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.
> 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.
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.