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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

A couple of counterpoints:

* Science, at least when I went through high school was Not Cool. It was for "nerds", something that you didn't really want to be labeled. I don't know if it's still that way in the US, but counteracting that effect might not be a bad idea.

* He talks about flooding the market. I just don't see that as likely to happen, and I don't necessarily see STEM stuff as a "lump of labor" with a fixed amount of work to go around, either. These are people creating and discovering new things!

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slightly tangential topic, but I had to respond to this because I do hear this from my fellow US citizens:

>>> "* Science, at least when I went through high school was Not Cool. It was for "nerds", something that you didn't really want to be labeled. I don't know if it's still that way in the US, but counteracting that effect might not be a bad idea."

I've got to be honest... what High Schools did you guys go to?? I had friends on the football team who were into science. I had friends who didn't care about sports and were into writing. I had friends who had letter jackets, I had friends who rode motorcycles.

I was into computers and nobody cared. I first cut my teeth with CSS helping out with the website for our school newspaper. I first learned to program by messing around and making silly ASCII racing games on my graphing calculator in BASIC. Everyone who cared just kind of thought it was neat, or didn't care and we talked about other things.

All this labeling of "nerd" and "jocks"... I really don't get it. There were many circles of friends to join. Or you could be a loner and that's fine too. Looking back, I'm not even sure what label I would have been given (never considered myself a nerd, I was too poor of a student :p)

Did I miss something, or does everyone else just get caught up in labeling waaayyy too much?

That's just not the reality I experienced, and I never saw the ecosystem through that prism. shrugs

I always suspected the generation above me (graybeard professors) had to deal with that culture, and that's the reason why scientists are such phenomenally bad leaders - they didn't really interact with other people during their formative years. By the time I went to grad school, almost all of my male peers were actually "jock" types (and really nice guys to be honest), and really smart, too, but that could be field-specific, 20 out of my 24 classmates were into synthetic chemistry.

I think people who are into science and tech are getting more varied. We laugh about the idea of the football-obsessed "jock", but for some reason locking yourself in a room to play Final Fantasy all weekend was seen as admirably geeky. Most of the guys I studied engineering with had participated in sports, many were quite good. A lot were into cars.

When you stop trying to live up to that pathetic Jargon File description of a geek, late nights with techno blasting and Chinese takeout, you can get out and realize that there's a bigger world out there. You join the football team and discover that the quarterback really loves watching Star Trek, rather than dismissing him as a "dumb jock" because he has a number on his shirt.

Maybe things have changed some. Mostly, the people I hung out with at high school did not have issues with science and math, but there were definitely people there who did.

I suspect most people remember me as being really into bicycle racing more than school, so I don't suppose I was seen as the nerdiest of the nerdy, and had friends, girlfriends, and so on. Also, being in a college town probably meant more of a focus on education.

CSS? Definitely a different time! This came out the year I graduated from high school: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt

There is a large difference depending on part of country (deep south, northeast, west coast), town, and part of town.

In some rural communities football and ROTC is glorified and science is for the nerds. In other parts of the country it is different.

> Or you could be a loner and that's fine too.

Or you got picked on, beaten and made fun of and adults (who have also mostly bought into the "sports are God" mentality) didn't really care to do much about it.

Now I am talking like I had extensive experience with this, but in reality I went to one American High School for one year only, otherwise I went to one in Eastern Europe.

I would say overall the East European one was poor, didn't have any extra curricular activities _but_ science, math and English (foreign language) was top notch. Just to compare, math material I studies in 9th grade back home was taught to seniors in 12th grade in US. It was nice tutoring them math. And I also got a taste of the sharp boundaries of cliques and social groups in US High Schools. These are the "band" people, they hang out together, these people smoke pot, they hang out together, these are the nerds they talk about Start Trek and hang out together and I had to pick one. I picked the nerds, and it was strange how many things revolved around "whom do you hang out with". I definitely saw that as a negative side.

I guess my experience at such a small rural community was an outlier. Football was huge, our team was great, but we also had a good band program and quite a few of the band members were also football players--they'd march the half-time show in their football uniforms.

People didn't get beaten, the rare fights stemmed from personal conflicts rather than "NERRRRRRDS!". Nobody was really subjected to harassment that I ever saw.

Our school was something like 75% Hispanic and 25% white. The white kids were maybe 50% Mormon, which may have had some effect on behavior.

You know who cared more about cliques than anyone else? The try-hard "rebels" who obsessed over "jocks" and "preps". I socialized with everyone, and I think that was closer to the norm. I ate lunch at the band room with the band kids (many of whom were in cross country with me), I shot the shit in class with the stoner kids (who were also band kids and athletes), I went to game night with the Mormon kids (who were in band and sports).

I think this whole "nerd" obsession with "nerds" vs. "jocks", the image of getting stuffed in lockers or beat up, I think it's seated in a past that's been gone for a while.

I'm sorry you thought you had to pick one group.

In what I see as the best case scenario (reasonably approximated by my school experience), cool kids can do nerdy things, but they are without doubt "cool despite those hobbies/interests". The cool football player can be on the rocket club and nobody will question him about that, but neither will it be scoring him any "cool points".

Maybe that is how it should be, but I am inclined to think that STEM-type clubs should be glorified and looked up to.

> That's just not the reality I experienced, and I never saw the ecosystem through that prism. shrugs

I agree. Did you go to a small high school?

