I Regret Quitting Astrophysics
marcelhaas.com
marcelhaas.com
Hmm, which do I miss?
-- The once-per-year job cycle where if you don't find something you like, you have to wait another year to land your next soft money position?
-- The lack of perception of fairness or clear criteria for how the top fellowships are awarded?
-- The feeling that you're in an endless apprenticeship model like a pyramid scheme where only by the top people leaving do you get a chance to have some responsibility, better pay, freedom?
Hmm. Turns out I don't miss it so much.
Well, did I say “funny”? I meant “utterly depressing”. I’m in because I don’t think I would like any other job better, but I have a lot of sympathy for people who flee this broken system.
-- Seeing an amazing world I would never have seen through conferences, observing time, telescopes, etc.
-- Being able to read what I want, explore what I want, in the hours of the day I want
-- Being able to do something to the end, fully and well
For sure, sometimes I wish to go back to those positive things. But right now the reasons I left continue to outweigh the reasons to stay/go back.
During my PhD, I got the full experience, drumming up new ideas, grant/proposal writing, managing and setting project goals, maintaining collaborations and doing the actual work. It was fulfilling and fun especially working with great group of people that are 100% dedicated but, boy, was really, really hard.
The long hours, terrible pay, and watching people stuck in the post-doc treadmill got to me. Plus, I saw quite a few 2-body problems fall apart (mine included). I also watched my advisor go through the tenure process, it seemed like he never slept.
It's been challenging getting into industry (I'm still looking :) ), but, if I make it, I'll write a blog post to see if there are any regrets in 5 years. But, like the author, I'm already missing the culture, going to seminars (the terrible seminar coffee), and nerding out with friends in other disciplines.
Academia will always look like the grass is greener "I can do whatever I want" type. But we shouldn't forget actually you can't, you can only do what others think you're good at, and what the grant review panels think you can feasibly do.
My plan is to just use the extra money from a tech job to open my garage lab. It's getting easier by the day. A fancy deltavision microscope costs less than a cheap boat, so it's not even an expensive hobby if you think about it. You really can do whatever you want, you'll just be limited by money than by other people :)
And why not rent time on one? Apparently the University of Arizona (and a number of other universities) rent time on theirs for $25/hr (https://microscopy.arizona.edu/equipment/deltavision-rt-deco...)
You can rent time if you just need it for a bit here and there, or if the economics make sense that way for sure. But then, I'm saying I can also buy or build my own and still do it with just regular tech salaries on the side!
Yeah, that's a lot more than a cheap boat. You can get a lot of boat for 50k - like a Boston Whaler 190 Montauk. Not yacht, but boat.
And not sure what you're making, but that's a pretty damn expensive hobby for most of us.
And a tenure-track position usually comes with some workforce or at the very least a good network of experts to refer to. There are of course really shit academic positions, but you'll anyway not have time for research if you have a really shit job, so that objections seems to cancel.
I think that your idea is the practical one and you'll get a lot of mileage out of it, but may I add one more limiting constraint, one I've had to learn to respect from experience? That constraint is mental energy.
Your job in tech has constraints that mean if you're doing it right and are working in a role that's pushing you to your full potential, you won't have enough mental energy at the end of the day to work on your side projects. While that might be disappointing, it's often a lot better than the alternative: if you select for a cushy job which has great WLB, you may experience a level of disillusionment from stasis that can also make it hard to want to work on things outside of work.
I wish I had an easy answer to this stuff but I don't. Long-term, if you have a stable career in tech, it makes it a lot easier to take time off for sabbaticals or periods of startup work (yours or others) because you can return to a well-compensated career that's pleasant and will give you enormous surplus lifetime earnings -- a perfect match for scientific work on the side, as you put it! But it's still a career.
To get growth you'll be happy with, it will take the lion's share of your mental energy and strategic planning, over a long period of time. Good fortune aside, there's often no way around that.
But referring to a relationship, and the difficulty of finding a location that works for both people in a relationship. See:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=two-body%20p...
