Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Unsurprising. The pay sucks, hours are long, and the largest industry to hire postdocs (Biomedical) is going through a fairly severe recession that has impacted lab developers in Boston and SF as well.

Edit: My analysis of the second order effect is wrong.

From the article - "Much of the shift can be attributed to employment numbers in the biological and biomedical sciences, which saw a 3% drop in the total number of postdocs from 2021 to 2022 and a 10% drop in the number who were U.S. citizens and permanent residents. It’s not clear from the recent data release what’s driving the trends. But the declines coincide with a boom in hiring at biotech companies. And data from a separate survey released by NSF last year indicated fewer U.S. Ph.D. graduates in the life sciences are pursuing postdocs than ever before, with an increasing number heading to industry"

Basically, it looks like you don't need to have a postdoc anymore to work as a researcher in the Biotech industry now.

That said, PE/VC funding has dried up in Biotech compared to a couple years ago

Paying postdocs private sector hourly salaries will probably resolve the issue, but that effort needs to come from the NSF, NIH, DHHS, and other grantmakers.

> Paying postdocs private sector hourly salaries will probably resolve the issue

What's the actual issue, though? Is there something bad that this effect is causing?

Salaries are basically limited to $50-70k a year with 50-60 hour workweeks.

If you did a PhD in Biochemistry, you could make $100-200k a year plus stock working 40-50 hours a week at most working for Pfizer in Cambridge MA instead of earning around $60k working 50-60 hours as a Postdoc at a regional Boston based program like BU or Northeastern - you have to pay the same amount for rent and groceries, but you earn half as much and work much longer hours.

At that point, the only reason to be a postdoc is to get your foot in the door if you went to a less recruited program or are from abroad.

For example, in the article - “My personal experience is that Americans were always less willing to put up with conditions that foreigners like myself had to put up with,” says McDowell, who moved from the United Kingdom to the United States for a postdoc in biomedicine.

But what's the actual problem that fewer postdocs causes?

Much less experimental and fundamental research.

Companies aren't going to invest in experimental research in the biotech space as the costs are so high.

Most compounds end up getting validated in some way shape or form by researchers, then productionized by the private sector.

This has a pipeline effect on development in the industry.

For example, mRNA Vaccine research was purely experimental research done by postdocs and junior researchers at UPenn in the 1990s, before being commercialized by BioNtech and Moderna in the mid-2000s.

There really isn't one in my opinion. Academic postdoc positions in many fields are pitched as a stepping stone to professorship, but professor positions are very few so you end up with PHDs continuing the low-pay grind after graduation to prop up academia for a dream that doesn't come true. I think it's good more are recognizing this and just going to industry, maybe eventually this will cause problems and academia can be motivated to fix itself instead of viewing post docs as disposable. Or maybe there's no problem to fix and this is academia just getting correctly recognized as the grind option for people who are actually ok with that

> academia can be motivated to fix itself

The fundamental issues with postdoc salaries and grantmaking lies with the US Government. It is the grantmakers like the CDC, NIH, CMS, DARPA, etc that essentially set postdoc salaries for grants.

And these agencies are completely averse to change.

Furthermore, us in industry are NOT going to fund fundamental or experimental research due to relatively low margins.

The professor positions themselves aren't particularly cushy at the end of that road. Some postdocs take a look at the prospects of 60-70 hour weeks, very little time to focus on anything scientific or technical, and huge piles of administrative work, and relatively low pay and choose to industry options not out of a lack of the ability to land a professorship.

Postdocs are the single most productive members in a research group.

The PI is typically a tenured or tenure track professor, who got the job based on their research ability, but now they are relegated to an office, teaching 1-2 classes/semester, writing grants, reviewing papers for free for for-profit journals, reviewing grants for NIH/NSF, etc.

Grad students are not well motivated, not skilled, need lots of training, take classes, need to work on a thesis, and often times also teach. So they are low output and high time investment.

Postdocs require little-to-no time investment as they already have most prerequisite skills, have no other obligations beyond research, and sometimes even bring their own funding. They are basically professional researchers and are by far and away the most productive members of any given research group.

>If you did a PhD in Biochemistry, you could make $100-200k a year plus stock working 40-50 hours a week at most working for Pfizer in Cambridge MA instead of earning around $60k working 50-60 hours as a Postdoc at a regional Boston based program like BU or Northeastern - you have to pay the same amount for rent and groceries, but you earn half as much and work much longer hours.

