I'm starting to suspect my work is incompatible with a full-time academic job | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to suspect my work is incompatible with a full-time academic job

humprog.org

75 pointsluu86 comments

> Well, obviously the part-time thing will bring a reduction in my institutional teaching and admin duties. I have to say there is uncertainty about how much relief will arise in practice

As someone who has tried something similar, institutional bureaucracy expands to fill all available time. People engaging in bureaucratic empire-building will still happily consume your personal unpaid time. And splitting attention between multiple lines of work creates some legitimate additional overhead, which doesn't help.

I'm not sure what the winning strategy is. I think it is necessary to either get out entirely or play the bureaucrats' "system-game" to some degree, but not on their terms and not fairly. When the bureaucracy demands useless work, maximize their costs and minimize yours. Many academics constitutively cannot make themselves do a lazy, poor job, but is a useful skill to deploy defensively so that you can fulfill your education and research responsibilities. Often you'll find that the bureaucracy only cares about the superficial appearance of compliance; the actual actions performed are irrelevant to them. Shift responsibility to some other part of the bureaucracy and use LLMs to generate boilerplate. If the bureaucracy never attempts to punish you in any way, that may indicate you're being more compliant than necessary. This approach is safest if your retirement plan is fully funded and you don't truly need to keep the job. It is also helpful if at some part of what you do is visibly important to someone who does have power; this helps deflect consequences when you accidentally step a over a line. Everything depends on context and execution though; I hope the part-time approach works out for you.

How do you determine what amount of bureaucracy is acceptable to do?

just enough to get yelled at, but not enough to get fired. Be an annoyance to deal with, by towing the line.

Seems like a reasonable metric that isn't based on simple gut reactions to anything.

Prioritize work by ROI and alignment with the institution's mission, communicate the prioritization to relevant decision-makers in your management chain, and actually follow through on it unless coerced otherwise.

Edit: There's no guarantee this will work out positively—nothing is guaranteed—but it's worth considering if the alternative is giving up / changing careers.

> As someone who has tried something similar, institutional bureaucracy expands to fill all available time.

Can you give examples? I'm very curious what their useless work looks like.

I’m an aging (60s) academic and I’ve found that the old assumption of our world offering a “life of ideas” that any talented person would want is no longer true. If you’re coming in now or came in in the past 30 years, it’s liters just a job. Not necessarily a bad job, but certainly not a calling.

The tenure system is necessary for it to function, because wages are so low relative to skill level and the job market is so unreliable, but it also makes things worse because the old hands mostly don’t fight evil changes (and there have been tons of evil changes recently) of only the young will be affected.

Of course, the current state of the US government and the rising anti intellectualism don’t help.

Presumably in the absence of tenure wages would have to increase.

Unlikely, given the 10/50 to 1 demand/supply ratio. The very top people are workaholics and true believers, so it is unlikely that the absence of the institution of tenure would affect their choices. For mid-quality people, there is an overabundance of researchers who would get that job, tenure or no-tenure, for a piece of chocolate.

I agree, but with one amendment: most tenure-track roles in the US will have 50 to 200 applicants for a single position. Over the last few decades, tenure lines have decreased while PhD admissions have not. Adjuncts do so much of the teaching at all kinds of institutions these days.

It is true, but I was referring to suitable candidates. I had what I believe was a very good CV (prestigious fellowships, a meaty publication list in some top 10% disciplinary journals), and I had exactly zero invitations to interview over more than 5 years of applying to tt jobs.

What kind of chocolate ? :) (humor)

Yes but if you remove the "last long enough and you'll have a job for life and your kids get college degrees for free" carrot how many of those people who want the job now no longer will?

Plenty. Anybody who has been in academia sees the institution as cultish. Nobody wants a tenure track job because their kids will go to college for free and give up other work opportunities for that carrot. The last problem academia will have is not enough people applying to tenure track jobs.

> Anybody who has been in academia sees the institution as cultish.

Anybody? I'm sure this is not the case.

> Nobody wants a tenure track job because their kids will go to college for free and give up other work opportunities for that carrot.

You conveniently left out the job for life part which is a huge part of why most professors want a TT job. There are other bonuses of course but "can't be fired" is a pretty sweet gig if you can get it. Hence the couple hundred applications for every open TT role.

