It's cultural. Their PhD advisors treated them the same way. A PhD is effectively a hazing ritual required to break into academia.
The power your advisors wield over you is terrifying in graduate school. You are severely underpaid AND they have you over a barrel.
It's 1000 times better especially when your research is clearly not on the cutting edge and you end up comtemplating life choices because what you're doing are basically useless to the world, and you're only doing it because some funds decided to throw money on it.
At least that's how it is for people whose primary research method is coding, such an easy exit. The powerpoint making variety have it harder though.
I realize this isn't the case for everyone, and I realize my situation was odd, but... there's always a trump card: you can drop out. I get that for international students it's not always so simple (losing your student visa, having to go home) and can be a very hard choice.
My supervisor and my department occasionally tried to push for things that I believed were ridiculous, and the threat of dropping out seemed to work reasonably well to push back on that. My understanding is that a supervisor having a low completion rate is a black mark that can hurt them, especially if they're chasing tenure. I didn't pull this out like a petulant child stomping their feet when they didn't like their chores, but rather when things were getting stupid.
Tony: "This is totally unreasonable and the timeline doesn't work for me."
Supervisor: "This is how it must be. There's no other option."
Tony: "I could drop out and continue on with my life."
Supervisor: "Now wait a minute, let's see what we can do to make this work..."
Normally, during tenure decisions, the grad students and postdocs will be interviewed by the dean. If you work for a pre-tenure prof, and decide to leave, meet with the dean and let them know your concerns before dropping out. Make sure to include lots of physical documentation, such as emails requesting you to do inappropriate things.
I still look back and would have loved to do that research, but I appreciate his honesty.
In Germany PhD is almost always done after an MS and the PhD usually takes 4-6 years depending on the group.
Your definition is painfully on point.
And the perks of "getting into academia" are getting smaller with each day.
But hey, you get to have those 3 letters next to your name and probably can ask for a higher salary, that is if you don't go back into the academic machine and the hunger games of chasing grants/contracts and eventually tenure (but it is my impression funding a successful startup is easier than getting tenured today)
The rewards for a successful startup are about 2 orders of magnitude higher than the rewards for tenure, too. The latter means that you have a job for life; the former means you don't need a job for life.
>The rewards for a successful startup are about 2 orders of magnitude higher than the rewards for tenure, too.
Massive [citation needed] on both these claims. "But my brother-in-law" is not evidence. It's not at all obvious that there are more startup markets than tenure positions. Also, founding a successful startup is largely a matter of luck, and being in the right place at the right time.
And for the first decade and a half it was great to make money, but also possess the grounding to build things collaboratively with academics. But then AI happened, and the market inefficiency that academia created for itself by making 3/4 of us make less than a high-school dropout with a trade skill caused tech to suck them all up like a sponge to feed the AI craze.
And these days, the same craptastic culture that drove me out of academia (pedigree, PhD (even though I have one but not from one of the 4 horsemen of AI or even one of the right schools so it's nearly worthless apparently), and the coveted "applied scientist" title which at least at AMZN means you get 15% higher comp to order both the scientists and engineers around because you convinced an L10 you were one whatever your actual qualifications are) are now status quo in tech. But I'm old now, and every day I am tempted to just throw in the towel and retire.
Commence those downvotes guys! None of what I just wrote could possibly be true in any way. Tech is clearly awesome and we just need to keep up the great work so we can hit that singularity sprint goal by 2030 or so to save Ray Kurzweil from squandering his hard-earned money on an Alexa-equipped toupee.
As of 2016, academic institutions hired 21,511 full-time, tenure-track professors [1]. Your odds of getting tenure given that you're in a tenure-track position vary by institution, but seem to range from about 75% at elite private institutions to 90% at state schools [2]. Figure about 18,000 professors were hired into positions that will eventually grant them tenure.
AngelList lists about 30,827 companies at the Seed or Series A/B/C stage [3]. Crunchbase has 33,577 funding rounds that occurred within 2016 [4]. The former stat has issues in that it includes funding rounds over a broad time period, and the latter potentially has issues with multiple funding rounds for the same company happening; however, given their general consistency and the existence of funded companies that do not appear in AngelList nor Crunchbase, 30,000 companies funded per year seems about right.
The average tenured professor salary varies heavily by field, but the Chronicle of Higher Ed reports it at $104820 [5], Glassdoor at $70385 [6], PayScale at $71993 [7], Indeed at $66921 [8]. There were 12,688 mergers & acquisitions in 2018 [9], the vast majority of which were for undisclosed amounts (companies do not have to disclose the transaction if it's for < $75M). Given the distribution of the ones that are disclosed, it's a good bet that most of those are for between $1M-20M (I've heard $1M/engineer as the going rate for aquihires, where the team succeeds in delivering a product but the product fails in the marketplace). This is still roughly 100x what the tenured professor makes though.
[1] https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/10112018%20Data%20S...
[2] https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/dont-worry-t...
[3] https://angel.co/companies?stage[]=Series+A&stage[]=Seed&sta...
[4] https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/a416e3bdb17...
[5] https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Much-Did-Professors-Ea...
[6] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/tenured-professor-salary-...
[7] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Tenure_Professor/Sa...
[8] https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Professor-Salaries
[9] https://www.statista.com/statistics/245977/number-of-munda-d...
So, it’s clear more people get funding than tenure. However, difficultly really is a function of the success rate of each track and the amount of investment they make in it. Still, for the average collage freshman tenure is likely much harder.
The average college freshman is not trying to get a phd. Picking a low starting point like that is just a way of making it appear more difficult than it is. The more appropriate number is the number of phd's attempted.
I didn't respond to your comment because the right denominator is going to depend on who is reading this thread. A Stanford CS major with a 2400 SAT whose parents successfully founded a tech startup is coming from a dramatically different pool than a data-entry drone with no college degree and no technical skills who figures that a weekend startup is his ticket to riches. The former's chances at both getting a funded startup and a tenure-track position are pretty good. The latter's chances are effectively zero. The latter falls into the pool of people who could conceivably "start" startups, but doesn't fall into the pool of people who attempt Ph.D programs.
You are not a lottery ticket.
Realistically, I think that tenured professorships and funded startups largely draw from the same pool of people and hence have the same denominators. That's why I focused more on the numerator. If you have the skills, dedication, and knowledge needed to become a tenured professor you usually (not always) have the skills, dedication, and knowledge needed to found a high-growth company, but there are more opportunities for the latter around, as well as fewer gatekeepers that can exclude you for arbitrary reasons.
If you think a hazing ritual is required, as a kind of filter for who wants to be a professor most, you can set high standards for the work while still treating people with respect.