Something Deeply Wrong with Chemistry (2010)
chemistry-blog.com
chemistry-blog.com
"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 the power balance almost 100% in favor of the professor in any interaction with grad students. Professors have acquired essentially unlimited and arbitrary power to dictate conditions, and grad students have no choice but to comply or leave academia -- throwing away a lifetime of work and preparation.
More at http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/full/nbt.2706.html
[1] http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/images/nbt.2706-F1...
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.
1: you are expected to feel privileged for doing something you vaguely enjoy. (how many people actually enjoy running columns and NMRs at 12am?)
2: you are expected to be altruistic in your ambitions. Curse those vaguely better paid lizard people who are working in industry to forward some profiteering enterprise rather than "science"
3: there are huge barriers to entry (tech excluded) so you will not do something entrepreneurial and make a name for yourself without the university. To make sure of this, we will name claim on anything you do for the next 10+ years anyway.
It's no wonder to me that many of the talented people. Leave to go do banking or consulting - they work less for more!!
2. Many forms of basic science cannot be done in industry. Take my field, high energy physics for example... there's only one supergiant particle smasher in the world and it's not owned by IBM. Anyways doing public science may or may not be altruistic, but I don't see that as a problem of science. In my case I just _actually_ enjoy what I'm doing (see 1) any benefits for the public good are just a bonus.
3. Entrepreneurial options vary pretty widely depending on the field. Regardless, I don't think most people get into science with the master plan that they will make a magical new discovery and then sell it and become a billionaire. If that's your plan, again you're doing it wrong.
Also a lot of people you find in the sciences simply aren't that motivated by money. Many of the ones who go into banking either found out along the way that they weren't into it. Or regrettably often, they just got forced out of their field by competition so had to take a fat paycheck and boring job as a consolation prize.
It would also be interesting to see if you get an influx of grifters chasing after a piece of the pie, resulting in lower-quality science ("Trump laboratories! We have the best tubes, and we have the best numbers! You're gonna really love our science, buh-lieve me.").
Not saying I really think that's what would happen. But at least with the way things are right now, the only cheaters in science are usually after some kind of bizarre notion of obscure fame/glory (see e.g. [1]). And they are rather rare.
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 wonder if there is a term/concept for this in economics or sociology. I've been looking to nail down the idea a bit.
Also, the supply-side of the equation is very important. There are plenty of people willing to be graduate students and post-docs for low pay, so they won't get paid much even if the work they do is important. This is made worse by the huge number of foreign workers who are willing to work for peanuts as postdocs and graduate students, see: https://psmag.com/the-real-science-gap-f00edae57ba1#.pbo4crt....
2. I'm sure they said that about rocket science, too. Of course, SpaceX is repeating all the same mistakes that academia is so perhaps it will go the same way.
Science shouldn't be done privately but if academia keeps messing up like this it will eventually move there if anyone cares about it.
> Also a lot of people you find in the sciences simply aren't that motivated by money.
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 money that are important, like happiness. A graduate student in the sciences gets paid enough to live on, and enjoys a good amount of job security. The work is for a good cause, and despite all the complaining most graduate students. You are pretty unlikely to get fired as a graduate student. A postdoc is a much worse job, I don't think anyone should take a postdoc unless they really don't have any other options (or are from a third-world country). With that said, when I started my PhD I didn't care about low pay, but later on this was no longer true, and having just finished a PhD if I could go back in time I would not do it again.
Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night. And it took you 10 months to figure out that this is the correct procedure, and now you have one year left in your contract, and you probably ought to be publishing and getting ready to give lectures for academic positions... So that's a straight month of 6 nights a week 100 hour a week work.
You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen.
I experienced this as a grad student, too. You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life.
But you can extend this all the way down to high schoolers (or before?), where the kids out partying/socializing would be at a disadvantage to the kid studying alone in his room.
"When Doudou Wong from Shanghai was four, she began attending additional math, Chinese, and English classes outside of her weekday kindergarten"
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-r...
Comparing Shanghai education to US education is like comparing the best school district in the US to the average school district of China.
As with many things the communists parade around, you will be shown the front gates, but you won't be shown anything past it lest you realize you're seeing the facade of a movie set.
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 impromptu go out all weekend every weekend, well, that's maybe not going to happen, but I think that a lot of scientists use the process as an excuse to justify their social anxiety - the causal arrow here is in the wrong direction.
