I'd like to note agreement and support of this perspective. Personal anecdote to follow.

At a Top 60 World Ranked Research University, I have seen first-hand the students / Post-Docs dealing with a critical lack of jobs or opportunities within academic research. Not to belabor my overall vitriol toward the Boomer generation regarding their behaviors in the market (e.g. "Get all I can, screw those behind me"), but those who have 'made it' and are decision makers now have changed the dynamics to reflect more of a cut-throat, race-to-the-bottom labor pool perspective. That doesn't even factor in the 'IP creep' of interests outside of science trying to get a piece of the action these days.

The most telling example? A person working in a good lab (good publication record, pretty well funded) was a PhD Post Doc from the institution where they were working in the lab. Due to cutbacks, the Chair told the PI that costs needed to be cut, which meant 1 employee had to go elsewhere. Rather than suggest the last-hired employee be the one, the Chair pointed to the PhD Post Doc and said: "Just fire her and get an H1-B."

I trust my sources and do know the context of the conversation / lab's outlook. It was pretty stunning to me though. Go to great university, get PhD, put in effort and be on papers as a Post Doc, then kicked to the curb for an H1-B on a purely fiscal basis. That's some hot garbage right there. I'm glad to note that the Post Doc in this story has left bench science and is now a full time professor elsewhere, where she is appreciated much more. And, without hesitation, she steers talented science minds away from research as a career.

I call bullshit. Given how little a department actually spends on employees that report to PIs, it would be interesting to know how this happened! Further, H1B is not a zero-cost or low cost proposition for universities and departments, especially for short term appointments! He said she said can provoke discussions, but should also be viewed with skepticism! It might work for large companies because the upfront cost ($10k attorney, filing, etc.) amortizes over the several years the h1b is likely to be employed.

Well you can call bullshit but I have the math and you can't argue with it. The Post Doc was 1 year away from being promoted to Instructor, which meant they were at the upper bound of the Post Doc salary. Also, if the Post Doc was promoted to Instructor, they would become Faculty and would be unable to be shit-canned during a Reduction In Force (RIF) scenario. The Chair made all of this clear. So, if you're going to call me a liar, you can go pound sand because that's not how I roll.

Thanks to a little tool I found here on Hacker News, I was able to look up the number of H1-B Visa applications for this Top 60 Research University, and in one year alone, they applied for 70+ Post Doc H1-B Visas. Obviously they know how to pull it off.

Besides, everybody in science knows that students / Post Docs are expected to be like slave labor, and as many have pointed out, the conditions of the H1-B are extremely beneficial to the employer in the context of pressure to perform and retention. Skepticism is fine, but it's not bullshit. Your rebuttal is ineffectual and belongs in the circular file.

I am not accusing you of lying. These are hardly facts to lie about and involve a lot of supposition. For instance, the chair may have made an offhand remark, but the faculty (especially if tenured) may or may not be beholden to the chair. No promotion anywhere is obligatory, so the postdoc could have been denied Instructorship for a hundred other reasons, etc. etc. Further if the postdoc was denied instructorship and another H1B was hired in their place, then it is just tantamount to eliminating the instructor position. It goes on and on.

For context, I'm assuming this is said tool

http://visadoor.com/h1bvisa-database

For example Cornell appears to be quite familiar with the process

http://visadoor.com/companies/cornell-university

>but I have the math and you can't argue with it.

Where is "the math"?

You just reiterated your previous post with more vitriol.

Debating the validity someone's anecdote (when it is only incidentally relevant anyway) is not something to get hung up on.

He probably misspoke and meant J-1, but the import is the same.

That sounds surprising as a post-doc will be paid significantly less than a staff member (which an H1-B implies.)

It seems like at least some universities use H1-B for some postdocs, eg [1]

I think it's worth adding that for higher ed, H1-B is uncapped.

[1] http://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/ucb_departments/h-1b...

No, you don't understand.

Science is its own reward. You're pushing forward the frontier of human knowledge! You should share everything you learn for free with the world, and just be happy that you left the world a better place than you found it.

Money is such a lesser reward anyway compared to the adulation scientists get. After all, history will remember the guy who discovered the capacitive touchscreen, not the one that made billions putting it into a phone.

That's exactly why academia sucks so much - since for the best scientists science is its own reward, people figured out they can skimp on monetary rewards.

