How five researchers fared after leaving academia
nature.com
nature.com
I will highlight one aspect of this. Over the past few decades, as universities have become corporatized, they have started to acquire certifications, because that is what bureaucrats do. Many certifications are related to what faculty do in the classroom. So, increasingly, faculty have to change how they teach and shoehorn it into the certification framework. For proposed courses, faculty has to meet to make sure they fulfill requirements. During and after the course they have to document what happened and submit reports on each course.
This does what most such bureaucracies do: it reduces the variance in the output, at the cost of reducing the average. Great courses and faculty are chained and amputated, while there is marginal improvements on the made-up metrics for the worst courses/faculty. But most importantly, it destroys the motivation for faculty - constantly fighting the system is not what most people want to do.
If they only truncated the tails - equally removing the top performers and the worst performers - then we'd expect the average stays the same.
If the distribution is right-tailed, with some absolutely stellar performers, then we'd lower the average by removing them.
If left-tailed, with some horrendous performers (even legal liabilities), then we'd improve the average by removing them.
Bureaucracies at the end of the day are just institutionalized process, and while process by definition reduces variance, it can both raise and lower the average.
What happens is that they invent nonsensical metrics to measure performance. The high performers are hampered by these metrics, but the low performers just hack the metrics. For instance, my university's admins were fascinated by the average grade in a course, in a department, for a faculty. To be in their good graces, your students needed to have a 3.5 or higher.
Well, what do you think was happening. The bad faculty just had lots of easy assignments in their courses to ensure this. No extra work needed for faculty. Their courses were worse than if they were not subject to this pressure - they might have just stuck to giving a reasonable mix of the textbook problems. The high performers were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Reduce how much you teach your students by adding easy assignments or take the good salary increment at the end of the year.
To summarize: remember that the average and variance is for bad metrics that either don't measure what needs to be measured, or worse are anti-correlated with what needs to be measured (and improved).
Addendum: actually, I don't even agree with the above framework of metrics. Teaching is an art, and very much like no one runs any sort of metrics on music to decide that Mozart is among the greats, there aren't many real metrics that can be used to identify good teaching from bad.
Sexism (not sure about racism) really is a problem in academia in a way it just isn't in the corporate world.
There are influential old professors in science departments all across the world that genuinely believe women can't do science. They refuse to change, refuse to step down, and the universities don't do anything about it because the administrators just exist in lala land.
It gets worse than that. I know at UniMelb (the more "woke" major University in the most "woke" city in Australia), they refuse to do anything about a particular Chemistry professor who is so egregiously sexually predatory that even the men know about him; a genuine Weinstein character.
His most famous act was hosting a fake department party at his holiday house. He created invites that implied it was a big event, but only sent it to one young female student he had his eyes on. God knows what would have happened if she actually turned up alone...
I guess the point is that University administrators really can create the worst of both worlds - on one hand pushing a "diversity" narrative that demonises (powerless) young white men, while at the same time covering up for (powerful) genuine bigots and sexual predators.
Just for what it's worth, the department actually put out a report praising the predatory Chemistry professor mentioned above - he was promoting diversity by only taking on female students!
But they did kick out the powerlifting coach, for a similar episode of sexual abuse.
One example from someone near to me: She got permanently harassed by a colleague in the office. Friend of the boss - which complicated things, the boss on his own was nice and helpful - that guy even gave me the creeps later, as a man, with his constant women hostile comments and a specific aggressive behaviour. The guy was just unhinged, clearly dangerous, and that he looked strong did not help. It went so far that she hit him with a piece of equipment she just had in her hand after being verbally barraged by him again, an involuntary automatic reaction. Thankfully that made him back up for good.
Another "nice" story at the same university: The married older professor, who told her how lucky her boyfriend at the time was to have her and a good job, clearly implying the compliment how attractive she was. He was right, sure, and a simple compliment is okay, no? But given the power dynamic it was not a good situation for her, and she saw it as more than a simple compliment because of the way it was delivered. Became a problem later, iirc, when a possible job offer would have meant working directly under him - no pun intended.
Add to that the typical academic situations of professors hating other professors, not attributing work, and being in a discipline where the majority is men, and even that normal - but of course never great - part of academia always had the question mark of how much of that behaviour was made worse by discrimination against the minority she was part of. And if she had reached a good position, how often would she have been seen as only being there because of being a minority, and not because of her effort, even though she was as far as I could gather one of the best in her field, doing bleeding edge research in a highly prominent area?
There were positive aspects of that environment, sure, but the negatives existed.
She does not work in academia anymore.
I also think that structurally, universities have academic career advancement problems. It's a very difficult system to to into and out of, in a way that is toxic for everyone but unusually so for women.
It's almost perfectly crafted to disadvantage women. Compare it to law, and imagine someone who moves through the elite path quickly. Graduate college at 22, finish law school at 25, go into heavy debt but start at around $200k a year, work brutally until age 30. Ok, not a great spot for starting a family, but you have now earned well over a mil (you probably started at 200 and are now well above 300k). You don't have much time, but you do at least have money and the ability to buy help. You also (if you're a woman) still have a few years before age related issues in having children manifest.
