I couldn’t move for a postdoc and shouldn’t have been penalized for it | Hacker News Reader

I couldn’t move for a postdoc and shouldn’t have been penalized for it

science.org

67 pointsrossant78 comments

> I didn’t mention my other reasons for wanting to stay in Minnesota because it wasn’t the reviewers’ business; normally, employers aren’t allowed to ask about spouses or children.

My interview training at Big Tech forbade me from even asking about the candidate's trip to campus because the answer could reveal a disadvantaged socioeconomic status.

But universities behave as if employment discrimination laws don't exist. At least they're starting to be held accountable, see this case from the University of Washington: https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/10/31/university-takes-...

Just because big tech does something g does not mean it is driven by law.

It’s more likely they simply want to know less, as knowing less can limit liability.

Simply put. If you did not know x y or z about the candidate, then the candidate can’t claim z y or z is why they did not get the job, where x y z might be protected.

Most of the rules at big tech are simply not driven by laws requiring it. But by layaways limiting liability.

You're drawing a weird distinction here—"it's not about the law, it's about limiting liability should we end up in a lawsuit."

Yeah, the law doesn't require avoiding asking specific types of questions, but big tech lawyers recommend being careful because knowing that information can expose you to potential legal liability. The decision to limit how much you know about a candidate's background is a direct side effect of the law and its application, even if the law itself doesn't say you can't know this stuff.

I think it’s a very relevant distinction targeted at this statement from GP:

“universities behave as if employment discrimination laws don't exist. At least they're starting to be held accountable”

This seems to be suggesting that they are violating employment discrimination laws, but that the laws so far have not been enforced perfectly.

I think parent is saying that they are not violating employment discrimination laws, they are just less paranoid about accidentally violating them than FAANG companies are.

Universities do generally have a much smaller $$$ target on their back, so it would not be too surprising if big tech is more paranoid about lawsuits than universities.

Based on many anecdotes from friends and family in academia as well as many recent news reports (such as the one linked to by GP at the end of the line you quoted), I would say that universities have been violating employment discrimination laws regularly and egregiously and are only recently being held to account for it.

Big tech's methods for avoiding liability may seem silly or extreme, but they arguably also work: if you literally know nothing about someone's protected classes you cannot make decisions based on them. Academic hiring, meanwhile, seems intent on collecting as much information as possible about as many protected characteristics as possible.

I think "hiring process inappropriately used race as a factor" sounds a lot like "they are violating employment discrimination laws, but that the laws so far have not been enforced perfectly", actually.

I agree with your statement, I’m strictly referring to the exchange I mentioned and not to the overall topic.

The link to the UW case is literally at the end of the line you quoted? I would assume that poster meant for those things to be related.

The “at least they are starting to be held accountable” comment literally includes a link to the story of one that was violating employment laws.

It is an important distinction. Original posts implies the university is breaking the law. There is huge difference between breaking law and not doing the safestest easiest to win in court thing.

The original post doesn't just imply that universities are breaking the law, it links to a post by a university where they acknowledge they were breaking the law:

> The review was completed in September and indicates that race was inappropriately considered and used in a way that is inconsistent with University policy in the hiring process for an assistant professor position in the department. Race was inappropriately considered in the hiring process even after some faculty received guidance from College of Arts & Sciences and University leadership that such considerations are inappropriate.

So in this case the distinction is meaningless because the GP was literally saying "big tech has tons of barriers up in place, but universities seem not to care very much until someone actually calls them out for breaking the law".

Surely you mean lawyers and not layaways...?

In this case it wasn't even a university who did that. It is reviewers at the national science foundation. The largest federal funding agency in the US.

Larger than DARPA?

The NSF budget is roughly double DARPA’s, at ~$8B vs ~$4B in 2022.

Yes folks, those numbers are suprisingly small.

Funding, not funded.

From Wikipedia:

> With an annual budget of about $8.3 billion (fiscal year 2020), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities[0][1].

Note: That budget is ~$10 billion for FY24.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation

[1] https://new.nsf.gov/about

DARPA is a funding agency. It employs only admin and program management people, only about 300 of them, and spends around $4B a year, dispersing most of it to universities and third party labs.

It’s leaner than the NSF, which employs five times as many people and has a budget only twice as large. Probably NSF has a large number of small-dollar grants to track compared to DARPA.

And neither of them are the largest research funding agency. The National Institute of Health (NIH) granted $30B on a budget of $41B in FY2020.

