"if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it. "<p>-- J. J. Thompson"
I got my biomedical engineering PhD, and was a neurology professor at a top children's hospital doing brain/epilepsy research for a few years. Literally my dream job for most of my life. I left it two years ago due to many of the reasons listed, and got a job going quant/algorithmic trading at a prop firm. I have never been happier, it is a hell of of a lot less stressful, I may actually pay off my student loans before I retire, we just bought a house, and obviously don't regret it for a second. Most of my old friends at my old job are jealous; they have psych or bio backgrounds, and have more or less hit their ceilings in terms of where that skill set can take them. For engineers who know how to code (I was a core contributer to www.bci2000.org for a decade+), math is math, and it doesn't matter if it is doing real time processing of brain signals or market data.
I would say "stay as far away from academic research as you possibly can" is the best advice someone can get these days. It is an awful, stressful waste of the prime of your life.<p>From what I saw in biomed only 1/10,000 or so will end up with the time, skills, and appropriately ambitious project to allow a decent job to get done. The rest will be forced to produce BS (literally, most of it is just misinformation at this point) or quit before even graduating.
In the HN spirit, where's the opportunity? How can we help improve the life of researchers?<p>Start ups trying to help:<p>Science Exchange (YCS11) <a href="https://www.scienceexchange.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scienceexchange.com/</a> : outsource parts of your research to companies<p>Instrumentl (YCS16) <a href="https://www.instrumentl.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instrumentl.com/</a> : identify and push relevant grants towards applicable research<p>Experiment (YCW13) <a href="https://experiment.com/" rel="nofollow">https://experiment.com/</a> : crowdfunding platform for scientific research<p>Transcriptic (YCW15) <a href="https://www.transcriptic.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.transcriptic.com/</a> : a robotic cloud laboratory for the life sciences<p>LabGuru <a href="https://www.labguru.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.labguru.com/</a> : inventory management and lab notebook<p>Lab Spend <a href="https://labspend.com/" rel="nofollow">https://labspend.com/</a> : tracks spending and finds savings on supplies and chemicals
In the mid 90's, Caltech's David Goodstein predicted an impending "Big Crunch" in science, writing: "We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch."<p>The essay is long but well worth reading: <a href="https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html</a>
My comment from a few days ago:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12717765" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12717765</a><p>When I was first exposed to the research "environment" during my Diplom studies (undergraduate - graduate, early to mid 90ies), I immediately recognised that if you actually love research and knowledge, academia was the last thing you ever want to get into. No surer way to kill the spark.<p>Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student. Interestingly, that's also the feedback I get, though as "helpful" advice that while what I am doing may be both good and important, it is unlikely to lead to success in academia. With the implication that I should stop doing it and concentrate on something more reasonable. Fortunately, I am not particularly interested in success in modern academia, so I get to do something I consider both good and important.<p>A related issue is that there really is no such thing as a senior researcher. Instead, professors are turned into research managers, responsible for helping their charges' careers, who then also turn into research managers. Actual research appears to be mostly a still not entirely avoidable side-effect. (And this seems similar to the way the only real way to advancement in industry is to switch to management, all dual-track equivalence rhetoric aside).
I feel for these scientists. I understand what they went through- I went through it myself during the run-up of biomedical training in the mid-to-late 90's. After being a PI at a national lab for a few years, trying to get funded against more experienced scientists (some of whom copied my ideas!) I decided to move to industry.<p>Now I have a job with a well-defined 20% time dedicated to research with effectively no limits on what I can do. I don't need to ask for funding- the resources I need are just expenses I charge against my company's effectively infinite budget. If I want to write a paper, I do- and those papers get cited far more highly than my previous papers, because my employer's name is gold.<p>My salary is high enough that I maintain a lab in my garage and self-fund most of my experiments.<p>This path doesn't work for everybody (the number of positions in industry that allow this freedom is limited) but in my experience it allowed me far more time to be a productive researcher than if I had tried to be a professor at a tier-1 university or a researcher at a national lab.<p>Interestingly, my PhD training (in biomed) turned out to be ideal for being a data scientist, and my personal interests that I pursued during my training turned out to be ideal for working at my firm. In some sense, PhD programs produce the best programmers and researchers in industry, along with teaching a fair amount of how to deal with politics, which is critical in both academia and industry.
