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Comment by tharne | Hacker News Reader

I think the author buried the lede here. My biggest takeaway from the article is that you'd have to be an absolute sucker to work in academia given how poorly you'll be treated. Each person that puts up with this only makes the problem worse, giving at least tacit approval to the status quo. If folks were to start opting out of academia in larger numbers for jobs in private industry, schools would be forced to improve working conditions.

Unlike lower-skilled workers, the kind of person who even has the opportunity to get a PhD is also likely to have other good opportunities should they choose to take them. Academics should improve their lot and that of others by voting with their feet.

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>My biggest takeaway from the article is that you'd have to be an absolute sucker to work in academia given how poorly you'll be treated.

Every now and then I get an overwhelming sense of guilt when I talk to/think about my friends who are engaged in academia or pursuing advanced degrees (I'm 28, for reference).

The crazy workloads they have, the insane restrictions on how they can do their jobs, and the cut-throat nature of the industry means that they're working so much harder than I am, and are either doing their part to advance the grand sum of human knowledge, or are training to literally save peoples lives...and I'm sitting here, a college drop out, getting paid _way_ more than they're making, in an industry where I will never have any fears about job security, playing with networking equipment and writing about it.

From what I can see, tenured professor at an elite school is a pretty good gig. But it's a really tough gig to land, may not pay very well compared to private industry (assuming it's in a well-compensated field), and may force their partner to live somewhere the other employment opportunities aren't great because your own job mobility is likely pretty limited.

Feels almost like the minor league / major league situation in professional sports. Minor league baseball players are generally not paid a living wage, and major league players start around half a million dollars a year. Obviously many players are doing everything they can to reach that dream job (even if most fail).

That idea of being a comfortable tenured professor at a great school is a dream for many. And obviously, many don't make it, lot of folks are going to just drift around as adjunct professors, scraping by, taking second jobs. But as long as SOMEONE is getting to be a full professor at Stanford, lots of people are going to think, "that could be me", and get exploited along the way.

Yeah. I forget what the term is but there are a number of occupations where's there's a big gap between the "lottery winners" and the hoi polloi.

Arguably even the winners in academia don't make that much in terms of money but they're still viewed as successful professionals, have a decent lifestyle, and do OK--especially if they're not in the highest cost areas.

These kinds of professions are often referred to as "tournaments", a term I think captures their essence nicely. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory)

This captures the spirit of academia fairly well. The thought "that could be me" is a powerful factor indeed.

I worked in a company for a while that hired lots of people out of academia. The fascinating thing was that despite the vast majority of candidates being smart and incredibly well qualified, a massive chunk of them had been so tuned to the stupid hoops you have to jump through for academia that they were near worthless in industry. Whether that was the complete inability to treat other people as equals, or just completely unable to apply themselves to actually build something that could ship. Academia can be a real trap.

If I had a dollar for every time someone mentioned prestige for why we should be doing something I'd have had enough to fund one of those dumb projects.

Working longer/harder doesn’t mean more efficiently. And the idea of the visionary idealist scientist upon whom humanity rests is a romantic idea from the past.

No, it really isn’t. But cynicism like yours drives most of them out.

> I get an overwhelming sense of guilt

That guilt is proportional to the value you place on your work-time/daily output. The guilt will subside as your output importance does.

Also, the grass often appears greener, and many in academia are mired in its doldrums too.

> I will never have any fears about job security,

Sounds like you're under 45

The only folks over 45 I've met who cry ageism are those whose skills stopped growing 10 years prior, yet they continued to demand wage increases year over year. The worst offenders were "QA Professionals," who would get paid $200k to write a JIRA claiming that a page wouldn't load because the favicon 404'd.

I had the opportunity to work with a dozen or so phds as an undergraduate, both in academia and in the industry, and what I saw was that the vast majority of them were not happy with their careers. Even the ones who were gainfully employed in the narrow field of study they specialized in. It definitely influenced me to skip the phd and go a different route.

> My biggest takeaway from the article is that you'd have to be an absolute sucker to work in academia

The first thing I thought as well. When you read all these horror stories about burned out phd students, why is anyone doing this?

If a woman in STEM wants to combine family and work (or a man or anyone else really) there are many jobs in the industry that are actually relatively 9-5, and pay really well.

I don't understand academia at all. It sounds like a combination of paperwork, flying to conferences, endless networking, publishing papers for publishing's sake. It's like a Kafka novel.