> [..] could reveal a disadvantaged socioeconomic status.

Does Google provide any kind of "interview fund" to the applicant? Otherwise the mere fact of being there - flights, hotels, travel - says a lot about the applicants socioeconomic status. Just a 3 day trip (hotel, car, flight) to MV from my area is starting at $1500 - $3000 from a quick look around.

Is the worry they are going to reveal that they just hitchhiked or spent the last 100 hours on a Grayhound and walked to the campus from the bus stop?

I interviewed with them a few years ago and they reimbursed everything for the on-site. I can't remember if they also offered to pay up front if needed.

Thanks for the answer. Re-reading my comment I think my tone was more snarky than I intended as it was an honest question.

That is good to hear. Glad they are helping out like that.

> Does Google provide any kind of "interview fund" to the applicant? Otherwise the mere fact of being there - flights, hotels, travel

All companies will pay all expenses related to interview travel.

If you ever face a situation where a company won't, rest assured it is some kind of scam.

Red Hat's first CEO

What company doesn’t reimburse interview trip expenses?

You might be inadvertently showing your lack of socioeconomic disadvantage with this question. Maybe you meant "technology company" or "SV company" but..

Lots of companies? If you search for "interview expense reimbursement" there are tons of articles informing people of how to ask the company about reimbursement or figuring out who is paying and other general confusion to how this works for the standard person.

Or any college educated job? My dad went through his career with a two year technical degree and even when the nuclear industry imploded in the 80s, companies still paid to fly/him out to whatever nuclear plant was looking to hire. It doesn’t get cheaper than the power generation industry.

See my first sentence above.

> My interview training at Big Tech forbade me from even asking about the candidate's trip to campus because the answer could reveal a disadvantaged socioeconomic status.

I mean, candidates put their university, new grads often put their high schools, that can easily tell you whether they come from the upper class.

The importance of cross pollinating you postdoc and grad degree is to prove the worth of your degree. If you can be accepted at multiple places it is a good indicator that you know your stuff and your institutions are putting out good candidates.

I have met plenty of PhDs shouldn't have been awarded them. Often because they were good at filling out paperwork and being liked by the right people.

I don't really see how that makes sense unless your PhD research was a dead end. With a topic that isn't a dead end, continuing on as a postdoc at the same place would indicate that you were doing well enough with your topic and it had enough value that the lab considered it to be worth keeping you on.

In my field there's such a shortage of talent that people practically fight to convince upcoming PhD grads to continue on as postdocs. The PhDs are already mostly trained, have shown their worth during their PhDs, and already are familiar with the facility.

Plus, so much research these days involves collaboration between institutions that focusing specifically on differing your postdoc and grad as a sign of the "worth" of your degree seems a bit ridiculous. I don't think I've had a single research task that didn't involve working with people from another institution.

What field are you in?

It's related to synchrotron light sources. Since there are already very few such facilities, there is not a lot of available talent to pull from. Especially with people starting to age out and retire faster than new people can be trained (or so I was told, I have no hard numbers).

The facility I'm at is very interested in bringing me on as a postdoc for a project which would be a much larger version of my thesis work implemented at several large facilities (certain key aspects of which my advisor does not have a background in and is expecting to rely on me for), so it feels a bit weird to find out that it'd be a mark against me despite the obvious value.

I'd expect the bigger mark against me to be skipping out on the next significant step in my specific field of research to start from scratch in something different just for the sake of being different.

Fascinating, I'd never heard of synchrotron light sources before and had to pull myself out of a rabbit hole to write this. Thanks for taking the time to write a nuanced response.

I wonder if particle and laser physicists tend to be excepted from this trend, since these depend on specialized equipment.

Would you be working with different faculty, besides your advisor? Would your postdoc research feel like a distinct research project, or would it feel like malingering continuation of PhD research?

I think the preference for moving institutions is to avoid seeming "stuck." Some PhD students malinger on postdoc work at their home institution, making it seem like they don't know how to finish a project or know when it's time to scope/start a new project.

So, it might prove beneficial to ensure your projects do not fit the stuck/malingering narrative.

I think this bias is unfair, because there are plenty of reasons someone might want to stay in one place: house, family, etc. But like any bias, you can meet it head-on by controlling the narrative instead of letting the biased narrative play out.

> The importance of cross pollinating you postdoc and grad degree is to prove the worth of your degree

Regardless of the intent, it's a fairly arbitrary way to weed out candidates without actually evaluating their strength, and the actual outcome is hurting women or people from a lower socioeconomic background. The schools you went to should be a lot less important than your publications.