Ironically, this sabotages science very much. Research works best when you can focus on your work and are free from dealing with bullshit like worrying whether you'll have enough money for your rent or groceries of health bills.

I understand how the forces of the market lead to this, but it still rubs me wrong - jobs seem to be rewarded inversely to their social value. ER personell and doctors saving people work three shifts and live on minimum wage. Soldiers risking their lives can barely get by (especially after they actually took the risk and didn't die). All that while celebrities earn millions for being nothing more than celebrities.

And don't get me wrong - I don't mind that a talking head earns in a week more than most in a year. I only wish the society could reward properly the people who are working their butts off to make a positive difference.

Yeah the incentives are totally screwed with regard to long-term incentives. Hence, PhD biochemists, material scientists, and physicists finding greater renumeration in Uber-driving than their academic field.

A few years ago I had a colleague leave academia to become a waiter at a not-even-trendy restaurant... that's a pretty exceptional example, but it illustrates the same concept you are getting at.

More presently, a different friend completed his PhD in physics, couldn't find a job, and now is working in software.

Research is its own reward to a substantial extent, but as well as (relatively) reducing salaries/job security/etc, there's also a lot more 'publish or perish' pressure, which IMO seriously screws with the pleasure of doing research. Good researchers don't like wasting time publishing tiny incremental improvements on their previous work, but they have to to stay in the game.

I can understand that in a competitive market for jobs, monetary rewards will go down, but it's a shame that the joy of the work is being broken down as well.

Apple and touchscreens is a bit of an outlier here. History remembers the following guys, but few know who made billions putting it into stuff:

1. Jack Kirby and IC

2. Bardeen, Shockley,and Brattain and semiconductors

3. Akasaki, Amano, and Nakamura and blue leds

4. Boyle and Smith for CCD arrays

5. Townes, Pokhorov, and Basov for lasers

6. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins for structure of DNA

It's besides the point that some of them weren't necessarily in academia.

You can find their names, their speeches, their books and papers in any library or in many places online. Whilst, who remembers CEOs of Intel (notable exceptions apart), or of the 10s of other important semiconductor IC companies, or of companies that made commercial 'laser' disc and cd drives, or biotech companies, etc.?

History remembers everyone. But the layperson has never heard of most of these folks. The choice between such low-level fame vs. billions in fortune (along with its own low-level fame) is, well, not a very evenly-matched one.

*Jack Kilby

Sorry, but until I did further searching, you had me believing that a comic book artist was also responsible for the development of the integrated circuit!

You forgot Franklin on point 6. She deserves more credit than Wilkins, anyway.

> who remembers CEOs of Intel

You're right. We should pity those poor CEOs of Intel who have nearly no recognition except for daily news articles and a single wikipedia page, leaving their wretched souls with merely their 8 figure annual salaries to comfort themselves.

Surely we can do something to get them what they really deserve? Won't someone please think of the Intel CEOs?

The world would be a better place if we all had this thought process, but I could never have this perspective. Even when I first read your comment, my gut reaction was disgust. It took me a moment to reflect and even then I know I couldn't condition myself to think like this. I crave external approval and as much as scientists might think of themselves, the world at large see's you as a tool used by politicians and entrepreneurs.

Thanks for being able to have a healthy perspective and I hope you can convince more people to do the same.

I also am having hard time getting this perspective, but not for the love of money. On the contrary, being employed usually cuts down my effectiveness compared to doing the same task out of my own volition. In other words, I hate work, but I'll gladly do the same thing for free - if someone took care of bullshit concerns like having a warm meal and a decent place to sleep for myself and my younger siblings who are still in education. I believe lots of science-minded folks think the same - they'd love to do reasearch, but maybe they want to start a family, or maybe they have parents to support, or maybe they don't feel like being someone's slave labor.

I'm pretty sure his post was dripping with sarcasm.

I'd agree - I'd bet more people know the name Steve Jobs than Bill Buxton.

Er, he has posted elsewhere about advising his brother to take the money and go to Wall Street instead of doing science.

Personlly, I was disgusted as well (and I'm a scientist).

>as much as scientists might think of themselves, the world at large see's you as a tool used by politicians and entrepreneurs.

Just who the hell do you think we are?

The monetary rewards need to increase, but here's another perspective regarding your comment on the world seeing scientists as tools.

Scientists discovered the elements, the atom, DNA, semiconductors, etc-- beyond money or fame, these were tangible huge advancements for mankind. To follow in those footsteps and stand on the shoulders of those giants is rewarding.

