Comment by btrettel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btrettel | Hacker News Reader

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> Instead, they’re riddled with anxiety and depression because they’ve been convinced to tie up their entire identity in being one of the lucky 10% that lands a tenure-track research job, then hung out to dry by the gatekeepers they probably thought would help them.

I'd be interested in seeing a survey on how many people currently working on a PhD believe it will lead to a tenure-track job. I'm a PhD student now and I'd be skeptical if it were more than 25% of people in my department, for example. (I myself have no interest in tenure-track jobs.) There does seem to be more demand for the jobs than there are jobs, but I think in the STEM fields I am familiar with, people are more realistic about what types of jobs they are qualified for. It helps that STEM fields have more options than the humanities, for example, too.

Also, my guess would be that many PhD students realize that they won't ever get a research job, and they treat this as their opportunity to do research.

CS is incredibly unique here since the "backup" plan is incredible and many people prefer it. Go speak to people in fields like history and although most people say "well at least I got to have fun in grad school for a while" the truth is that they all want faculty positions and the number of applicants per position is growing past 500:1.

Pretty much this. They entered the lottery and lost. The terrible irony is that as awful as grad school frequently is, you still have a clear purpose and some degree of social status and you haven't lost the lottery yet. Which is to say... unless your skills are highly marketable in industry (probably meaning you are in engineering or science) things will likely get much worse once you graduate.

Several Ph.D.'s I know work in jobs largely unrelated to their qualification and interest simply because there aren't many jobs outside of academia that make good direct use of a humanities Ph.D.; some languished for years in adjunct positions before giving up in hopelessness and frustration. Some work as administrators, however - universities seem to value administrators with Ph.D.'s, and at least you get to work at a university and interact with students occasionally. And you can, uh, still teach as an adjunct on the side. Maybe.

The sad truth is that universities (in the US at least) are almost feudal systems, built on the backs of adjuncts (who do the teaching) and grad students (who do the research.) Yet in spite of an absurdly cheap workforce, tuition is incredibly expensive and universities drink money like water.

As a Physics PhD, I certainly went into grad school wanting to get a faculty position; is suspect most people did in my cohort.

Of course we're mostly data scientists now, because only 5% win the faculty lottery.

Data science wasn't a path that existed when we started. I wonder if its existence changes what people going into a Physics PhD expect.

> Of course we're mostly data scientists now, because only 5% win the faculty lottery.

This seems like a sad waste of physicists, even if the faculty pyramid scheme is obviously unsustainable. I for one would like to see more actual advances in physics.

What can you do?

Suppose you magically double the number of faculty positions. Within one year all of the new positions could be filled a hundred times over. Now you've back to the exact same scenario, except that now you also have twice as many slots for grad students, too.

Create more national labs, research institutes etc. that widen out the end of the funnel without widening the start.

/fellow physicist who went into DS

Perhaps, but many of these labs are extensions of universities. I do research at SLAC, a national lab which shares grad students with Stanford.

Most of my cohort are now data scientists or ML/AI engineers.

Honestly, the trend I seeing is that weaker students -ie can't find data science or consulting jobs- move on to post-docs.

Although, there are the dedicated few academics that also move on to post-docs as well.

Physics research always involves statistics, cough, 'machine learning' cough so that's how people are selling it these days.

I'd take a post-doc simply to avoid either of those careers.

Hahaha, some of the people I considered the most academic in my physics cohort are going consulting.

After 5-6 years of making 25k per year and working long hours (which is not bad given the cost-of-living where I was in grad school is low), the salary becomes a very real draw.

The thing is if you want to become a professor a PhD is the only way. However low the chances are, they are zero otherwise.

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