Where Can a Ph.D. Take You? Back to School, Usually | Hacker News Reader

Where Can a Ph.D. Take You? Back to School, Usually

nytimes.com

103 pointssimonorlovsky116 comments

I found some of the phrasing in the NYT article odd, and this sentence clued me into why: "The authors, who did not get postdoctoral degrees themselves ..."

I think the NYT reporter thinks that people in postdocs are pursuing another degree. They are not. It's just a way for people with PhDs to remain in academia, doing research, so that they can build up their publication list to land tenure-track academic positions. (And, sometimes, even industry positions.) Perhaps what the study authors told the NYT reporter that they did not do postdocs, and the NYT reporter translated that to "did not get postdoctoral degrees".

I agree this is a holding pattern, as the author says it is. But it's not quite "back to school", as the title implies. (I know the person who wrote the article probably did not supply the title, but I suspect they both have the same confusion.) They're not pursuing another degree.

Also, chances are that the authors of the original study[1] did not pass erroneous information to the NYT reporter as they both hold PhDs in their field.

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6286/663

I'm not sure holding pattern is fair either. I think doing a postdoc is a normal healthy part of a research career. I don't think most people are ready to start their own groups straight after finishing a PhD.

I think that one, or even two, postdoc positions is reasonable. But three or four is not unheard of, and that's definitely "holding pattern" territory.

I agree. The title should read 'Where Can a Ph.D. Take You? Forward to More Research, Usually'

Which is the entire point getting a PhD in the first place. More research. Forever.

I (along with many others) cringed at the phrasing of postdoctoral degree. A post-doc is not a degree. The article's comparison of a post-doc to law school for liberal arts majors was equally egregious. Sloppy writing.

Now, to be fair to their point. What they are observing is a cultural phenomenon in academia which is to stay in academia until you can't stay any more. Industry is for those who fail at academic research, whether that failure occurs at the post-doc stage or pre-tenure stage. This is in contrast to the sentiments of the real world (the perspective of the article author) which wonders why these "students" take so long to get a real job.

Yeah, and it doesn't hurt either that you spend more time in your career payed below-market rate and without tenure, right?

Plenty of people went straight from PhD to running their own groups, including my thesis advisor and his first grad student. It varied a lot from discipline to discipline. I would have observed at the time when I got my PhD, that the population of post-docs created the "need" for post-doctoral experience.

There were fields where post-doc experience was rare:

1. Engineering and computer science, where people had good employment prospects outside of academia

2. The humanities and social sciences, where there was no money to hire post-docs

Fields where post-doc experience was a requirement:

1. The sciences, with an abundance of money for hiring post-docs, and hit-or-miss employment prospects in industry, depending on your specialty and ancillary skills.

The other thing I've observed is that multiple post doc appointments don't really improve your chances. The superstars have identified themselves as such while still in grad school, or during their first post-doc appointment.

I concluded while still in grad school, that the arc of my career would not intersect with a professorship, so I finished my PhD and bailed out of academia.

Exactly. By this point it's out of necessity, to stay in the game. It's like asking an MBA, "If you could get to a plum Wall Street job without an internship, would you?" All of them would say, "Of course not!" In Science, the supply/demand imbalance is such that this "internship" (post-doc) lasts a lot more than a summer.

I have a friend who did his MD/Phd immediately after undergrad. That wasn't enough to land a job, so he did a several year post-doc before landing at a research university. Even still he was in his 40s before getting tenure. At that point tenure is about rewarding performance more than anything related to academic freedom.

> It's just a way for people with PhDs to remain in academia, doing research, so that they can build up their publication list to land tenure-track academic positions.

Precisely this. Or also (my case): we have been doing research all our lives and were too afraid or too insecure to try to pursuit some other path. In my case, for a variety of reasons, I landed a postdoctoral position after I got my PhD but never really felt comfortable in it. Took a whole year to build up the nerve to start looking for industry positions until I finally found one that looked like a good match to my set of skills and I finally left academia. I don't regret it a bit.

Knowing what you know now, would you have skipped the post-doc? Or did it provide some further insights that your PhD could not?

I wouldn't have skipped it, as I learned a lot of stuff that I found incredibly useful. I would have left earlier, that is also true.

