yourself into a niche that's so small it gets plastered over.

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