You can also be working on stuff that has no impact whatsoever. There are a lot of physics PHDs working in cosmology trying to figure what's going on on the other side of the universe. Sure they are doing some interesting engineering setting up experiments, but if they find the answer to their scientific question they have to find something new to research and get grants for which is a big hassle.

I think the joy of pure research is that you only have to engage in occasional bullshit academic politics and otherwise have a completely pure existence in a monastery of scientific spiritual ideological purity of sorts. This is probably why some of the most sought after jobs under communism were non-political professorships at Universities, like being a math professor. Many of the post-soviet oligarchs were professors at universities during the soviet union times.

Being a professor in USSR gave one not only a rather high state-mandated salary, but also an opportunity to be bribed for passing an exam when a student would otherwise flunk it.

I am in academia, because I do not want to work in an office. I do not want to leave my apartment before 11am

Did not work out, since I now have an office, but at least I can show up at 2pm without being fired.

A lot of jobs in the software industry have flexible hours.

Or remote work, in which case you don't have to leave your apartment at all if you don't feel like it.

As student I used to say that I will never accept a job that is not remote work. But they are harder to find than expected

> I don't understand academia at all. It sounds like a combination of paperwork, flying to conferences, endless networking, publishing papers for publishing's sake. It's like a Kafka novel.

As an academic, your description is rather accurate regarding the research part of academia (you left out the teaching).

Some of us put up with all that because we love the science, the sense of discovery, of doing what no one has done before, advancing human knowledge, the feeling of working for public good and not for some profit-driven corporation. Flexible hours is also a plus (although also a double-edged sword).

(I confess I do like the "flying to conferences" part as well, though).

>the feeling of working for public good and not for some profit-driven corporation.

By advancing human knowledge you are arguably working for hundreds of profit-driven corporations at a time

> If folks were to start opting out of academia in larger numbers for jobs in private industry, schools would be forced to improve working conditions.

This is exactly what is happening! (Well, the leaving, not the improving).

The argument is that men are more willing to put up with the particular nature of the poor working conditions in academia, hence women disproportionately leave.

I have no question why a reasonable person, woman or not, might stay away from academia.

I wonder why there are few women in engineering, where the conditions and the pay are so much better. I've seen a number of women in IT industry, from junior developers to CTOs, and most of them were brilliant and sharp. But they are still a minority in the field. This puzzles me.

Like you almost all women I've seen in tech are brilliant. The best explanation I have for the imbalance is lack of interest on average. Having a son, we could see the difference even from around age 1. Boys really are drawn to things that move while girls seem to react more to social interactions. We really tried not to influence e.g. with the choice of toys. I find it no surprise that 20 years later the same boys fill up IT and engineering while the girls are working in HR and corporate communication. There's always outliers, and I we need to take care of them especially because their contributions can be very valuable (on both sides), but I think trying to evening out the gender gap in all jobs is like chasing an invisible dragon.

My scientific career ended when I did a back of the envelope calculation on how much I would be paid per hour of expected work as a post doc.

It was less than minimum wage.

Mine ended when I realized professors were graduating more than 1 PhD student apiece on average, and that I’d almost certainly need to wait for someone to die before I got a job. (Ok, die or retire, but profs don’t just retire at 65.)

There were 50 PhDs graduated in the time I was at my alma mater, there was one opening for one tenure position.

At my work (state University), we hire at least 4 faculty a year, graduate between 15 and 20 PhDs a year, and have a policy to not directly hire and of our own PhDs into faculty positions right after graduation. They need to first work at another institution as faculty or lecture. We have at 3 faculty which completed their PhD in our program. I think we have around 40 faculty.

Agreed. I am completely failing to understand why anyone would willingly go into academia provided other options are available.

In the UK at least, there has been a huge exodus from academia, but it’s not really visible. Great post docs rarely stay, because either they’re enticed elsewhere by better wages and no nonsense, or they’re pushed out by awful treatment.

But there are plenty of other people willing to take their place, so the only consequence is that research standards drop, which is something most of society will only notice over the very long term.

So I disagree with the idea that individuals leaving will somehow fix the problem. The real solution is to change the terrible culture imposed on academic by the people at the very top. Turning it into a business espousing KPI driven nonsense rather than a vocation. This culture began in the USA and is now widespread in the UK, and it has destroyed goodwill and IMO resulted in dramatic drops in teaching and research standards.

The solution is to scrap REF, restore direct government funding, rebalance funding from grants to departmental funds, reverse the centralisation of administration and the lop-sided admin-academic balance, remove admin workload from academics, provide proper teaching and research career tracks, and cut the number of students attending university.

