You’re describing academics who have already made it, people who got tenure. There are plenty of really minted PhDs who would be quite happy to move to the arse of nowhere for a postdoc with no teaching duties. The competition for academic posts is intense in every field I’m aware of and the outside options are not great except in fields where a Bachelor’s is an excellent choice already. You could afford at least five post docs used to living in genteel poverty for the cost of one established academic.

Recruiting a postdoc at a new institute without a track record of advancing people is a very tough sell. That would be an extremely risky career move.

The best bet for a new research institute is to have a large endowment and recruit two or three large names in a field. People who already have a good reputation. The large endowment is necessary to prove that you will ongoing resources to keep the research funded into the future.

> Recruiting a postdoc at a new institute without a track record of advancing people is a very tough sell. That would be an extremely risky career move.

Doing a postdoc is itself a large bet that usually fails to pay off, retrospectively making both the PhD and the postdoc look like extremely poor choices by any monetary calculus. The supply of people who want to stay in Science/Research/Academia is a lot greater than the demand outside perhaps ML/AI. Even fields with great outside options for PhDs, like Economics, Computer Science or Engineering have enormous competition for academic jobs, or para-academic ones, like adjuncting.

Off topic, but I always do a bit of a double-take at how Americans use "Adjunct Professor." In Canada, that would be called "Contract Academic" or similar. I'll bet it is different again in Europe, so for clarity, that is basically a low paid teaching position.

In Canada, an Adjunct Professor is unpaid, but actually somewhat prestigious. It is a recognition of your abilities in a field and might be given to someone in industry who collaborates with a researcher at the university (for example).

"In Canada, an Adjunct Professor is unpaid, but actually somewhat prestigious. It is a recognition of your abilities in a field and might be given to someone in industry who collaborates with a researcher at the university (for example)."

That was originally how it was used in the U.S. too. "Someone who needs a non-permanent affiliation with the University to teach some classes" - usually someone from industry or the community, etc. whose expertise was valuable to the educational mission.

The modern version is...sort of depressing.

> Off topic, but I always do a bit of a double-take at how Americans use "Adjunct Professor."

I think in the US, almost anyone with a job at a college is a 'professor'. You see 'professors' in their late 20s or early 30s.

Sorry to bring the bad news, but the author the first comment is 100% right. Moreover, structure in academia is different than in Startups. In startups, people don't care about "names" and "prestige". In academia, it is different. In order to get your next job in academia, you need (1) recommendation letters (2) citations. Advisors usually have a larger network and experience to be able to publish papers and help you climb the ladder through their networks/recommendations.

In Industry, you can come from no-name university, and you can still make it to FAANG (or top tier companies). In academia, that's impossible. To start, it is impossible to make it to good PhD program without publishing papers in top-tier conference, MSc student in no-name universities can't afford finding advisor to easily do that. Good PhD programs will help you to join a good Lab, and usually it is through network + recommendations.

In Startup world, you can sit in your dorm room, without anyone believing in you and you can make it.

P.S. I am a research engineer, I worked in both places and that was my observations. There is no shortcuts, everything is hierarchical in academia.

Well, I think that's a bit pessimistic.

I think every Msc student at a "no-name" german university has the chance to publish a paper at a top-tier conference. Student research assistant jobs are plenty and the Msc Thesis can be real-science. Every Msc. CS program here I know has a research-option so that instead of lecture you can do research. It's just hard to publish in those top-tier conferences and most research is more applied (and therefore more niche!) so its not easy to find an advisor for this. But in my experience even if the professor is working in a more applied setting you can push for a more basic-research, research is research. But you can do a phd here without publishing a paper first, so I don't think most Msc Students see it as a priority.

As someone who went through German academia at a very high level, with a top PhD, early and lasting grant success, top-tier publications and a multidisciplinary network, but who still could not land a Professorship in Germany but had to leave the country for it, I can tell you, it is not too pessimistic what ___luigi writes.

Hierarchy is everything in academia, especially in Germany. The only way to tenure is to have someone up there already who is willing to pull many strings for you.

>> .. a "no-name" german university

We come from different places. German universities are good in average. + MSc student have the chance to work as "working students" (20hr/week) at any company in Germany. https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-un...

>> .. It's just hard to publish in those top-tier conferences

Hard is relative. You should also check the costs of publishing a paper or attending a conference for students from global south https://twitter.com/hadyelsahar/status/1374699909451030542

>> But you can do a phd here without publishing a paper first

I agree with that.

If academia is 100% about status hierarchies this definitely wouldn’t work. It probably won’t work anyway but if there’s anything real in the function used to judge academic worth of work then there’s potential for it to work. There are multiple ways to improve that likelihood, more money most obviously of all. But new successful research institutes are founded so it’s clearly possible. Very unlikely unless there’s a very big budget, excellent taste in selection of applicants or both, but hardly impossible.

> .. more money most obviously of all.

