Self-awareness is good but less impressive when they're still charging universities obscene amounts to access material the journal obtained basically for free.
Early in my career, I considered (with an MS in Electrical Engineering, but with 4 years of professional programming experience) a switch into law. Big firms hire (or did in the past) people with tech degrees to do patent work and will pay a salary plus pay for law school.
When I joined the big firm, there were about 25 people in my role. I was the only with with an EE or CS degree/background, the only one without a PhD, and the only one with actual post-academic work experience. For me, it was a 10% pay cut before accounting for law school tuition, similar benefits, and an small increase in hours. For all of the PhDs, it was essentially a 100% raise, substantially less work, and superior benefits.
I've never heard this before. What job title would you search for?
If you're looking for a job like that with Big Law, you might look for "litigation advisor" or something similar.
For example: https://foleyhoag.com/careers/technology-specialists/ (note, this is the firm where I did that work)
There are a handful of academics who are truly built for working in academia and wouldn't be as successful in "the industry" but at least half could transition out of academia and clean-up with a normal office job.
If that's a good reason to keep pay low, why don't we apply this to the management and administrative class? Surely, we could find someone smart and capable who'd be happy to do an exec's or a director's job, without seven-figure pay as a consideration...
Think of all the money we could return to shareholders, if we just made the directors subsist on prayers and ramen...
We do, depending on domain. Directors in a lot of social programs make low pay for what they deal with. Luckily, many are mission oriented rather than being motivated primarily by money.
Consider that preparing you for jobs outside of university should be the goal of your education, not relegated to a two-day seminar.
And also consider how relatively fucked it is that such a seminar is actually quite necessary due to the fact that the vast majority of your faculty haven't spent more than a trivial amount of time in industry. (Things that don't count as non-trivial industry experience include: the gap year between undergrad and grad school, the one year industry Post-Doc, sporatic consulting, the "spinoff" that never got past a seed round in which the university endowment or SBIR was the lead "investor", or especially the "several internships at top companies" lol.)
If you want to do anything else just get a masters
This is vague to the point of meaninglessness. To wit, consider the following questions:
1. What is "Research"? (In PhD school the de facto answer is "whatever things get published in top conferences")
2. What does it mean to "learn how to do Research"? (I argue the most important skill is knowing which questions to ask, but that's not something that PhD students or even Professors every get to actually do -- your funding agency's friendly managers/directors will clearly articulate the set of questions you are permitted to ask during Proposer's Day workshops.)
All of that to say: learning how to do "Research" is the goal that students are told they're supposed to have. The actual goal of a PhD program is to generate income from overhead on grants. This has a nice side benefit of occasionally producing valuable licensing revenue streams. That anyone learns anything is a happy coincidence.
There's a regular story told in physics departments that if you leave you can't get back in. But in my experience, maybe people leave and don't want to go back.
At least in CS, becoming a Professor of Practice is both higher prestige and a much lower barrier to entry than becoming an Associate Professor with Tenure. The job security of the Professor of Practice is de jure weaker but de facto much stronger. (Tenure doesn't mean shit these days, especially in the USA.)
> But in my experience, maybe people leave and don't want to go back.
Bingo. And it becomes way more extreme by the year.
After a couple decades in the tech industry with a modest lifestyle, 4.3% on your entirely post-tax brokerage account comes damn close to paying a full professor's salary. Retirement at 45 ain't a bad gig.
Get bored? No problem. Move somewhere nice close to a good-but-not-top-10-R1 university.
Teaching can be fun. You can always ad junct if and only you get the bug. Most departments are extremely happy because the customers LOVE being taught by people who did the real thing.
Research is similar: if you find a student you really enjoy working with or an idea you really want to pursue, you can opt to write a grant or take an industry gig for a bit. Student's choice -- chill poverty or same work but with weekly standups and more meetings and 5x comp. Again, the customers LOVE being able to tell Congress they are funding real stuff.
