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Comment by hguant | Hacker News Reader

>My biggest takeaway from the article is that you'd have to be an absolute sucker to work in academia given how poorly you'll be treated.

Every now and then I get an overwhelming sense of guilt when I talk to/think about my friends who are engaged in academia or pursuing advanced degrees (I'm 28, for reference).

The crazy workloads they have, the insane restrictions on how they can do their jobs, and the cut-throat nature of the industry means that they're working so much harder than I am, and are either doing their part to advance the grand sum of human knowledge, or are training to literally save peoples lives...and I'm sitting here, a college drop out, getting paid _way_ more than they're making, in an industry where I will never have any fears about job security, playing with networking equipment and writing about it.

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I worked in a company for a while that hired lots of people out of academia. The fascinating thing was that despite the vast majority of candidates being smart and incredibly well qualified, a massive chunk of them had been so tuned to the stupid hoops you have to jump through for academia that they were near worthless in industry. Whether that was the complete inability to treat other people as equals, or just completely unable to apply themselves to actually build something that could ship. Academia can be a real trap.

If I had a dollar for every time someone mentioned prestige for why we should be doing something I'd have had enough to fund one of those dumb projects.

From what I can see, tenured professor at an elite school is a pretty good gig. But it's a really tough gig to land, may not pay very well compared to private industry (assuming it's in a well-compensated field), and may force their partner to live somewhere the other employment opportunities aren't great because your own job mobility is likely pretty limited.

Feels almost like the minor league / major league situation in professional sports. Minor league baseball players are generally not paid a living wage, and major league players start around half a million dollars a year. Obviously many players are doing everything they can to reach that dream job (even if most fail).

That idea of being a comfortable tenured professor at a great school is a dream for many. And obviously, many don't make it, lot of folks are going to just drift around as adjunct professors, scraping by, taking second jobs. But as long as SOMEONE is getting to be a full professor at Stanford, lots of people are going to think, "that could be me", and get exploited along the way.

Yeah. I forget what the term is but there are a number of occupations where's there's a big gap between the "lottery winners" and the hoi polloi.

Arguably even the winners in academia don't make that much in terms of money but they're still viewed as successful professionals, have a decent lifestyle, and do OK--especially if they're not in the highest cost areas.

These kinds of professions are often referred to as "tournaments", a term I think captures their essence nicely. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory)

This captures the spirit of academia fairly well. The thought "that could be me" is a powerful factor indeed.

I had the opportunity to work with a dozen or so phds as an undergraduate, both in academia and in the industry, and what I saw was that the vast majority of them were not happy with their careers. Even the ones who were gainfully employed in the narrow field of study they specialized in. It definitely influenced me to skip the phd and go a different route.

Working longer/harder doesn’t mean more efficiently. And the idea of the visionary idealist scientist upon whom humanity rests is a romantic idea from the past.

No, it really isn’t. But cynicism like yours drives most of them out.

> I get an overwhelming sense of guilt

That guilt is proportional to the value you place on your work-time/daily output. The guilt will subside as your output importance does.

Also, the grass often appears greener, and many in academia are mired in its doldrums too.

> I will never have any fears about job security,

Sounds like you're under 45

The only folks over 45 I've met who cry ageism are those whose skills stopped growing 10 years prior, yet they continued to demand wage increases year over year. The worst offenders were "QA Professionals," who would get paid $200k to write a JIRA claiming that a page wouldn't load because the favicon 404'd.

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