Now, again, it's not great, but compare this to academic. You finish college at 22, you finis your PhD at 28. That's moving quickly. Next, you do a post-doc or two. Now you're 30. And now, even if you're a winner with a tenure track position (not tenured, just the kind that can lead to it), you're still in grave danger, career-wise. It's do-or-die. You are also, at this point, earning about half of what that law graduate earned at age 26. You have no ability to buy your way out of this.
Now, to me, it's nutty that anyone voluntarily signs up for this, male or female [1]. But it's unusually harsh on women, because taking time off at this junction to have kids derails your career at the worst moment. And academic is unusually bad for on-ramps later in life. There essentially are none. Honestly, in spite of age-related discrimination in tech, I'd rather try my odds finding an on-ramp in tech at age 40 than in academia.
There is a commonly cited study that showed women applying for academic STEM positions received over twice as many offers as similarly qualified men. I actually think the research was good, but people didn't dig into the data. The comparison was for women and men who had achieved a high level position in academics. Yes, I have no trouble believing that women who make it through this gauntlet (which again, I absolutely insist on pointing out is lousy for men too) are very appealing to departments that don't want to change structurally. If a well funded department can hire a group of women who made it despite the odds, they can put a halo up and appear to be one of those virtuous departments even as they participate in the structure that makes it very unlikely women will become one of that small successful group.
[1] indeed, part of the reason universities like worker-visa programs is that it creates a pool of candidates who aren't allowed to live and work in the US with economic freedom.
That said, I don't actually believe the "real jobs" this comment appeals to are a thing. I would argue that anything that involves serving on a committee is more of an appointment than a job, as practically by definition the members of a committee are not responsible or accountable for anything except diffusing said responsibility and accountability. The whole real-job trope is mainly an artifact of the anxiety of inlaws, I suspect.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUR
In late 2021 and early 2022, the rate was the highest it had been in 20 years.
Although people leave jobs all the time, this is a notable increase. It is worthy of a study and maybe even worthy of a catchy name.
Academia is 1. costly, 2. long, and 3. weighted to favor people from backgrounds that can afford tutors or finishing schools. You want Ph.D.s from non-elite backgrounds with the financial means to handle 10 years of college at a poverty wage (or for the first 4 years, who can pay large sums rather than earn anything.) Plus, when they finish, they’ll be expected to have picked up the habits that will impress other faculty, who are disproportionately likely to come from families where Ivy League colleges are realistic options. How big can that pool possibly be? And the timeline to increase the pool is decades long.
Industry can be similar, but at least there you have the option for a smart kid to go through a bootcamp and move their way up on merit, while making a competitive wage. The pool of DEI candidates is just bigger for companies, and it’ obvious that it would be.
"After I got a PhD in biophysics [...]"
"Quantum-technology evangelist at Quantinuum, a computing company in Broomfield, Colorado."
It is kinda sad really. From biology straight to a "bullshit job" in big co. It is not even her field.
Testing the waters outside your specialty when you're in your second postdoc is not a bad idea. Presumably that means you've not been able to get a permanent job at least a couple times.
> My blood pressure even dropped five points.
Is a drop this small reliably measurable? I thought variances this small are very common.
So while this might seem logical from an outside perspective, two postdocs are common if not pretty much the norm for people hired as Tenure Track faculty at high ranking institutions in many fields nowadays. The name of the game is derisking - how much of a track record can you build before they hire you to confirm you will succeed.
> Testing the waters outside your specialty when you're in your second postdoc is not a bad idea. Presumably that means you've not been able to get a permanent job at least a couple times.
In my field 3-6 years of postdocs before applying for tenure track positions is the absolute norm. So it is really not an indication of anything.
There is this funny sentiment amongst a certain subset of HN readers, that an academic track is somehow a cushy path where you don't have to do anything just do some networking and somehow get into an easy job where you can just be lazy and let your graduate students do all the work and reap all the glory.
Realistically (as also somewhat alluded to in the article), an academic pathway is extremely stressful with significant uncertainty until you might achieve tenure. And even once you achieve tenure the stress doesn't really stop. While graduate students are typically the ones doing the footwork in the lab, most head of labs/research groups continue to work a lot, in order to secure funding to keep the lab/research going.
I just transitioned from an academic role to industry and the stresslevel, even coming up to some deadlines atm, is no comparison.
What I am saying is that running ChatGPT can be a new .replace()
Fare thee well, five researchers.
/s
1) bad headlines that ask a question rather than provide information are so normalized that they appear everywhere now, so lots of titles are like that,
2) Auto-removing “how” addresses only some of those, and rarely well, and
3) When it doesn’t just fail to fix the problem but also mangles the headline, it generates discussion like this one we’re having now, and I think there’s a strong argument to be made that this is worse than letting the headline start with “how”.
And yeah, submitters may be able to fix the headline when submitting the link. The problem is they in-fact do not, pretty often.
There hasn't ever been even an attempt to explain why he chose this behavior, so we can only keep guessing.
How John Smith Bought Foo Corp -> John Smith Bought Foo Corp
Why John Smith Bought Foo Corp -> John Smith Bought Foo Corp
Within some time window the OP can edit back in the missing word if it makes a difference (as it did here), and you can always email hn@ycombinator.com when one gets missed (as I shall do now).