I was recruited pretty heavily relative to my peers, when I finished up my biochem PhD. Clearing $100k was actually a pretty tall order without a postdoc. There are jobs out there, and I managed to get one of them, but they were very competitive. With a postdoc, $150k was on the low end, but also still competitive. Basically no one is hiring at $200k in biotech, beyond director roles.

> I was recruited pretty heavily relative to my peers, when I finished up my biochem PhD

When? Your numbers don't make sense in the late 2010s to present.

Even my friends working as Sr Associate Scientists (BS only) for employers like Pfizer or Biogen are earning $100-140k base after barely 2 YoE, and younger friends and family of mine are getting $100-110k base for new grad roles now

Last year.

Take a quick look at Indeed:

https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=structural+biologist&l=Boston%...

Amgen, Senior Scientist - $125-$150

UCB, Scientist I - $96-$125

Noblis, Molecular and Cellular Biology Specialist - $109,100 to $190,900 with 8+ years of relevant experience.

Actalent, Sr. Engineer of Internal Cell Culture Development and Manufacturing - $80-$115

$16k PhD stipend in 2024?!?

Which program did you do your PhD at!!!!

Even UCSC has a stipend of $24k, BU a stipend of $27k, and UIUC a stipend of $25k.

No offense, but it's sounding like you attended a non-target program. At that point it absolutely makes sense to switch to software.

Also, you may need some hiring mentorship. Indeed is not the best platform for roles.

Also, Assoc to Sr Assoc is just 1.5-2 years so you are absolutely going to break $100k in 2 years

I was at an R1, public land grant university. By the time I realized how insane it was, I was close enough to graduating that I just decided to stick it out.

I wasn't a great undergraduate and didn't have the background I'd have liked for the field I went into. I took a gamble on myself and it paid off, but yeah, there are some PhD programs out there that do pay a bit more. However, I am aware of a couple that actually paid less.

There are hundreds of land grant programs ranging from Tier 1 programs like UCB or UMich to regional state schools UAlaska Anchorage.

Just saying "R1, public land grant university" isn't relevant.

> I wasn't a great undergraduate and didn't have the background I'd have liked for the field I went into

That was your problem. Not "H1Bs" or "foreign" researchers.

UC Berkeley alone can graduate around 700-800 Bio and bio related undergrads (MCB, Chemistry, etc) a year. Let alone the dozens of other similar programs (UCs, UMich, UW, Big 10, Ivies, etc)

That said, with your background in structural bio you will do well in the bioinformatics and potentially even ML space, and will probably be able to realize some actual changes that you wouldn't be able to in the more traditional and hierarchical system that exists today in Life Science research.

>Just saying "R1, public land grant university" isn't relevant.

There are 146 R1 universities in the United States. There are about 35 in the western half of the United States. There are no R1 universities in Alaska. There are 105 public R1s. R1 universities are widely considered the top tier for PhDs. In my field, I had a once in a lifetime opportunity to get hands on training with a new, otherwise inaccessible technique. I did well, and like I said, was recruited heavily. This included turning down a job at the premier institute in Germany where this technique (cryo-electron microscopy) was basically developed. My PI was prestigious and well respected in the field. His previous students went on to ultimately take director positions at places like Pfizer.

Yes, I could have taken $30k/year to go a school on the California coast, but it'd have come out to about the same once you adjust for cost of living.

>That was your problem. Not "H1Bs" or "foreign" researchers. $16,800 is not significantly less than what other PhD programs I looked at were paying. Low 20s was pretty common.

From what I remember, Cornell was paying like $24k/yr at the time.

Lack of research. Most academic research is done by postdocs through grants from e.g. NSF. NSF and other grantors cap postdoc pay at below living wage in expensive cities like Boston. (The professor and university who hire the postdoc have very little flexibility to pay them more.)

Add that it's a temp job with no security and fewer people want to sign up. So a lot of cutting-edge research can't get done.

But is that because a lot of value can be found in these same people producing in industry at the moment? I wonder if there could be a cycle of sometimes discovery being more valuable, because biotech is fairly commoditised, and a cycle of implementation sometimes being more valuable, because we haven't made the most of discoveries.

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