I am finishing up my postdoc now. I went back to do a PhD from IT because I loved the field I was entering and ended up really enjoying my PhD. I learnt a lot, got exposed to some great minds, and raised the bar for my own standards of quality, efficiency and intellect. But now, after two years of a postdoc for a tenure track professor in the US, my academic dreams have unravelled. I am looking for jobs in industry even though I am being encouraged for academic track.<p>From my experience, it seems like the classic scientific research method of the old guard who I was mentored by is fading. The greats in my field would concentrate on one topic, work slowly, wrap it up, move to a new topic, and cultivate protoges. Now, the people securing tenure-track and tenure all seem to have half a dozen diverse projects to start with (to see which one suceeds and look hungry) - I see a lot of corner-cutting in their research - being bold is rewarded over detail and care.<p>Most of my peers whom I respect for their research output and well-roundedness haven't made the cut for academia. A cynical sure fire recipe for making tenure in academia? 1. Have a great knack for politics; 2. put yourself ahead of your students by treating them as monkeys for publishing with no regard for their scientific development; 3. cut corners (tell yourself you will fix it when you get tenure); and 4. be a narcissist - you can't afford to do anything that doesn't impact your track record positively (outreach counts!). That is not to say there are not some great people who have got positions - but the criteria for who makes the cut has changed sufficiently that it feels like it is being played by those who are willing to play the rules of the game. The worst part is that there is rarely any consequence down the line - once you have secured enough funding the community overlooks all but most severe transgressions.
I'll put my 2 cents in here too.<p>PhD in bioeng. Not planning on academia. Unfortunately, most of my cohort of grad students are ... blind?... to the data that we all know is out there. I'm part of 2 groups on campus that specialize in industry networking and start-ups. We do monthly happy-hours where we pay for the beer and nachos and we also bring in speakers that have PhDs in industry to talk about the transition and network with them too. We get a lot of people (30+) to show up to these events.<p>But they are ALL 2nd or 3rd round post-docs. Almost no actual grad-students. I've talk to them. They all know that they have no real shot, they all know the odds in the lottery. They do not care. The only thing I can think is that these 22-27 year olds really think they can out-work each other and 'make it'. Past data in their lives says that they have always done so, and the next time should be no different. It's amazing that such smart people can be so damn bullheaded. Scientists are people too, including the stupidity.
I'm curious why this field hasn't been "privatized" to some degree. Why doesn't division of labor apply? Why not have scientists go off and do their research and rely on a team that is skilled at hoarding grants or publishing works from raw data? I imagine it's probably due to some institutional barriers (e.g. you can't get funding outside of a university context).<p>I imagine the reason is as always - our leaders are two-faced in their support of science. They claim that it's a national issue but fail to make professorship even remotely competitive in the hard sciences. This kind of thing raises the most righteous indignation in me. We have a nation of know-nothing politicians claiming "We need more kids in STEM!" without doing anything to address the quagmire academia has become, largely because of over-competition for resources.<p>For all of this myopia around STEM it's largely a misnomer. No one in industry cares about climate science, geology, theoretical physics, abstract algebra, topology, combinatorics or number theory - at least not in the dollars and cents view. They may care insofar as there's a cash benefit, but not to the degree that they care about building better oil pipelines, faster algorithms and more efficient fabrics. So what we end up with is a world where Nike, Facebook and Exxon Mobil attract the best talent - a world where PhD's are basically forced to quit their jobs in order to go make money for the bourgeois.
I've been in biomedical research for 15 years, and I am leaving the lab atm. Many of my peers are as well. It's not a viable or enjoyable career anymore. Funding is extremely political, and proposal reviews border on arbitrary. Typically, the funding has been decided by seniority and politics, and the review is justification.<p>I imagine that it will get better eventually, but I can't wait for that to come to pass, and I can't in good conscience advise others to do so.