> The last problem academia will have is not enough people applying to tenure track jobs.

Well we're talking about what would happen if there was no tenure track so I guess this is pedantically true. But I'm not saying we'll suddenly have open professorial roles with no applicants, I'm saying maybe without tenure as a carrot we'll go from 200 applicants for each job to something more reasonable like 30-50.

You conveniently left out the job for life part which is a huge part of why most professors want a TT job.

Also, age makes you better at doing jobs but worse at getting them. You do not want to be on the open labor market after 50, especially if you’re specialized and probably (possibly undiagnosed) neurodivergent.

> You do not want to be on the open labor market after 50

This might be true in something like software development (I don't strictly think it is but I'm at least open to the argument) but it's definitely not true in academia.

People want old professors. If anyone I'd expect it to be easier for a 50, 55, 60 year old professor to get a TT role than a 29 year old with a wet ink PhD.

How is this not true? Apart from specific disciplines with a permeable barrier between university and industry (for example, computer science, finance), the median age at which a tenured position is obtained should be between 30 and 35 years old (and I believe the variance of the distribution of ages to be small). It is very rare to get a tenured position at 40, and the chances are much slimmer for older people.

I think that most people who haven't spent time doing a PhD, doing post-docs, etc. have very misguided ideas about how the academic world works, and their notion of "professorship" comes mainly from movies.

Especially at R1 universities, researchers are hired primarily (90%+) for their research; teaching is very secondary. The "genius discovery" is the improbable outcome of their research; the most likely outcome is a substantial scholarship in some field, which is built up over time, initially individually (PhD, postdocs) and then collaboratively.

Academia is cultish (strict hierarchy, a sense of calling for the profession, long hours and minimal pay for "juniors", non-academic careers, even when well compensated, considered inferior, etc.).

I spent ~15 years in academia between PhD, post-docs, and prestigious fellowships. I have never heard anybody saying they wanted a tenure-track job because of the institution of tenure (thousands of post-docs have objectively no chance of landing a tenure-track job, and they are not even looking outside of the ivory tower) or because after getting the job, they cannot be fired. That's a huge misrepresentation of the motives of the vast majority of academics.

"I'm saying maybe without tenure as a carrot we'll go from 200 applicants for each job to something more reasonable like 30-50." - I don't know the answer, but I would bet one would see 190 applicants instead of 200.

Yeah it seems to me like academia is dead in basically every sense. Not just internally as you describe but also in the culture. People just don’t value learning anymore, the romantic image is fading. And now there’s no distinction being academia and industry in the sense that even vocations need a degree now, most people have an experience of university that is far removed from traditional academia, again giving it a pure economic focus. We’ll see what happens but I do feel like the last 20 years has seen a steep decline in the cultural value of academia, and as you point out, a strong professionalising of academia

> the old hands mostly don’t fight evil changes (and there have been tons of evil changes recently)

Can you elaborate?

This kind of thing is blowing up all over the place, see here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg

Sabine has a chip on her shoulder about academia and simultaneously she gets the most rewarded for feeding into the anti academic narrative. That also plays well on HN where there is a cohort of people that like to pretend a PhD is useless and that PhD holders are less intelligent than themselves.

Do you have a more specific criticism about the "chip on her shoulder" and how "gets the most rewarded for feeding into the anti academic narrative"?

The criticism is pretty specific: she has an axe to grind about string theory holding back fundamental physics and projects this onto all of science. One need only watch her videos to notice this.

Another simple observation: her rant videos receive millions of views while her others receive significantly less. It doesn't take much speculation to see that an intelligent person that genuinely believes her own rant would prefer the output that also gives the most financial rewards

mmmm... In this case, I don't think the "having a PhD is useless" is remotely close to what Sabine is saying, which is "academic science exploration and experimentation is broken". Yes, it's PhDs and career academics as core participants in the game, but there are plenty of valid reasons to pursue a PhD and then move into industry that are no incompatible with either 1) what Sabine is saying, and 2) the PhD experience in higher ed.

The current academic system certainly has a lot of flaws, but Sabine also has an axe to grind, so one should take what she says with a few grains of salt.

Do you know the nature of the axe that she grinds? It's important to determine the kind of salt pairing.