Doesn't the fact that you don't even get a degree out of a postdoc make it worse? In some groups, being a postdoc means simply that you're software engineering for 0.25 of the pay that you would get as a software engineer in industry. You're hoping to get a chance to stick around as a researcher, but you're not doing actual research (hence no degree).

no, you're doing research. I know some postdocs who practically don't do research, they manage labs or write software, but their names go on the papers that come out of the lab which is frequently good enough. and usually, the postdocs do research.

my advisor said that being a postdoc was the best time of their life (they has tenure) because their responsibilities were ~0, they had no one to manage / no one they was responsible for, but they also had effectively no superior or supervisor because the PI was busy managing the graduate students and expected that the postdocs see to themselves.

Yeah, I know mathematicians are often incredibly productive during their post-docs. Mind you, if you aren't its a kiss of death to your academic career.

I'm sure your advisor had an awesome experience, but there majority of postdocs don't get tenure-track positions and end up regretting doing a postdoc.

Many of my peers ended up doing postdocs (most finished PhDs in the early 00s). Some are academics today, many work in industry. Some like me are now in completely different fields. I was mostly lucky in that I got a job at an early stage startup after my PhD. I didn't want to be an academic so the post-doc route was not as interesting.

The relevant part was that none of us thought about post-docs as another degree but the next stage of our careers.

Academia, as a career path, is a non-starter for the huge majority of people who even want to go down that path.

Universities are not growing at the same rates that they were in the 60's and 70's. If you're a graduate student, not only are your classmates your competition, but every professor who supervises more than 1 PhD thesis is actually contributing to the overpopulation of PhDs. These two things in combination are why we have so many adjuncts on campus doing most of the teaching of undergrads.

Even if the above weren't true, the path to a tenured position is not something I'd wish on a mortal enemy. Start off with several years in grad school making poverty-level wages. Add on 1-3 postdocs at a minimum, making probably 3/4 or less of what an assistant professor would. Then, there's the 6 year job interview (i.e. the tenure process). And, then, factor in that you don't get to choose where you live during all this. You have to go where the jobs are, and there might only be a handful of jobs in your subfield any given year.

That all amounts to about 6-10 years of post-baccalaureate slog before you can even start a career and begin living like an adult.

If you come out the other end without a job, then your next search becomes even harder. If you get the job, then, yes, congratulations, it's now very hard to fire you, but good luck finding another tenured position if you decide you want to move. Oh, and the people you work with, you're going to see most of them every day for the next 10, 20, or 30 years.

In spite of all that, I might have actually ridden the train to the end, had I not realized that I was preparing to enter a field where I'd literally have to wait for someone to die before I got a job. Nobody told me any of this until I was already in grad school for a couple of years, and even then I ended up figuring most of it out on my own.

I will say that fortunately things are better in computer science academia. (Note I'm assuming you go to a top school for your PhD). The extreme competition is still there (even at a top 4 school), but:

1) it is common to skip a postdoc or only do 1 postdoc

2) the "backup" option is going to work for an industry research lab or a tech company for 200k+ per year. And if your field is one applicable to industry, like systems (databases, networking, distributed systems, OS) or AI/ML, you've also gained skills that actually do command a salary premium (although the premium does not come close to the opportunity cost of a PhD) and some job security.

Yeah, I didn't mention that. Things are much better in a handful of technical fields, CS foremost among them. Math, engineering, physics, and economics all have some possibilities outside academia. Most other fields, you might as well cross off those years on your CV if you're looking to industry.

Also, if you spend more than 1 year "out of the game," forget about ever getting back on the academic track.

Yeah. My impression is that spending a few years in industry research (and publishing) still leaves the door open for the academic track, although this is all hearsay.

Are you in HR?

I've spent a couple of years out of the game and was fine. It is on the rare side though.

> Universities are not growing at the same rates that they were in the 60's and 70's. If you're a graduate student, not only are your classmates your competition, but every professor who supervises more than 1 PhD thesis is actually contributing to the overpopulation of PhDs.

I must say, I quite disagree with what seems to be a generally negative tone on HN towards academia. Basic research is fundamentally important, more than that there are extremely talented people who should be doing it - rather than allow themselves to have their time wasted by some corporation that does absolutely nothing beneficial for civilization.