How do you expect to weed out candidates without hurting low-SES? Everything disproportionately hurts low-SES. Especially conventional metrics relating to their strength as a candidate!

> and the actual outcome is hurting women or people from a lower socioeconomic background.

Can we get a source on this claim?

My dodo brain remembers something like women earn more college degrees than men[0], especially at the postgraduate/terminal level.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72

An overall difference still means it is possible for this factor to be working against them.

There is no reason for this to hurt single, childless women disproportionately. We should not be coddling women for their choices in homelife. Nobody is forcing them to start families.

It really isn’t that hard to get a PhD…well you put in the hard work, you’ll get the degree. You don’t need to be a genius, and the training/experience you get from a PhD program is useful.

Someone using their phd to brag about their superiority is dumb, the best researcher I know only has a masters (I have a phd and I’m not as good as he is). On the other hand, I don’t think their are many PhDs out there that don’t deserve their degree, just that there are misunderstandings about what the degree means.

It's interesting to see how attitudes have changed in my lifetime. I suspect this is just a case of "the old way" peeking through because it hasn't formally been updated yet.

My father wore a tie pretty much his whole career. I don't own a suit, never mind a tie (despite similar jobs and status.) He worked to a strict time schedule, I arrive and leave when it suits me. Obviously he never "worked from home".

I guess he might have moved city had a "job promotion required it" (but I'm not sure - he liked where he was.)

By contrast my current employer treats location as fungible. When a replacement CEO was appointed, and she happened to live in a different city (where we have an office) she just works out of that office.

So I kinda get both the "you must move" logic (it's no big deal,company men do it all the time - and in academia it exposes you to new thoughts) while also seeing this thinking as out-of-time ; a relic of former eras.

Of course it sux, but in this case still a happy ending. If that thing doesn't want you this thing does. Sometimes things take time to change, an academia, which likes tradition, is seldom leading the way. (Which is its own irony given that -students- want nothing more than to "change the world".

To be clear, the problem in the article is not quite the location per se (although the author tries to make it about that because it makes their position more defensible). The problem is that they were proposing to continue their research in the same university as their PhD. Which is generally considered not ideal.

If they wanted to work at another university in Minnesota it would have been fine.

I agree with your point. Assuming of course that there is another university, with the necessary requirements to support the proposed work, within commuting distance.

I'm not that familiar with Minnesota, or the author's current city, or the preponderance of research universities in the state. (Setting the boundary as Minnesota though seems to cast the net quite wide.)

My scientific career was crippled when I didn't move for a postdoc. The supply/demand imbalance is such that only those with absolutely immaculate track records will be given a chance at doing top-level science.

That does seem to be true unfortunately in my experience with neuroscience.

> When I started my Ph.D., I knew that if I wanted to pursue an academic career, I would likely have to move someday

> In the end, I decided I needed to find a way to stay in Minnesota.

> The instructions clearly stated that applicants who proposed to remain in their current location had to justify their choice. I interpreted that to mean the research needed to be distinctly different from my dissertation

So the author knew how the game is played, had a plan to not have to relocate, then got cute at executing that plan, knowing what the question likely meant, but ignoring it.

1. The requirements are fucked 2. The author knew the requirements were fucked, but now is acting surprised that that's the case

Knowing how the game is played doesn’t mean agreeing with it, and anyway the game can be played in many different ways.

The thing is that it shouldn’t be necessary to move if you are doing a good job and the project is good and your history is good. They should’ve been able to justify their decision based on more solid arguments, or not at all.

The problem is that the competition is brutal, the bias is probably even more brutal, and any tiny argument that can help with a decision is going to be used (as long as it’s accepted by the community).

I commiserate, since I too started my PhD later in life, but luckily I don't have any kids and my wife can work remotely. I'm moving for a postdoc right after the Spring semester ends.

I understand why the bias against not moving exists, but interestingly, despite the supposed taboo, lots of programs self-hire for faculty (at least in CS) [1]:

> 7.4% of professors have a Ph.D. from the same university that they are teaching at. MIT in particular has a high rate of self-hires, with 36% of their professors having MIT Ph.D.s themselves.

It makes me wonder if this is a case where prior wisdom has not caught up with modern practices.

[1]: https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#cs-faculty...