My feeling at the time was that I was a good enough researcher that getting postdoc positions probably wouldn't be a problem, so I could stay in the field for another ~6--8 years if I wanted to. And if my research had gone well in those jobs there was a reasonable chance (say, 50-50) that I could get a tenure-track job somewhere. But I wasn't super comfortable with that risk along with having very little freedom as to where I would live. (Having a two-body problem didn't help either.) I also factored in the opportunity cost of staying, say, ~8 years in postdoc roles before switching to industry and figured that if there was a good chance that I was going to leave academia eventually, I should do it sooner rather than later. Part of this was motivated by some researchers I interacted with who were really smart, did great research, but just kept jumping from postdoc to postdoc and couldn't land anything permanent.
While I do miss the astro research, I have learned a lot from industry that I would never have even known existed had I stayed in astronomy. (This may be more a function of working at a startup than industry work in general.) I'm not sure what work OP is doing specifically, but the industry work I've been doing has been pretty fulfilling. It helps that I've mostly been working on applying ML to health technology. Industry is a big place! There is a lot of fulfilling work out there even if it can take time to find it.
I've been in industry for 25+ years, with no regrets. I've told people that there's a good living to be made doing things that other people hate. In my case, I solve hard multidisciplinary problems, usually involving math and sometimes physics. Persuading people to hire me can be tricky, but persuading them to keep me is easy.
How do you go about finding the right kind of projects to work on, or the right kind of environment that appreciates what you bring to the table? And how often do you come across like-minded people? In my (short) experience, apart from occasional threads like these, it’s very difficult to spot kindred spirits.
PS: If you’re up to interacting by email/Zoom, I would love to get some perspective based on your experience. (Email in my profile)
"The people who questioned my decision to become an extronomer were right. I was wrong. It seems too late to get back in."
This mindset irks me because this individual strikes me as being bright, talented, curious, and hard working. You are not wrong because you took a leap in life and it didn't work out perfectly, its a valuable learning experience. It is different if you assess the opportunity costs and risks and rewards with going back to astrophysics and decide that it is not worth it and move on...but to say it is 'too late' is you pouting and trying to let yourself down easy.
The author obviously understands this is a learning experience--that's why they wrote the essay in the first place. The challenge is that, on a practical level, starting over will likely take too many years, with too great a risk of not getting a job in academia. This is hardly "pouting and trying to let yourself down easy." It's the disheartening wisdom that sometimes you learn things too late in life to benefit from them.
And that is on top of the foundation that he has already built in his earlier years. Unless there is some glitch where you lose all previous experience in life if you decide to backtrack a bit.
I guess ultimately I don't really know what the author's goals would be in academia, and I am not from academia...and that makes it difficult to really explore the situation.
As for his goals, well most of the article is about the things he's missing so the straightforward guess is to have that back?
This is a persistent sentiment in CS and adjacent circles, I've noticed, and a serious hindrance to finding fulfillment in life and career.
It's not a race, it's an Iron Man, and for the vast majority of people just finishing somewhere they feel proud of is (should be) enough.
It's way too easy to shift the goal to being a little bit more successful then you currently are and it makes people miserable even if they are doing well by most people's standards.
“Comparison is the thief of joy”
I saw research from a few years back that indicated happiness peaked a little over $100k in salary and actually tended downward above that. It’s been my experience that people who are solely focused on salary tend to do so because they don’t know what else to optimize their life around.
Would you say most of the people there are hustling for the chance at a professorship, early career, or just love the environment/work?
The postdocs are generally there to pursue a faculty position or to broaden their skillset and springboard to the next thing. 65k seems high for a postdoc in most fields though. My academic postdoc salary a few years ago was 50k, and that was considered generous.
Staff, research scientists, lab techs, and other non-postdoc, non-faculty technical roles in academia are not generally in the career path to a tenured position, so I’d guess environment/work would be primary motivators.