Obviously it's a problem if these people are disenfranchised, not sufficiently funded or otherwise aren't able to do what they wanted to do and for those reasons are turned away from Academia (btw tenure track is not the sole option for doing fundamental research).

But on here it seems the entire critical conversation is centered, on job options, salary, competition, and all the other things are really evidence of someone too deeply emersed in the corporate culture. If you are doing good research - competition doesn't matter, if you care significantly about the research salary doesn't matter all that much. There are surely negative aspects but statements like these:

> That all amounts to about 6-10 years of post-baccalaureate slog before you can even start a career and begin living like an adult.

Sound almost like corporate salesmanship for getting talented people out of Academia, into useless soul-destroying jobs.

The fact that the notion of salary leads you to "corporate culture" suggests true relationship between work conditions in corporate and academia. There is nothing inherently corporate about good reward for work.

Fundamental research is important and should attract top talent - but saying that individuals should correct errors of society leads to ugly, ugly effects like resentment and elitism.

There is no alternative to correcting incentives. As soon as people start to connect "good salary" with "academic culture", everything will be OK.

Most basic research is not beneficial to civilizaton. We fund it knowing that a small fraction of it will prove to be immensely useful. (And of course, without being able to know which fraction that is in advance.)

I think what you're trying to say, in that most basic research has no inherent economic value to civilization. I agree with that premise; but there is more to it. The benefits of research is not just its output, but its effects: fostering communities of people dedicated to investigating curiosities which we non-academics cannot (or do not) want to dedicate significant time and/or effort to doing.

No, I meant what I said. Most basic research is useless in essentially all respects (not just in terms of the economic effects of its output). That does not necessarily mean that it's bad research, intellectually speaking, just that society is no better off for it.

This attitude is part of the problem.

People shouldn't have to make a decision between quality of life (good salary, recognition, benefits, etc.) and doing fulfilling/meaningful work.

Wanting to be compensated fairly for your work is not corporate thinking. It's basic fairness and rationality. The fact that academia treats it as a character flaw is part of the problem.

Being paid less for a more fulfilling/meaningful job IS fair.

If that were true, the most meaningless and soul destroying jobs would be paid the most.

They aren't.

it is a factor, but not the only factor. Besides, the world isn't completely fair, you know.

Fair point. The market is working properly.

The problem is mostly academics selling lies about that market to impressionable young students. They're supposed to be mentors looking out for their students' best interests, but are actually just pushing up the labor supply and pushing down prices.

forgotpwtomain's comment is highly indicative of the way academics do that. "Ignore the reality of terrible job options in academia. Industry is dirty and being a penniless researcher is the only noble path through life."

I don't know about you but I'm quite grateful that people like Donald Knuth stayed in the apparently terrible place that academia is rather then becoming senior managers at IBM for 500k+ a year.

I don't think that not having a huge salary == lower quality of life, I think having a non-rewarding job does though.

> Industry is dirty and being a penniless researcher is the only noble path through life."

I never advocated this, while for some people in fact being penniless doesn't significantly impact quality of life; for a lot of talented people that want to have families it does in fact matter and it's a large loss for science if Academia cannot retain these people.

So am I. In fact, I wish more people were able to work on research. Treating a desire for a comfortable living as the problem rather than an objective to be fulfilled is what keeps us from getting more and better researchers.

Also keep in mind that his generation's options were much better. The academic job market was a lot friendlier back then.

Wholeheartedly agree on this, the college I went to harboured and nurtured a disdain for profit seeking and expected you to adopt a self-sacrificing altruistic approach to pursuing research.

No thanks.

I'm sorry that research wasn't enough to convince me to turn my back on living moderately well. Seems like most the people in my cohort felt the same, which is a shame because in the top 20 from my college, only 3 stayed on to do research. Which means profit-seeking companies are siphoning most the talent from research.

I have a PhD in computer science, and an industry research job which involves a lot of development. I know a decent number of people with PhDs. I know one person with a tenure track professor position.

