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>rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research.

We probably should first acknowledge that the vast majority of research is incremental and not groundbreaking.

>not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about

Depending on your interest, this may be a case of expectation management. We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case. If it's wildly interesting, chances are lots of people are also interested and the competition drives down wages. If it's truly groundbreaking, there may not be a viable market for it so it likewise wouldn't have high wages (as wages tend to be commensurate with the differential contribution to the economy). If you are lucky to work in a field you love and are such an outlier technically that you can command high wages, you must by definition be a low probability case. So most people are left trying to find the balance of making money and doing something they are truly passionate about unless you happen to be passionate about something valuable that most people dislike.

> We probably should first acknowledge that the vast majority of research is incremental and not groundbreaking.

The way we fund research heavily skews the research attempted so that that's even more the case than it otherwise would be.

> We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case.

But you’re not eating it, salaries suck in STEM academia compared to private jobs. If you don’t have freedom either, what’s the point?

It’s a colloquialism about trade-offs and not meant to be taken so literally.

Again, autonomy is another aspect that you may need to consider as part of that tradeoff. If you want to maximize autonomy, great, but it’s unlikely you’ll also maximize pay (as a general rule).

Most jobs are like this, I don’t see why academia should be any different. I also don’t think it’s coincidence that pay in academia has stagnated as the number of PhDs ballon.

> If you want to maximize autonomy, great, but it’s unlikely you’ll also maximize pay

And that's the literal trade off gp was referring to

Right, and it was phrased with "unfortunately" and as a "dystopia" which I took to mean "it shouldn't be this way." I wasn't trying to refute their point that tradeoffs exist, but rather indicate that's exactly how one should expect the system to operate. (Possible I misread their intent, though.) The idea that someone would expect to 1) land a job they love while 2) making gobs of money and 3) have it generalizable across an oversaturated market like academia seems to indicate a lack of understanding of the incentive structure within the system.

> The idea that someone would expect to 1) land a job they love while 2) making gobs of money and 3) have it generalizable across an oversaturated market like academia seems to indicate a lack of understanding of the incentive structure within the system.

I think that’s a strawman, even if unintended. The idea is that academia means a pay cut in exchange for a job one loves and more research freedom. The worsening situation of research funding makes the academic track pointless.

Again adding that I mostly mean in STEM, I don’t know the other fields that much.

What part do you think is specifically a strawman? The idea that they want to make more money in academia? My response was to the OP's "not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about" statement. The only part I've added to their argument is that the PhD market is oversaturated; I added that because it adds important context to the market dynamics that govern pay.

I'll try to put a finer point on it. Why should the work in academia not result in a tradeoff? Why should the jobs in academia pay the same in industry when you are given other benefits?

You are generally removing yourself by a degree or more from the economy to work in academia. E.g., you may develop a new algorithm that helps image recognition, but you aren't likely to be putting it directly into a production environment. As I previously said, pay is generally commensurate with your direct contribution to the economy. So if the nature of your job distances yourself from the economy, you should probably expect lower pay. Now what you get in exchange is some more autonomy in terms of what you focus your energy on. The idea that someone expects both autonomy and high pay seems at odds with reality.

Practically every job results in weighing tradeoffs. People get paid in more ways than just economics. A social worker doesn't get paid the same as a financier because they are more distanced from the economy. But many people find the job still worthwhile because in exchange for lower pay they have a more fulfilling job. Military members weigh whether to continue serving in uniform or make more money as contractors. PhD astrophysicists may have to choose between making lots of money in finance or studying the cosmos. In the same vein, the academic tradeoff is only pointless if you don't value the other non-economic parts that academia offers. If you want to maximize pay, academia probably isn't the track for you; maybe you're better off working on maximizing ad spend in the attention economy. But if you want the autonomy to focus on problems that you feel are more interesting or more important, maybe it's worth the tradeoff. It's all about the tradeoffs but the OP doesn't seem to acknowledge that these tradeoffs exist because they imply one should be able to make lots of money while working on what they love. That's only available to a relatively small number of people, especially in an oversaturated market. There's only one starting center fielder position for the Yankees and it seems odd if we lament that we can't all seem to play. That's all I was pointing out and I'm not seeing how that's a strawman.

I'll second this, I've also seen a lot of people that like to brag about, e.g. working 80 hour weeks, but usually don't actually do much work. At any given moment they're likely talking to someone, or playing on a phone, etc.