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.
The way we structure our research institutions is arbitrary: we can and should restructure them if they aren't working.
Also, most research projects are short enough on funding as it is. So what if you declare that this lab either has to 1) hire two people do to this job in shifts or 2) simply not do the research at all? You get back to the same situation dnautics mentioned where the truly passionate/competitive researchers are going to be doing whatever it takes to get it done (or, with strict enforcement, the science just doesn't get done).
I thought we just said earlier how easily replaceable this post-doc is.
Not buying it. Bleeding edge of research doesn't really exist, it just doesn't move fast enough to have any sort of "bleeding edge". It's slowed down by lack of money and poor management and too much bureaucracy far more than it is by someone not working long hours. As has always been true with these things.
This is why startups will, sadly, end up beating academic science over time. Because startups are bleeding edge.
"It has to be this way!" is a very difficult claim to verify, you can't expect others merely to accept it, you must prove it, and I have seen very little evidence so far, including from my own experience with people who did research at university.
You're thinking of bleeding edge as "new drug that at least shows up in some pop-sci stuff". People working in labs come up with new methods of doing X in situation Y all the time because X and Y can both be crazy specific to a certain line of inquiry. A thousand of those lines of inquiry will likely be explored before anyone outside of their extremely specific area of study notices. Your sampling bias is pretty irrelevant to the process.
As a concrete example, maybe you need to apply a novel algorithm to a high frequency data source (e.g. a single photon counting module). So you need to program an FPGA with a deserializer to do the processing (in lieu of wasting money on a DAQ that can pump data into your computer at a few GHz sampling rate), and only one postdoc understands the algorithm and FPGAs well enough to do it. Does that sound like a crazy, unusual, made-up scenario?
> This is why startups will, sadly, end up beating academic science over time. Because startups are bleeding edge.
Have you seen how hard it is for startups that actually work on bleeding-edge scientific work to take off? Is that not something that Y-Combinator (for example) has specifically been looking for a more hybridized model for? Most research done at university is a very risky bet even for startups, especially if you want not just a result but a marketable result.
Want some concrete examples of the system working? Take a look at the envelope that quantum information research has pushed in the last 5 years. On the theoretical computer science side, you've got people like Scott Aronson answering significant open questions at a dizzying rate (read his blog for some basic, well-explained evidence). Meanwhile you've got groups like Martinis'[1] making the first quantum computer that can accurately simulate a different quantum system. All with a huge amount of collaboration in a social network of scientists that spans the globe.
Where's your evidence that startups are the hammer-screwdriver-impact-driver combo that solves all of humanity's intellectual problems with but one institution? Because that's a much stronger claim than "academia does moonshot research that wouldn't get done otherwise and its not the scientific equivalent of another day another CRUD app".
[1]: http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~martinisgroup/publications.shtm...
There's no justification for rushing in science in general, in fact, and all the rushing for publications and other rubbish is going to make all the research worse, not better. It should be a careful, deliberate process. If you are working 16 hours and are constantly worried about what your professor thinks of you, I am forced to be wary of your science.
> only one postdoc understands the algorithm and FPGAs well enough to do it.
I'm not going to go into problems of poor knowledge transfer obviously present here (bus factor 1?), but if this was the case, the post-doc would have negotiation power and this entire situation wouldn't be an issue. Clearly the post-doc is extremely replaceable, as the letter in the article implies, so you should have like 10 of those. If not, why are you threatening the post-doc? This sounds like a situation of not enough people, not too much people.
This asymmetry concerns me, and I am rather confused by it.
> Have you seen how hard it is for startups that actually work on bleeding-edge scientific work to take off?
It's hard, and overall, I would say it's worse (hence the sadly). But it's a lot better than the nonsense that academia is engaging in right now. It at least provides some competition and puts pressure on academia. If academia doesn't fix its act, eventually, private will have to take over. It's the same situation as it'd be nice if all the big, well-equipped companies would create and promote the electric car, but if they won't, someone else will have to do it, even if it's less preferable.
Something tells me that the big name post-docs can actually dictate their own terms and are not the same post-docs we're talking about. I'm having a hard time imaging that post-doc getting emails like this.
There's lots of ML research on the startup side right now, I wouldn't be surprised if the demand for quantum research will rise with time. The main advantage academia has isn't the system, but the government money... which is not at all indicative of the system working well. ahem government contractor companies ahem And seems like private can also grab government money.