My friends left the academic treadmill not because of a lack of love for the work, but for the lack of opportunities. The qualities you dismiss as corporate culture - decent pay, hours, security, location - most people think of as quality of life issues. Academia is a tournament, and not everyone can end up on top. I also think you are discounting the enormous amount of luck involved.

I'm not 100% down on academia itself. I would have gladly endured years of poverty wages, multiple postdocs, and the stress of the tenure process if I thought the light at the end of the tunnel weren't a freight train. In fact, some of the happiest years of my life were when I was making around $12k a year as a graduate student. Like I said, I started down the path, and would have continued had there been a reasonable probability of getting a job I could live on at the end.

But, that's a large part of the problem. Most people with PhDs are either not using them, or are low-paid adjuncts making barely minimum wage cobbling together 5 courses a semester at 3 different schools. Guess how much research those people get to do? In many fields (those where you need a lab, basically), the answer is "none," and that further contributes to keeping them second-class citizens. They are disenfranchised for all practical purposes.

> btw tenure track is not the sole option for doing fundamental research

Yes, there are industry and government research labs where you can do research and publish. But, for many fields, the tenure track is it, full stop. And, even in fields like CS or physics, where these other options exist, relative to the number of degrees granted, the number of jobs is pretty pitiful.

Sure, I can sit in a cafe and do fundamental math research, but not many fields are like that. A ton of math and CS papers are online in one way or another, but not all fields have it that easy. Most of the time, you need a lab, or a university-equivalent library (which you must physically go to to access the resources).

> Sound almost like corporate salesmanship for getting talented people out of Academia, into useless soul-destroying jobs.

That's the point. My post is 100% reality. I've lived it. Why should the best and brightest go to grad school and get PhDs when their prospects are so bleak? I'm really glad some do, but unless that's all they can ever see themselves doing, it's just not economically rational.

In my experience as a gradual student, the academic job situation for PhDs was widely known, at least in my field -- physics. That was in the early 90s.

I know that a lot of people entered grad school with the stated goal of pursuing an academic career, but I wonder if that is more of a rationalization than a definite objective. My guess is that people are motivated simply by an interest in the subject matter, and in getting more education.

In my own case, my dad, and my grandfather, both had PhDs, and almost all of my close relatives have advanced degrees of some sort. There was a strong family "culture" that valued education for its own sake, along with a sense of education being the thing that "they can't take away from you," developed through the experiences of the Great Depression and the world wars. Those are the kinds of motivations that aren't really influenced by job market statistics.

I am extremely happy that the my initial postdoc route was a total bust. It was so hard to leave academia and take a risk in the startup space directly after my PhD. I ended up in data engineering/science at a small EdTech startup. Looking beyond the bump in salary (relative to a postdoc), I find my work extremely rewarding, love my colleagues, and really look forward to going into work everyday and developing my skill set. This was probably the best career decision that I made in life so far. This non-traditional career path is hard for my family, friends, and professors to fully digest and absorb. My dad still wonders why I got a degree in virology/immunology and decided to basically go into software engineering. My friends who are still in academia think I made a terrible mistake going into a startup scene completely unrelated to my graduate education. However, I feel like I am getting great training and setting up for a wonderful career. I seriously doubt I would have felt the same way if I ended up as a postdoc in some research lab.

Luckily, 'programmer with thorough knowledge of X' is almost always a desirable skill set, for any given field X. But seriously, I never knock a job that someone is happy about.

Is there any chance that you would wish to initiate research part-time in your field? I would presume any self-funded research program would need to be limited in scope and heavily weighted towards computational citizen science, which seems to be where your growing skillset can be readily applied.

>computational citizen science,

This is actually a good approach. As a former bio PhD now in software, I am working on some side projects in the area.

I would definitely be interested. One the biggest problems is that the barrier for entry to do any type of laboratory science is really high (lab space, equipment, expensive kits and reagents, etc) compared to software. I think bioinformatics is a good place to start.

FourSigma and IndianAstronaut, what do you think about doing bioinformatics as research, formulating and testing hypotheses, and then either using a cloud lab or a garage lab for at least some wetlab testing?

I've been researching intensively whether to go get a life sciences PhD, and I'm now leaning instead toward just learning bioinformatics and ML, with the wetlab stuff as an adjunct. If that's an effective way to do "real research", then it might be more accessible.