I work in a group that has about 30-50 students, 2-3 professors, 3 scientists, 2 postdocs, and 5 techs/engineers (depending on how you draw the lines). Professors make $200k. Scientists make $80k. Techs make $60k. Every single person is highly competent and could easily fetch a higher wage for their skillset. Nobody’s here because they think it’s a path to a cushy life. Working among exclusively smart people, having good conversations, not being in a nasty corporate framework, and doing work with purpose are all top reasons to stay in academia. The list of reasons not to is long (and easy to come by).
This is a really interesting take to me because my experience was quite different. I thought many were smart in a vary narrow field but at times lost outside of it, prone to ego-based biases, and much more concerned with publication and funding than really intellectually curious. There’s definitely pragmatic reasons for the latter but it seemed to water down the pure intentions people have brought up in this thread.
Of course there were wonderful people as well, but I’ve found that in the private sector too. I guess it goes to show mileage may vary and perspective is a key component
I don't think the author is saying he has been out of the field too long, but rather that hiring committees (even postdoc advisors, or fellowship committees) looking for astrophysics faculty candidates are not going to give a second glance to someone who left academia for several years.
This is the key attitude to gauging whether it's worth sticking it out in academia. I tell people you really need to be 'obsessed' with science (indeed, obsession is really a key concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riaYwt0gf20). Just being interested in problem-solving isn't close to enough to put up with the low pay and rather tough working conditions. There's lots of interesting problems out there in industry.
A data scientist!
I only completed my undergrad in physics before shifting to tech, but I've seen many instances of people working in software/programming/data science roles after their undergrad/grad studies in physics.
The days of a physicist being a top hire for quantitative finance based on potential in a new field, are largely over.
No reason why as a data scientist he can't pivot from financial services into something more research oriented within industry, or back into academia; the pay will likely be much less in the latter case, but the opportunities for work on a more meaningful track with like-minded people will be there.
More generally, I would say that the key would be to target roles and teams that cross the boundary between pure research and software engineering, which could vary from straight research software engineer roles - with say, "machine learning" or tech associated with data science (e.g. "jupyter") as an example of what you might search for in key skills and keyword filters; or by generally investigating the support roles within academic institutions because that can be a backdoor way in. Naturally the closer the research to your specific experience the stronger your application would be.
One way outside of the normal job search platforms you can identify those gaps is to keep an eye on conferences (especially during the present time while they are online) and the communities they serve and (e.g. if you are a coder) the most widely used code libraries as referenced in academic papers; apart from giving you an idea of where your skills might plug a gap they offer scope for networking in the former case.
Sorry to be vague/obvious or responding to a different question, but I don't have specific examples to mind, this is just what I have seen actually working as a strategy into data science-related roles in similar institutions with people without your enhanced qualifications (stem phd and industry data science experience).
For the vast majority of other fields, if you move to industry, they (academia) are not interested in you anymore. Yes, there are some exceptions like that flight attendant who survived after falling out of the plane at I don't know how many feet of altitude, but in my research field (one the life sciences) I have yet to see someone moving back to academia after having left to go work in industry. First, they (academia) do not want you anymore, you are simply expired. Second, as one faculty when I was a postdoc said: we would like to ask researchers who moved into the private sector how life is out there, but they never came back to tell us. And, I must add, it is easy to guess why: as soon as one gets some distance from the academic world (and I guess, from most worlds, but let's stay focused on academia), they see that when researchers are not making ground-breaking work, they are just doing some work, not better or worse than many others that requires passion and dedication, pay little, and leave you like snow in the summer sun when you are not needed anymore.
Recently, someone in academia told me: when you are tired of industry, you can try to get back into academia, maybe as a professor of practice. Like, for 1/3 of the money and 3 times the annoyances? I would much prefer to open a pizzeria and I don't eat pizza.
Plus, you rub elbows with a lot of academia if you plan on going back.
It is probably too late to get a tenure (or scientist) track position, but through perseverance I think you can work as a software developer (and probably a bit of a pay cut if you are OK with that) in any number of scientific research institutions (e.g., JPL, any number of FFRDCs). Many of these software engineering jobs have the possibility of working remotely, as well. And your PhD will be a big help if you are applying for NSF, NASA, DOE grants. I work at an atmospheric science research institute and we are in the process of hiring an AI/ML developer. I too prefer the academic / research institute life. I am looking forward to getting back to science conferences when the pandemic is over.