As a single dad of a young child, and an academic, this is just impossible for me. I have a few precious hours to work, and need to get the most out of them. I end up being pretty socially isolated at work.

I don't agree with the "you might as well forget about it" thing you wrote. Funding in academia is about explaining why what you want to do actually furthers the agenda of the funding agency. If you can master this skill, you can fund almost any work from almost any funding source. It might sound dishonest, but I am convinced it's actually not- the phenomena in our natural world are all connected, and we don't understand them that well. To solve almost any random problem deeply requires work that translates to fundamental advances in almost everything else. Norbert Wiener explains this well in his book Cybernetics, where he talks about how work on missile guiding technology led to his concept of cybernetics, which was a revolutionary way to understand both engineering and biology.

Plenty of research doesn't need millions to do. If you're a mathematician or almost any kind of theoretician or computational scientist you need a laptop maybe the odd bit of cloud time on a bigger blob of compute, in the case of mathematicians you might need chalk. The millions you do need to spend though are on private per-paper viewing of literature, thats the real mind killer. If universities just had alumni access to literature they would rapidly just become subscription library services for theory people! I can work like 3 months a year and finance literally the rest of my time on theoretical work. But only if I don't have to pay £60 to read enough of a paper to realise its a worthless piece of crap.

I should add those 3 months would also pay me about 2x better than a postdoc working fulltime in a university. Thats the level of pay disparity with industry, and the level of pointlessness of a university as an institution if you dont need a wet lab to work. A genuinely good business idea would be a virtual institution with library services.

You're forgetting the cost of funding students, but also there are costs in securing prestige for your institution. The university benefits when your grants are large and plentiful, so they encourage research faculty to pursue those projects which earn more money, even if it's not exactly what they care most about.

> You're forgetting the cost of funding students, but also there are costs in securing prestige for your institution.

But why does he need students to do his own research?

I made a similar calculation and went into industry. I am now at the point where I could self-fund an indefinite post-doc (with benefits) at the risk-free rate of return. By the time I would be going up for Full Professor, I'll be able to self-fund an equivalent salary -- again, at the risk-free rate. And I don't have to worry about the inevitable layoffs coming to higher-ed, tenure be damned. And I can do my Science from a ski slope or a beach instead of from some random rural town.

If you want to do Science, just spend 1-2 decades in industry and save your money. If you want to lead "The $LASTNAME Lab" at "Famous University" where you have "X PhD students" and "Y post-docs", then you're going to pay for the silly prestige game by giving up actually doing Science for the rest of your life.

The situation may be different for people who need wet labs, but in Math and CS here's just no reason to bust your ass to get tenure. Just bust your ass in industry instead. You'll be working for The Man instead of doing what you really want either way, I promise, and honestly industry often has more interesting problems than whatever happens to be of interest to whichever person was willing to live in an expensive boring place on a small salary while shoving their ideas into the Heilmeier Catechism.

> You'll be working for The Man instead of doing what you really want either way, I promise

As an academic who does work on my own projects all the time, I'll have to disagree. I mean, yeah I have to do things I'm not thrilled about, like advising students and filling out course evaluations. But at the same time, I only work 4 days a week, 28 weeks of the year, and those days I'm done at noon. The rest of my time I spend working on my projects, which are 100% what I'd be doing if I were to come across a billion dollars tomorrow.

> If you want to do Science, just spend 1-2 decades in industry and save your money.

I see this advice a lot, and it's logical. But I don't think practical. If it were, I think we'd see more people going this route, but I'm not aware of too many (well, any really). Can you point to anyone who has amassed a small fortune in industry and now is a successful independent researcher?

It seems like the more popular route is to spend 1-2 decades amassing wealth and then just retire on that money. Or to invest it. You'd be what, 40+ at that time? That's a prime age for family rearing. The kids' college funds need to be swelling at that point. At such a critical time in a family, who in their right mind would leave a lucrative career to be an independent researcher, a job path that is largely reserved for independently wealthy people.

If you want to blow your family's nest egg at 40 by pursuing an independent research agenda, go right ahead, but I think that's a risk most people won't take. Even if successful, it's not going to have a positive ROI (that's not what research is about). That's why researchers spend other peoples money and not their own.

> But at the same time, I only work 4 days a week, 28 weeks of the year, and those days I'm done at noon.

