In industry we just call those junior and senior employees.
> And while they are the primary workhorses of research, there are large swathes of their graduate student careers where they are not particularly (or often negatively) productive.
Um, hello. This happens in industry as well. It's called training, learning, whatever. It's an investment on the part of the company in the future of its workforce. Why should academia expect to only pay employees who are "fully educated" and require no non-productive time to learn things?
As someone who has been there, academica is so f*cked up and those in it seem completely out of touch with the reality outside of it.
But the expectations are different. "Well, what do you want to work on?" and tailoring a four or five year program to meet those needs is something I'm very unlikely to do for a staff scientist, but something I discuss with every one of my graduate students.
I know some folks who did PhDs in non-engineering fields at state universities who had to TA every single semester, often TAing multiple classes, just to earn ~$20,000 per year.
There are a lot of problems, though. Your funding isn't guaranteed; you can be basically kicked out of the program (because very few people can afford to self-fund) for reasons that have nothing to do with you or your performance, and if this happens in your 4th or 5th year, you're fucked.
The other ugly fact is that even if you're not paying tuition, your advisor is. This means there's less money to send you to conferences or fund his lab, and it means he's under tighter financial constraints than he really should be. Your advisor gets his budget docked $80,000, and only $20,000 goes to you (the rest, to tuition). That's a bit ridiculous, especially because you're no longer taking many classes or using university resources except to do work on their behalf. There's no good reason you can't be paid $50,000 and your advisor has $30,000 more to fund his lab.
There are some very talented undergraduates with expertise in several of the above. They generally end up being the most successful PhD students, since they are immediately productive from the get-go. (Or, they work as a junior quant at Jane Street.)
>people must continue learning basic skills during PhD
Hence why they’re considered trainees, and not junior employees. Junior employees may have rudimentary skills in certain areas, but not so rudimentary that their productivity is zero (or negative!)
>and postdoc
No postdocs should still be learning basic skills. The (ostensible) purpose of a postdoc is a final step to prepare very talented PhDs for a faculty position. People who are faculty material should have mastered all relevant skills during their PhD. Sadly, the postdoc has been perverted to become a holding tank to absorb excess PhDs with no other career options, since, as the article points out, postdocs are a source of cheap experienced labor.
I’m all for treating grad students and postdocs as real employees, but we need to acknowledge that doing so would dramatically raise standards for admission, which I’m also all for.
That attitude is very bureaucratic.
Computational research is always interdisciplinary. Administrators organize universities into departments according to the needs of undergraduate curricula, but those administrative boundaries have little to do with the skills needed in research. The skills you learn during PhD are probably enough for your PhD research, but then you may need new skills when you start a new project as a postdoc. And again when you start a new project as a junior faculty member.
Postdoc is also the career stage where many people switch fields. For example, a background in X or even computational X is often insufficient for some research topics in computational X. You need to hire people who got their PhDs in CS, mathematics, or statistics, and then those people must learn X before they can contribute. And once they start contributing, they may have to learn software engineering to turn the methods they have developed into useful tools.
Do companies let junior employees work on whatever they want? Manage their time as they want? No, one of the key indicators of an employee status is that their time and work is managed by their employer.
If a junior employee works on some passion project related to their work but on their own time, do they own the intellectual property of that work? Probably not; many employers demand that all IP created by the junior employee belongs to the company.
I think this is a case of “be careful what you wish for”.
In the Bell Labs days, before our economy got taken over by criminals, smart employees really were treated as researchers-in-residence who could mostly pick and choose their projects. They didn't have as much freedom as tenured professors--they still had to work on things the company cared about--but they had a level of autonomy that, these days, doesn't really exist.