Many of these people will leave for academia. Some of them have spare time, or maybe will have spare time after their kids are grown, or will be able to retire early. Then they could become citizen scientists [1], independent scientists [2], etc.<p>Like independent film or video games, they couldn't compete head-on with big budget research. But they could presumably make progress in areas ignored by them: longer term, more fundamental research for example.<p>When I was a postdoc at MIT, it was common for the grad students to want to have a "lunatic fringe" track at conferences or an "unconvential ideas" seminar. But once you're in the heirarchy/buerocracy of academia, you understand why those don't exist. Perhaps independent scientists could actually do them?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science</a>
[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist</a>
I understand this article is mostly about the pressure of finding grants and doing research, but the role also includes teaching. I would be curious to hear, based on the experience of others, how much of the money generated by teaching a class goes to the professor.<p>Something like:<p>% = ($ Professor paid per Class) / (Students per Class * Number of Credits for Class * $ Charged per Credit)<p>At least by my calculations based on my own experience, 90% of the revenue here gets sucked up by overhead with only 10% going to the person teaching. If a non-profit was run this way, it would get shut down.
Pure math phd here, now working in finance.<p>On a personal level I wish I could've been a research professor.<p>But on an objective level, in pure math the invisible hand of the market is acting correctly. There's already so much amazing pure math published, you could devote your whole life just to understanding 1/100th of the math published in the 1990s, to say nothing of the stuff published in 2016.<p>We don't need more basic researchers right now.<p>Sucks though that a lot of people (like me) have to watch a life dream crumble, though.
The problem I faced - and still am, to an extent - was that during my PhD I was given no support or really any information at all about the possibility of a life and career outside of academia. I was fortunate enough to be offered a postdoc position in the same group that I did my PhD (particle physics) before I’d actually submitted my thesis. However 6 months later I desperately needed a change and managed to find another postdoc as a research scientist in the Medical Physics department of a cancer hospital.<p>Medical physics research has felt more fulfilling than particle physics, but I’m now in a position where my current contract expires in around 9 months, and with a mortgage to pay and a family to support I have to decide between: looking for yet another short-term postdoc position (in a hopefully related field of physics) - ending up in exactly the same position in 2-3 years; starting to apply for grants and funding with my current research group - a very stressful process with no guarantees of anything; moving into industry / private sector - assuming that it’d be possible to find a company that had a need for the very specific knowledge base and skills that developed over the past 7 years.<p>Or all of the above, at the same time, while trying to continue working my current research projects.<p>As someone that has always had an interest in computing, data analysis and software, but has ended up approaching them from a physics-based direction, I don’t feel qualified to compete with computer science/statistics grads for most of the software development or data science jobs that I see advertised.<p>I'm sure that there are other fields out there that would suit me, but having never had a non-academic-research job, I'm struggling to know where and what to look for.
Does anyone have any practical advice for moving away from an academic career path?
yeah, i left science for the reasons the article outlined.<p>it's a big weight off of my shoulders. i tell people who are thinking of going into science not to do so, now.
"as a young researcher moving to the private sector, he’s had to prove himself all over again."<p>This is true and is worth anyone making the switch keeping in mind. Commercial companies want a commercial track record before they trust you with important decisions.
i hear this is the same problem in politics. a ton of fundraising and very little politicking or whatever it is politicians use to do normally during the day.
Having gone through a lot of what is discussed in the article, I have concluded that academic research careers are for rich people only. I didn't even have student loans, but the pay was ridiculous given how many years of my 20s I spent in school, i.e. not making any income. Retirement is a real thing you know? So is getting old and having poor health.<p>The comments on the nature.com page are interesting, too. No matter how much you love your career and your research, there is more to life.<p>Also, you can see how climate research has become a total echo chamber--the people fighting over the scraps of funding will gladly sell their souls to a communist lie if that's what it takes to get by.