TBH I have no idea what number of "bullshit hours" I work, but I spend the vast majority of my time working on things I'd probably be doing anyways. I certainly think what I'm working on is more interesting than what I'd almost certainly be doing if I had accepting one of my TT offers.

> If it were, I think we'd see more people going this route, but I'm not aware of too many (well, any really). Can you point to anyone who has amassed a small fortune in industry and now is a successful independent researcher?

This largely depends on how you define success.

They certainly aren't doing things like putting together performance bonus packets or playing the peer review game, so if you look to things like bonuses/promotions or journal papers in prestige venues they're probably not "successful". But isn't the goal to get off the bullshit ladder? You don't really think the prestige publishing game is anything other than BS make-work, do you? ;-)

> It seems like the more popular route is to spend 1-2 decades amassing wealth and then just retire on that money.

Sure. If your version of "what i would do with a billion dollars" involves lots of slopes and beaches then why not? What's wrong with this?

> Or to invest it. You'd be what, 40+ at that time? That's a prime age for family rearing. The kids' college funds need to be swelling at that point.

I know a lot of folks from my PhD cohort who went this route and took Professor of Practice positions for their kids' college years.

> If you want to blow your family's nest egg at 40

Who said anything about blowing? The principal should continue growing, just a bit slower since you're spending some of the interest...

> At such a critical time in a family, who in their right mind would leave a lucrative career to be an independent researcher, a job path that is largely reserved for independently wealthy people.

A STEM PhD, after 10-20 years in tech or finance, IS an independently wealthy person... that's the whole point.

> but I spend the vast majority of my time working on things I'd probably be doing anyways

But is it your project? Or is it your employers, and do they actually own it? If you’re fired, do you still get to work on that project?

> what I'm working on is more interesting than what I'd almost certainly be doing if I had accepting one of my TT offers

I’m curious, why wouldn’t you just decide to work on a project that was more interesting to you?

> But isn't the goal to get off the bullshit ladder?

The goal would be to do research. So my question is: who is doing such independent work? Who are these researchers and how are they disseminating their work? If there aren’t very many of these people, can we not conclude this mode of research is not a viable alternative to mainstream research?

> What's wrong with this?

Nothing is wrong with this. But the suggestion is that if someone wants to do research, they should amass wealth in industry and then do research. My point is that close to 0 people end up taking this route (at least from where I’m sitting, maybe there is a whole community of multimillionaire tech researchers I don’t know about).

So I wonder how viable this path is? Do people just not consider it? Or do they lose interest in research over those two decades? Does life get in the way?

I guess my overall point is that, most people who want to do research, just do it. Spending decades amassing resources just to get started seems backwards.

> took Professor of Practice positions for their kids' college years.

And so you’re saying they funded their own research with their wealth at that point?

> you're spending some of the interest...

I thought we were talking about funding a research agenda. From where I’m sitting, that costs millions. If you’re making millions in interest income, I think we’re talking about at different scales here.

> IS an independently wealthy person... that's the whole point.

My meager research agenda costs roughly $1 million per year (no special equipment or facilities). How long can a retired tech worker burn cash at that rate and still make it through retirement?

Maybe the math works out but I don’t know.

> But is it your project? Or is it your employers, and do they actually own it? If you’re fired, do you still get to work on that project?

Varies. I optimize my employment situation for my personal ROI.

But it turns out that making money off of even excellent scientific work is often very hard and involves insane amounts of slog. Like 1 hour of science to 10 hours of not-science. So usually employment and assignment has better risk-adjusted return. Not always, but usually.

> So my question is: who is doing such independent work? Who are these researchers and how are they disseminating their work? If there aren’t very many of these people, can we not conclude this mode of research is not a viable alternative to mainstream research?

I know there are several people like this in my field. They publish a paper every year or three, often in smaller venues. Or just throw things on arxiv.

> So I wonder how viable this path is? Do people just not consider it? Or do they lose interest in research over those two decades? Does life get in the way?

I think the middle and latter options happen quite a lot. I meet a lot of early retirees on Tuesday mid-morning lifts. I think a lot of people lose their passion for research in their 30s. This happens in the academy as well. Sometimes after amassing wealth you realize "hey, you know what I enjoy more than doing world-class mathematics? Chilling in my cabin with my family and skiing."

> And so you’re saying they funded their own research with their wealth at that point?

They took the PoP positions to pay for their kids' college without spending down savings. A sort of middle ground between working and retirement, and also a good way to build some collaboration opportunities.

