What the author doesn't realise that while the lab heads might not be doing a lot of science on a day to day basis - most are overloaded with a bunch of other stuff that is forced upon them... endless committee meetings, grant writing, teaching and teaching administration etc...
I left academia--more-or-less--after doing several post-docs and taking a hard look at an employment landscape where colleagues who were at least as good as me were taking offers from second- or third-teir institutions because that was all that was available. I knew some of them were profoundly lonely and struggling in those positions, outside of the charmed circle of the top teir they had comfortably inhabited for so long.
Beyond that, there was the realization that unlike the profs who trained my generation, people my age pursuing tenure were rarely getting into the lab. They couldn't afford to. They had to stay relentlessly on the track of paper and grant generation, as well as committee work, if they wanted to succeed.
I would be a really bad fit in that job. I got into science because I love the hands-on act of "disturbing the universe", in Freeman Dyson's memorable phrase, and even in the improbable event that I landed a tenure-track job (improbable in part because as a post-doc I tended to work on problems that interested me, rather than ones that would lead to lots of publications) I would end up spending most of my time doing stuff I wasn't very good at and didn't much enjoy.
It's one thing to say that "every job has a certain amount of work involved" (there are always less appealing things you have to do in the name of the stuff you enjoy) but when a job is mostly stuff you aren't suited for, it's not a good idea to pursue it.
This is the fundamental problem of modern academia: researchers are getting shunted into managers and administrators as soon as they get on tenure track. While the age they make the transition to tenure track is going up, the length of active research careers is going down. Hands-on research scientists who are active over the full length of their career are almost always in some kind of permanent research associate position, free from the vagaries of tenure and promotion. They are the people most of us who go into the sciences want to be, but the positions available for them are few and far between.
We need serious, genuine academic reform so that there are more positions available for career scientists who do science, rather than careerists who transition to managers and administrators the moment they become assistant professors.
Honest question, if your colleagues were "top tier" researchers, and they ended up at "second tier" schools, does that not somehow imply that those "second tier" institutions are more prestigious than their presumed "second tier" status? They obviously are able to recruit quality.
I guess the real question that I'm trying to ask is why the obsession in academia (and HN) with segmenting institutions into "tiers"? It just seems odd and contradictory that academia would be so bent on self-imposing a caste system.
I'm often the only person in the room without a PhD when I go see a customer. They usually want me to either fix something 10 minutes ago, prototype something next week, or invent something next month. I do.
There are websites around that list me as having a PhD in my specialty (I just have a four year degree). Most recently, one aerospace organization flat out refused to correct their page because it looks less professional if I'm not listed with a degree I don't have.
As far as advisors taking credit instead of their students... ten years ago I saved the life of an asshole and the conscience of a friend when said friend came to recruit me to be a spotter while he attempted to kill his advisor after he'd published something my friend wrote, under the advisor's name. I talked my friend into merely destroying the prof's car.
I realize that I talk about violence a lot in my posts. It happens, it is part of life, it must be dealt with even in techie or academic circles.
De-escalation sometimes requires causing a small amount of damage in order to prevent much greater damage. It's like felling a few trees to build a firebreak.
I don't give a damn about the advisor, other than he's a human being and has the right to live his wretched life out, but I do know that my friend would've been haunted by his conscience all his life if he actually hurt someone... and haunted by his pride just as long if he didn't exact some form of revenge, because this is what our culture demanded.
I don't want to kill my advisor (he's a pretty good guy, honest, and generally not a douchebag... in all honesty I have in the past and would in the future have a beer with him ).
It just seems like everyone is a cog everywhere -- in academia, the real world, whatever -- and there is no escape.
That's what really sickens me. There's no room for original ideas unless you found a startup, and then, what, you sell your company to IBM/Google/Microsoft/whoever in a year or two and it's the same damn song and dance.
A PhD isn't a requirement to be a cog -- it doesn't even seem to make you a big cog that drives a lot of other gears and functionality in the clock, going by those I know with one. It seems (from the inside) like a lot of extra effort and stress. So, the letter hit close to home.
This has been going on for quite a while.
http://www.astronomycast.com/2015/04/ep-372-the-millikan-oil...
Not really, most of these tasks require some expertise. For exemple, committee meetings could be about recruiting colleagues and assessing their work or selecting papers for a journal or a conference. Grant writing requires expertise too...
Teaching is probably the easiest one to solve. Some kinds of classes should be attributed to teachers, not researchers (those are very different kinds of expertize).