I went into "academia" (or close to it), doing software engineering for a telescope being built. Astronomers are a great little community out there, and they really need help writing code. A lot of them aren't familiar or have experience with best industry practices that could save them so much time/money/heartache.
Bunches of projects are hiring, and if you have creds, and industry experience, that will only increase your value. I'm sure you could find a job at any of the wonderful facilities wherever you want to be around the world!
Sometimes you have to look at the grass from the other side to realize it's greener, and that's fine. Some day I may go back to industry and get paid again. But it's all good fun anyway.
At least in the US, tenure is a really big thing. But there are plenty of people who are paid employees at the university and aren't teaching, and I'd also consider that academia.
The good thing is that public universities tend to post jobs with salary ranges, so you can get an idea of what labs are looking for what, at what pay rate. The pay tends to follow the expectation of having a somewhat less competitive and intensive work environment, more flexible hours, etc.
A huge number of postdoc fellowships[0] cut off at 12 months (NIH DP-1, various NSF postdocs) to 4-5 years (NIH K99, Simons Foundation BTI, Burroughs Wellcome Career/CASI Awards). You can, of course, hang on for longer by being paid from research grants. However, even that is tricky because the size of a "standard" modular NIH grant hasn't gone up in ages and even a modest salary ($60k + benefits) will now eat up a substantial chunk of it, so you'll spend a lot of time looking for money. Frustratingly, you often can't be the PI on grants either, so it devolves into ghost-writing. It also makes it hard to settle down if you are piecing together a string of 1-2 year contracts.
This is, IMO, stupid. It's not good for doing science and a few studies have shown that not good for training scientists either. A system that funded a few more staff scientists would likely produce more and better research and training.
[0] It's even worse, as many awards for tenure-track profs are ALSO gated on time-since-degree.
Having been a tenured professor who left (sort of, not completely), these issues are really salient to me. I was surprised when I left how many stories I heard of others doing the same. They just aren't mentioned for many reasons, including institutional ego.
Academics in many fields is in a crisis from my perspective. It's not obvious because there's always amazing advancements like the new mRNA vaccine, but it comes at a huge human cost that is rarely covered (pieces like the recent Atlantic article notwithstanding, and some stuff in places like STAT). Also, those advancements are often misleading, because the volumes of stuff that are more typical (like the hydroxychloroquine story) you don't hear about, without the skeptical eye of the world waiting for a much-needed and very-real product.
At least in my field, I suspect the author would have problems returning only because they don't fit the narrative that's required for positions. Again, this depends on field, but a lot of academic hiring, at least at the level of faculty, is about branding of sorts, of building up a story of them being on a meteoric trajectory of genius so brilliant it can't be contained by fate or circumstances of any sort. I've read it referred to as the madonna-whore complex, which is quite accurate. It's hard to explain unless you've been on the side of faculty hiring, but it's very much about looking like the next super-Einstein-Nobel Winner in a room full of people who will never attain anywhere near that much fame (but who think they have), in a scientific process that is really about incremental contributions anyway.
It's all heavily location-dependent too. The author talks about nomadic lifestyles which is accurate, but there's also an element of that which is important to keep in mind: if your nomadic wanderings leads you to a great place, it's great, but if that place is dysfunctional, it's horrible. It's hard for me to say it's a case of grass-is-greener only because it really depends on all sorts of things, including that individual, their connections, and a lot of luck.
I think the pathology of modern academics only increases as you go up the ladder, to be honest, unless you're in a good place. I can't stress enough how much of an oversupply there is at the moment of extremely talented labor, and dysfunctional, corrupt systems that are broken and outdated. There's plenty of academics that is cutting edge and open-minded, but there's also a lot of it that is supremely dated and behind the times, years behind industry due to narrow-mindedness, reinforced by distorted incentive systems.
I keep thinking something has to give but so far there's no end in sight, at least in the US.
