I got a PhD in particle physics 6 years ago. I did my first postdoc and enjoyed it - I got to travel, and work on relatively interesting things occasionally. Every year since then it's got worse, to the point where I've given up on getting a permanent job and am actively looking elsewhere. If I was offered an tenured academic post tomorrow, I would decline.

The other thing that is generally left out of this discussion is that academic excellence does not matter for a permanent job. There's no politics as vicious as academic politics (since so little is at stake), and who your supervisor is for your PhD matters more than how clever you are. If your achievements are first-rate, no-one up the chain will really understand them, and you'll be derided. If what you do is unoriginal, but suits the political landscape fame and riches (60 hour weeks and a starting salary of $75k) may become yours after you've moved city, country or continent a few times.

That is scale-independent. If you have tenure, funding committees become the new tenure or interview committees. Collaboration boards and conference boards (which confer status and prestige and therefore opportunity) work who likes whom - not on competency.

All the best people (technically and personally) I met during my PhD have left the field and I'm hoping to join them soon...I'm just slightly ashamed of myself for staying in the field this long.

+1d specifically for "There's no politics as vicious as academic politics (since so little is at stake), and who your supervisor is for your PhD matters more than how clever you are."

Also, don't be ashamed - if you tried to do good, thorough work despite seeing quick and dirty work being rewarded, in the end you did a great thing!

I can only speak for the biological sciences (I am a grad student in bioengineering), but from my perspective this is 100% accurate.

My PI got his own lab and his first big grant (R01) in his late 20s. My father did the same at 28. In the lab I am currently in, I have personally witnessed 3 brilliant, qualified, 40 year old post-docs with fellow to faculty transition grants be turned down for assistant professorships. If you go into academic science with the idea that you will end up as tenured professor, then you are naive.

As a tenured professor, and even as a new PI, you will not perform much, if any science. You will spend your time writing grants, approaching industry for funding (sponsored research, gifts etc), writing and reviewing papers and editorials, managing grad students, complying with regulations, teaching classes, serving on useless committees etc). There is also stiffer competition for grants every year, making it extremely difficult to stay funded. Our lab does alright because we are heavily industry funded, but individual groups in our lab have suffered.

I plan to either go into industry, work for a startup, or start something with some colleagues.

BTW: R01 in late 20s is absurdly early. Your PI is not typical.

In 1980, about 2% of R01 recipients were under age 30. So yeah, it's early, but not totally impossible.

In 2010, about 0.1% of R01 recipients were under age 30. That's bordering on impossible.

I'm under the impression that it has only gotten worse.

Anecdote: A super smart friend of mine from physics grad school finished in 2008 and went on to post-docs at Caltech and Harvard. He was unable to get a tenure track job, primarily because in that 4 year timespan only 1 faculty position opened up in the entire US for his (tiny) field. He now works at Google.

In fact I'm not sure that anyone from my cohort is still in academia. Other students used to come ask me questions all of the time, because I had worked in industry before going to grad school. Their questions were always some variation of "what are my options if I get out of physics?".

Edit: I'll also add that most grad students I knew gave little thought to their post-grad job prospects before starting grad school. It seems now that the message has trickled along a little better that the outlook is very poor.

I interviewed recently for a Data Engineer position in Chicago and was surprised when 2 interviewers from the data team introduced themselves as astrophysicists. They reasoned that they weren't happy with the career path in academia and so found a way out.

It's becoming more common as far as I can tell - I also left academia (mathematics) since academia is less about the work you do now. My brother stuck it out and finished his PhD in chemistry, but he too bolted from academia since he hated it as well (and that is with the fortune of having a high reputation thesis advisor, but who milked him for as many papers as he could before my brother threatened to just up and leave) - he's now a senior engineer at Samsung.

The academic landscape is just poor these days - it is a pretty brutal world to operate in.

I'd just like to emphasize:

while most people would agree that we train too many PhDs, I can assure you: the process of training many PhDs (in any discipline) has been very, very good to Google. It selects for, and hones the skills of, people who are quantitative, can form hypotheses, and test them.

I went to Goog- and took a significant temporary hit to my bioinformatics career- while working as a software engineer on stuff that was far from science. However, I can assure you: my training could be easily transferred.

Looking at the alumni list for my program, http://biophysics.ucsf.edu/people/alumni I see a very wide range of outcomes- yeah, a few professors, but also SVPs of companies, venture capitalists, doctors, software engineers, patent counsel, and industrial scientists. You can also see the postdoc bolus.

Another way to put it: going to school is not the fast or easy path.

I'm seeing more and more bioinformatics-related positions in industry that are listing a PhD as a requirement. I'm currently trying to decide if it's worth it to do the PhD now (in Bioinfo or a strongly related program) or to side-track for a little while doing something more directly computational or entrepreneurial. I'm ultimately interested in coming back to bioinformatics regardless. Would you say it's worthwhile to do the PhD (even if intending to work in industry), or to try to make up for the lack of a PhD with other experience?

The older, safer part of my says get the PhD. The younger, more risk prone part (which I ignored for too long) suggests you're going to make a bigger impact sooner by doing something computational and entrepenurial.

The PhD means, when you get to industry, you won't end up as a lab tech. it doesn't mean that you will be running a lab, however.