And you don't have to sit in faculty meetings where a bunch of people pretend that their grant agencies and students aren't customers, or that their department chair and dean aren't their line manager and skip line manager, or that their PhD students aren't criminally underpaid direct reports.
Overall, it's nice to be able to clip coupons on bonds and have uni admin fawning over you. It beats the alternative of the tenure track, where you have to continue wage slaving at a university whose admin has been totally MBAified and can't really offer your direct reports much in the way of solidarity because there are 100 28 year olds who can also be PIs on military-industrial projects interspersed with the occasional NSF/NIH grant.
(He says as he writes his thesis and prepares to start his postdoc.)
NSF grants are hard to get, with a small award being for about $600K over 3 years. That translates to about $300K after the university takes its overhead. For me, that would about fund about two PhD students for 3 years for about $31K per year during the 9 month academic year. Many PhD students in computer science do internships during summer where they make a lot larger salaries, or they are funded by me for that period instead.
In my city, Rochester, according to this website, our stipends are the most generous in the USA based on the low cost of living here. https://csstipendrankings.org/
We would all like to pay students more, but either we then have fewer students or need the government to award larger grants. As someone who had a hard time getting into a PhD program due to how competitive it is, I would be opposed to depriving folks of educational opportunities.
Students typically take classes and do little research for their first 1-2 years, but they do receive a stipend during that time period.
And ofcourse the Titans of social media - zuckerberg, chamath, tiktok and 1000s of engineers, PMs will not pay for the harm their engineered products have caused because waters have been muddied enough and no true accounting of the harm can happen.
It is kind of like inventing a new synthetic highly addictive drug which is technically legal but very harmful and you can sell it to everyone.
You don't need Facebook or the Gram to be keenly aware that all your university buddies who went into tech are going on vacations to Maui and buying their second homes, while you're still grinding your life away for nothing in a university lab. In fact, all you need to do be aware of this is to show up to your friends' bi-weekly happy hour at the local.
No, it's not. Social media created a world wide bullying environment. Most of people all over the world are in trouble because they have to compete unrealistic image of you or your profession created by social media. Whatever you are or do, you are never good enough. Education, medical field and science are especially vulnerable in this regard.
Tech sector isn't really exception, but insane amount of money people get in some parts of the world for compensation makes it more tolerable.
Social media might make this disparity obvious and in your face, but it did not create it.
1) Have an entirely separate life outside of academia. Do not mix the two, maintain a strict separation, and keep all academic relationships strictly professional.
2) Don't think of your advisor as anything other than an employer. They're not a father figure or a mentor or anything like that. You're just cheap labor, and don't forget it.
3) Don't think of you university as a 'place of learning and research' - they've all been corporatized to the hilt, and are basically run on the same lines as any business entity, including the worst aspects of corporate HR.
4) If you do have mental health issues, absolutely never go to anyone like a university-affiliated therapist, etc. If you ever have a dispute with the university, they'll use any such interaction in an effort to discredit you.
5) Fraudulent manipulation of data is more common than not as is dishonest behavior by PIs, and if your data from your own research doesn't agree with their past work, they'll try to prevent it from getting published and otherwise sabotage your progress, so expect that.
6) Academic politics is among the nastiest that exists, and enemies of your PI will also happily sabotage your progress just to make your PI look bad. Even other grad students might try something like this, so trust noone (and see #1).
7) If you have any really brilliant ideas with commercial potential, don't say a word about it to anyone, don't write it down, because the university will claim that it owns all your IP and will demand a percentage of anything you do with it, so keep quiet until you've left the system.
You can learn a lot if you get into the right situation, however. Careful vetting of any prospective research group is important in that respect.
As you can imagine some people do great with it but I'm also aware of some catastrophes.
I like to think that our relationship, where we're free to vent about our work but also talk about and enjoy lots of other things, helps to keep us both mentally healthy.