Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’

It looks like as college has become standard that everyone "needs" or even "deserves", we are getting to the point where academic positions should also be handed out on a basis of some social distributive program.

Yes it's hard to do and involves sacrifices. But not everyone needs to do it. It's not immediately obvious that we gain a lot by opening the gates wide and accommodating any life choices to be compatible with any prestigious careers. Artists and scientists used to do this kind of traveling around and being under the patronage of various rich people or institutions. It isn't clear that making it into a steady stable job with orders of magnitude more people chipping away at it incrementally has brought proportional results at all.

If it's not for you, why not find something that is?

The academy can encourage social climbing, pointless competition, and careerism to the detriment of intellectual honesty, sane policy, and good science. Academic institutions can be moral mazes just like other public or private organizations.

As for (a), I agree that a lot would not be in politics but, if you have seen it first hand, academia sucks the life and minds of out of early stage researchers in a way that other jobs do not. The salary means they are comfortable enough not to complain and no time for it anyway.

As you become more senior, responsibilities start to accrete around you. You can make more progress on something, but you start to do so by supervising others and writing grants to make it happen, rather than just doing the work yourself. This can be satisfying, but can also devolve into endless paperwork.

I have what should be a relatively employable background (ML + Neuro with a smattering of biology), and yet I rarely hear from recruiters (though I would love to).

The things I learned during my PhD makes my bachelor’s and master’s subjects seem almost worthless.

I'm sure it exists. I may be wrong since it's based on personal experience, but I can't believe it's thriving (at least, in my field, computer science). These things are taken more and more seriously. If anything, I can only imagine they occur less and less frequently.

I agree but only to some extent.

First, there are many research institutions in the world. The same way there is more than one software company. They are not all equally selective and prestigious.

There are also a lot of companies doing R&D. It may not be academic research, but it can also be pretty cool. In that sense, not getting an academic position isn't the end of the world. Even if it may seem so from the perspective of a post doc.

That's far from my experience.

From my experience this is not true. I personally know about 10 classmates who either dropped out of the (pure math) PhD or left academia immediately afterwards and ended up at FAANG as generic SWE. They all said that a few months of DS and alg prep was enough.

One problem is there is plenty of discussion and no action to address the problems of the parent comment.

It's difficult to understand what action is possible, since the people holding the power to change the system are highly motivated to keep it as it is. But of course, we can discuss this all day.

The problem is not the role of academics in the world, that's clearly very important.

The problem is the current economic situation of Universities and their relationship to post-docs. It's more akin to a pyramid scheme or a ponzi scheme than a valid career. The music hasn't quite stopped, but it's already fading, and the people that are paying attention are starting to cry foul.

I luckily escaped this death march, but I still keep up with Physics research, and I've noticed that the political structure of modern academia has caused fundamental research to stagnate. Risk is no longer rewarded. The tall poppy is the first to be cut. Small, incremental improvements are rewarded, big theoretical leaps are never approved for funding.

High energy particle physics in particular has completely stalled since the 1970s! Similarly, we still don't quite understand how high-temperature superconductors work. Fusion research has burnt a lot more money than helium. The efforts to marry GR and QM have produced a lot of papers, but no results.

Take a casual stroll through ArXiV, and you'll discover that 99% of the stuff that is published is a total waste of time. It's "diploma mill", "publish or perish" garbage. This means that sifting through the endless torrent of worthless papers for the occasional insightful one would be a full time job all by itself. This alone is sufficient to stall progress!

Scientists are no longer standing on each others' shoulders, they are now trampling each other in a mad scramble for funding and tenure.

I did after several years. I, luckily, was in CS and landed on my feet. My partner and many friends did not quit. They, unluckily, were not in CS. So I have the displeasure of seeing it from both ends of the degree and many angles.

> Is it just sunk-cost fallacy?

Some but not all. You have to realize that the entire world is gaslighting kids every day into thinking that the hole-in-one once-in-a-lifetime shot is normal and common. But it isn't. It isn't normal. What's normal is failing to make it after giving 7 years of your life for less than minimum wage because there are 1000 applicants for every hyper-specialized position and almost all of them have more experience than freshly-defended-and-posted you, even if you're coming out of Harvard or Yale. But most people at the bottom never see this until it's too late, because nobody at the top talks about this ever. Worse, people at the top constantly lie about it or dismiss how bad everything is because _they_ made it and don't see what's so bad from where they are. They're all stuck in pre-2009 mindsets before available job postings completely fell off a cliff and never recovered.

To pervert a common expression, psychological warfare is a hell of a drug.

> which means you all need to unionize

This does happen, but, I don't know where you live, culture in the US is extremely hostile to unionization. Hell, the NLRB only decided that graduate students qualified as employees and were thus _allowed_ to unionize in 2016 after more than a decade of saying otherwise.