We got a lot of good results from the "guy just goes on his own and is left alone by everyone and just sits there and studies alchemy for a bit" system, too. Consider how much was accomplished before with very little effort and how much people are working now, and how many people. I understand the problems are harder now, you need better equipment, etc., but that doesn't mean I'm not going to call a spade a spade. I've seen the time of so many post-docs wasted that I'm not going to just ignore that.
You can't expect everyone to just accept that, it needs to be justified. That's what I mean by "not buying it". It may be true, but the evidence is not there, not there at all.
That seems like a very artificial definition of bleeding edge. I've only ever heard it as a description of working in an area where a lot of important aspects are unexplored and using any praxis based on what we've already gleaned is risky. I'd like to know where you're sourcing that "time is important" condition.
> I'm not going to go into problems of poor knowledge transfer obviously present here (bus factor 1?),
The head of the lab may very well not know how to use FPGAs (nothing about what I described entails the lab was researching any kind of computer engineering), and the postdoc might have even taught himself how to do it just for this task.
> but if this was the case, the post-doc would have negotiation power and this entire situation wouldn't be an issue
It is still an issue, because you can find another smart postdoc replacement that will teach himself how to do it without raising a stink about his hours spent working for the next 10 times he needs to do something crucial. Will it take more time for this one subgoal? Yes, but replacing someone who is constantly starting salary negotiations every time he thinks he has some leverage is in the end likely to be a time-saver.
> It's hard, and overall, I would say it's worse (hence the sadly). But it's a lot better than the nonsense that academia is engaging in right now. It at least provides some competition and puts pressure on academia.
So it's worse, but it's better? You've failed to explain (at all) how you know startups can solve these problems when they have no track record of solving anything like them. Without that explanation, your justifications smack of motivated reasoning and isolated demands of rigor.
> It at least provides some competition and puts pressure on academia. If academia doesn't fix its act, eventually, private will have to take over.
Academia already has plenty of competition internally; it's one way that the limited number of tenure and postdoc positions has been quite beneficial. You've also again failed to even mention how private will take over, and how it'll be any better once it does.
> There's lots of ML research on the startup side right now, I wouldn't be surprised if the demand for quantum research will rise with time. The main advantage academia has isn't the system, but the government money... which is not at all indicative of the system working well.
Yes, once ML research started producing useful results in reasonably predictable timeframes. I agree quantum research will also enter the startup world once it starts producing useful results in reasonably predictable timeframes, and that change of gears will accelerate development. But how do you think the field is going to develop to the point where it can be depended on for revenue?
> You can't expect everyone to just accept that, it needs to be justified. That's what I mean by "not buying it". It may be true, but the evidence is not there, not there at all.
I provided a concrete example of an area of research in academia moving forward at breakneck speed in an area that doesn't yet have much value to businesses (their involvement has all been within their own moonshot, academically modeled research divisions). But you've provided zero examples of startups excelling in such an environment, and I'm just supposed to buy that?
I very much doubt that this reason you claim has been properly looked at. Every single time I look at a situation like this it never happens for a good reason, but because someone was greedy and was trying to cut costs somewhere. The main reason this gets written off as OK is because nobody cares about nurses, or post-docs, or whatever other group of exploited people. They're replaceable and interchangeable and are just thrown through the grinder because it's cheaper than figuring things out properly. The cost of burnout is never considered because the implementers can get away with not bearing it.
When you are making use of a person's time and you are not properly compensating them, and the improper compensation is a result of a huge imbalance of power, incentives, and options, that is exploitation.
All bad systems are and will be exploited, that actually only confirms my argument. When bad systems exist, it's a signal that they're not actually doing useful work, and are miscalibrated and inefficient. These inefficiencies are then very easy to exploit by other parties, because the thing that we claim to value (good science) is false, and the thing we actually appear to value (doormatiness) is true, so it is not surprising at all that people who can appear doormatty are benefiting from this system and science has nothing to do with it. That's exactly what you set up! If you measured for the science, you'd detect the rest and kick them out in a short while.
Further people working 100 hour weeks make so many mistakes their work flat out can't be trusted. And should automatically be rejected by any sane review board on that basis alone. Not that it will be but as has been shown many times 'modern' science is fairly broken.