This is a problem that can only be solved with intelligent thought at the top, not by people acting individually. Market forces are the problem in academia, not the solution.

Suppose I want to research a $topic, and get recognition for my research. As a recent graduate or soon-to-graduate undergrad student the traditional path to "doing research for the public good of the mankind and personal glory as a scientist" in academia is much more salient and easy to take than in private firms.

Sure, I maybe have the mental faculties to become an engineer. Do I want do so, however? If I go to work in a firm, I need to do what the owner of the firm wants to in exchange for the monetary and other rewards. In academia, you write grant applications and research proposals for something you want to do (or to be practical, something you and you advisor agree on, but usually the opportunities are much larger than "client wants a webshop").

And what I would be doing at a $firm? Building more applications and other products and optimized adverts of products for other people, when majority of my free time I try to avoid unnecessary apps, adverts and consumption of useless products that waste natural resources of our planet for no good reason at all?

Sure, there are some companies who offer opportunities at doing basic research, but a) getting into those jobs you need to be exceptionally exceptional (getting into a PhD program, mere "exceptional" is enough), and b) would I really, really want to work there? I am reasonably sure that I have less ethical dilemmas if I am funded by a government or foundation to do research at a public university than getting a paycheck from $big_name_company, to produce value for $big_name_company.

I've seen a similar article and they had a more provocative headline: There aren't as many women in STEM academia because they're too smart.

You should also add to this that increasingly, large tech companies have access to much better data for nearly any area that is interesting for research.

Further, companies can go from research to product that ostensibly makes a difference at scale with a speed that absolutely no University could.

I'm really not seeing any reason to stay in academia whatsoever if you want to do the most exciting applied research today. Maybe if you want to do basic science or something more obscure where the applications are very far off.

I work in the health sector and honestly, it comes down to a couple things:

1) They have more data. It's not clear that it's better.

2) That difference is, to the eyes of many of us, showing up, making things worse, and then "pivoting".

3) I get to decide what I want to do. I want to add a project on X? I go work on it.

I would seriously quibble with the anarchic independence you describe in #3 because (depending on the field certainly) you need to fund that work with grants and postdocs etc... Do you might feel like you can but it's generally largely dependent on convincing other groups to fund that work.

I'll Grant that The above doesn't really apply to pure math or philosophy

I'll admit that I managed to find a position with an abnormal degree of freedom in a fairly applied field (epidemiology) but I don't think that's any more atypical than people with particularly nice jobs in the private sector.

But right now, I'm working on projects in emerging infectious diseases, healthcare associated infections, some philosophy of science stuff, some algorithmic work in network science, and something that can best be described as "digital humanities".

I have a friend who’s a physicist-turned machine learning researcher working on health issues. I asked him about why he decided to say an academic researcher instead of going to the industry where (to me) there’s clearly more data. I was told that academic institutions tend to land better partnerships that companies don’t tend to get maybe due to privacy concerns.

I think your friend's impression is pretty accurate.

Industry in healthcare, especially the tech industry, has a long road of trust building ahead of it.

I think we're also a little jaded. We've been talking about how big, real-time data streams like pharmacy sales data, social media, etc. are going to change the game for disease forecasting since I was an undergrad. We're still not even close.

> companies can go from research to product that ostensibly makes a difference at scale with a speed that absolutely no University could.

Isn't that the point of being an academic? That you don't have much, if any, interest in generating a product?

I guess I didn't make my point clear.

For researchers at University of Toronto as well as within Google, neither (probably) wants to directly work on a product.

However both would certainly (At least in my experience) like their work to impact humanity on a wider scale then simply the number of citations their paper has. Again primarily thinking about applied researchers here.

So in that sense, both researchers are insulated from the producing of something business related based on their research. However one of them has a significantly greater chance of their research being used to actually affect people at large scale in their lifetime.

> My biggest takeaway from the article is that you'd have to be an absolute sucker to work in academia given how poorly you'll be treated.

And women don't have the luxury of putting up with that BS.

> Academics should [...] vot[e] with their feet.

You do see the problem here, don't you?

I don't see a problem with that, no.

It would result in more people going into successful careers in industry.

That's a good thing.

The problem would be that they would no longer be academics.

For a lot of people who head down that path, they consider it more of a vocation than a job. It may well be a good thing for all the next folks who consider the path, but it choosing that would come at a large personal cost for them.

Most folks are not that altruistic.

Vocation does not pay. It's fine if they prefer the grueling life, and should be left to it.

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