What a brilliant way to describe it. But I must add that industry has the same problems. I work in big tech and we have people who are brought into leadership coming from a hot startup because they are perceived to be John Galt figures, and they turn out to be unqualified status seekers.
I wish more people thought like you and very much agree that academia could benefit from an influx for folks with industry experience and programming best practices!
But it sure would have been nice to have some professional support programmer around for advice on design and help out with the gnarlier bits.
I don't think this essentially different in business, it is not uncommon not to get hired when you're overqualified or considered too old for the job. The reasonableness of such restrictions can be discussed but they also exist in academia in most countries. In my country, for instance, none of the national funding schemes accept "having been in business" as an excuse in the CV (only medical reasons and pregnancy), so you're expected to be fully comparable to anyone who has worked the same number of years since the Ph.D. in academia. It sounds ridiculous but that's the rule. So you will compete with someone who has 40 publications as someone with 20 publications, for instance.
Status and prestige confer power. Power brings resources. How one uses those resources is separate.
That said, status and prestige are only correlated to title. An essential staffer will get what they need to do the work they want to do the way they want to do it.
I have gone past the age to feel strongly regret to any choice I made. As long as I made a desicive choice without much delay I'm good with it (of course unless something really bad happens), because I know I'd regret if I choose the other way (or not), anyway.
Hits way too close to home!
As a bullshit data scientist, I cry a little inside when people ask me what I do. Whilst I deeply miss academia for the same reasons in that post, I absolutely don't regret leaving. I do however, regret quitting the bank/quant job I got immediately after finishing my PhD. Was far more interesting, challenging, productive and way more useful than the absolute nonsense I typically work on now.
Maybe grass is always greener on the other side of the fence or maybe we should be focused on a more balanced approach to our careers.
Also there are lots of ways to maintain a connection with the academic worldview without being a full-time academic...adjunct, professional societies, journals, online communities, etc. You can eat the food without being a dishwasher.
Get back into academia with newfound commitment. This time you won't be looking over your shoulder wondering if you're missing something in "the real world."
Not saying that this is the best of all universes but just saying that the road not travelled isn’t necessarily one that would haven ended in success, even though it’s tempting to think of things in that way.
To start with, if you're tied to an area, you have to start your search with the area and get creative finding the right job title instead of the other way around.
I miss the money, of course, but doing research makes me much happier.
One thing he said though I think applies more universally than he thinks: "There is strong competition and people typically experience quite some pressure to achieve." One could say that about positions in sales, trading and even programming. It is hard to stand still these days and not be run out of a job.
If you are an astrophysicist curious about moving into the datascience profession, I would just like to point out that satisfaction with a move like that depends on a large number of factors, and that you should consider not only Marcel's experiences (which I think are important and shared by many) but your own personal circumstances. There are pro's and con's for every person.
Let me offer another datapoint:
* I left after my PhD, which ended absolutely terribly. I knew years before finishing that I was just not cut out for a life in academia, and positioned myself in the best way I knew how for a life in industry, but I did not anticipate just how truly painful the experience would be. I stayed to finish my PhD out of a nagging obligation to follow through with a lifelong dream of mine. I thought I would deeply regret leaving after receiving my masters degree. Whether or not that is true, I really don't (and will never) know. But I was not happy.
* My personal reasons for unhappiness are not uncommon but are definitely not universal. I did not excel at the entrepreneurial and social aspects of astrophysics that are crucial for success. Without strong social and professional ties to close collaborators within the community, and without an innate ability to thrive in an environment with very little structure, add to that a predisposition for mental health problems, I burnt out quickly. I found myself withdrawing from social settings as burnout set in, and the hill was steeply downward from there. When I don't socialize, my ideas stagnate, my work suffers, and my perspective warps until it's easy to submit to delusions like "I am doing great" when really I was (obviously, in retrospect) not doing great at all.