Yep. This is the same bullshit that some companies with open-source products try to shove down your throat.

Money? No, we have an even better reward - you'll have a great entry in your portfolio!

You don't do science for the money[0] nor for the adulation. You do it because solving real problems that nobody else has is exciting. There is some of that in industry too (I think?), but I imagine it's not the same environment.

[0] My social worker wife always reminds me that we are compensated well enough. Physics, at least, seems to pay better than e.g. biology (physics postdocs usually pay 50-60k nowadays while bio postdocs can be less than 40k).

The penchant for solving problems that nobody else has but are potentially massively socially useful is actually the entire reason science jobs are compensated so poorly.

You talk to many scientists (myself included) and they'll tell you they'd do the job for free because of how interesting it can be, provided that they were comfortable otherwise. This is well known by the suits, and so, wages trend in the direction of zero.

The problem appears when people aren't paid enough to fit their definition of comfortable. People in science are highly educated by default, and their definition of comfortable takes that into account. This is why people leave science and don't look back. They can be comfortable doing something else, and it only gets more appealing over time. In your 20s, slumming it is to be expected, but beyond that it starts to get awkward.

A postdocship worth 50-60k only happens after 5 years of school (making 18k-25k) working 12 hour days. Realistically for the social utility of science and the sheer effort and difficulty, science should pay 2-3x as much as it does-- but frankly, our society doesn't value science in the way that it did during the Cold War.

Grad school stipends have gone up, not down (was 34kish at MIT last year, although Cambridge is expensive). Public schools usually have smaller stipends. 12 hour days is a bit of an exaggeration too (although it happens sometimes). I get that other fields with similar experience pay more, but we're not exactly living on ramen...

speak for yourself (or for other top-10 schools) - i worshiped my rice cooker for filling my belly day in day out for 50c a pop. i got about $10k per year and even in the mid-90s that was !#@!@# all.

I couldn't tell you how invented the capacitive touch screen (probably several) and I'm an EE, but Steve Jobs made billions putting it in a phone.

I think that was rayiner's point.

Academics don't want to play entrepreneur. We don't want all the money. We want enough to do what we like doing.

I think I'd rather take the billions than the place in history.

He was being sarcastic. Nobody (including me) knows who invented the capacitive touchscreen. Everyone knows who Steve Jobs is.

I don't think it's necessarily the case that academic science is a shitty value proposition; it could work well if funding were increased (obviously) and the university science model was done away with in favor of something resembling the institute model:

1. Everyone should be able to call themselves a PI and get space if they can bring in grants, and everyone should be able to apply for all grants. You shouldn't be locked out of getting funding just because your employer hasn't given you an arbitrary title.

2. The faculty / student model should be done away with after the masters degree. PIs should be spending 100% of their time doing research (or raising money) and stop wasting time on tenure track nonsense. If you want to employ someone to do science under you as a grad student or post doc is now, then they should be paid a salary at least as large as what a technician would make in industry. There should also be no institute or government ceiling on salary, as people should be able to negotiate for whatever they are worth.

3. Salaries should be increased at the expense of overhead, which could be massively reduced outside of a university.

4. Investigators should own their IP. Institutes should have TLOs in place to help investigators monetize the IP for a percentage of ownership if they want.

The main issue with this model would be funding start up packages, which is a non-trivial problem which I haven't figured out a solution for yet. Perhaps these could be partially crowd funded? I would be interested in getting peoples' input.

Fully in agreement. I think the answer to the PhD/postdoc glut should be more institutes. We still need the universities for teaching, and they are doing an outstanding job at that. I think of all the university systems in the world, American is perhaps the best. But unfortunately, institutes are more prevalent as a research model in Western Europe. More British and French researchers in my field are affiliated with institutes than American. Institute affiliation (INRIA,CNRS, private-endowed institutes in UK, Max Planck Institutes, etc.) is the norm in Europe, while it is an outlier in the US.

How are appointments handled in the institutes in Europe? Are investigators typically also affiliated with universities to get students, or is everyone working there a salaried employee of the institute?

If the research is publicly funded then the IP should be public in my opinion.

This was pretty much the reason I didn't go to grad school, despite having a full ride. Seemed like a one-way ticket to misery and poverty, and I was kinda over that after working my way through college (having as many as 3 jobs at a time plus classes full-time).