Do you have a write-up of your answers lying around somewhere? I'd be interested.. (half a year to go on a Master's)

No write-up, but people I know have left physics for:

* Quantitative finance

* Insurance (working on models that were beyond what the actuaries were trained to do)

* Data science

* Scientific equipment R&D

* Scientific equipment sales

* Popular science writing (this is a bit of an outlier!)

* Defense contracting (engineering, "scientific" programming, etc)

* Programming

* Door-to-door insurance sales (no joke)

I usually tell people to brush up on their programming skills as much as possible. If you're a theorist who only does pencil + paper or maybe Mathematica, it might be hard to find a decent job. Also, it never hurts to talk to / network with any industry people that are related to your field (software or hardware vendors, etc).

I'm now doing data science, but have also done hardware development and electrical engineering related things (signals). When I was transitioning to data science I also did some very specialized consulting related to my PhD. A few people paid me to do simulations and/or help then implement some techniques that I worked on as a grad student.

Also: I had a very supportive advisor, who encouraged me to accept a job offer before I graduated.

I got a PhD in physics, in 1993. Everything written in Katz's article was widely known to grad students when I was in school. Through a bit of planning and probably a lot of luck, I went to industry after finishing my degree. (Friend of a friend owned a tech business).

One "fact" that is apparent by omission in Katz's article rings true today as well: The complete lack of any consideration of industry employment by a physics professor advising grad students. When I told my advisor that I was likely headed towards industry, he gave me his best wishes, but admitted that he had nothing to offer me in the way of guidance towards such a career.

There's an amusing aspect of Von Munchausen By Proxy Syndrome in a PhD thesis: You cause the problems that you subsequently solve. I chose a problem, and steered it in a direction that required solution via extensive work in electronics and programming, which then became the basis of my resume.

The irony is that those of us who swore up and down that we were in it for the love of science and not money, are now the ones who you must compete with in the job market.

As an aside, I observed that a lot of people went into fields like physics to escape the eventuality of confronting the job market, and may not have been any better off in a supposedly more lucrative field.

Munchausen by Proxy is not something you want to do in science - it's explicitly faking data (child injuries) so you get attention that you desire. It's not causing the problem, but faking the problem. MbP definitely is a very serious problem, but it's not the problem that the parent claims is happening. A better semantic fit for the science world for MbP would be faking data to get grant money.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchausen_syndrome_by_pro...

Thanks. I realize that my analogy was a stretch, but I didn't realize it was that much of a stretch. ;)

It kind've fit, but not quite. I hadn't heard it in a context other than the literal before, which was interesting to see. :)

To follow-up IvyMike's earlier comment [1]:

It was indeed very true then, and it is even worse today.

In 1999, there were around 400,000 STEM PhDs in the US, but only 70,000 STEM academic faculty positions available. Today, there are over 800,000 STEM PhDs, but only around 100,000 STEM faculty positions [2].

And the gap will get even worse: in 2013, over 35,000 new STEM PhDs were awarded, but only about 3,000 new STEM faculty positions were open [ibid]. It's just unsustainable.

So, anecdotes aside, this is a very real and very serious structural problem. No matter how 'passionate' or how resourceful they are, with current trends, at least 9 out of 10 current first-year PhD students will invariably not get an academic faculty position when they enter the market. The longer this elephant in the room is ignored, the worse it will be [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763857

[2] http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/fig_tab/nbt.2706_F...

[3] See also related discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7764289 (where I initially saw the chart from).

I started a group leader position (not tenured) since about 1 year ago in bioinformatics (UK). The trend only got worse since this article was written. It is particularly bad in biology but physics and chemistry are not much better off. There is an ongoing debate about what to do about it. A good overview of the debate can be found in this recent perspective published in the PNAS journal (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/09/1404402111).

If you have a passion for research and have a solid back-up plan that you are sure can always fall back then feel free to try. Keep in mind that your salary will go down. Also, age factors in and there is some bias towards people that have always been on a straight path of high academic success. This should not be a big issue for the PhD but it will start to matter for postdoc and tenure track positions.

I have a PhD in chemistry and now I drive for Lyft. It pays 20% better than a postdoc.

I'm seeking to start up my own research program outside of traditional academia to gt away from the broken system.

If anything, the trends outlined in this article have continued in the last 15 years, so it's truer now that it was then. The disparity between PhDs vs. faculty positions is illustrated in this graph:

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/fig_tab/nbt.2706_F...

(The last time this was posted here everyone complained about how the annual and cumulative scales are different and make the graph hard to read, so caveat emptor.)

Physics could be an outlier, as there is a non-academic career path for certain specialities. But these tend to be the more engineer-like specializations. If your passion is theoretical physics, your job prospects are probably limited to searching for academic roles, and that's a tough place to be these days.

I have a PhD in Neuroscience and left the "postdoc treadmill" to be a software engineer. So far I am very happy with my decision and wish I would have read this article before getting my PhD. It's 100% accurate, and everyone in the biological sciences knows it.

I am finishing up a phd in bioinformatics. This is accurate.

I just finished a PhD in Biochemistry. It's accurate (I got a job as a programmer)

how difficult or easy was for you to change field?

Not bad. I spent a year as a CS major in undergrad and programming is something that I did as a hobby for most of college and grad school, so even without a degree, I had a pretty decent resume for entry-level positions.