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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

You’re describing academics who have already made it, people who got tenure. There are plenty of really minted PhDs who would be quite happy to move to the arse of nowhere for a postdoc with no teaching duties. The competition for academic posts is intense in every field I’m aware of and the outside options are not great except in fields where a Bachelor’s is an excellent choice already. You could afford at least five post docs used to living in genteel poverty for the cost of one established academic.

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Recruiting a postdoc at a new institute without a track record of advancing people is a very tough sell. That would be an extremely risky career move.

The best bet for a new research institute is to have a large endowment and recruit two or three large names in a field. People who already have a good reputation. The large endowment is necessary to prove that you will ongoing resources to keep the research funded into the future.

> Recruiting a postdoc at a new institute without a track record of advancing people is a very tough sell. That would be an extremely risky career move.

Doing a postdoc is itself a large bet that usually fails to pay off, retrospectively making both the PhD and the postdoc look like extremely poor choices by any monetary calculus. The supply of people who want to stay in Science/Research/Academia is a lot greater than the demand outside perhaps ML/AI. Even fields with great outside options for PhDs, like Economics, Computer Science or Engineering have enormous competition for academic jobs, or para-academic ones, like adjuncting.

Off topic, but I always do a bit of a double-take at how Americans use "Adjunct Professor." In Canada, that would be called "Contract Academic" or similar. I'll bet it is different again in Europe, so for clarity, that is basically a low paid teaching position.

In Canada, an Adjunct Professor is unpaid, but actually somewhat prestigious. It is a recognition of your abilities in a field and might be given to someone in industry who collaborates with a researcher at the university (for example).

"In Canada, an Adjunct Professor is unpaid, but actually somewhat prestigious. It is a recognition of your abilities in a field and might be given to someone in industry who collaborates with a researcher at the university (for example)."

That was originally how it was used in the U.S. too. "Someone who needs a non-permanent affiliation with the University to teach some classes" - usually someone from industry or the community, etc. whose expertise was valuable to the educational mission.

The modern version is...sort of depressing.

> Off topic, but I always do a bit of a double-take at how Americans use "Adjunct Professor."

I think in the US, almost anyone with a job at a college is a 'professor'. You see 'professors' in their late 20s or early 30s.

Sorry to bring the bad news, but the author the first comment is 100% right. Moreover, structure in academia is different than in Startups. In startups, people don't care about "names" and "prestige". In academia, it is different. In order to get your next job in academia, you need (1) recommendation letters (2) citations. Advisors usually have a larger network and experience to be able to publish papers and help you climb the ladder through their networks/recommendations.

In Industry, you can come from no-name university, and you can still make it to FAANG (or top tier companies). In academia, that's impossible. To start, it is impossible to make it to good PhD program without publishing papers in top-tier conference, MSc student in no-name universities can't afford finding advisor to easily do that. Good PhD programs will help you to join a good Lab, and usually it is through network + recommendations.

In Startup world, you can sit in your dorm room, without anyone believing in you and you can make it.

P.S. I am a research engineer, I worked in both places and that was my observations. There is no shortcuts, everything is hierarchical in academia.

If academia is 100% about status hierarchies this definitely wouldn’t work. It probably won’t work anyway but if there’s anything real in the function used to judge academic worth of work then there’s potential for it to work. There are multiple ways to improve that likelihood, more money most obviously of all. But new successful research institutes are founded so it’s clearly possible. Very unlikely unless there’s a very big budget, excellent taste in selection of applicants or both, but hardly impossible.

> .. more money most obviously of all.

I would challenge this point. There are few research labs in Singapore and middle east (UAE, Saudi Arabia) where money is not a problem. I have seen many researchers fly there to build research groups, but many of them leave after some time. You can see papers coming from these groups in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, KDD, etc) every years, but these papers come from individuals, not groups. Money is one ingredient, you need fresh blood and students to work on new ideas. You need an ecosystem for research and industry to adopt and develop some of these ideas (e.g. Standford/Google, UCLA/DeepMind, UoT/Uber, MIT/Boston startups, etc)

Well, I think that's a bit pessimistic.

I think every Msc student at a "no-name" german university has the chance to publish a paper at a top-tier conference. Student research assistant jobs are plenty and the Msc Thesis can be real-science. Every Msc. CS program here I know has a research-option so that instead of lecture you can do research. It's just hard to publish in those top-tier conferences and most research is more applied (and therefore more niche!) so its not easy to find an advisor for this. But in my experience even if the professor is working in a more applied setting you can push for a more basic-research, research is research. But you can do a phd here without publishing a paper first, so I don't think most Msc Students see it as a priority.

>> .. a "no-name" german university

We come from different places. German universities are good in average. + MSc student have the chance to work as "working students" (20hr/week) at any company in Germany. https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-un...

>> .. It's just hard to publish in those top-tier conferences

Hard is relative. You should also check the costs of publishing a paper or attending a conference for students from global south https://twitter.com/hadyelsahar/status/1374699909451030542

>> But you can do a phd here without publishing a paper first

I agree with that.

As someone who went through German academia at a very high level, with a top PhD, early and lasting grant success, top-tier publications and a multidisciplinary network, but who still could not land a Professorship in Germany but had to leave the country for it, I can tell you, it is not too pessimistic what ___luigi writes.

Hierarchy is everything in academia, especially in Germany. The only way to tenure is to have someone up there already who is willing to pull many strings for you.

> There are plenty of really minted PhDs who would be quite happy [...] for a postdoc with no teaching duties.

As one of those people, I'm happy to move to the middle of nowhere, IF it's for a place with a stellar reputation that's going to help me do good science and (unfortunately) has some name-brand recognition.

In the US, it is hard to recruit postdocs unless you are at a top 10 school (I tried several times). Potential postdocs are largely incentivized by: (1) name recognition of their mentor since their letter and networking will get them their next job and (2) the likelihood of getting top-tier publications. Also, they get a decent salary and health insurance in engineering fields.

A brand new research institute does none of these things for them. I don't see why a fresh PhD would choose this over either FAANG or a university.

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