I truly love working on the problem, investing time in research papers, and experimenting, but I have no desire to stay in academia. Plus, I have a well-paying full-time job (that I took during the pandemic to save my wife from having to shoulder our living expenses basically single-handedly while growing our child inside of her).

> Suffice it to say I'm taking steps make sure my next gig has more room.

I hear you. It's crazy how mentally abusive a lot of people's relationship with their PhD is. I'm convinced it's one of the reasons so many people with PhDs marry other PhDs. They're the only ones that "understand" the level of single-minded devotion you have to have to be an early career researcher.

Lack of pressure to change something is absolutely a reason in and of itself. How could the system be changed to avoid this?

Another change I'd like to see is shorter undergraduate programs. Most can stand to lose a few classes off the beginning that duplicate high school and a few off the end that duplicate grad school. That might have to be a political decision in response to the high cost of education. Shaving off a year could help you avoid the family issue entirely, especially if you worked for a year or two before returning to grad school.

Similarly, another proven model is that senior year of high school can also be used to reduce the duration of college. You can already get college credit, but it's a very fragmented and uneven system. State governments could fix that with policy, again to address the high cost of education.

That said, I don't really trust the funding agencies and department heads to do the right things that will actually improve the long-term health of the system. I think we'll end up with a shitty band-aid solution instead like giving postdocs mediocre raises. It could take a really long time for the system to truly crumble enough to force change.

We'll see though, I hope things take a turn for the better in the coming years because certainly I know many PIs that are frustrated for one reason or another. If you get enough profs on the same page it could have some actual power.

They could, but why?

It's not just neglect during the PhD. Even a non-neglectful academic is asking a lot of their partner. Stipends are low. Post-docs require chasing term-limited positions around the country, often with little to no savings, for up the half a decade. Building wealth is impossible, having a family is just barely possible, and the process takes you well into mid-life depriving your partner of a career and a real relationship.

I have seen more divorces during post-docs than during PhDs.

Everyone I know who made it through PhDs and post-docs without scars fell into one of two categories: unmarried or wealthy. I think academia's biggest open secret is that a HUGE number of academics -- especially in and around large metros or in nice climates -- are chasing a prestigious and comfortable job because their trust funds allow them to not care about the money and their upbringing makes it difficult for them to deal with having a manager.

This is because the career was originally set up for those who were independently wealthy, or at least rich enough to have a spouse who didn't work. All of this stuff happened within the last 150 years, and it was made worse in recent years following the massive increase of skilled people in the discipline.

A career in science also differs based on whether you're an academic or in industry. On whether you're out their seeking grants, or out making products to sell.

These are all decisions being made based on what people demonstrate that they will tolerate. No different than the Japanese Karoshi-culture. If your Ph.D. or Post-Doc supervisor won't allow you to have a life outside of science, then dump them. Leave them up the creek without a paddle. They are not your only option.

At its absolute worse, the hours involved in an academic Ph.D./Post-Doc aren't significantly worse than a chronic precariat worker. I had two jobs during a particular semester when finishing up my A.S., and averaged 3.5 hours of sleep per night (outside of the weekends). I've read about a guy who spent years walking and taking transit for 8 hours each day from his house to his 8-hour a day job. 16 hours per day just dedicated to work. Ultimately his job and/or co-workers pitched in to buy him a car.

The harsh hours in scientific academia is ultimately a choice. And the choice is not between science and a life. The choice is between science with this particular supervisor and a life.

A secondary mistake for Ph.D.s in particular is requiring an original contribution to science instead of a demonstration of appropriate levels of mastery, because this requirement really screws over students who realize that their thesis is wrong, or intractable, too late. And even worse incentivizes cheating above and beyond the already existing incentives.

> Would there be less incentive to do bullshit studies and cave to political pressures and bribes if the people doing the studies didn't need the job to survive?

People who genuinely need the job to survive, quit, and get a job that allows them to survive, sometimes alternating this with academia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Streleski ). Or like the graduate students and Post-docs at the University of California, they band together and strike.

Social pressures and sunken-cost fallacies affect enough people of all socioeconomic classes. Especially when the added grief is spun as a status symbol.

Focusing specifically on the the word "selfish"--isn't academia about dedicating yourself to scientific discovery? That discovery may require a sacrifice from your spouse, but should benefit humanity at large.

That may or may not be a sacrifice you're family is willing to make, and it's a shame that you're required to choose. But it's not selfish!

Regardless of personal intentions, it's also a fact that we have a massive oversupply of people trying to make it in academic science. Functionally the only way it is selfless then is if you are meaningfully better at science than replacement level (and again potential replacements run deep these days).

