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Comment by rick_2047 | Hacker News Reader

rick_2047

After weeks of PhD bashing here is one article which successfully defends it against a lot of arguments against a PhD.

I especially like the comparison of an academic career with the startup track.

While it is true, that BENELUX and Norway have more budget for research as it stands, opposed to say the cutbacks in the UK, but I would still be interested in the blog entry after he has finished (the last small piece is more than 90% effort). It is just like mountain climbing: you can only state that you made it if you make it home. Everest is littered with - I guess happy - bodies.

btw .no, .be, .nl are among the richest in Europe (petrol, gas, trade, EU admin. overhead etc).

Universities in the Netherlands are getting hit by budget cuts pretty severely as well. This means that permanent contracts are getting harder and harder to come by in academia.

Three main reasons for this in the Netherlands: * A permanent employee of a university is considered a civil servant, which means that it is impossible to fire him. * A temporary employee is "protected" by law; after three consecutive temporary contracts, the next contract is by law a permanent one. * Most funds at the university come from limited time projects.

This means that universities are very hesitant to hire people on a permanent contract and labour protection laws sort of turn against you.

Wow. In Norway, there is a similar problem with the "four-year" rule, which means it becomes very hard to fire someone who has worked for an employer for over four years. Now the PhD of course also takes four years, and PhD students are employees. In practice, almost no-one claims the four-year rule following, say, the PhD and a short-term research-assistant engagement (there was a recent case where two people in Oslo did something similar, and the university settled out of court, hiring them permanently, but it was quite unprecedented), but this means that universities much prefer the fixed-term contracts to be shorter than that, again reinforcing the glut of temporary positions; but if we had the three-contract rule, quite a few people I know would have been permanently hired already.

The PhD contract is just a single contract, and a position only becomes permanent after a third contract in a number of years I think.

Once you get your PhD, and you're rehired at the university, you get a different position, starting the counter from 0 again.

But no, if Norway had the three contract rule as I described, the people you know would have been fired already.

> the people you know would have been fired already.

I guess you're right, though who knows what those pesky unions might have said.

As pointed out elsewhere the comparison don't hold up.

Startups are high risk high return.

That can't be said about PHDs

You are comparing top startups to mediocre Ph.D.'s. Top academia is very high-risk and very competitive. You take on very difficult research problems in the hope of becoming famous (but you may never be able to solve them). The rewards are accordingly high - having a large impact on the world, getting tenure to do what you love for the rest of your life, being surrounded by the best people in your field.

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