But in spite of an excellent CV, with the caveat that I had no affiliations with top schools and was not part of any in-group--I did not know how important both would be for an academic career, I though my many well-cited publications and clear and long-term research plans would have been enough.
Over the years, I applied for at least 70 tenure-track positions for which I felt I had a good chance of making at least the shortlist of 20 viable candidates. I was called for just one preliminary phone interview.
I started applying for industrial positions in Machine Learning and, after receiving a few offers, took a job that paid 5 times my last postdoc salary (my last contract was 6 months, so it would have been 10 times). It has been a fulfilling, very well paid, and fun career so far.
I always recommend that not-too-promising postdocs consider a career in the private sector early on, especially in technology or related fields. They rarely listen, think or led to believe they are different. They aren't.
Even those are not enough. I had all of those (great undergrad and grad school pedigree, postdoc with a novel laureate, publications...) You need to have a final boss who will go to bat for you, unfortunately the Nobel laureate was 84 and more into playing slots at the Indian casino/fucking around in the lab than he was in advocating for my career.
This is one of the things I like about industry jobs. Your career at a company might grow or be derailed by one person, but it's just that particular company. If it's a big company, it's just that particular org. In academia a single person can derail your entire career. As you've pointed out, sometimes it's not even malice. They just aren't interested in doing what they need to support you.
At one point my skip-level was a VP at a software company who loved to push people into doing things by saying "Think about your career. If you do things right you will be set for life." Outside of his tiny universe at that company, nobody even knew he existed. I burned some bridges with that person and some of his sycophants, but I just moved on to a different company with zero ramifications.
It's liberating to be able to just say F-it and move on.
It is true that you can change companies and rapidly leave behind all the problems and conflicts and issues you had in your previous jobs.
In academia, first, it is very challenging to move to another institution after you start your tenure track position (few jobs available, students need to be taken care of, it is at least a 2-year move), second if you have "issues" with other people in the field, and especially when they are more powerful than you (better known, better network, better financing), you have a miserable professional life in front of you. I see many an academic living on the verge of psychological collapse.
Freedom has no price, for all the rest there is money in the bank account.
For any postdoc that thinks the university has leverage for this reason, if you are able to get a H1B, you can switch employers easily. You are not stuck at whichever company sponsored you.
* My understanding is that universities prefer J-1 visas in almost all cases [1][2], and such visas are not portable.
* H-1B is more flexible than J-1, but still not as flexible compared to a green card. In particular, the new employer has to fill out a new application, pay the fees, etc. Also, universities are exempt from the H-1B cap, but other employers may not be.
[1] https://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/ucb_departments/h-1...
[2] https://postdocs.stanford.edu/postdoc-admins/how-quick-links...
We also had an untenured research scientist who did all of the PI's work and grant writing. After two 110+ hour weeks getting three grants written for several million dollars they went home to enjoy the weekend and dropped dead of a heart attack at 42. I miss him.
When I think back to my thought process when I was applying for academic and research jobs after my PhD, there's one thing I remember that always keeps me from ever second guessing my decision to move to the private sector.
At least in my field, so many people in academia and research had big egos and were a-holes. Some of them were brilliant, many of them just thought they were. It was so easy to end up in a toxic mess. You know that interviewer who makes you feel small because they knew some random minutiae that you didn't know? There are plenty of those in academia and you'll be answerable to them.
I've worked for a bunch of big companies and there's less acceptance of a-holes. If nothing else, your colleagues will acknowledge they are a-holes and validate how you feel. Even if somebody is a brilliant 10X a-hole, a decent management layer will put walls around them to minimize their damage. And if you find yourself stuck working with or for an a-hole, you have more options to switch because there are more jobs.
Don't consult a self-perceived expert on a field on a project you're considering? Uninvited from their July 4th BBQ.
Standing up for a junior tenure-track faculty who a senior person doesn't like? Have fun getting work done while scheduled to teach the 800 person remedial chemistry class, disparagingly called 'chemistry for artists.'
Need some equipment but you forgot to wish me happy birthday? Sorry, unforeseen maintenance lol. Oh please.
I still have memories of wanting to tell some of my tenured professors that they needed to grow up and find bigger things to cry about. I was in my 20s, they were all 40+.
At least IME, the younger non-tenured professors were less likely to engage in this pettiness because they had, as you have pointed out, a lot more to lose.
As silly as that but Nietzsche had it right: the will to power is one of the primordial forces.
AFIAK, the leaders in almost every field are in academia, where they have the independence to do research, not earn profits, and where their research has the greatest impact because their employer doesn't hide it from the world as long as possible.
I noticed a major university announcing some new center to nurture businesses to monetize IP. I remember when universities tried to generate knowledge and value for society.
But try to be a tenure-track professor in biology at a mid academic institution. You are fed up, you want more money, money you think you deserve. Where do you go at, say, fifty years old?
For instance, for something very practical, market-ready, basically Engineering I'd say you're correct. For basic research, not at all.
This doesn't really square with the horror stories I see from the private sector.
The remaining 10% are more than enough to account for the horror stories
"Oh? At which price point?"
"At the $4000 price point! It's a travesty!"
If the price of milk shot up from $2/gal to $20/gal that's a shortage.
Erm, exactly?
If there were a real shortage, salaries would be going up. The fact that salaries aren't going up to counteract that "shortage" tells me that there really isn't one.
Calling a livable wage and fair working conditions a Lamborghini is not applicable.