> I thought we were talking about funding a research agenda. From where I’m sitting, that costs millions.

To be clear, the premise that started this thread is the "a guy and his laptop/occasional cloud spend" style of research that's prevalent in CS and Math. Yeah, if you need $1M/yr then you need an income stream or a different level of wealth.

> I guess my overall point is that, most people who want to do research, just do it. Spending decades amassing resources just to get started seems backwards.

I think this is reasonable advice for people who (1) need something more than a laptop and modest cloud compute, and (2) are absolutely sure that they would rather pursue that particular research as opposed to retiring early, and (3) are certain they they will be able to retain funding streams for the duration of their career.

How about those world class mathematicians working at subway?

What about them? There’s no way they would be able to get an academic position, which requires orders of magnitude more mental health fortitude than an industry position.

Look up Zhang.

One big thing is it's basically impossible to start doing research when you are 40 or 50 after spending 10 to 20 years not doing research. You might imagine that you can, and I do know a few people who think they can, but no it's extremely difficult and basically not happening. Is there literally any highly cited journal paper with a first author who didn't do research for 20 years?

Also, you have way more energy, drive, creativity when you are young and you just spent 10 to 20 years on other things instead of doing research during a time when you could have had the most impact.

> A STEM PhD, after 10-20 years in tech or finance, IS an independently wealthy person... that's the whole point.

Was an independently wealthy person, as the US job market was rigged to favor upper middle class professionals. Nobody knows if that's going to be the case for the fresh PhDs entering the job market today. Those lucrative careers may be threatened by any number of reasons, including political pressure and/or instability, more PhDs entering the industry, increasing competition due to remote work, and AI.

This is a good point. I think there are still opportunities, and will be for the next 10 years, at least for good CS PhDs. Certainly not for all PhDs in all disciplines.

> rigged to favor upper middle class professionals... remote work

In the case of PhDs, it's exactly the opposite. Those jobs have very weak immigration moats compared to eg law, medicine, engineering, even software devekopment. The vast majority of phd students in CS are already non-residents and that's been true for decades at this point.

For the same reason, PhD labor is probably the least effected by remote work.

> But why does he need students to do his own research?

That's a phenomenally good question. Short answer: because of incentives in academia().

To be high up in the academic hierarchy(), you want top-ranked publications. So you work on those and score a few - good on you! However, a researcher in the same field outdid you by publishing their own work AND supervising a student. That increased their output, so they get the promotion. Now they get more means to attract phd students and postdocs, all collaborating with them, further increasing output.

The nasty thing is that this cycle has knock-on effects. Do everything by yourself and you're stagnating; collaborate and you are rewarded with more recognition, promotion, more citations, more reviewer invitations, more invites to give talks/keynotes, etc. And: more quantity and quality in those trigger more and higher-valued of those. Suddenly you're growing into a "respected member of the community" - which strengthens your position at your instituting. Stronger position locally is more local options for growth, leading to the next cycle.

TL;DR: Because the direction of academia is in the hands of managers (uni admins, politicians, grant body admins), and managers need quantifiable data... so you're incentiviced to make your numbers go up.

I totally agree. Academia is a prestige game. If you just want to do science, you're better off taking a non-traditional path.

Benefit to that is you are training the next generation. Do research on your own, good, but have ten grad students working for you and you can basically multiply your output by ten. Note, the grad students a majority of the time won't be able to do the research without your advice, this is just a fact; there are exceptions but that's just how it is the majority of the time.

Also, who is going to defend your scientific legacy after you pass on to the great ivory tower in the sky?

> But why does he need students to do his own research?

What a... weird way to phrase this.

"Need"? All the faculty I've worked with have wanted students to work with them. Science is frequently a collaborative effort, and having more than one person working on a project is often a good way to make the project better. They generally do not see students as a burden, but as an investment into the future of the field (and their own success, of course, but in a collaborative sense).

It's fine if you decided academia wasn't for you, and I don't doubt even a little bit that people do exist who see students as a burden to be dealt with. But my own experience has been vastly different from that, so it strikes me as odd that you simply assumed a cynical stance off the bat.

Anyway, your general stance seems very cynical. I like doing my own work, but I also like collaborating with people, and I know I'm not alone in that.

There is, of course, sci-hub, if your morality aligns with that.

