Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

When I was an undergrad I worked with a prestigious professor whom I respected greatly.

One day, I stumbled into lab, apparently looking fairly love-struck (i'm a man, and was seeing a new girlfriend), and he said: "dekhn, if you want to be successful in science, you can't have a wife or a girlfriend or kids. They are a distraction and to be successful, you have to dedicate your whole life to science. Nights, evenings, everything. A wife and kids will just waste your time".

I'm glad I ignored his advice and got married to that new girlfriend (and had kids, after establishing my career). He later narrowly missed out on the Nobel Prize and married his postdoc. But he was right: to be truly successful in science today, unless you're a charismatic genius, requires an extraordinary level of dedication- and a lot of family support.

That said I'm surrounded, in my job, with successful women scientists who came from academia and have kids. This sometimes leads to weekend meetings where both of us end up saying "Oh, I have to go now to take my kid to soccer"...

[edit: I realized I left out an important bit. Both my wife and I got phds and have professional jobs. But I optimized for high salary and status, while she optimized for "freedom"- the freedom to drive kids around to activities, etc. Which in some sense, I guess, is just another anecdote supporting the paper.

That's incredibly stupid advice. I got my Ph.D. at Caltech, and as far as I know, every Nobel Prize winner in the chemistry department had a wife and children.

Its callous, not stupid. Consider whether those individuals best work (nobel prize granting e.g.) came before or after they started families. Consider how involved they can be with their families given how often you likely saw them around the department. Yes, it can be done. But its hard. And you're unlikely to be ultra successful if you devote the time your family deserves (not to mention the luck/charisma/skill/dedication needed on top of that).

Maybe it's that being married and having children helped them be successful.

Albert Einstein was married and had a kid by the time of his “miracle year” in 1905.

Albert's wife agreed to this:

A. You will make sure:

1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;

2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;

3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.

B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:

1. my sitting at home with you;

2. my going out or travelling with you.

C. You will obey the following points in your relations with me:

1. you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;

2. you will stop talking to me if I request it;

3. you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

D. You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.

What exactly does 'truly successful' mean here? If Nobel prize is the standard that's ridiculous. As someone who is a fairly successful (by conventional metrics) tenured academic at a top-10 school in the physical sciences, this was really dumb advice but not atypical from previous generations (along with: "make sure you have a wife at home to take care of everything" which, btw, was the more common advice to get, since almost every male academic had a wife and kids)

It is quite possible to get grants, do valuable work, advance your field (and get awards, if that's your jam) and still live a pretty normal life. In my case my spouse is also a successful (by conventional metrics) academic, and we have kids. It's not without challenges, but it's quite plenty of positives. And neither of us are charismatic geniuses. We have talents, sure, but the more important thing is that we are organized.

The unequal impact highlighted here is very real. As the man in a dual-career academic couple, I have actively worked (along with my wife of course) to counter it. Simple examples include strongly encouraging and supporting a spouse, including crucially owning/ being the primary point person on childcare - especially needed when they are in the midst of grant applications or important conference presentations, even in early childhood years.

are you a professor at a tier-1 university (you say "tenured academic at a top-10 school in the physical sciences")? Is it in an expensive city? what's your h-index? How much time do you spend writing papers and going to conferences, versus doing research. Is it lab work or theory? how much money do you bring in? Do you work weekends? Do you ever have to go to a conference and it means your spouse has to do extra work around the house?

Yes. Very expensive. h-index > 35. It varies. Both. ~$0.5-1M/year. Sure. Yes, and vice versa for my spouse as well.

You run a lab on $1M/year (grant money?). When I was a PI over a decade ago, that's enough to employ at best 2-4 research scientists.

What I actually meant was salary- because if you live in an expensive city, it's almost impossible to buy a house on an academic salary. Certainly you could buy in the worst part of town, far from your institution, with higher crime rates and lower quality of houses...

$1M / year is on the upper end in the engineering school I'm at (average faculty brings in less than half that). I mostly have Ph.D. students (as do most people in my field) that cost ~$100K/ year incl. overhead, or postdocs that cost ~$150K/ year incl. overhead. Things are very different in medical schools where staff scientists are more common and also you have to fund your own salary.

Total household income is > $450K/year, which along with lots of saving early in our career, allows us to live in a home close to work and in a nice neighborhood. Everyone's experience will be different, and we are certainly lucky, but I am in a pretty similar situation to a dozen other recently-tenured faculty I know in my career/life stage at my university. We work hard, but the differences in hours etc. relative to my friends working at various Bay Area companies seem modest. YMMV.