This makes most people either knowingly selfish (if they are sacrificing others' wellbeing for their research anyway) or very arrogant about their intelligence level. Or naive about the system, but I don't think you'll meet many postdocs that don't know these facts.

The people that stick around and grind away at research work even once any chance at a tenure track position has passed are a lot more defensible as selfless of course, but that's not really the most common situation to find in a lab. The majority are gunning for a career in academic science, even down to the poorly treated pre-PhD RA labor.

Now obviously if some rich kid or someone with no personal attachments wants to fuck around in academia they should totally go for it. I just don't think selfless is the right word for that, and it's certainly not the right word for your typical academic ladder climber.

It's okay even if different researchers are working on similar problems, because replicability is important.

A common control in sociological studies of educational systems is to compare people who are just above a particular cutoff (say a 2.00 GPA), and just below that cutoff (say a 1.99 GPA). These people are often effectively equivalent except for one good or bad day, or one harsh or forgiving instructor.

If an academic department makes 15 positions available for graduate students, it will have 15 graduate students. Regardless. Is the 16th applicant who just didn't make the cut worse than the 15th who did? Probably not. And they might have been better, or at least have been a better fit.

I'm better at science than I am at the replacement job. Ergo the maximum I can contribute to the world is through science.

Choosing to go into research means your career choice is entirely determined by what you are most interested in, what you are passionate about, what you want to spend your day thinking about. I feel like the benefit to society is often secondary in that choice. It's nice that often science benefits humanity as a whole, but often it also doesn't and is just obscure niche research.

And indeed, the relational sacrifices that come with a (high ambition) career in science are IMO not worth it. I would not recommend anymore to pursue some abstract high brow principle like "the pursuit of knowledge" over deep, loving, healthy, sustainable relationships with people to a young ambitious person. People are more real than principles.

Ideally you can combine it of course. But the academic job market is not easy and rarely allows this without significant friction.

I am 99% sure I will leave academia after my PhD.

However, I would venture that being successful in any career --- be it research, business, politics, arts --- requires a certain amount of focus and neglect of your family and friends.

But later, if you succeed, you can make it up to them and make it worth it for them as well.

A warning for the younger readers in our midst: this is NOT how most relationships work. You normally don't get to mismanage a relationship and then "make up for it" later. When you do, there are almost always lasting scars.

That said: this might be true for business and politics. But academics? LOL. Becoming a professor, even at a top university, is a pretty pathetic definition of "success". A professor is a mid-level manager position that pays about the same as an entry-level position at a top tech or finance firm. Most people involved in allocating budget / selecting projects understand that the work being managed is mostly not valuable; that's why they don't mind telling you that you need to pay your subordinates about what they'd make at McDonald's.

It's a first line management job where pay is not enough to "make up" for the lost years and the work almost always literally doesn't matter.

> But later, if you succeed, you can make it up to them and make it worth it for them as well.

This might be true in business and politics, and to some extent in arts, but it's not true in academia. And to the extent that it is true, it's enabled by pushing shit down the hill.

Which is why I'm a lapsed academic. I turned down my TT offers because I realized that I couldn't, in good conscience, build a career out of abusing junior labor. And universities put hard constraints on how you pay and manage PhD students, so avoiding at least financial abuse is mostly impossible.

I am at now a point as a researcher where I am financially secure, work on interesting problems, and have time for my wife and children. My colleagues, junior as well as senior, seem to be in similar situations.

To be clear, in my case "focus and neglect" meant working weekends and evenings and lots of travel for some years before we had children. I see successful people in other careers doing the same.

My current situation does not involve anything remotely like "pushing shit" or "abusing junior labor". I have no "hard constraints" and I see no "financial abuse" at my university.

I couldn't accept the job and look myself in the mirror while knowing that not only do my direct reports struggle to get by, can't save for retirement, but that I'm one of the only employees in the country who doesn't even have to care enough to pay FICA taxes.

With finance or ad-tech like you are recommending the whole output of the job is often zero or negative sum. That can happen in academia as well but it seems less likely.

If you moved money from a sinkhole garbage establishment project to some other promising scientific endeavors, that would almost certainly be a net positive for the world even if the total spend is the same and you "just pushed money around". A similar principle applies when considering many industry investment decisions.

Regardless, "finance" is broad as hell and there are a huge number of potentially well-paying careers that are not finance nor ad-tech. Not to mention that a FIRE research scientist who is less beholden to the current system might very well contribute more scientific progress over their lifetime than the latest career academic.