The situation is actually very similar to what I've read from folks in game-dev. Almost one-to-one. And like you suggest, these sorts of situations probably all have their root in the supply/demand of labor imbalance from people choosing the career out of passion and being willing to sacrifice on many fronts for the opportunity to do it.

This is a bad thing. If science is to be seen as simply a hobby by the coming generations, the world as we know it is truly doomed to complete stagnation.

I met one person at my Master's degree lab who went on to PhD, he said his childhood dream was to be a professor (and his father was a professor). I also have a father that is a professor (and have been very curious about PhD - although that window is getting narrower as I'm getting closer to 30:s) but he have multiple times told me that "it's not worth it", "it's a waste of time, the opportunity cost lost is too high", yet in my field I often see job post that requires a PhD, so I get mixed signals.

I can relate, as this basically describes me - though I've been lucky enough to find bare programing jobs that I quite like doing.

One of the toughest things about leaving academia is discovering that (i) no-one who doesn't have a PhD has any clue what a PhD is and (ii) everyone who has a PhD has a healthy disregard for the intellectual capacities of their fellow doctors.

I've also had immense luck - I've been a computer nerd for a very long time and I was programming a lot in my field (neuroscience). So all it took was a word from one guy I knew at a big software company and I was hired. I also have to say, that a PhD, or better said, a Dr. in my country still means something, especially if you have customer contact.

But I've seen things... bright people in their 40s who have to drop out in their 40s to be hired as a labor assistent at pharma. Associate professors who would run out of money and that's the end of the career. Doing a PhD was easily the dumbest and most risky decision of my life and I was extremely lucky to get away with only some mental scars. The only positive things I can think is the friendship with other PhD students (because you went through hell together!) and the confidence in my abitity to process and dissect huge piles of information. In the end, the latter is sole reason companies are willing to give you a shot. Dont undervalue it and sell it accordingly. If you have a PhD you most likely are very persistant and very capable of self-learning.

As a whole, there are fewer jobs to be had because we've really upped efficiency by magnitudes. Things like coal mining used to be done by teams of people (it's what my grandpa did) but now can be mostly done by machines. Houses can be mass produced by a handful of orgs. And of course the US also used to do much more manufacturing before it was mostly outsourced. So we became a service economy.

Except we automated the heck out of services too. Bookkeeping types of jobs have been mostly replaced by software tools. Likewise the kinds of jobs that connect people to other people like phone operators or marketing/advertising agencies have either been made obsolete or so efficient that a handful of companies (e.g. Google, Facebook, Amazon) can basically meet the needs of the entire nation. Nearly every industry has been disrupted now by tech, which means we've increased efficiency & reduced jobs in all those fields

On top of all of this, we have had great success in bringing women and minorities into the workforce. The economic prosperity we had post-WW2 was primarily not shared with African Americans, so the vision of getting a good job and buying a house while young was not a possibility for that group. Probably the best time for economic opportunity for minorities in the US is right now.

Most of the above is good. And I wouldn't even label what we have as "bad Boomer policies" so much as just outdated ones. We are sooo slow to adopt any sort of policy changes whatsoever. The free market is good at solving lots of problems, but it is utterly incapable of solving problems related to distribution of wealth, because companies only have the power to direct wealth inward (if the company were, on average, directing wealth outward it would very quickly go bankrupt and cease to exist).

As for academia, a lot of low hanging fruit has been had across multiple disciplines, so testing new theories has become exponenially more expensive. Cutting edge research 100 years ago would have cost $10k to set up a bunch of mirrors to measure the speed of light. Now it costs in the $billions to measure the presense of certain kinds of matter. So the return value of scientific funding has gone down... so scientific funding has gone down. Despite this, the state of the job market in the US is not very appealing so more people than ever are pursuing / staying in academia.

I have no idea what the fix is but I think a basic income policy would help

It seems entirely possible that there is no way to replicate what was a relatively short period of hyper-growth that has defined most of our lifetimes, and instead we need to base our policies and planning around the idea that what we’ve considered to be stagnant growth rates are actually the norm.

Overall I agree that the NIH & NSF extramural funding policy is designed with the sole goal of maximizing the number of tenure-track faculty. The messaging around sequestration, and the Grant Support Index mechanism, made it explicit that the main policy goal was to keep creating tenure-track faculty at the same rate. Even if this isn't sustainable. There are many programs to buoy the supply of (aspiring) tenure-track faculty, but few for any other career path. I'm just not aware of any policies to prevent grant recipients from hiring staff should they choose to do so.

Further, what is it that you're implying with that statement?