* The transition to datascience was on one hand fantastic. I have a structure that (1) forces me to socialize daily, (2) forces me to confront my productivity levels frequently. Even when completely remote these past 9-10 months, I find my productivity is far more consistent than it was in graduate school, and my life is far more sane. I have a true work-life balance that I could only fantasize about before.
* The stress is much lower (in my current role). My work no longer defines who I am as a person. Doing what you love sounds great on paper but really what it means are higher highs and lower lows with each small success and failure. While in the beginning of my graduate school experience, I was reasonably well-rounded and rational, as I dived deeper into my own thesis work, I started noticing that I became far less receptive to criticism. My thesis work was so integral to my identity that it became harder and harder to be objective about it.
* Financially I am far more secure, and that is incredibly important to me. I'm not earning anywhere near as much as a $500k AI/ML researcher at FAANG, but I'm also not earning a $30k grad student salary or a $50-60k postdoc salary. I can live extremely comfortably while still building a savings (and am no longer in credit card debt). I also can find a job in the location I want. I don't need to write 20 detailed applications (all during "application season") for roles around the world, wait months to hear replies, and then pack my bags to go wherever I'm accepted. That's a hell of a perk.
* Like Marcel, however, I do find myself missing many aspects of the world of astrophysics. I miss a community completely made up of people at the top of their professional game, making groundbreaking contributions on existentially important things, where everyone seems to share the same "datascience" mindset. I miss symposiums and lunch talks and people with deep passion for what they do. However I have found it incredibly satisfying to work alongside people with other strengths; programmers, product, designers, and managers. These people may or may not have a deep passion for what they do (for some its a job, for others its a passion), but they all have incredibly valuable expertise to share and perspectives to offer. So in that sense, it's not clear to me which world is better.
* As time wears on, I'm finding myself losing some of the knowledge I once had, and that's a bummer. Datascience allows me to keep the statistics channels of my brain somewhat active, but I'm no longer doing things like graphical models and MCMC. I'm trying (slowly) to build a blog where I can do these things as a hobby, but it's difficult to motivate a lot of times; I find that a lot of times it takes me back to the stressful mindset of grad school. I still have three unpublished papers from my graduate school days but the longer time goes, the less of a chance I think these will ever get published, but they stay in their current state because the last time they were touched I was almost losing my mind from stress and I just avoid teleporting myself back to that terrible time.
I apologize for the rant but my point is: your mileage may vary; Marcel makes some very good points but consider all the pros and cons for yourself. As someone else commented, a sufficiently motivated data scientist can definitely get back in the academic game (though it will be more challenging).
I can absolutely believe that this is still an issue, but it's also highly disappointing that's still the case.
All your data analysis is done on a computer, and I'd bet that every telescope or instrument you have to interact with is computer controlled and can be worked with remotely with little modification.
Yes, astrophysical datasets can be absolutely enormous, and bandwidth can become a serious constraint, but we have solutions to those problems too - that's one of the reason terminal sessions (in their various modern guises) are so powerful.
You would think or hope that by the end of 2020 when a global pandemic has taught many of us that, for much of the time, for those of us whose working lives are mostly spent "in computers", we would have learned that geography is not a significant barrier. At least not with decent enough internet connectivity.
Again, sadly, I'm not surprised to see that in certain circles it is still an issue. It's a cultural change, and those can take an awfully long time to work themselves out.
You might miss the people involved and the culture, but you can always cultivate and find that somewhere else. And not like you drop all those connections anyways.
But I think there is one better: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51947019-the-regenerativ...
The key thing is (1) finding that within you which you want to contribute to something bigger than you (linking intrinsic motivation and to positive contributions towards society and community) (2) and then, growing the capacity to accomplish it.
If he's prone to seasonal affective disorder (SAD), he may be feeling down because of that and taking it out on his career choice.
If you are feeling bad about your career, family or life situation,
- just buy a SAD lamp such as the Philips Wake Up lamp
- use it religiously for a week
- after a week, assess the problem again - do you feel the same about it?