I would 100% lean towards to a more computational skill set while having some exposure to a wet-lab experimentation. I think having a data science skill set in biology is becoming extremely valuable. Moreover, if you choose to leave academia you have a set of skills that are in high demand across a range of industries.

Thanks for the advice! That's very helpful to fold into my research/analysis of next steps. :-)

I don't think you can judge such a decision as being a mistake. Usually, if it turns out well, then it is not, and otherwise, it is! I think it is important to pursue what drives you and follow your curiosity! I wish you all the best, it is refreshing to hear that you look forward to going into work, I feel that that excitement makes all the difference! Good luck!

Would you care to share where you're working? I'm finishing a PhD in cognitive science (grad minor in computer science) and am interested in the EdTech space.

The article makes assumptions about job prospects for PhDs and which careers getting a PhD will enable, but is it strange that I want to get a PhD just because I want to be able to do research and learn about all the currently unsolved problems? I realize that I might not be able to do it for a living, but being able to take a few years off and get paid (although very little) to study something of your choosing sounds great in contrast to getting paid more but spending your time doing things other people want you to do.

Would I be better served just taking a few years off and studying on my own? That seems unlikely though since having an advisor is very useful/important..

In my experience, the better option is to seek work with a better pay and then learn to enjoy that. If you find joy in doing things well, almost any job that challenges you will bring you happiness.

This is why I'm doing my research Masters. I have no interesting in pursuing a long-term career in academia, but I love research and this path keeps me reasonably well-funded for the next few years to focus on a really hard problem that I find interesting.

I figure that I have the rest of my life to work in industry, so spending a couple years doing paid research into something I am really interested in sounds good to me!

This is the first time I've heard about this.. In the US our Master's degrees are unfunded and actually quite expensive, although they sometimes involve research too.

How does it work? I assume you're doing this in the UK?

I've got friends who are doing PhDs in computer science(in UK) and they both had to do a Masters course first - but they have funding for the whole duration, including the masters course. I actually work as a C++ programmer, and they both make more than I do, doing a PhD is very well paid, at least in Computer Science.

rarely is PhD well-funded in the UK. You're not living well at at all, and TA positions are not the norm as in the US. The US has much more money for these. Even in CS, the people you talk of must be very lucky with rare, google-level/industry-funded positions.

Most PhD listings I've seen offer around £15-18kpa plus remission of fees.

But there are a lot of incredibly badly paid software/technology jobs in the UK, so it's not at all impossible for someone to be earning less than that in industry.

My friends are each making £30k per annum, the stipend itself is 25k but they make at least 5k a year just marking exams and giving practicals. With it being tax free, it's easily equivalent to a job paying £35-40k(they are both at a Russel Group university).

I, on the other hand, make £25k per annum, and that's before tax :P

tax free? I didn't know that! Still, terrible money for london at least.

You need a new job somewhere that pays basically decent rates if you're IT or a developer!

Well, I don't live in London. My fiancee also works in IT, she makes 30k per year, and we can easily afford to rent a 4-bedroom house, have two cars, and save enough each month to get a mortgage in a couple years. I really like my job and I'm comfortable financially, so why would I need a new job, especially if it meant moving to the crazy city like London. No, thank you.

why does the UK not value tech jobs as well a the US?

There are many ways to get funding as a grad student for Masters in CS the US: most commonly via Teaching or Research Assistantships that not only pay your tuition but provide a stipend as well. Its true that MOST masters are not funded, CS seems to be the exception. All my peers in college who decided to pursue a Masters degree in CS had some sort of funding which reduced their expenses by a LOT.

I'm in Canada. We have both course-based Masters and research Masters in Computing Science. The course-based ones almost never have funding available and are quite expensive, while the research ones are more competitive but well funded and act like mini-PhD's (at least that's my general experience).

The thing to bear in mind is that PhD programs aren't geared towards people who just want to work on interesting questions, get the PhD, and then leave and do something else. You'll be immersed in a culture where all of your peers see a tenure track position as the only job worth having. No-one will take any aspirations you may have outside academia at all seriously. Unless you are very tough and independent-minded, you will have your perception of your own goals shifted by this.