It can take 5-10 years to find a tenure track job now because professors don't retire. I've seen 90+ year olds walking around departments, and 70 year olds are common. All the low hanging fruit is gone, so projects and problems take longer and longer. Together, it means that whatever semblance of academic integrity and honor is gone. There's too much pressure to produce something big that you'll hide data or even steal it. Even collaborations don't mean you'll see your name on a paper. My partner got their research scooped by former collaborators!! And your recourse for blatant plagiarism? Nothing! No institution will fight for you because your career doesn't matter to them. There's a huge pool of postdocs they can pick from if you give up. Most of the professors still pretend that they can talk things out and share data, or blame you for not anticipating the issues.
The pay is secondary for most people who made it through grad school. They generally _want_ to do research. But when the pay is less for a more toxic environment, it's a no brainer. And somehow the professors are confused why no one wants to stay...
That is survivorship bias. There are low-hanging fruit in newer fields, or fields with recent major shifts.
Where do you get these numbers from? This is not at all like that in Europe. A postdoc gets (say, in France) 30k per year, doing a calm, interesting job and paid travel to a couple of conferences per year, with almost total freedom to choose their daily schedule. This is not a high salary, but it is certainly livable and quite above the median of the country. A 150k salary is nearly out of reach for even quite senior developers, and nonsensical for "junior python developer roles".
When I complete the PhD, if I go to industry in the USA, my income will probably be similar to that of my friends who will have been in industry the entire time (and gotten steady wage increases throughout).
It's important to note also cost of living. 40k/yr might sound like a lot, but in Boston, rent is >1k/month even with roommates, we don't have dental care, our health insurance is imperfect, groceries are expensive, etc. etc. Meanwhile in Tucson Arizona or Bloomington Indiana the stipend is something like 22-28K/yr, as cost of living is lower.
Generally speaking it's reasonable to say that completing a PhD in computer science is not a financial investment, but rather, something I am doing because I want to do it. I am very unlikely to literally "profit" (compared to, if I had gone straight to industry instead).
I hope this information is useful/interesting!
The work/life balance part is a bit trickier to quantify. Anecdotally US postdocs work pretty hard, but my experience is that highly paid engineers at FAANG-style companies also work pretty hard. If you don't want work to be your life as a SWE $250k seems to be the easiest achievable comp while meeting those requirements.
CS is certainly an outlier in terms of salaries, but ANY person capable of landing a postdoc in a STEM field at a competitive school in the US is capable of figuring out a way to get a job as a software engineer in Big Tech (the grind of leet code is nothing compared to the grind of doing a PhD, full stop). This is why >60% of PhD grads in CS across top schools are ending up in industry, and I knew a TON of PhDs from physics, math, chemistry, etc. who left research immediately after graduating and are now SWE.
The problems are also way out of the ordinary. I’d like to draw a parallel with medicine. Most researchers are doctors who interact and treat patients. In contrast - I think a lot of engineering post docs or phds may not be working on stuff the industry cares about.
Why is it obvious? There might be some groupthink on HN (and bias toward our career paths), but plenty of people go into academia.
> pay and work conditions are horrible
It's not like bosses and businesses in the private sector are Nirvana. You can see plenty of stories about them on HN.
the worst part is that i think this experience has completely tanked my confidence.
now id take a jr python dev job in a second.
Work can be pretty good postdocing in some labs in Europe.
But the end of the road is still that after the postdoc you’re expected to either be a rockstar or a nobody. So anxiety is always there.
But imagine the displacement of those ivory-tower academic greybeards who will suddenly have to compete with actual professionals? They're still teaching HTML/CSS in my university, for example; cloud is largely pooh-poohed; AI and ML are barely on the curriculum, and sub-par at that; more interesting subjects, like e.g. computational neuroscience, or any software engineering that isn't Python, simply doesn't feature. They'll be out on their ear.
Plain HTML/CSS is still relevant today. Not everything needs to be an SPA. I also don't understand how one would write SPAs with React/Vue/whatever other framework without first having at least some understanding of HTML and CSS.
Agree with the cloud being poo-pooed.
Don't agree with barely any classes in ML. Grant money in ML has been hot, which means academic hiring in ML has been hot, and a good number of those hires are teaching classes. Basically every major CS department has a broad selection of ML courses or even ML concentrations and minors. Most smaller departments seem to have at least one or two courses to choose from.
I've never seen Python used to teach software engineering. Java is the classic language for that, even today. Although I suspect that we may have different definitions of software engineering.
In addition, most of my EE professors were from industry and would smoke their contemporaries. They knew their shit cold and then some.
1. https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...
2. https://research.google/people/106471/ (Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20220612100903if_/https://resear... )
Assuming just because you have a PHD means you need to use it is a sunk cost fallacy. Starting over can be a completely rational choice.
Perhaps the value of a PhD is not limited to its "market value". I hope that part of the intrinsic value of a degree is an ability to think critically, unlike the "senior software engineer" example I cited, for which the "market value" is probably quite high. Sometimes markets are not rational. Myself, I do not care what any job market suggests. To me, education has value, both for the individual and for society at large.
"Tech" companies are not well-known for fostering crtitical thinking ability. Most of the world is eating, and feeding families, without knowing how to program computers. It has been that way since the dawn of humankind.
https://computing.louisiana.edu/meet-blake-lemoine-computer-...
If the pay isn't good, the culture and work should be. In academia, that's almost never true. I couldn't support my family, nor ironically pay my families student loan payments as a post-doc, the decision was an easy one to make... But if I were really doing it for the love, the love isn't there.
You might think "oh here's an industry person who doesn't like academia", wrong. I loved research, writing papers, teaching people stuff, forming collaborations, etc. Just can't make it survivable financially or psychologically.