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Comment by gww | Hacker News Reader

A few of my colleagues with bio PhD's have started microbreweries with various levels of success. They seem to be much happier than my colleagues and myself who have chosen the post-doc route.

This is a bit of a tangent but it seems to be a common trend now among labs to arrest trainees (particularly phd students and post-docs) in their positions as long as possible. For example, the institute I am at has recently extended the maximum assignment length for post-doctoral fellows to from 4 to 6 years. I can see the PI's reasoning for this but it is incredibly demoralizing and one of the contributing factors for a lot of people I know who have abandoned their careers for unconventional jobs.

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In my opinion, that’s what needs to happen. Thin out the ranks of professors as they move to greener pastures in the workforce and eventually you’ll see schools get in a position where they have to work harder to recruit. Better pay, benefits, support, etc.

That's pretty much happening in computer science in the US. Pay for CS faculty members has been rising significantly faster than inflation, and faster than other fields, although still not nearly as fast as in industry. A brain-drain of people at all levels of seniority to high-paid tech jobs is a big part of it, although increase in demand is another part of it (the number of incoming freshmen declaring a CS major is exploding, driving lots of places to expand their departments).

The same effects have also made long postdocs less common, and it's even possible to jump directly to a tenure-track faculty job from a PhD with no postdoc in between. Alternately, people seem to be doing a kind of "industry postdoc". You get an industry job, but one that lets you publish (DeepMind, Facebook Research, some startups, etc.), and after a year or two you either find you like it and stay, or you use that as a springboard to apply for faculty jobs, treating it as having been basically a high-paid postdoc.

Still plenty of stuff to complain about, but the job market looks far different than in the natural sciences or humanities.

> Still plenty of stuff to complain about, but the job market looks far different than in the natural sciences or humanities.

Yup. Economics [0] and comp sci are basically the only doctoral programs worth going into at this point (at least if you're an American citizen). You can debate which one is _more_ worth it, but the fact is that if you're doing anything else, you're in a for a world of pain.

[0] http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/if-you-get-phd-ge...

Tangentially, the author now prefers applied mathematics to economics [0].

[0] https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1015988356184866817

> Alternately, people seem to be doing a kind of "industry postdoc"

This isn't new. I had plenty of professors that worked at e.g. Bell Labs before returning to academia.

Professor is already a very comfortable job. Adjunct lecturer is an awful job, but the requirements for those are already quite low, and frankly generally don't include "is an effective teacher". IMO, the problem here isn't supply-and-demand for the lecturer job; the problem is that the service being provided ("teaching a course") isn't the product the customer (student) is buying! In the common case, the student is buying a degree and doesn't care about the course (because the course is a "distribution requirement" inside or outside of major, or because the whole major/degree is a a pointless arbitrary requirement put in place by employers). On both sides, student and teacher, parties are simply going through the motions to fulfill the illusion of a meaningful degree.

I am skeptical that will ever happen. At least in North America there are a plethora of international students willing to train here for next to nothing and in some cases I've heard rumours of post-docs not taking a salary at all.

The post-doc where I got my PhD was making $5k less than I, or around 17k

His English sucked, his physics PhD in non linear quantum mechanics useless and his resume-writting skills was non existent.

Yet, he's the only person to read my thesis, the cluster worked only thanks to his efforts, and he administered 20~30 workstations while doing his research. I would not have graduated without him and he is more dear to me than anyone I met at school.

I think it's tragic that they low ball international students that way. Many of the ones I have met work exceptionally hard; including doing activities like you mentioned.

> This is a bit of a tangent but it seems to be a common trend now among labs to arrest trainees (particularly phd students and post-docs) in their positions as long as possible

I've witnessed this as well. One of the worst offenses I saw was a master's student in a 1-year master's program (basically supposed to be a post-bac / used for switching fields) who spent around 4 years in the same lab instead.

Chalk me up for another anecdotal "I saw it too" - You would think the upper admins would notice someone on the books for 6-8 years but they didn't do anything. Its a culture that higher education departments perpetuate.

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