Often times people have grievances against systems because they aren't doing a good job achieving their aims or there's big injustice/corruption. Sometimes people take an ego wound from something and it causes them to be overly uncharitable or dishonest for revenge.

The meme that permeates from academia about publishing quantity being more important than quality has me believing it can't be all ego wound. There's problems there.

The critiques she provided ten years ago, when still in academia, were interesting, but now that she's out its mostly tiresome.

In other words, the axe she grinds these days is one provided by the youtube content mill, which demands ever more logs to its boiler.

sounds like the criticism still applies and is ever more relevant if you wish to understand that Trump voters, who by and large do not have college degrees, experience resentment when they hear academics are getting federal funds to do things that "sound cool" to support their "comfortable lifestyles."

Why is it right for people who didn't go to college to be forced to pay for physicists to do useless research?

You’re presuming it is useless just because it sounds useless to a layman.

I don’t know what caused her to go down this path, but she has become more radical and sensationalist over the years, and her convictions about fundamental physics border on crackpottery IMO. I don’t see her engaging in good faith on all these topics.

That could be because she optimizes for views, willingly or not. There is a reason why a lot of podcasters and youtubers move toward more extreme and polarizing views, that's what attracts more viewers and creates more engagement. Same reason why places like twitter or facebook pushed the emotionally charged posts up... keeps the viewers engaged and locked.

Re: interpellation [0]. This was highlighted in a recent article about Mr. Beast [1].

Hadn’t considered this being a truth for her channel, but I can see what you mean.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation_(philosophy)

[1] https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/in-the-belly-of-the-mrbea...

As an academic you have a vested interest in holding that opinion and you should disclose that

Yes, and the chip on her shoulder is that she never managed to produce research and the community told her that.

She is a captivating speaker, but I like to think that partical physics research is important to future technology. I want to see mankind reach beyond the stars.

The totally real leaked email from a dastardly fraud-physicist that 100% confirms Hossenfelders's worldview? From a guy who supposedly wishes to be discreet, but also sends an email to a Youtuber with 1.6M subscribers with an axe to grind about this exact topic, using his full name? Which then Sabine courageously exposes anyway, despite the wishes of this evildoer. He basically admits he's a welfare queen to her because... reasons?

Sureeee, I can't wait for the next Musk tweet where a absolutely not fake EPA employee sends a nice email explaining how they are sipping Piña Coladas and playing mini golf with office furniture everyday. It might not be the best uses of resources, sure, but it feeds his family and is pretty sweet, so please stop doing the DOGE thing.

I liked my teaching assignments, because I could talk to a lot of users/students. Talking to users is always the best.

But I didn't have to worry about writing min. 2 papers a year. I only did some nice conferences. And I could easily work on the side.

As a postdoc with a background in NLP, I've come to the same conclusion. I feel like I'm stagnating in academia and have decided to quit my postdoc and self fund research that I can hopefully monetize in the future.

It certainly doesn't help that the pay is atrocious — I make less in inflation adjusted dollars than my first job straight out of school nearly 20yrs ago, in a higher cost of living place.

You sir are having a mid-life crisis. You may need to change your career but do not give in to the urge to buy a sports car. It won't fix your career aspirations nor make you any younger.

Absolutely buy a sports car, regardless of age, if that's something you're into. It won't fix anything structurally wrong with your life but you're definitely allowed to have fun.

Would strongly suggest renting one first. The fun might last for some; it didn't for me (thankfully, I found this out while renting).

I'm not a car expert, but it seems like the really fun ones require a lot of expensive maintenance. I imagine it wouldn't be hard to rent them for the day/weekend from people who did buy them, but can't really afford them.

The "really fun ones" can often be pretty limited. How often do you need to go 0 to 60 super quick? Particularly when a Tesla minivan can do it faster? If you really want to try them, consider joining a car club.

I found a "fun enough one" worked best for me, because it can be a daily driver.

fun ≠ utility

I imagine part of the fun is probably also seeing, hearing, and feeling something different. And maybe trying to grab others' attentions.

I'm just speculating, because I don't care for fancy or "fun" cars.

The real fun ones are called motorcycles and they're way more affordable when you look at smiles per dollar.