I suspect most of this labeling happens in large high schools. When a grade has more than 150 or so students[1], it becomes impossible for them to all interact with each other. They get divided up into different classrooms, take different classes, each lunch at staggered times, and form small, non-overlapping cliques. At least, that's the impression I've gotten from talking to people about it.

My high school was small and homogeneous: everyone knew each other, took many of the same classes, had the same teachers, etc. So the world described in pg's Nerds essay[2] is pretty foreign to me.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Interestingly, it was a very large HS. My graduating class was 800 strong.

flooding the market has already happened, as evidenced by poor morale among postdocs (in the biosciences, EG). Or heck, even the existence of the career phase known as the "postdoc". Basically, it didn't exist 40 years ago, when I started grad school 10 years ago the expectation was one postdoc, 2 years. Now it's 2 or 3 postdocs at 4 years a pop.

Other signs of market flooding are high rates of fraud, and deception, although there are no good metrics for that, really.

Also, my experience was this:

Grad school: 24k -> 26k over 6 years, at a highly-ranked institution. (MIT, my only other offer, offered me a measly 18k, I declined for obvious reasons).

1st postdoc: 30k for 1 year. I left, because my project was completed. This turned out to be a good choice, because my boss quit six months later (and threw the other postdoc under the bus - he was lazy).

Lab tech job: 35k. This was a job that was supposed to go to an entry level post-baccalaureate. I got it within 14 days of moving to San Diego, took it, because I knew the job market was rough. It's worth noting that I took a job that was a demotion, in terms of credentials, but got a pay raise.

2nd postdoc: An "internal promotion" from the previous, 40k.

I guess it's also worth mentioning, I'm ~30 years old and still making 40k, despite having slaved away as a PhD (talking 80 hour weeks) from a top-ranked school. My peers who went on different career trajectories are making far more than I. OTOH, I have plenty of friends (whom I know through social activities, so did not make it into tech) that are unemployed, which in most cases, is worse.

Ouch, yeah, that's pretty bad. What exactly do you have a doctorate in? Aren't there prospects in industry, rather than academia?

http://indysci.org/board/

I applied for a job in industry (with http://www.crunchbase.com/company/draths-corporation). Cold emailed the CEO (in 1/08). Got an interview with the CEO, in 7/08, was told to "call back in a month and I'll see if I can allocate money for you" - he'd been demoted to CSO by the VC. It was a really fun trip, he was great to me, but I could tell he was an a-hole, and he said, you know, you should really consider being an executive of your own. I thought he was crazy, but now that's exactly what I'm trying to do (but of a nonprofit, which might be even crazier). Again, this was in 7/08, and I'd been watching the Chris Martenson "crash course" videos and following the Ron Paul presidential campaign and knew that the market was about to crash. By 8/08, the market had begun its topspin downward, and I never got a response. Ultimately, draths went out of business, so it was probably for the better.

More recently, I applied for a job in industry with these guys (http://www.genomatica.com/) and actually got a job offer that I had to decline because they wanted me to start immediately, and I (perhaps stupidly) felt I had an obligation to finish my project where I work now. OTOH, I seem to have enough freedom to try to do my own thing.

So, yes there are prospects in industry. One caveat is that although my publication record is not terribly impressive by the conventional "impact factor metric" (I personally like that I've made innovations in three wildly different aspects of biology - difficult protein expression, small molecule drug development, and bioorganometallic chemistry), I have an extremely good academic pedigree, that gets my foot in the door to interviews and lets me at least try to justify my existence based on the merit that I value and the skillset that I've developed. Inasmuch as I hate that the title is being devalued, I feel sorry for PhDs that have their degrees rubber-stamped, because it's gotta be really tough for them.

I don't quite see what's obvious about declining MIT for 6k unless there's a significant decrease in prestige of the PIs you worked with.

MIT in general is worth more than the 6k more you're getting from Scripps.

Lab techs are offered higher pay because the prospects for promotion are limited at best, they compensate for that with slightly higher pay. As a post-doc you aren't expected to keep that job forever, whereas lab techs do so for decades.

You seem really disgruntled about the current system. Academia isn't easy, considering the limited funding available, it is in national interest to only have the best doing research and your CV isn't exactly super competitive.

Edit: The vast majority of younger faculty I've worked with (i.e. Assistant Professors with < 5 years of experience at the University of Toronto only did post docs for 4-6 years in total. Not the 8-12 you seem to imply, and this is in biological and medical sciences.

I think you're wrong. As much as I despise rankings, Scripps was ranked number 1 among chemistry departments my year (my degree is in chemistry). I didn't have to do any TAing. Among my classmates and the class after me (whom I hung out with the most, classes of 20 students tend to do that and at scripps we're really close), there is: A professor at Scripps, A professor at Berkeley, A professor at Stanford, A professor at UCSD. I am in contact with them and will possibly launch a collaboration with the one in Stanford. Finally, at 24k I barely broke even on my expenses. I'm sure I could have survived on 18k, but I'd have more grey hairs.

And "The vast majority of younger faculty I've worked with". Sounds like selection bias. Talk to the postdocs and see how long they've been around.

I think it's definitely possible to flood the market, it's just difficult to make that generalization because STEM can mean a wide variety of things. There's so many STEM fields that it's kind of silly to lump it as one. Just as an example, according to the BLS, chemical engineer jobs are projected to grow 6%, slower than average compared to all occupations. In contrast, software developer jobs are projected to grow 30% over the next decade. Not all STEM fields have equal opportunities so it's certainly possible that some areas get (or already are) oversaturated and not others.

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