(There may be some exceptions to this generalization for fields that have very close connections to industry, e.g. CS.)

I feel like the odd one out considering an academic career in my engineering PhD program. I don't think the attitude you're describing is all that common in many technical fields these days.

I'm sure it depends on the field, the university, and the department culture, but isn't that what admissions interviews and open house are for?

Another problem that the article didn't mention is that with the end of mandatory retirement, professors take a lot longer to leave [1]. With people sticking around longer, there is less turnover in tenure track positions, and more competition when positions open up. It's the reason people accept the poor pay and terrible job security of being an adjunct: you've got to hang out somewhere waiting for that dream job and you don't want to stray that far from academia... Serial postdocs are doing the same thing. From personal experience, its very difficult to find that one thing that you absolutely excel at, your life calling, but having to face the likelihood that you may never get that dream professorship and make the money to have children or buy a house.

1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/02/new-study-sho...

This article shows a gross ignorance of the reality. Academic sciences especially are woefully under funded and anyone coming out now with a PhD has no position to go into especially if you are half decent. Accepting to only teach in a crap university and struggle to have a research career is not a choice for competent people. Instead they leave once they fully understand the insermountable task of obtaining a decent life in the academic world is. Worse is the younger 40-45 yol academics think people now face the same world they did. Whereas there has been a 10x increase in PhD graduates since they went looking for a position. The number of available jobs has not dramatically increased at all. This and the stochastic nature of funding of grant proposals means no one chooses to remain in academia. Apart from the top 1% or the no hopers who think being a stooge for the next 40 years is admirable and they should take one for the team to pursue "science". The reality is research jobs outside of academia are obviously booming with this sudden availability of talented and highly educated work force.

We should better educate people entering (or considering) PhD programs about their likely job prospects after graduation.

There have been a lot of articles (example [2]) written about the terrible situation that graduating PhD students are put in, where they'll likely be stuck in a postdoc for 10+ years with no chance of advancement.

It's insane that 1/3 are graduating without a job in hand. Either we limit the number of PhDs we generate or we increase the available number of (academic?) positions [1].

[1] https://research.wisc.edu/biomedworkforce/wp-content/uploads... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-...

they know. there is no other path to the job that they want. what do you propose they do instead?

The study surmises that they (PhD students) generally do not know:

We describe evidence of a “default” postdoc and of “holding patterns” that suggest a need for increased attention to career planning among students, their mentors, graduate schools, and funders.[1]

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6286/663

With the availability of information on the internet and their education levels, I have a hard time believing PhD students don't know about the job prospects. More likely they continue to believe that they will be the exceptional case.

The same thing 99% of the human race does and always has done, and the 1% who are wasting their lives trying to become astronauts or movie stars should also do: accept that the job you ideally want is not available, and learn to enjoy a job you can get.

tell that to start-up founders and people trying to be athletes as well

My remarks were certainly addressed also, by the same logic, to people trying to become Olympic athletes. Founding a startup isn't quite the same, because there isn't so much a fixed quota of startups. It is possible to win without having to make ten thousand other people lose.

you'll only find out for sure if you'll lose when you try. if you don't try, you definitely lose.

should we select movie stars, athletes, and professors at birth? via lottery?

> you'll only find out for sure if you'll lose when you try. if you don't try, you definitely lose.

If you're going to follow that philosophy, you're better off buying a lottery ticket. They're a lot cheaper.

> should we select movie stars, athletes, and professors at birth? via lottery?

I'll bite that bullet. Partial allocation by lottery would be a lot less cruel and wasteful than the current system of full allocation by sacrifice.

I've heard a few people in CS say they loved their postdocs. My outsider's impression is: there's generally no teaching responsibility, no pressure or anxiety over your thesis/graduation (the biggest stressor for a PhD), generally more flexibility in your research agenda (though it depends on the lab), less pressure to find funding, and there's no stigma to just leaving or moving around whenever you want (it is common to leave a postdoc after just a year). Although you're still paid poorly.

>Although you're still paid poorly.

In the US, yes - in Australia postdocs get between 60k and 90k per year, with an additional 15-17% that goes into your Super (retirement account - Australia's equivalent of US' 401k). I'm a "new" post-doc in Perth with a salary of 86k p/y and my wife doesn't need to work.

