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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

Part of what contributes to this is the "brainwashing" that takes place in PhD programs that discourages applicants from transitioning out of academia into "the industry". Academia has tons of extremely smart, hard-working individuals, most of whom would have excellent white collar careers with half the work and 2-10x the pay.

There are a handful of academics who are truly built for working in academia and wouldn't be as successful in "the industry" but at least half could transition out of academia and clean-up with a normal office job.

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I really don't understand this mentality either. I left academia to work in a company where my job is still doing research and writing papers but I get paid more money. I even write grants! And I get treated way better by the system in place, I have private health insurance, I get a performance bonus, I even get a company paid ski week!

There's a regular story told in physics departments that if you leave you can't get back in. But in my experience, maybe people leave and don't want to go back.

> There's a regular story told in physics departments that if you leave you can't get back in.

At least in CS, becoming a Professor of Practice is both higher prestige and a much lower barrier to entry than becoming an Associate Professor with Tenure. The job security of the Professor of Practice is de jure weaker but de facto much stronger. (Tenure doesn't mean shit these days, especially in the USA.)

> But in my experience, maybe people leave and don't want to go back.

Bingo. And it becomes way more extreme by the year.

After a couple decades in the tech industry with a modest lifestyle, 4.3% on your entirely post-tax brokerage account comes damn close to paying a full professor's salary. Retirement at 45 ain't a bad gig.

Get bored? No problem. Move somewhere nice close to a good-but-not-top-10-R1 university.

Teaching can be fun. You can always ad junct if and only you get the bug. Most departments are extremely happy because the customers LOVE being taught by people who did the real thing.

Research is similar: if you find a student you really enjoy working with or an idea you really want to pursue, you can opt to write a grant or take an industry gig for a bit. Student's choice -- chill poverty or same work but with weekly standups and more meetings and 5x comp. Again, the customers LOVE being able to tell Congress they are funding real stuff.

And you don't have to sit in faculty meetings where a bunch of people pretend that their grant agencies and students aren't customers, or that their department chair and dean aren't their line manager and skip line manager, or that their PhD students aren't criminally underpaid direct reports.

Overall, it's nice to be able to clip coupons on bonds and have uni admin fawning over you. It beats the alternative of the tenure track, where you have to continue wage slaving at a university whose admin has been totally MBAified and can't really offer your direct reports much in the way of solidarity because there are 100 28 year olds who can also be PIs on military-industrial projects interspersed with the occasional NSF/NIH grant.

We even have the opportunity to have PhD students in the company and we pay them a decent salary!

You should be discouraged from abandoning projects when hitting a wall. I’d advise against dropping out of PhD program if you don’t have a publication ready in second year. Also, there’re people who truly enjoy science and pay isn’t the deciding factor.

> Also, there’re people who truly enjoy science and pay isn’t the deciding factor.

If that's a good reason to keep pay low, why don't we apply this to the management and administrative class? Surely, we could find someone smart and capable who'd be happy to do an exec's or a director's job, without seven-figure pay as a consideration...

Think of all the money we could return to shareholders, if we just made the directors subsist on prayers and ramen...

>Surely, we could find someone smart and capable who'd be happy to do an exec's or a director's job, without seven-figure pay as a consideration...

We do, depending on domain. Directors in a lot of social programs make low pay for what they deal with. Luckily, many are mission oriented rather than being motivated primarily by money.

I don’t know how the pay is where you are. It’s fine in the country I live in.

There are also people who truly enjoy science while wanting to provide for a family.

In my PhD program I don't see that at all, in fact our program recently paid for students to attend a multiple day seminar about how to get jobs outside academia. I'm not sure where you get that impression from

have you considered you might already be brainwashed

> in fact our program recently paid for students to attend a multiple day seminar about how to get jobs outside academia.

Consider that preparing you for jobs outside of university should be the goal of your education, not relegated to a two-day seminar.

And also consider how relatively fucked it is that such a seminar is actually quite necessary due to the fact that the vast majority of your faculty haven't spent more than a trivial amount of time in industry. (Things that don't count as non-trivial industry experience include: the gap year between undergrad and grad school, the one year industry Post-Doc, sporatic consulting, the "spinoff" that never got past a seed round in which the university endowment or SBIR was the lead "investor", or especially the "several internships at top companies" lol.)

The goal of a PhD education is to learn how to do research, first and foremost. That is the entire point of a PhD

If you want to do anything else just get a masters

> The goal of a PhD education is to learn how to do research, first and foremost.

This is vague to the point of meaninglessness. To wit, consider the following questions:

1. What is "Research"? (In PhD school the de facto answer is "whatever things get published in top conferences")

2. What does it mean to "learn how to do Research"? (I argue the most important skill is knowing which questions to ask, but that's not something that PhD students or even Professors every get to actually do -- your funding agency's friendly managers/directors will clearly articulate the set of questions you are permitted to ask during Proposer's Day workshops.)

All of that to say: learning how to do "Research" is the goal that students are told they're supposed to have. The actual goal of a PhD program is to generate income from overhead on grants. This has a nice side benefit of occasionally producing valuable licensing revenue streams. That anyone learns anything is a happy coincidence.

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