If you're prone to SAD, after a few days of using, your motivation will come back and the "rational" reasons which you felt very strongly about will lose all emotional charge.
t seems pretty damning to suggest that a community selects its members based on something other than having "skills and experience that can be very valuable" to that same community. Is that really true? Hopefully we're putting the best people in place for these academic jobs, and not simply the well-connected people who happened to go to the fanciest schools.
I'm just happy I get to see a terminal screen for a living.
The fact is everything has its downsides. Industry has just as much politics.
The key is to find a balance of what you like doing and your livelihood - sway too far one way, sure, you'll have money, but you'll hate yourself. The other, you won't be able to have an adequate lifestyle, and also hate yourself.
A job with meaning is hard to find, maybe we should encourage and support all these smart people to start a business/research venture? Because it feels wasteful to generate so many PhDs and nothing comes out of it.
Companies like Google or Morgan Stanley can hire those people and use those skills to generate something like 1 million dollars per year (look at how much money per employee those companies generate). We don't value academic work anywhere near that much.
Well, some research presumably came out of it and the experience of planning and executing that research is presumably at least somewhat transferable to a lot of others tasks. The reality is that a lot of people don't directly use a significant portion of what they learn in school. Even if they got a CS degree and become a developer, there's probably a lot of theoretical CS most won't use outside of interview questions. And many of us have shifted our careers multiple times even if we've stayed loosely adjacent to prior roles.
With the right foundation and motivations, the quiet and solitude of being physically apart from it (and the politics) might actually improve your chances of real insight.
I think a better decision, for people in similar circumstances, would be doing corporate data-science as a hobby (via contracting or freelancing) and keeping your full-time astronomy career.
I recall a seminar given a few years back by an astronomy PhD graduate who was talking about career prospects outside of academia, and naturally all of them were 'data science' related. The speaker's first remark was something like 'I don't mean to say that data science is just marketing, but...' and then proceed to describe their career as a person 'with statistics and scripting experience'... working in marketing.
In journalism, it is said that you can always find employment if you join the dark side, which is public relations. I think less people fool theirself in thinking that PR serves the public interest.
We can speculate about why we are hemorrhaging scientists to marketeers, but for the self-interested individual, it's rational. I've always thought that teachers and scientists do not have as high status as they should for the contributions that they provide to society, but perhaps we shouldn't want to attract people to those fields who are in it for the riches and glory.[†]
[†] (of course, it's more nuanced than this)
Capitalism generally pays for one’s contributions to the economy, not their contributions to society.
However, I do think there is room for regulating areas where the incentives of the economy and society are misaligned. What’s best for the economy isn’t always what’s best for society and vice versa. When they are at odds, I would favor some guardrails.
I think most would settle for living wages and reasonable career progression prospects.
The author should get back to it. Don’t leave a good thing.
Newsflash: the vast majority of jobs out there are not that fun. That's why you get paid. If they were a lot of fun, you'd be the one who pays, just like you pay when you go to a concert. Some jobs are meaningful. Working for Moderna and making a vaccine that's going to save millions of lives, that's meaningful. Finding a cure for a certain type of cancer, it's meaningful. But saying that astrophysics is meaningful because some internet surveys find it to be "the sexiest job in the world", that's quite shallow. 99.9999% of the jobs out there don't end up with you saving the world. You just do some stuff, get paid for it, and then go home and live your life with your family and friends.
To the author's credit, I read that sentence the other way around: the internet deigns "Data Scientist" to be the "sexiest job," but he doesn't feel satisfaction that matches that reputation.
>The internet says I have ”the sexiest job of the 21st century”, but I think my previous job was more enjoyable to brag about at birthday parties.
The author appears to be alive, and astrophysics still seems to exist. So, what exactly is the problem? I expect wrong answers only.
I have no idea how that blatant age discrimination is legal but....
It sound simplistic but honestly, this happens in life. I feel for the author as someone in the same situation (left academia for industry). But at some point it is what it is. You can't change reality. You can't reverse time. So in every moment you just have to decide, "Given the world is this way, what do I want to do?" The world is going to continue on day after day and is not going to stop or fundamentally alter itself to align with your preferences and well-being. All you get is the choice.