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.