There are two cultural issues, though:
1) Automation won't be used in many cases since automation is not how the advisors did things when they got their PhD. They usually don't care if the student has a better idea for how to do things than theirs, even (especially) if the student is technically correct.
2) Even in cases where they do automate some procedure and save a lot of labor, the grad student is simply expected to use that time to do that much more new / additional work.
In order to automate something, you have to actually discover and refine the process first
Original report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.363/full
Retraction report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.2339/full
Living under a bridge would be better than enduring this kind of stress. People have to take a step back and look at their lives. Nobody can work so much consistently without mentally and/or physically damaging themselves in significant and lasting ways.
May want to consider how many people would not have survived that kind of environment.
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).
An oversupply of labor should have made the time problem evaporate.
Exactly. It didn't. That suggests the time problem is resistant to labor parallelization.
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.
You're correct that the oversupply is not very high quality. But it's not because people are treated better in private industry. How many grad students quit mid-gradschool because "private industry pays better". How many postdocs quit mid-postdoc because "private industry pays better"? The market won't correct for this so easily because of several reasons. 1) the government incentivises the hiring of grad students and postdocs and channeling labor into that market 2) there is a narrative disconnect where professors don't give the 'real story' to people intending to pursue an academic career, partly because they are disincentivised to do so (see 1) and partly because there's selection bias (they got lucky, but don't realize it, and think that anyone can and should do what they can do) and 3) there's an irrational prestige drive that channels labor into this pool. How much propaganda do you see that science is awesome! And science is cool! And I fucking love science! And how much propaganda do you see that the life of a scientist is miserable, shitty, and doesn't pay well?
This is simply bad management. This task should be handled by a team that is managed by simple tools available since people stared to write shit down. So your paper have a few more authors and the Prof can claim he rightfully needs more postdocs, more postdocs get employed, have real lives and will by simply being able to sleep be vastly more productive. Real science will get done faster, better, with better paper trails and attract smarter people to the field that will currently simply not stand for this kind of shit.
I don't get it. Why can't this be done by multiple people in 8 hour shifts?
The medical profession is also pretty insane for making its residents work crazy hours and get almost no sleep for 24, 36, or even more hours a shift. It never made sense to me, especially as these people are risking their and other people's lives by going without sleep for so long.
Though I'm not surprised that this letter came from someone in the chemistry department. ChemE especially has a reputation within Caltech as one of the most difficult paths for both undergraduate and graduate work. The ChemE specific classes usually require a much bigger time commitment and the tests are notoriously difficult.
We split up and it took years for both of us to recover.
I don't mind once in a while having to start growing cells in the morning and hanging around for until evening to collect the results. The expectation that you should always be working that kind of hours... well, it doesn't make any sense to me.
The one that really bothered me is that some of the professors would come in on Saturday morning and call their students. It wasn't that they needed them. They were just bored and lonely.
Society benefits from scientific research. Dismiss its wage problems at your own peril. Sadly, a lot of research is outsourced to universities because labor is cheap. Why pay someone loads of money when you can contract with a university lab? It might be good in the short term, but the talent is leaving research in search of greener pastures.
The sad reality is that right now, those concerns can be dismissed. There is a huge supply of good researchers (especially foreign researchers) who are willing to work under poor conditions just to get a shot. Until there is more money in the system / more positions / fewer people in academic science, you are going to see PIs with unreasonable expectations because they know they can get away with it.
Not only that, but they know the next lab down the road is working just as many long, hard hours.
It's far worse than this. In my field, even in industry I have had far more lucrative offers from quantitative hedge funds than any industrial research labor. Let alone staying in academia, where it literally starts to become a factor of four (or more) difference in salary between a postdoc and finance.
The only reason I did not bite is because I am fortunate enough to have no college debt even after undergrad and phd. Most are not in a position to be so picky.
Thankfully, my work is sufficiently specialized and my background is strong enough I am not easily replaced. However, like many on HN I'm not representative of the general population and am certainly in a fortunate position. I am on a 'tenure track' in an organization where proprietary work and intellectual property I develop is legitimately valued.
But broadly, I agree. And I've seen some pretty horrific results along the lines you alluded occur to several of my colleagues.
I left my research position studying hereditary influences on cancer development to work in auto finance. Lots of people in my position doing the same. The talent pool is shrinking.
