Hacker News Reader

Comment by tnecniv | Hacker News Reader

When I was still a PhD student, my advisor lamented that he couldn’t find postdocs to hire because big tech was paying them more for the same role with minimal constraints. If that kept going for a while, I imagine it’d put pressure on at least some parts of academia (CS and engineering don’t expect you to do a series of postdocs like biology does, and pure math has their own system of seniority I only know a little about). The money dried up though.

View on HN

I literally went through this recently with someone in my department. They wanted to know what professors did similar research to me at R1 universities of comparable rank. I told them no one and they didn't believe me. I sent them an annotated version of a bibliography to a survey paper I had recently written, writing down where each person worked. I just don't think they understand that right now, as an intern for a big tech company I am making more money than some of our junior professors. When I can get a full time position my cash in hand compensation goes up, plus equity and more benefits (like 401k). Who the hell would go into academia? You have lower pay, fewer resources, and more bureaucratic BS. There's lots of bureaucracy in industry too, don't get me wrong, but it's easier to deal with when you're getting paid more.

A post doc position wants me to move across the country, into a major city, and pay me $50k/yr for a position with low growth opportunities and where I will have to move again in another few years? No thanks.

> I'm being asked to do things that have never been done before -- and I love this, it is the ultimate puzzle -- but how the fuck do you expect me to give accurate ETAs and to do this 3-5 times a year and launch ground breaking work with some 2080Ti nodes and maybe one A100 node?

If it is work that some industry is highly interested in, and this industry has deep pockets, it is very hard to compete with it in academia. Look for more fundamental questions to research (there exist insanely many, just don't follow the hype) that can be investigated with a lot less ressources.

Fwiw, this is the route most academics take, but it is still not easy to publish in this domain. I've seen workshop papers get rejected from very clearly academic work because they don't use real world or large datasets. I've seen theory papers get rejected because they don't have experiments. Yes, read that last one again. And mind you, these big companies also do a lot of theory and foundational work too. The process is just noisy.

I think having trouble finding a postdoc is a good outcome of the process, the incentives in this case are working properly. Postdoc positions were designed as a short bridge between a PhD and a tenure-track position, not as a long-term crutch for people who are not ready to leave academic research.

When postdoc positions first were created, they were illusive and of high prestige. Then the idea got abused to add labor for professors to varying degrees depending on the field.

We are in the big science phase of biology using AI. Individual labs and researchers will be hard pressed to compete but the worse part is the lack of original thinking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com