While certainly not every doctoral candidate hails from a wealthy family, there is a pursuit of status that does lead to similarly homogeneous views.
What are you even talking about?
There's just some things that are stuck in rigid unchanging organizations/industries. Anything heavily government reliant or bureaucratic, which universities are probably the best example of, is going to be extremely slow at adapting to the world.
Just like how lawyers still use fax machines.
It's extremely hard to be different and make change/stand-out in those organizations. Which also relates back to the articles point about cultural insularity.
Same thing for the government too. I'm civically minded, so I've taken a couple contracts here and there to help out the Government of Canada, but man is it a pay cut. But what are they going to do? Pay more than the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court?
Sometimes governments try to work around this with contracting companies so that they don't have to see the salaries directly. But this is just padding extra waste and cost.
But this is what exponential tech is going to look like, at least until AI replaces us then who knows.
You get software engineers that get paid 70k a year but also janitors that get paid 70k a year with the same number of years in.
There are other things governments could do though.
Coming from a US perspective, the biggest one would be to pass some kind of law that employment contracts can't prevent you moonlighting for the government. I'd probably be willing to pick up some contract work to do on the cheap, but I can't because of my employment contract.
Another is that the government already has access to a lot of things I don't, and I'd be willing to trade my time for access to some of those things. Free flights on army cargo planes would be a great perk. I would totally do some work if they'd let me drive a tank for like 30 minutes and fire the cannon down the range a couple times. They probably have access to HPC clusters that would tempt some (I don't have the skills to have the interest, but I'm sure many do).
Government pensions are another option, although they'd have to require less than 40 hours a week of work to qualify. It might end up being more expensive than just paying more.
Tax breaks are another option. Someone would have to figure up the demand curve, but a 10% cut to my effective tax rate would be tempting depending on the amount of work required.
Free education would be another option if they could offer it for part time work.
I don't feel that the government has gotten particularly creative in trying to attract talent. The pay is bad, the job is a bureaucratic nightmare, and the perks kind of suck other than the pension.
The downside is that a lot of those are likely to piss off the rest of the government employees.
I don't know how to do it in the US, but in Canada you should be able to get these types of short-term gigs if you do a bit of networking in Ottawa and mention that you're a specialist in X, and that you want to help out here and there to give back. Wont take long. People want to bring in experts that will take occasional lower pay for impact.
Edit:
Also, the servers are BEEEEFY, haha. They might be cloud first these days, but when I was there it was still all on-premises and man alive are those machines huge.
I do know some CCs and branches are trying to make changes but the PS in general is an absolute dinosaur for hiring and shows no signs of improving to match the bleed they'll have as people start retiring out.
I recall someone I hired had also applied for a government job while completing his degree. They called him back a little more than a year after. Of course, his salary out of college was 4x what they were offering but can you imagine what candidate the government ends up with? The people who are still looking for a job in tech a whole year after graduation…
This is a brilliant idea. In some sense, the gov't is the biggest non-profit in any modern nation. Large corporations love it when you "moonlight" at a non-profit. Your are idea is not so far-fetched! I'm sure lots of techies would love to pitch-in and help to improve an online gov't service -- be it local, regional, or national.
Pay your consulting firm 100x more than they would pay any one government employee, and not ask questions about how much of that goes to each consultant.
Yes. Why not?
One is a job in a market, with no "external" validation to make up for the lack of pay. The other is one of the most elite legal jobs in the world.
No need to look at a few prestigious positions. Aren’t doctors on government payroll over there? There’s already a precedent to paying some government employees market rates it seems.
> Sometimes governments try to work around this with contracting companies so that they don't have to see the salaries directly. But this is just padding extra waste and cost.
It also changes the dynamic to fixed price bids where the government has to understand its own needs well enough to write such a bid. Probably the best case-study of that going extremely wrong is, ironically also Canadian, with the Phenix pay system. The government gave the contractor what they understood to be their payroll rules but it turns out they were not what was agreed to. The whole saga lasted almost a decade and cost billions.
