Postdoc Myths
cs.kent.ac.uk
cs.kent.ac.uk
In areas with relatively good job markets, such as CS/Stats/Economics/Finance, Postdocs are often quite prestigious and are marketed by top schools as a way to attract promising young scholars and give them time to research without the pressures of teaching/service. In areas with very bad job markets, such as the humanities, they are also seen as prestigious because any academic position after the Ph.D. is extremely difficult to come by.
For the lab sciences, my understanding is that a postdoc actually is more similiar to doing a doctorate in another domain. Experiments are too expensive and time consuming to let a Ph.D. student design and develop a line of research on their own. Instead, that's what the postdocs do. Also, it is not an option. You must do a postdoc (often a long one, and often multiple) in order to have the experience needed for a TT job.
For mathematics and much of the social sciences postdocs are awkardly in-between all of these. They are increasingly common and almost required and increasingly long. Yet, there's no good place for them in the current system, where they are technically fully-credentially academics but treated like overgrown students.
There is nothing wrong with the good postdocs, it's the bad ones that are the problem.
1) a postdoctoral that doesn’t lead to a professorship is one where they are looking for someone to do work independently without being trained. Basically, a very senior grad student. You largely follow the law ultimes of grants written by the PI.
2) a postdoc leading to a position is one where you are trained in developing a research program, writing grants, giving career talks, etc.
The easiest way to make sure your postdoc falls in the latter category is to find an advisor with a track record of past postdoc a getting professor positions. If someone has been a professor for two-four decades and has few former postdocs who became professors, you are unlikely to get training to become a professor.
I call myself a Senior Research Fellow, but in the end I'm just a postdoc in the late 40s who has almost no chances to get full tenure and has messed up his life for good.
Before anyone blames me, think twice. I've got new contracts offered with almost no effort on my behalf over the years, and all my positions where pure research with no teaching duties. It's not easy to turn down such seemingly generous offers and try to make a living in another way (with a background in linguistics & philosophy!), even when you know these contracts won't last and only delay the inevitable.
They spent 30 years "working" on their research interest instead of at the beck of bosses and clients. Even if they spend retirement stuck as a grocery clerk, they'll have a better life (more funded free time to pursue their personal interests) than almost everyone.
All the smartest kids get tracked into getting math and physics PhDs and by the time they get to the postdoc stage it just becomes this insane impossible rat race tournament.
I saw the writing on the wall and got out of academia as soon as I defended my utterly mediocre PhD thesis in math.
I jumped on the data science wave in 2013 and all of a sudden everyone thought I was a genius for being able to run model.fit() and interpret the results.
These tracks that funnel you into cutthroat tournaments just seem like bad places to be.
Already data science is starting to become more of a commodity skill set.
Instead of trying to outcompete everyone I’m keeping my eyes open for my next big opportunity.
Why doesn't industry recruit postdocs more aggressively? It's a large pool of smart, hardworking people, most of whom don't have stable or well-paying jobs.
I work in a reasonably hot area (neuro/ML), have relevant skills (Python, C++), and a decent pedigree, but I think I've talked to ~3 recruiters ever—and two of them were introduced to me by a mutual friend.
The main reasons are inertia (they never recruited postdocs before), aversion to risk (postdocs did not work in industry before), and a sprinkle of laziness here and there. They were much more open to interviewing postdocs that had spent a few weeks getting up to speed (or so recruiters and hiring managers thought) on industry practices in boot camps (such as Insight DS for my field).
Some forward-looking companies could organize one-month boot camps specifically for hired postdocs, but the interviews should also change (e.g., you cannot ask a postdoc on how to put a certain model in production, since they never did that before). And there is nothing more solidly written in stone than the way of interviewing for tech positions, apparently.
One of the main achievements of the Insight Data Science program (which I have participated in), is that it makes you produce output (a web app) that is legible to employers.
People are very risk-averse when making hiring decisions, and tend to hire people who know what they know.
What I recommend to postdocs of Ph.D. students when they reach out to me asking for some advice on what to do in their career, I always recommend not to pursue a second postdoc. One can be fine and fun, you become basically a senior researcher in a field you feel some passion for, and you do not have the stress of completing and defending 5+ years of work (my Ph.D. actually lasted less than 3 years). But by starting your second postdoc, with no solid chances of landing a TT position at a good research institution (I assume that it is what most people continuing their postdoc career are looking forward to getting), you get deeper and deeper into a maze from which it becomes more and more difficult to find a way out; you start to become too old and credentialed for junior or mid-level positions, people in tech (or industry more in general) identify you as an academic – which is always a bad thing if you are not a renowned academic in a particular niche of current interest, say NLP, Computer Vision –, you lose your confidence in being able to change your career. However, the story does not have a happy ending. Very rarely, these postdocs listen to me; they prefer to succumb to the authoritarian voices of their advisors and peers, who more often than not say that if they do good work, they will find a TT position soon, maybe they just need another publication, a little grant, or some luck.
If there are around 500 applicants per position, presumably you would need to apply to around 500 positions.
The main reasons for my lack of success were: a Ph.D. from a foreign country; a prestigious fellowship from a foreign institution; a non-US model system I used for my research; the wrong gender. They all made me and my advisors/sponsors (those who dedicated more than one minute to think about my career) overestimate my chances of landing a TT position at a research university.
In any case, I have been very happy with my career change. What I do now is much more aligned with my personality and I now know I would have not been happy in a TT position. In particular, since myself and long-term commitment took divergent roads many years ago, the difficulties in changing institution after starting TT would have put me in a pretty bad mental place.