Thanks for sharing.

Your experience is atypical in my field (medical biology/ML/drug discovery)/region(SF Bay Area). Think UCSF/UC Berkeley. My professor at UCSF was soooo happy he could hire starting professors at $70K a year (20 years ago; now it's about $120K).

A typical PI would have $10M/year in grants, have no grad students (or 1-2), only postdocs (who are already publishing), live fairly far away (45+minute commute). Once they reach full tenure it's about $250K/year salary (with summer free, but usually 1 day a week consulting with pharma instead), plus a heavy teaching load. And every single one of them is working nights and weekends to just barely keep up.

I looked at that, and concluded there was no way for me to be happy, and moved to industry, where I get paid more, work less, and have a far better work/life balance. I even have more time to do independent research and publish than I ever did as an academic. So I'm always interested in what attributes people who managed to pull off the "two body problem" in the physical sciences are doing.

That's a fascinating comparison.

It's true that there are major differences in academia across different fields. NIH funding is typically so much more $$ than NSF[1] -- and I wonder if this has an effect on how these fields are structured and thus who enters them. In particular, could the soft money[2] salary encourage people who are willing to take that bet?

But also UCSF/UCB's biomed stuff is kind of a different machine as far as I can tell -- it's not as focused on training (hence, fewer students and more postdocs/post-PhD researchers) and more akin to a traditional industrial research lab. But then: who are they teaching exactly at UCSF (where's the "heavy teaching load" coming from) if there are so few PhD students -- med school students?

For those reading along:

[1] Think medical/biomed/bioeng/pharma/etc. (NIH) vs physics/astronomy/computing/social science/etc. (NSF)

[2] "Soft money" means your (PI) salary is paid from the grants you get; don't get enough grants to cover your salary and you're out, typically, if you can't get a friend to sponsor you under their grants.

$10M/ year seems unusually high, even for med schools - are you sure those are annualized costs? Perhaps it's because I'm familiar with the more basic science (non clinical trial) parts of NIH, but a typical R01 is $250K-$500K/ year in direct costs so that would imply having to hold ~15 of them (with overheard) to reach $10M/year.

It seems like $10M in total value of active grants in a given year (~5 R01s) might be more typical (though the standard for tenure I've heard of in med schools is maybe ~2-3 R01s, so 5 would make you top tier and highly sought after).

For clarity, when I'm referring to $1M/year in annual funding, that's coming from ~6-7 active grants whose total value might be in the $5M range total.

R01s are too small to be worth applying for, typically. Or rather, most PIs have an R01 that pays for themselves and maybe some travel and publication feeds. Most of these people end up making center grants or finding other mechanisms (like non-NIH funding, such as CZI).

There's no way I personally would have been able to manage 5-6 active R01s a year; but then, when I did grant review, I noticed that other folks did a lot of copy/pasting and exagerating about their publications significance, which is not something I was willing to do.

The key is hiring experienced grant writers and having an insanely social department head who's part nerd, part salesman, and part tour guide.

No true Scot would ever be caught dead making claims about "success" like that.

I was told the same: that if I weren't able to give up everything "I would not be successful". 8 months later and with a breakdown, I was fired from that lab. Better, because people were forced to work (literally forced: even if you had nothing to do you needed to stay until 8pm) at least 12 hours per day, no weekends, no days off, nothing. And my scientific productivity tanked.

I managed to somehow continue to a PhD and then I even got a permanent position, but for that mindset I am "failed scientist": I'm over 40, I don't lead anyone, I don't have grants (only two failed ones that caused me so much stress that I didn't want to do them again), nor I have a teaching position (I would gladly get one if it were just teaching, and not the hell of grant seeking). I do the same stuff I was doing during my postdoc years, with a little more job security, of course.

FTR, I made sure that my connections outside work were nowhere near labs, and nowhere around science. Much better for work-life balance.

Academia seems so obsessed with "excellence" it's not even funny. And that excellence needs to be obtained at absolutely any cost. Probably I wouldn't have chosen this career had I known beforehand what I was getting into.

Perhaps he was either a) jealous, b) skewing to anti-social, c) rationalizing obsession in one area to the detriment of another, or d) lacked time management skills.

What's the point to achievement if you have an empty house and empty life? That is another kind of poverty.

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