But there's nowhere to put your coffee mug

They make handlebar attachments for that, but good luck if the mug doesn't have a lid.

Also it’s good for society to have a supply of organs for people who need transplants, and since so many people are unwilling to give up a kidney while living that takes a steady stream of abrupt deaths.

I mean this is certainly a take. Equally I’ve been riding since I was five and 35 years later I have all my organs so perhaps the future really isn’t set in stone.

That you're still here to write that comment is selection bias. (Also: riding since you're 5 suggests you're probably good at it, which is a different kind of selection bias.)

This is correct to be fair. I’m not sure I’m good at it though, just…realistic. I do know people who died riding, four of them over the years. A few more who had accidents, including a guy that was run over by a truck causing his leg to explode like a sausage.

The cause was almost always the same, riding beyond their abilities. I’ve never had any illusions as to the fact that I’m not Valentino Rossi and I’m pretty sure this is why I survive. I drive exactly the same way, extremely defensive and within my abilities. I treat being in control of a vehicle with a level of seriousness I don’t see from most.

If someone discusses motorcycling with me, and they can’t convince me they are going to approach it in much the same way, I advise against getting on one as heavily as I can.

The very first person to die that I knew was an 18 year old work experience kid who took it up because me and my friend both rode and he thought it was cool, we were young ourselves still and encouraged it.

He died on his first trip on a popular route for weekend riding, only a few corners in. From witness accounts he tried taking a corner at the same pace as the older more experienced dudes, entered with way too much speed and that was that. Dude was still on his learners, didn’t even make it to his full license :(

motorcycles are also significantly more dangerous, regrettably.

I used to be very into them when I was younger, and then having multiple friends get into motorcycle accidents kinda turned me off of them :/

A relative of mine runs a motorcycle school and that's what originally got me into it. While bikes are dangerous, a regrettably high percentage of the accidents are things that were completely avoidable if safe and defensive driving practices were used. In my subjective opinion it's a completely separate mindset you need to develop and the minimum required program simply does not come anywhere close to that. As the saying goes, on a bike it's only a matter of when you fall, not if, so all the gear all the time.

I had some friends, I say friends. They are dead because you can’t treat motorcycling like driving. You have to actually pay attention and not act like a tool if you want to live.

I am able to pay attention and am not a tool, I am still alive.

edit

For context, in my country a not insignificant amount of motorcyclists will try and tell you the only thing dangerous about riding a motorcycle is car drivers, but the statistics simply do not show this. They show that the majority of incidents can be attributed to the motorcyclist. Yes, other drivers are heavily represented, just not to the levels of your average "I can do no wrong" motorcyclist would try to convince you of.

That's just an affordability question. A nice person from the dealer picks up the car from your house and then drops it back off when they are done. You just pay the bill.

Granted I DIY it all just for entertainment.

What's wrong with buying a sports car? They're awesome!

I personally don't see much benefit over just lighting cash on fire and inviting friends over to enjoy, but everyone has their passions.

It's a life experience. Enjoy having one or skip it. Either works. It's your life.

Ah, you must not enjoy driving. Different strokes for different folks.

I was more making a comment about how you really can't use most of the value of a sports car (outside of the flashiness aspect I guess) unless you frequent track days.

I'm also grumpy; I do apologize.

All good! Hope you feel better soon.

It's one thing to buy a Miata, it's another to buy a status-symbol car

What differentiates a status-symbol car from a Miata?

About 1500lbs, 15mpg, and $200K?

(Apologies for the nonsense units, it's all they let us use here)

You could drive the car the next day also I guess.

It's a rapidly depreciating asset, but an asset nonetheless and its core function is useful.

Some people enjoy the aesthetics, the design of the car - they can be quite beautiful! Some enjoy the engineering - it can be challenging to squeeze so much performance out and still meet environmental requirements. Some enjoy them for the tuning and personal work they can put in to make it their own. Others like it as a status symbol - a recognition of the hard work they put in and what they accomplished. Some like it for the moment to moment feel of being pressed into the seat and the sounds it makes.

There are a lot of reasons to enjoy a sports car. It'll be something I almost certainly never do myself, but I can definitely see the appeal.

> it can be challenging to squeeze so much performance out and still meet environmental requirements.