But yes, so far I'm enjoying it greatly, after a few years of the constant Damocles' sword of my thesis deadline dangling over my head the freedom is great!

Wow, that's pretty good! I'm an Australian citizen starting a PhD in the US this year, so I'll keep an eye on any postdoc openings Down Under when I'm nearing completion. But I'm kind of worried that there won't be many opportunities for the field I'm in (circuit design).

Yes, that's my problem too - there are only very few groups that work in any given area, after this contract is over I may have to go overseas

Teaching responsibility is mandatory in all CS PhD programs I'm aware of. The pressure is not as bad as other areas, but the deadlines can get very stressful, circumstantially I suppose. The flexibility doesn't really exist: when going for a PhD, you already have a subject picked up, or a project responsibility undertaken, and probably very few ways of going about it because of where the funding's coming from. It's true that the responsibility of getting funding is limited, although some advisors will delegate writing the proposals to postgrads and just review those, taking up the time which you'd spent on your research.

That said, all my friends loved their PhD's, and started hating their choice after they got it.

He said postdoc.

Pay is between top grad student assistantship and assistant professor. That would be below industry pay in a hot field like CS.

Got me to being a CTO of a nanotechnology start-up. Academia is not the only end goal.

How can you take this article seriously when they write "getting postdoctoral degrees"? There are things to do in Universities beyond getting degrees... like doing science.

When you spend ten years of your life pursuing something, and you feel you have few prospects then it's likely that you'll continue down the same path. The attitude is better the devil you know than the devil you don't. I left academia after my PhD because I felt that I couldn't do another ten years in academia scraping by on $35k/year postdoc salary... Instead I went through a couple of startups, and here I am seven years later making what I probably would have been making had I never left academia. PhDs can make you painfully unhireable. Oh the irony!

The real article should be discussing where a JD will take you. That's the scam of the century.

In what way?

Law school bar pass rates and first year associate salaries are not what they used to be. According to http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/15/pf/jobs/lawyer-salaries/ , the median salary for a first year associate is $62k. Add to the mix that law schools inflate their employment stats by including people whose jobs have nothing to do with the law, and what you get is students suing their law schools for fraud (e.g. http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/08/pf/college/lawsuit-thomas-je...)

A JD is still a big step up for the sorts of people who get them. Humanities majors as a group don't hit much more than $60k mid-career, and more than half of fresh college graduates are unemployed or working a job that doesn't require a college degree.

Even after factoring in massive debt?

College and graduate school loan payments are limited to 10% of discretionary income under Obama's recent programs. So yes, even with the debt.

oh noo, 50% increase on the median annual income. whatever will they do.

And what's the percentage increase on student debt?

strawman

Pursuing a PhD only makes sense if you want to go to the academia. Staying in the academia only makes sense if you genuinely love science to the point that financial reward is much less motivating for you.

(There are some shortcuts and exceptions to that. If you have PhD in physics or probability-related applied mathematics, you can become a quant trader; a common career path for those who decided that purely scientific pursuits are not their cup of tea.)

Another exception is biotech startup world I think. You need a PhD cofounder to start a biotech company.

I think that's true. Most biotech companies are filled with PhDs. The cloud lab Transcriptic is an exception, started by a biomedical engineer in undergrad, but generally speaking it seems you need a PhD for credibility (not to discount the deep domain expertise one needs as well).

> Pursuing a PhD only makes sense if you want to go to the academia.

The pursuit of a PhD makes sense if you are interested in research.

Not really. You can do quite a lot of research without PhD. Being paid for it is another story, though.

except there's nothing like the rigour of a good PhD to teach you good methods, stats and epistemology. Not all do that, but there are many people out there whose code, research and generaly understanding woudl be much better had they studied for a PhD.

Now, of course it's not necessary that these learnings have to come through a PhD, but few people pick up good research habits without one. And that includes masters students who at least in some fields definitely get Research-lite levels of understanding from the teaching given.

A => B doesn't mean B=> A

I said the pursuit of PhD makes sense if you are interested in research. I never said you can't do research without a PhD.