I would challenge this point. There are few research labs in Singapore and middle east (UAE, Saudi Arabia) where money is not a problem. I have seen many researchers fly there to build research groups, but many of them leave after some time. You can see papers coming from these groups in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, KDD, etc) every years, but these papers come from individuals, not groups. Money is one ingredient, you need fresh blood and students to work on new ideas. You need an ecosystem for research and industry to adopt and develop some of these ideas (e.g. Standford/Google, UCLA/DeepMind, UoT/Uber, MIT/Boston startups, etc)

> There are plenty of really minted PhDs who would be quite happy [...] for a postdoc with no teaching duties.

As one of those people, I'm happy to move to the middle of nowhere, IF it's for a place with a stellar reputation that's going to help me do good science and (unfortunately) has some name-brand recognition.

In the US, it is hard to recruit postdocs unless you are at a top 10 school (I tried several times). Potential postdocs are largely incentivized by: (1) name recognition of their mentor since their letter and networking will get them their next job and (2) the likelihood of getting top-tier publications. Also, they get a decent salary and health insurance in engineering fields.

A brand new research institute does none of these things for them. I don't see why a fresh PhD would choose this over either FAANG or a university.

I don't think it's fickle to want to make a decent living from your hard-earned and valuable skills.

Indeed, with a point of view like:

> as I am currently acquiring some real estate that I want to put to good use in Germany

> space to work rent-free

> LLC-like structure

It sounds like the poster's head is not in the game at all. Like what instead of buying a literally useless building, you just pay people?

Hi, not to go into too much detail on a public forum. In part of a larger deal for real estate that I do have commercial use for, some other buildings will be included that I could either rent out or use for a charitable purpose. It's all or nothing for the deal. I actually contemplated renting them out and using the proceeds to donate to another institution. If this can instead be used to provide young PhD students with a place to live rent-free there is no taxation inbetween, which would be subtracted from what they might receive via another institution. Honestly, I mostly want to do some good with this in a way that has limited downside, and hope for the general concentration of creative career-starters with some communal infrastructure to result in a great place to live for everybody involved.

From your opening question and follow up, I am not clear on whether you really hope to create an institute, a limited duration retreat, a venue to host such things, or even a housing village and/or coworking space. But, from my US perspective, I might not appreciate the local issues you face.

An academic institute, as I take it, is a sustainable organization that necessarily needs to think about funding and recruitment. It is not just a building or a community, but a host organization to support ongoing fund-seeking activities as well as providing the environment for academic interaction. In the US, these are often soft-money and so the senior researchers are writing proposals and bringing in funding to support themselves and the staff working under them. Overhead taken from such grants and contracts supports the host organization and can circle back to cover gaps in funding or new-business development efforts by the researchers. Other matching funds might be used to help bootstrap an institute (or a strategic expansion), but I think that self-sustainability is the typical operating mode.

Recruitment needs to consider the opportunity costs that your candidates are facing to join you. The "cheap labor" of grad students and postdocs are not available to anybody who wants to pay the same rate as a university. The candidate is expecting to benefit from the prestige, experience, and social network when they take such a position. They need to see a path where this period of sacrifice helps secure their future career. Regular research staff, already in their career, would expect fair compensation. A place with no reputation is higher risk, and probably needs higher compensation to attract the same talent. Also, I think academics are usually a bit risk-averse or otherwise have a different cost-benefit model compared to those who would rush into industry, startups, or entrepreneurial adventures.

I joined an institute in the US which was formed slightly before I was born, and to date I've experienced over 40 percent of its life and mine on the research staff. As I was told, it started as a small set of researchers who identified a problem area and potential funding source. They shopped around for a university willing to be their parent organization, to provide the administrative, HR, and legal support needed to take the money and pursue the research agenda. By the time I joined, almost 25 years later, the division that inherited the agenda of that first group was perhaps only one fifth or less of the total institute in terms staff or funding levels.

No, but there's often a trade-off between making a decent living as a cog in a machine, or living on ramen and working on what you want to work on. I've chosen both at various phases of life.

Was just talking about this with a post-doc in the lab I've joined. He was saying there's poor and then there's poor. Without downplaying the fact that post-docs are underpaid, there are many benefits. You get to work on something you're interested in; in many labs you have almost complete schedule freedom; you typically have good medical benefits, etc. So there's a lot of freedom. As in industry, a lot of the experience depends on whom you're working for, but moreso due to the recommendation requirements and power differential. If it's a bio-lab that expects butts in seats pipetting 9-6, that's outside of my experience.

Of course! I only meant that (in my experience) academics tend to be headstrong and idiosyncratic, they don't always respond to incentives the way you might expect.

I feel seen.

It often makes sense to delay gratification. Like working with someone who is very well known in the field for little pay, knowing that their backing will give you many more opportunities in the future than a job that pays more now. Same is true of many startups. You make less than you would working for a FAANG company, but the experience and social connections can be worth far more in the future. It's definitely a personal decision

Valuable skills will enable a decent living for sure.

why not cooperate with local research-institutions and try to get some part-time agreements with the tenured academics? It's Germany, so the the chances are good since the professors are always chasing grants. A permanent source of funding for some phd-students is attractive.

I will note I ended up at an institution (admittedly an academic one) that for my field is usually met with "Where?" because the funding allowed for some very nice quality of life considerations and more academic freedom/less pressure to support yourself with grants.

It's not impossible, but you do have to figure out ways to offset the risk and prestige hit.