The reward for that investment is the same as the reward for the next guy who gets it down to 22.45ms, despite the first guy saving 0.1ms on the state of the art and the second guy only saving 0.05ms. Surely 0.05ms is worth a lot less than 0.1ms to society, and it shows this whole thing is almost totally detached from any value to society.

It's just lowest number wins and the industry will consume any number of resources (running CPUs in spinlock loops instead of more efficient ones, having human labor climb microwave towers at some risk of life) up to the reward amount to claim it, regardless of any marginal value to society of the improvement.

That said, I find it hard to believe you don't have constraints on what you can pay labor? Maybe it is field dependent, but the NIH sets some real low ball salary caps on how much postdocs (and other titles) can be paid with their grant money. So if you rely on this sort of government funding it is difficult to pay postdocs a fair wage for their experience and stage of life -- forget about it if you live in a particularly high CoL area, which NIH does not adequately account for.

So yeah, postdocs are taken advantage of in a lot of fields in a way that is (to some extent) beyond the control of the advisor. In a cheaper area it's not necessarily dire straights, but it is often a huge underpayment nonetheless. And if you talk to postdocs a lot of them are doing it because they're still chasing tenure track dreams that are not super likely.

At what point is it wrong to facilitate minor league baseball? I don't think there's an objective answer here, and obviously I don't blame people for trying to do their best as a PI. But I also don't think the OC's reaction to the situation is outside the realm of reasonable for an informed person.

As an aside, you're (unsurprisingly) kinda fucked if you wanted software to be part of your NIH-funded project, because they do not acknowledge the cost of hiring anyone with a remotely valuable skill set.

Who cares if they make more or less than a techbro? If they're happy with their job and they earn enough to pay for things they want (house, vacations, whatever), then they should chase the rat-race of the "ladder of success" because...?

We aren't talking about nurses or school teachers. We are talking about professors at large research universities.

Your sibling comment speaks of working "nights and weekends" with frequent travel. That puts an enormous amount of work and stress on their partner, and faculty usually don't make enough money to offset those contributions.

Deciding not to optimize for wealth is perfectly fine. Doing to do so while working nights and weekends with frequent travel isn't. Optimizing for "prestige" is infinitely worse than optimizing for "wealth", because at least the latter can be shared and has utility beyond pure ego.

Deciding to sacrifice your nights, weekends, and financial life to work on science and research is okay. But it's also enormously selfish. Other people who spend time doing "what they love" -- ski bums, for example -- at least recognize their selfishness as such.

Being selfish can be okay. But it's probably not great to be selfish and try to build a life-long partnership. Especially if you don't realize you are being selfish.

I won't tell anyone not to ski bum or not to do a PhD. But I will gut check people when they get confused about the difference between selfish and selfless dedication to a craft. An academic career -- the type where you spend nights and weekends without at least contributing a modicum of financial comfort to those around you -- is selfish.

At the end of the day, most grant-funded projects are born useless. There isn't as much of a difference between ski bumming and PhDing as professors like to pretend.

If you think the majority of people in your current field are not optimizing for prestige (and you're past the mid-point of a PhD), I would love to know what field that is - seriously.

Just incase anybody is unaware - this is really not how interpersonal relationships work. Especially romantic interests. You may one day find yourself with a lot of money/power but nobody who truly loves you (or enjoys your company) for who you are - or with not much to show for your years of tunnel visioned neuroticism, symptoms of complete burnout, & also nobody who loves you.

I’m not trying to say there’s something wrong with dedicating a large chunk of your life to a pursuit like they’ve mentioned - I’m just saying don’t be surprised when people you’ve neglected have moved on to greener pastures in that time.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Speaking of innovation on hn, this is definitely innovative levels of pedantry.

The answer is simple and obvious: be alone. It wont work for everyone but it works for me. Valuing your time means having to say no to intrusions and impositions.

Modern academic science is really its own special breed, and unfortunately a lot of that grinding these days goes to fighting the crazy career ladder, not so much directly to obsessive, curious science.

Hamming definitely made lots of sacrifices to become famous. Although if you noticed his achievements, they were actually all done early in his career, rather than late.

It depends; the neglect during studies is a temporary thing! All thos other things you mention are permanent things!

There's very little similarity between "temporarily neglecting family to provide better opportunities to my kids"[1] and "permanently neglecting family to get a high".

[1] Make no mistake, you can introduce your kids to better opportunities in a your social circle of Phds (or MBAs, etc) than your social circle of whoever your current colleagues are.