No! Absolutely not. A PhD is a huge time commitment. It takes a whole chunk out of your life which is one of the most important times for building a career. You absolutely definitely should not do a PhD just because you think you'd enjoy it.

> You absolutely definitely should not do a PhD just because you think you'd enjoy it.

I never said anything to that effect. All I said was, Ph.D is a great option if you like research.

That aside, you definitely shouldn't do Ph.D if you don't like research.

It really isn't such a great option because it has a huge knock-on effect on your future. You should only do a PhD if you either (a) are committed to having an academic career or (b) are in a field where there is a clear alternative career path. Doing a bit of internet stalking (sorry) I see that you have a CS PhD. That is one of the fields where there are many non-academic jobs available for PhDs. In my field, it's academia or bust, which makes the calculation of whether or not to do a PhD a very different one. If you're giving generic advice on whether or not to do a PhD, it's worth bearing in mind that CS is really the exception rather than the rule in this respect. In most fields, "do a PhD if you like doing research" is terrible, terrible life advice.

Are you saying noone should ever choose a less lucrative career just because they will enjoy it more?

There is no career for most PhD students. This is the whole problem with how people look at it. If it were the case that most people with PhDs could obtain stable, low-paying academic jobs, then you'd have a point, but most people with PhDs can't do that.

I agree with you that counting on a stable job in academia is probably a mistake for most PhD students. But your previous categorical statement goes too far.

It's a perfectly valid choice for me to decide to do a PhD for no reason other than an intense desire to learn more about some topic and then plan on making a living as a kayaking instructor or elementary school teacher or a handyman for the following two or three decades. As long as I have no delusions about the feasibility of my plan.

Of course, if you want. But surely it's unwise to actively encourage someone along that path. If it's what they really really want, they'll do it anyway. Advice is directed at people who are undecided.

First, I have a STEM Ph.D. and am in my 35th year at a U.S. corporation. Now my question: Just where do you expect all these newly minted Ph. D. grads to do that research?

At least in the US, the last two decades have not been kind to the once iconic corporate research labs. As global competition increased and the push for constant high quarterly returns by investors, more and more has been off-shored. The most recent casualty was DuPont CR&D but there has been constant erosion. My colleagues and I have actually lost count of the number of downsizings we have been through.

Here is a test for you: Next conference you go to, look at the talks and posters. How many corporate people are there who are not instrument vendors or contract labs?

I'm not sure I get your point though. I said the pursuit of Ph.D makes sense if you'd want to do research. I never said it's a good return on investment or you'd have a job or you'd end up doing research in the industry.

FWIW, I have a STEM Ph.D too.

Is the rise of more efficient competitors overseas the main thing that's made these labs disappear, or has something else more internal to these companies or to the domestic economy changed over the last 30 years?

...or teaching.

A Ph.D. in a field where the only thing you can do with it is teaching it to other people is no more than a pyramid scheme.

Stepping back and having a non-emotional discussion about sportsball might help. Consider that the default plan for the stereotypical high school football player is to play college ball, of course. Also, of course, they know the odds of a successful pro career are very low. Its just something to do until you have something else to do, and there's really nothing wrong with that.

Maybe another way to put it is the most interesting cultural change is the death of the career and the rise of the gig or job as the default. Once you know you're very unlikely to have a career, you're free to have a fun job or a fun gig or fun life while doing work you like, or at least like the most out of your options.

So the article boils down to the career path is dead, and that's had little short term effect on the workers, like every other job in the country.

I know a non-negligible number of new professors who, when offered faculty positions, negotiated a later starting date to pursue a postdoc for a year. Postdocs are a great low risk way to expose yourself to different research groups, to undertake crazy projects that you might not be able to do at your next institution, and to expose yourself to new communities (eg a theory CS PhD working in a math group) and to other researchers. Postdocs are also, in some sense, the most freedom you'll have as a researcher. As a grad student you are more beholden to an advisor than as a postdoc, while as a professor you have administrative duties, recruiting, teaching, and all that jazz distracting you from your work.

Is this at all surprising?

Obviously they're interested in research; ask anyone to name one place where research will happen - how many do you think won't pick "universities"?

Every day I'm glad I bombed my GRE.

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