Self-hiring is not a taboo, as long the candidate has experience from somewhere else. The usual expectation is that PhD + postdoc + first faculty job should involve at least two universities. Exposure to different ways of doing things leads to better research and makes the department less likely to develop an insular culture.

Postdocs are usually expected to move to a different institution, because most institutions don't have that many people working on the same topic. If you keep working with your former PhD supervisor, people may question whether the merits you claim are truly yours and not your supervisor's.

Hot take, but I don't think it should be such a taboo if individual institutions have "insular culture". As long as there is heterogeneity amongst relevant institutions, the synthesized literature can still be very productive even if e.g. MIT has a bias towards a particular way of thinking.

Conversely, I think it's problematic for scientific creativity how homogeneous behavior across institutions has become. I don't believe it is a result of this cross pollination requirement, but rather causality probably goes the other way. Many old professors at MIT were true lifers, from undergrad to PhD to faculty. Postdocs were often skipped entirely, or looked more like a 1 year visiting researcher gig.

Regardless I don't feel there should be a viscerally negative reaction to individual institutions having clear characteristics. It's true that objective evaluation is hard, but it's hard anyway honestly.

Institutions that grow too attached to their own ways risk becoming mediocre. People start caring more about internal politics than doing good research. Many European universities succumbed to that in the decades following WW2, due to a mixture of politics, loss of status, and poor funding.

> PhD + postdoc + first faculty job

You say this as if the expectation is only one postdoc these days.

>> 7.4% of professors have a Ph.D. from the same university that they are teaching at. MIT in particular has a high rate of self-hires, with 36% of their professors having MIT Ph.D.s themselves.

When you believe you're the best, you are probably going to be biased to hiring internally...

It's more likely that $RANDOM_UNIVERSITY wants to hire from MIT than the other way around.

Can confirm this. Attended the University of Northern Bumfuck, did not get hired by MIT.

I think I have observed a pattern where school tier k has professors who attended school tier k + 1.

If you are looking at the maximum tier, then there is no k+1 to draw from. So, you end up drawing from your tier, and, especially if your tier has few schools in it, you end up with a disproportionate representation of self-hires.

Oh, see, that's where you get universities that just don't grant tenure to assistant professors.

Relatable, though I didn’t write a blog post about it. I simply left academia for an essentially unrelated role in tech. Facebook solved the two-body problem that number theory couldn’t.

in Asia there is no culture of moving institutions and it has some really bad long term effects

There is a lot more nepotism as people rather take on someone they know and have worked with locally than risk on someone from outside that they know less well

They struggle with international and interinstitutional collaborations bc they only have a trickle of outsiders. I know for instance in China some researchers never attend international conferences. The whole environment is very incestuous

They still manage to do great research, but they have trouble promoting their ideas in the community and getting outside input

Maybe there is another reasons to why some never attend international conference that peers in other countries like EU and US doesn't have. Visa issues and lack of travel funding. I know a lot of researchers in the US who never went into an international conference although they are on average the best funded compared to other countries. And they don't have to suffer for visa appointments that can take months and you can get it after the conference very commonly.

Postdocs are only superficially about the research. Early career researchers are considered to be a fungible resource, definitely under-paid and teased with the typically unattainable possibility of tenure. The majority of academics relocate several times during their career.

> What’s so essential about moving?

When I was doing my PhD, my supervisor always told me that scientists need to move around. It's somewhat of a tradition in academia even if few people understand the reason behind it fully (e.g., my supervisor did not I suspect).

Academia is a really old institution and has evolved mechanisms to ensure its future. This is one of them I guess.

I experienced the people there as a close-knit community. So, moving might counter this effect. The other reason that comes to my mind is signalling. If you're willing to move with your family, it's a strong signal that you take academia seriously. I guess every institution likes to have such people.

I am kind of sad such smart people on here are missing the forest for the trees.

Moving institutions, historically, is about cross pollination of ideas. In physics this has been important because different institutions provide variations of how to 'think like a physicist'. On top of that, it allows for a mixing pot of lab culture and best practices.

They even did a good job of pointing at this in the movie Oppenheimer, where he visits Germany and has a formative experience which changes the trajectory of his focus.

It's very easy to 'do it by the numbers' and be repetitive in your work when you stay in the same institution. This is also the reason why 'sabbaticals' are still a thing, so professors will visit for a 0.5-1yr another institution or research hub for their field, which in theory happens every 7-10 years if the professor takes advantage of it.

> If you're willing to move with your family, it's a strong signal that you take academia seriously.

