Do postdocs ever end in your field, or can you build an entire forty-year career out of a succession of three-year postdoctoral appointments?

If you can work as a postdoc forever, can you do this with confidence? Which is to say, what are the odds that you'll wind up washed up at age 34, or 44, or 54, driving the mid-21st-century equivalent of a taxicab, after your PI's grants dry up and you can't find any other PIs who need your possibly-quite-esoteric research skills?

Tenure would help, of course. What's the ratio of assistant-professor openings to Ph.D.-level graduates in your field?

Getting your own grants might help. In your field, do people who have done, say, five postdocs in a row routinely get awarded grants in their own names?

(Full disclosure: I did a postdoc for fun, once. It was fun. There are many worse ways to spend three years of your life. But it was an expensive detour from my eventual career.)

That's a cute strawman of what people in the industry do. It's similar to saying that all post-docs do is resubmit the same paper to conferences/journals for an entire year until one barely accepts it, at which point they are so disgusted with their own work that they hate to even talk about it.

I love having postdocs too, but what after that? I run out of postdocs. At some point people are going to stop considering you for math postdocs because you've been out of the PhD too long. And while it's great to make 40-50K and think about math all the time, the cost in stability of moving a family around every two years is ridiculous and unsustainable. Ok, now you've moved your family around for 6 years or done the long-distance thing and no one will hire you for a postdoc anymore and no one will hire you for a faculty job. What then? Perma-adjuncthood. Now you get to go back to 30k a year and still have no job security, and less time for research. So what was the point of that sacrifice?

If you want to do research in a field like math and you can't get a professorship, you need to have an outside income that still allows 30 hours a week to think. If you want to do research in math and you can get a professorship, you need to protect your time fiercely even if you're at a research school and you're close to doomed if you are teaching 3-3 or 4-4. (I've seen some people do it.) So that dream of working on things that interest you with very little oversight is temporary pretty much no matter what.

In my field (life sciences), postdocs get paid about 40% more than grad students, and are required to pay into their benefits as they become official "employees" and not students. This, at least initially, puts them back close to the graduate salary.

Yes, it does increase over time, to about 2x salary. It also plateaus there quickly.

My question to you: assuming you are in this "certain subset of people," do you think that a string of postdocs is healthy for your career path? Of the dozen or so hiring managers and recruiters I've chatted with over the last year, any more than 2 podstdocs is a serious red flag.

It may not surprise you to learn that I don't spend all that much time worrying over my "career path", or "earning potential", or lose any sleep whatsoever over what some hiring manager or recruiter makes of me. Despite this, money and employment has never even remotely been a problem. My broader point is that obsessing over these career metrics subscribes to a very narrow worldview of what constitutes success, and there are a great many people in this world who exist outside this paradigm who lead rich and fulfilling lives. You certainly don't get any such notions from articles like this one.

I think it's great that you have found your version of success. I'm not sure I would say there are "a great many people" behind your cause, but if it works then I think that's fantastic.

But realistically, I'm not talking "earning potential", I'm talking about "spending your twenties making $10/hour as a graduate student and shafting yourself come retirement." Nobody becomes an academic to get rich, but I worry about the mid-life financial health of today's postdocs versus that of their mentors' at the same age.

I discovered while working as a research assistant that the post docs made about the same amount as I did and less than the secretaries (they had a union.) During my child support hearing the lady at friend of the court gave me the best unintentional advice I ever received while explaining why I had to pay my ex-wife more than I could possible afford on my salary. She said "You are making much less than someone of your skills and experience should."

And so I was forced to change careers. Doing research was fun, but if you want to do it (or make pottery or be in a band) professionally, then I recommend your spouse has a real job.

> explaining why I had to pay my ex-wife more than I could possible afford on my salary

> I recommend your spouse has a real job

It seems the spouse thing was what screwed it for you, not sure why you are suggesting it to others.

I like the point you are trying to make, but you go a little off the deep end there at the end. There's nothing wrong with pursuing money.

But neither is the pursuit of money any sort of notable goal. It's sort of like, "oh, well, get in line behind the other hoards of people who also want to be rich."

Nobody will care about what you do if this is your goal. On the other hand, if you can tell people "I want to make your life easier by: filling a market gap, changing an industry for the better, making X easier to use, making Y more affordable" then people will care. Thinking more about others than yourself is also probably a good way to actually find a good business!

Sorry, I did not mean to give offense, but the presumption that there's something wrong with not pursuing money is both a) irksome and b) at the root of a large number of ills in our society.

Actually yes.

I equate success with a job. No scratch that: at this point I'd settle for a damn interview.

I have a Masters in Chemistry, my girlfriend has a PhD in Chemistry. Neither of us, for the past year, have come remotely close to gaining employment that uses those skills (in Australia).

Really? Wow.

As an Australian who didn't go to university, I had the warnings growing up that getting a piece of paper doesn't guarantee you a job but I didn't know things were that hard for someone holding a masters.