If this is what we setup, we absolutely deserve to lose scientific progress over it. Then, perhaps we'll learn, figure it out, and set it up right. Expecting people to sacrifice themselves for the greater good while they're being exploited is both foolish and immoral.
I am currently transitioning from academia to industry, having just recently finished a PhD in high energy physics (looking for a job in data science). When I mention the lack of a job market in academia as a reason I am transitioning, people don't understand and look at me funny. If anyone is young and thinking of going into high energy physics, do yourself a favor and just don't. The glut of postdocs needed by the LHC, combined with the terrible failure of the SSC, has created a particularly terrible job market for high energy physicists in the US.
People complain about H1Bs, but the situation faced by international postdocs is far worse.
The only way this behaviour would be "wrong" is if candidates were mislead when they entered about what would be expected of them.
If you aren't willing to sacrifice, then don't. You can make a rational choice and walk away with your pride and future intact. But don't pretend someone was wronging you by asking you to sacrifice.
The main factor is a sort of culturally normative and ingrained rite of passage / hazing ritual / bullying / dominance effect, which primarily serves to inflate the boss professor's ego at the expense of the grad students. Getting a PhD was difficult and grueling for the professor, so they are damn sure going to make sure it's difficult and grueling for their own students.
The only way they themselves got through it was internalizing the attitude that a grueling work and study schedule is simply normal and simply the price of success.
This exercise of extreme and essentially arbitrary power over how the students live their lives, far beyond what any normal job could remotely require, is very gratifying to many professors. They've worked so hard, suffered themselves, and now THEY have this absurd power over others.. It makes them feel important and powerful at a very primal level to tell their students they have to live under these extraordinary conditions, and then see them obey.
They can literally choose whose career will live and whose will die, whose dreams will happen and whose will be broken and swept away without a thought.
To fix this, the professors need to have a lot less arbitrary power over their students. There needs to be another route to a PhD besides enduring poverty and years of ritual self-humiliation and long form ass-kissing. Only then will the culture shift, as the "grind mode" professors are replaced by new professors who didn't have to grind.
We had one like him few years back. One person in a large team was enough to demoralize all, team lead dropped out, few left. All this took months. Yes that one guy was marginally more senior, but the abuse cost a lot more in team productivity output than the seniority experienced output of that one problematic employee.
So yea, if it was my call, people like that will be out asap and off to be given proper medical help, rather than poisoning the team environment for everybody.
[also, people in athletics are not this dumb and figured out that you do not want to train 24/7 because that's not how the body works. That's not how the brain works, either, trust me]
This has nothing to do with discipline. I guarantee that this is hilariously inefficient, scares off all the good potential scientists because they actually have a shred of self-respect, and is probably contributing to a lot of social and mental problems in the country as a whole. The "work until you die" rhetoric has always been moralistic, not scientific.
This, this right here, is the only explanation anyone should need for perceived lack of scientific progress. How can anything useful at all grow in an environment like this? It's a miracle when it does.
It is the lowest tier of theater which demands the greatest sacrifices, because it can, because the people making it are desperate for work. The budgets are also smaller, so more responsibility is heaped onto smaller crews.
The best people get to work with the best theater companies, which have the best working conditions. They have to, or the best people would not work with them. This is often but not always formalized with a union contract.
Top theaters are usually union houses. The actors and stage managers belong to Equity, the crew to IATSE, the designers to United Scenic Artists, etc. In most cases, getting your union card is synonymous with making it into the "big leagues." On union shows, breaks, working hours per day, advance notice required for a call, which tasks can be assigned to people with specific positions, etc. are strictly regulated. Your work is held to an extremely high standard, but the hours in which you are expected to perform it, and the kinds of things that can be made your problem, are strictly bounded.
At higher levels, staffs are larger and more specialized: roles that would have been solo in a lower-budget world are a principal and several assistants on Broadway. Tasks that would have fallen to you by default have dedicated personnel, and you may in fact be expressly forbidden from doing them by the union contract.
There is immense upward pressure on the quality of your work because most engagements are short-term. Even if it's very hard to get fired, you still need to cultivate a network that is impressed by and likes you if you want to keep working.
The theater community, particularly at the top, has an admirably low tolerance for this kind of abuse.
Maybe I'm wrong about the "no pay" but even then I would still consider it involuntary.
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.