Comment by claudius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by claudius | Hacker News Reader

Provide funding for permanent positions. I'm currently in the last few months of my first postdoc in condensed matter physics (think superconductors, quantum computers etc.) but will move into industry next year for lack of perspectives towards a permanent position in a reasonable place. As far as I can tell, my research so far was not substandard and the software I wrote has enabled quite a few projects which otherwise would have not been possible or taken much longer. Most people I talk to (both inside and outside academia) express some degree of disappointment over people like me leaving (after 4 years PhD + 2 years Post-doc) but none of them put their money where their mouth is.

To be clear, I can understand that a PhD candidacy justifies a temporary contract and I'm not even asking for a permanent position directly after a PhD (as would be standard in industry), I'm only asking for a reasonably safe perspective towards a permanent position reasonably soon after graduating. Can't exactly start a family if you don't have any kind of job security beyond the next couple months.

In the physics PhD version of “it gets better”, after a few years in a career all the past folks will fade away. You are making the right choice.

Your comment essentially echoes complaints from academia about the most capable ones leaving for private sector that often pays many times more compared to what they'd get,if lucky, by staying. Somewhat it has became a norm to bankroll grand buildings of little value instead of ensuring reasonably paying jobs that last more than just a year or so...

Excellent point. I cannot afford providing funding, but I can fund myself for 3 years to work on useful software.

> the software I wrote has enabled quite a few projects which otherwise would have not been possible or taken much longer

What's the common practice with such software? Is that published somewhere, open sourced? Or kept private in hopes of being monetized, with IP owned by the author/university?

At the moment it's "available within collaborations". My former supervisor has had some bad experiences with people using his open-sourced software without acknowledgement etc., which is of course not quite ideal if you actually want to build a career in academia for yourself. Monetisation is not really an option.

My toolkit is maybe a bit non-standard in that it has attracted a few external collaborators using it as well and I like to think I have taken better care of upholding coding standards, documentation etc.

Normally software in my field is kept within a group and dies after one or two PhD students have left.

This is a very sad state of affairs, therefore I would like to bring your attention to a petition towards open sourcing all scientific (and generally tax-paid) software:

https://publiccode.eu

This is a great initiative.It should not be limited to software: research papers, databases and many other things that are currently either not available at all or are behind pay walls should be released.

For research papers, there's also this open access initiative which is gaining support: https://www.coalition-s.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S

Does this call for avionics software for the F-22 (and similar taxpayer funded software) to be open sourced?

There should be definitely some exceptions from this legislation as usually.

Agreed. Just started my second postdoc job in pyhsics and 30% of my time goes into paper work for registering in a new country and at the same time applying already for new positions. This is by far the major time waste I see.

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