It's kind of an open secret, but usually grant aims are somewhat vague. It's up to the grad student saddled with those couple of aims for their thesis work to identify what exactly to do. To vet the literature for methods. To order equipment or reagents. To conduct the experiment or analysis. To write up and interperete the results. To outreach to collaborators and set up meetings. To draft up the results into a published paper. Sometimes grad students are even relied upon to pen the next grant. The big joke is by the time you are done with your PhD project, you know more about the topic than anyone in the department or your professor or your committee. I think that actually typically happens by third year. Professors are tied up with administerial duties, class, and several other projects they may be juggling, along with their personal lives. You are lucky if your professor has five hours a week to devote to your particular project.
It is so shameful that grad students are the backbone of modern research yet we pay them competitive salaries with In n Out. It's no surprise how grad students are so likely to have significant mental health issues considering the workload doled upon them for pittance pay that they have to figure out how to make work over years of other costs rising, while they are often without a raise.
Relevant graphs on pages 12, 13, and 19. Math, statistics, and computer science are lumped in together on pages 12 and 13, but the graph on page 19 shows that the median salary for all three is very similar.
https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjn-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
>the median salary for all three is very similar.
Though note that this data is almost 10 years old. It wouldn't surprise if computers rose more than the average.
So not just professors, but a lot of positions that "require" a PhD pay poverty wages when someone has given up any kind of earnings for 5-6 years developing skills getting a PhD.
There is a big problem with east coast jobs (mid-atlantic to NYC) from "older" companies that require tech experience and a PhD but do not want to pay accordingly because theyre stuck in an 80s mindset.
For starters, there's this little thing called "commuting" you may have heard of. Ordinary people, without PhDs, do it plenty. The NYC Pepsi offices seem to be a medium-short walk from Christopher St. PATH; you would have no trouble living in Jersey City or Hoboken on the (computes) ~$2000/mo rent that would be 'affordable' at such pay. I bet you get tax-deductible transit benefits, too, and a monthly pass is around $100.
There are people in New York working full time jobs to make $15/hr, $30k a year. That's a lot more like the "poverty wages" you name.
I couldn't imagine living in any HCOL city with less than 100k minimum. If others want to struggle, fine.
But logically why not live in Chicago off that 80k, and take a 20 minute L ride to work.
Not sure what you mean by this - for advancement in academia this is 90% of what hiring or promotion committees demand.
> journals demand payment from the writers themselves
From the institution, not the authors.
Typically the authors pay the journal out of their own funding.
Either way it creates a backward incentive structure, of pay to access.
I was on a promotion committee where someone had a large grant but was not publishing. This went on for years and the response from significant segments of the department every year was literally something like "they have a large grant, it's fine, of course they'll publish".
Publications are seen as a dime a dozen, and open access and issues about replicability and so forth have just added to the sense they're not worth much. The attitude is more along the lines of "if your ideas are really that important and high impact, it will convince the federal government to pay for them." It's very much the classic betting market idea, that true value is revealed only when money is on the line.
I'm not saying this is good or bad, just my experience, in the US. I personally think the current funding system creates distorted incentive and reward systems, and that the original idea of academics was to insulate from that a bit or at least provide an alternative to traditional for-profit models.
If something doesn't change I think this trend will only accelerate. Journals will maybe become seen as irrelevant, with grant or funding receipt being seen as the actually rigorous form of peer review. Everything will become a form of seeking VC funding, either from private or public funders. Again, whether that's the best model for funding anything in the US, private or public, profit or nonprofit, is a different issue.
Further, the amount of published research has also exploded as the supply of qualified applicants has surged. That said, I think eventually the journals problem will solve itself - people inside academia are trying to figure a way out already.
Academia is a racket.
It's basically money laundering with extra steps, and there is no way out because literally every school does this and too many people on academia have Stockholm syndrome.