Do you not have access to Sci-Hub somehow? Or have I misunderstood the problem here?

Sci-hub has become significantly less useful because all new uploads are paused pending resolution of a court case in India. That includes anything published in the last year. A large portion of a working academic's reading load will be keeping up with recently published literature.

But for papers published recently you can email an author and they will send you a PDF.

Just imagine how useful search engines would be if you had to email someone every time you wanted to click a link. Just keeping up with the literature is typically a dozen or more papers a week, plus skimming dozens to hundreds more if you're actively doing research. That's a lot of email and it's a lot of unnecessary burden for the very nice people who reply.

Piracy and open access are the only scalable alternatives to institutional access.

It depends on the field, but I don't think access to papers is such a big deal anymore. Preprints and open access mandates have become popular enough that relevant papers are usually available for free through legitimate channels. When I'm working from home, I rarely bother starting a VPN to access a paper, because it's usually not worth the effort.

A bigger issue that affects independent researchers (and academics who are the only ones working on some topic in their department) is the social context of doing research. Even if you are a big name in your field, your ideas are probably not that special, and neither is your ability to execute them. For most researchers, the real value comes from having regular discussions with other experts.

Cannot you just get a library card at the university? I live next to a university where I have no affiliation, and if I pay $150 a year I can eat all I want. (Though I do think I have to be onsite as there is no remote access.)

Another trick is to sign up for the adult ed classes, or basically retiree classes to get access. I've even heard of people doing this to get cheap health insurance!!!

"Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives...."

This is not really true in the US. For example, NSF review processes are basically determined by peers, panels of PhDs who are experts in the field. While their expertise may vary, they generally do a reasonable and fair and scientifically meaningful review. To claim this is all "controlled by government burearcrats" is lazy and mostly wrong.

> This is not really true in the US.

Maybe not in the most technical sense, but what funds most of the research projects? Government (with NIH being the largest funder of biomedical research in the world), private companies, and non-profits[0]. US government dumps absolutely enormous amounts of money on research funding.

The difference in numbers can be pretty stark. I don't have data on hand for the exact breakdown for all research funding in general, but I have numbers for health research specifically (and I expect the trend overall to stay the same regarding research funding overall). Top 3 funders in the world are NIH ($26.1bn), European Commission ($3.7bn), and UK Medical Research Council ($1.3bn). For comparison, the largest non-profit contribution comes from Welcome Trust and is sitting only at $909.1mil, with WHO coming in third at $135mil.

Here is a published paper[1] from 2016 containing all these numbers.

0. https://undsci.berkeley.edu/who-pays-for-science/

1. https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

The point isn’t that the government doesn’t fund the research or set the big picture priorities, it’s that funding decisions aren’t really made by some random bureaucrat in isolation. In my experience NSF/DOE/DOD program managers are pretty sharp, often moving into that line of work after doing scientific research of their own, and they’re really good at eliciting and synthesizing technical feedback from reviewers (mostly academics and researchers from the national labs).

That’s not to say that there are no problems with the funding model, but I think it’s more that it’s difficult to get funding for new high risk ideas either already having funding and attention

This sounds pretty similar to non-academic corporate life. People who show up to hang out, get mad at people who don't do the same, you're encouraged to work extra hours to get ahead, only able to work on things you get funding for (i.e. what clients will pay you for or projects that those above you will greenlight), being controlled by corporate executives, etc.

But you probably get paid more in the corporate world, at least.

> The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there's a pool of funding available for something? That's not worth the bother. In that case it's just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that?

This is how I tried to justified my poor work-life balance from working on things I am deeply and personally interested in. If we treated grad school like a 9-5 job like all of the internal forces told us to, there's little incentive to stay in a worse version of an industry position that actually has work-life balance and magnitudes-higher compensation.

There are certainly some pockets of academic circles that only try to appear to be working hard 12h every single day and only care for having you rub my back I'll rub yours kinda deals. But many of Ph.D students that are monkeying around in STEM doing seemingly useless stuff actually expand their areas of expertise and encourage each other, gain curiosity, become creative and it helps them to make progress. You have to look for certain clues, they can't be having too much fun -then they are not doing any good work, if they appear too bogged down -they don't know what they are doing and shouldn't be there in the first place.

> They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn't hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time.

did they piss you off or something?

Yeah, you have to either do work that other people are willing to pay you for or pay to have it done yourself. I'm not seeing a problem here.