Not really. It only signals that you consider your career and interests as more important than the ones of your entire family. Because this increases the selective advantages of narcissistic people, this is a pretty toxic signal to look for.

Moving means often that your wife or husband must sacrifice their own career. If your partner earns more than you is not a really smart strategy. In any case can be a very selfish move.

Claiming that you must travel to be able to talk with other people in order to "complete yourself" (whatever it means) or to be exposed to the world is simply moronic in the age of internet.

Just a fossil requirement of the old times where scientists were supposed to entertain their noble sponsors with the tales of their travels in the longer European winter, or to report them as part-time spies in different kingdoms.

This means than the closer you live to the frontier, the better scientist you will be. Could find work at 2Km of home and earn some extra points in the checkbox of "had being humbled by the exposure to other cultures" that can be decisive later.

But me... nope. The problem that I was interested in didn't required to cross a stupid frontier (that in fact does exist only in paper currently). I'm not the kind of good scientist that "travels"; I just worked at 1000 Km of home

It’s complicated. Most people in academia are overworked, and will jump at any opportunity to easily justify a decision with some kind of well-accepted, easily-identifiable “weakness”. This might save them a couple of hours of work they would have to spend trying to identify other, better (but harder) arguments. There are simply too many papers to read and review, too many students to supervise, too many applications to judge, and too many things to write. The system rewards conformism and predictability, not real reflective hard work. When you review an application like this you are not really thinking “what is fair for this student/position?” Instead you are thinking “what will my peers think of me when they read my review?” And “How can I get the most with the least effort?” It’s sad but it’s the truth.

In Spain, staying at your alma mater used to be common (it's also a society where families are more tightly knit and people move less in all jobs in general, moving for a job is seen as undesirable for most people). But now there's a cargo cult in academia, Americans always move after the PhD so we should move as well, and not only to another institution but abroad. Most grant or position calls directly give points for having worked abroad, or even have a requirement of 2 years abroad or similar.

This is absurd for various reasons. Firstly, what the linked post says. Secondly, if moving is so good, it should be reflected in general in the scientific production, you're already grading scientific production so there should be no need to consider that. Finally, since academic salaries in Spain are crap, this actually incentivizes many good researchers to stay abroad (they move due to the points/requirements with the idea of returning to Spain, but stay abroad due to better working conditions).

In my case I'm a professor at my alma mater (although I did make short stays abroad, like maybe 1.5 years in total). But if I were in early career years right now, I probably wouldn't be able to do that due to the increasing mobility cargo cult (I would need to stay abroad for longer and in larger chunks of time). I'd probably have ended up permanently abroad or maybe in industry.

Lately I start to see some (at the moment, minority) voices against this cargo cult from feminists, as moving can be especially taxing for women that want to be mothers, and feminism in Spain is quite strong lately. I hope this can lead to eventually scrapping that nonsense.

Life doesn’t work like that. You’re born without a left arm and guess what, professional basketball player isn’t for you. You have to live in Minnesota? OK. But don’t expect others to change their criteria because of that.

If someone missing a left arm managed to get really good at baseball, they could still play. A one armed dude lighting it up on the field would be drafted, because objective results.

Of course this is highly unlikely because it handicaps skills related directly to baseball, but it's not completely impossible for a pitcher or DH. The Minnesota example is not comparable, because the ability to do good research is not inherently impacted by staying at one institution, and the grant evaluation is directly penalizing the staying part rather than indirectly.

I can't speak to whether the university or this guy's research were actually any good, but it hurts science to have such rigid proxy judgements.

Jim Abbott only has one hand, but does have two arms. He pitched in MLB for ten years, and threw one no-hitter.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Abbott

Cool, and Id imagine if the author has indicators that they have the experience, knowledge, and background to become the top researcher in their field they would have no problem getting funding.

After PhD plus postdoc in the same institutional cluster, not even the same institutions, I felt the infuriating need of moving. "What’s so essential about moving?" Growing.

I'll take the other side: life's not fair and you can't have your cake and eat it too. Move for the postdoc if you really want it.

(the article author got a better deal at the end anyways, imo)

If you have to postdoc after your PhD it means your field is saturated.

Move on to a growing field or start your own.

In the “better” fields, top phds go to faculty positions directly after graduating.

We need to stop treating all fields as equal, some are clearly stagnant while others are booming.

>start your own

This doesn't seem like realistic advice to recent college grads.

Going down the professor route isn’t realistic advice either for most recent college grads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com