Higher supply does lead to lower price, though.
In lot of places (and companies too) there is increasingly policies to avoid that.
https://www.ucu.org.uk/payscales
Universities of course have maneuverability in the specific spine point they pay people for different positions based on experience or demand, but in the grand sceheme of things specific roles are paid specific amounts of money.
At the author's current university, for example, the national pay scale is split up into different pay grades (each of which includes a contiguous range of spine points) for different roles, e.g. Research Assistant, Research Associate, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, etc.
That's why you can be a 'senior software engineer' 2 years out of college :)
Moreover a later start would also mitigate the tension between starting a family and pursuing academic interests, since the offspring would be out of the house (or well on the way) by the time the academic career begins.
When I was a post-doc I learned that we have essentially zero protections at least in North America. Most institutions hire post-docs as contract workers and can be fired at the drop of a pin with minimal severance. Disagree with your supervisor about the direction of your project or how your work should be published? Threaten to fire them or fire them and they have essentially zero recourse. Their work is owned by their institute and they essentially leave with nothing. This is particularly problematic for international post-docs.
As someone who is (formally) a postdoc it seems that the points raised in this article seem to apply mostly to postdocs who are not (formally) postdocs.
That is, indeed, there is no such thing as a "post-doc". But in most academic institutions, there are non-tenured researcher positions - fixed-period or otherwise - which have a Ph.D. as a requirement. They may called something like "Researcher", "Research Engineer" or "Research Staff Member" (as opposed to "Academic Staff Member").
Of course, my knowledge is as anecdotal as yours.
In my field (math) and country (USA) there are many postdocs.
Maybe you are in a different field or country?
(If you really don't believe me try search "postdoc" on math jobs https://www.mathjobs.org/jobs?joblist-0-0------
They add the term "post-doctoral" to indicate that you need to have completed a Doctorate. Or if you wish - to indicate that the conditions will be poor :-(
This was at another well-known US school. Perhaps thing are different in Britain, but I am not aware of any R1 university in the US where postdocs "do not exist."
My view is that there is a problem in academia where people in non tenured positions are being taken advantage of. However, most of these people do not actually have "postdoc" in their title. Positions with postdoc in the title are typically reserved for people who just received their PhD. It is fairly difficult to get a tenure track position directly from a PhD program, so (most) professors were (formally) a postdoc at some point in their career, and it is an important training step for applying for tenure track. (I hope this clarifies my above point, sorry if it was unclear).
Seeing that my institution and lots more do have assistant professorships for new PhDs in math, and I even have friends who have attained such positions, this is very much true. Of course one needs to be relatively successful.
Edit: Okay, it appears that some people consider those positions “postdoc in disguise”.
It all leaves me at a loss as to why anyone would choose that life. There are bad things about life in industry, but no one I work with complains anything like that badly.
It-will-be-different-for-me is self-explanatory and particularly strong when there is some kind of emotional commitment to the cause. Another example is marriage.
Most grad students and postdocs know that academia is competitive and tenure-track jobs are rare, and I bet many of them can quote the 1:9 statistic (or whatever applies to their field). However, that's just the prior. It's really hard to know your individual likelihood because it depends on a ton of factors that you don't--and sometimes can't--know or control. It really might be different this time.
For example, Cell/Nature/Science papers have a huge impact on hiring; a recent study suggested CNS authors are ~5x more likely to find a job. While you need to work hard to develop a good paper, you also need to be lucky in a lot of ways, ranging from the initial choice of topic to how well your write-up comports with 3 reviewers' whims.
It's also unclear how to weight many other factors. Is your advisor well-known? But what about the department's reputation? Is your sub-field trendy? How does your publication record stack up? I don't think anyone can confidently answer those questions and decide they're in the top 11%
My "it-will-be-different-for-me" syndrome was one of the reasons I found for why people still want to have an academic career when most academics are (quite vocally) miserable: burdened by endless bureaucratic work, often bullied by more powerful or astute colleagues, constantly receiving the complaints of students and committees, and brutally rejected on the regular by granting agencies, reviewers, and conference organizers. Most think or hope it will be different for them. But very likely, it won't be.
> enrich established PIs
Nobody stays in academia to be "rich", and in general they could earn far more and be far less stressed by working in industry.
The tenuous employment status of postdocs seems to be a choice made at an institutional level, although seemingly across every institution in the world. I'm not aware of any funding stipulations that prevent institutions from giving postdocs proper employment status/permanent contracts. Sure, a new project might require a postdoc and might have funds allocated for this, but why can't unis use their already-existing projections for incoming funds and allocate jobs (i.e. permanent postdoc positions), just as private companies hire staff on the basis of cash flow/revenue projections?
Project centred research does not bring in income for universities on an ongoing basis, which is what the argument about core funding is all about. If more funding were core funding, not tied to a specific project, then it would be possible for universities to do the right thing and provide career paths for Research Assistants.
Please note: I'm not arguing that universities in the UK are doing the right thing. I used to work as a postdoc there and understand very well what the author of the Postdoc Myths list is talking about. I'm simply answering the question as to why universities can't just do the right thing.
"Revenue generating" centres within unis have targets and projections (e.g. commercialization teams) so they DO have an idea of what funds they'll have in the medium term, even though it's on a project by project basis. I don't see how this is any different from any company that needs revenue in order to keep staff, but yet companies manage to keep staff permanently. In fact, even universities seem to be able to keep staff permanently, unless they're researchers.