So much so, in fact, that nobody meets them but cheat in the tests instead. Those that haven’t cheated haven’t been caught yet.

If you choose to drive a sports car, at least have the courage to admit that you value your personal satisfaction over the environment and future generations.

...a single person driving a sports car occasionally is not moving the needle of climate change. I think that's a bit ridiculous.

If suddenly the entire driving population of the US decided to swap - yes, absolutely, that would be a significant difference.

There are far, far bigger fish to fry when it comes to climate change than the occasional sports car use. Like say, the proliferation of SUVs and massive pickups.

Sure, that’s not my point. It’s a mindset thing: driving a sports car or electric SUV but simultaneously soothing yourself that someone surely tested those for environmental impact is just self-delusion. Drive a sports car if that’s your thing, but at least stand by your decision for what it is—an act of hedonism.

By that argument almost everything is. Ate some food that uses single-use plastics? Can't do that! Wanted to keep the lights on at night because it's more cozy? Nope! Want to drive to work because it takes <10 minutes instead of 40 for the bus? Dirty polluter! Want to feel comfortable in winter instead of shivering while covered in blankets? Just think about all that natural gas! Selfish selfish selfish! You can go as far here as you want - there's always something, it never ends.

If you're living in an industrialized country, pretty much everything we do to exist ends up being sub-optimal environmentally.

I'm not saying people should do nothing. But taking no enjoyment in life is also not a solution.

I don’t think we disagree. Doing something for your personal pleasure is fine (except if you’re Jeff Bezos and you’re shooting dick rockets into space for your personal pleasure. Just stop, Jeff.)

Deluding yourself that you have done all you could anyway is not. If you tell people they’ll save the planet if only they drive an electric and don’t drink coffee from plastic cups, they don’t fight for meaningful change anymore.

So by all means: enjoy your sports car. But don’t lie to yourself.

How would you recommend I get the kids to my inlaws' house besides using the electric SUV like I do now? Isn't hedonism supposed to be fun?

Key facts: 70 miles away, single car household, 4 people on board.

How about a car that doesn’t spend most of its energy on transporting its absurdly heavy self rather than the payload? It’s not like sedans suddenly aren’t a thing anymore.

That, or accepting that you drive an SUV because you like to drive an SUV. Either is fine.

> How about a car that doesn’t spend most of its energy on transporting its absurdly heavy self rather than the payload?

Precious few of these have ever been built, and none available commercially, as far as I know. The total weight of my family is maybe ~500 pounds. Any leads on any sedans less than this that can hit highway speeds?

Yes, I know EVs are heavier. Combustion vehicles waste most of their energy on the process of combustion. I ride a bike to work, which is the perfect vehicle for that application, but it won't work for this scenario.

...a single person driving a SUV or a massive pickup is not moving the needle of climate change. I think that's a bit ridiculous.

Do you see what I did? A large part of the driving population of the US decided they need a environmentally unfriendly car, many of them SUV and pickup, but a few sport cars too. That does make a significant difference.

The difference is that SUVs and Pickups are literally everywhere. They're the new default. It's all manufacturers sell, it's all consumers buy. It's a massive problem.

Sports cars, by comparison, are very rare. Not many people buy them, and even then they're often not a daily driver.

It's not a good idea if you can't afford it or it is distracting you from your real problems, but a nice car can be very fulfilling and makes the miles you are forced to drive or drive voluntarily many times more enjoyable.

Getting into nicer cars and real sports cars was one of the best calls I ever made.

Engineers punish themselves with pretty terrible cars when they could easily afford something that is better in many dimensions.

A relatively cheap performance version of Model 3 or Model Y can let you experience the best 99% of sports cars could offer for just $40k to $55k.

Even the non performance version of Model 3 and Model Y probably offer more “sports car” performance than most more expensive sports cars.

Yeah, but then you'll be supporting Elon and his cringe fest.

Only if you define sports car == muscle car; a sports car has far more performance than straight line going for it.

Sure, but the increased torque/acceleration is all that 99% of people are going to experience from any sports car they use. It's not like the commercials where they are going to be speeding up and down curvy mountain roads. They are going to go from home to work to grocery store in suburbia.

Bruh, buy a sports car if you want. They're relatively cheap compared to the other mid-life crisis cliché: an affair/divorce.

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