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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

When I was 19 I worked at Dominos Pizza, and they offered me a management track position. I would attend Dominos University, a management training course where they would teach me the art of pizza restaurant management and advanced pizza making skills. The starting salary for management back in 2007 was $38k per year with 10% bonus, and included health insurance, paid sick leave, etc.

I say this because - why do these adjuncts subject themselves to such torture? If you are smart enough to teach medieval poetry, you can run a pizza restaurant. These people fetishize university life and kill themselves for no reason. It's absurd. Universities get away with paying horrible wages because there is a seemingly endless line of people willing to be homeless in order to teach undergraduates and grade papers. Insanity

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Because some people want to live in a world where we as a society can value things like medieval poetry and have thriving ecosystems around that.

There's a seemingly endless line of people willing to enslave themselves to a broken system rather than fold and turn into a Dominos manager like the system wants.

Except that those same people do a terrible job of actually "valuing" these things. In the absence of things like community engagement/outreach, "society" is not going to care all that much about those topics. Building a "thriving ecosystem" around whatever scholarship/research you're doing can come later, community outreach should be a forefront priority.

At one point do you get punched in the nose enough times to realize you aren't meant to be a boxer? These people clearly didn't make it in academia. As much as I want to be an NFL quarterback, sometimes you have to accept reality and try for a different goal.

Well, what if you wanted to be an NFL quarterback, had all the skills, but couldn't find a job because Joe Montana, Dan Marino, John Elway etc.--greats in their day--had tenure?

You can post on Twitter about how unfair it is, but I would rather take control of my own destiny and do something else. Living in my car outside the football stadium in the hope that someday I'll be hired would be naive. The same for the adjuncts.

There is no system, it's all just people. If you want academics to study medieval poetry you're welcome to pay them directly to do it, or establish a charitable foundation for that purpose. Personally I have other priorities and don't want any of my taxes or school fees used for that purpose.

I'm conflicted but tend to agree. The other day as I was reading some academic job market horror story on Twitter, it occurred to me that this is the market's way of saying we have too many candidates! Go away! It's like you have a train full of people, and new people are continually trying to embark, even though it gets harder and harder for each new person.

In the long run, medieval poetry PhDs probably will end up in well-paying (if less inspiring) jobs like running pizza restaurants - but don't underestimate the awfulness of the short-term.

I understand the gist of what you are saying but consider this. Are there enough pizza management positions to absorb the number of adjuncts? I don't think so and I know you were just using Dominos as an example. If the set of all underpaid, abusive adjuncts suddenly entered the marketplace what consequences would there be? Are there enough positions? Would more less intelligent people be unemployed or have their wages decrease?

Overall, though you are right. There is way too much participation in graduate school in relation to the job market for those skills. However, this fact does not justify treating people poorly and this is where labor market regulation comes into play. Unfortunately we Americans, in the form of our elected officials, have decided that such regulation is too burdensome.

There aren't enough pizza management positions but unemployment is at an all-time low - even if adjuncts find manual labor beneath them, there are plenty of restaurants, paralegal, office labor, and other semi-skilled / unskilled jobs that they would be fit for.

My critique is that adjuncts see university employment as the One True Path when there are a multitude of other careers available, if only they would give up their teaching dreams.

Yes, I understand that to be your point and I overall agree with it. However if all of those people tried to gain employment elsewhere there are side effects.

A friend of mine with a Ph.D. in math and a Master's degree in electrical engineering works in industry in data science. He once told me that he would not want to hire people with a Ph.D. to do non research. He said they just have a hard time fitting into an environment where most other people aren't as insightful/perceptive.

Can people with the minds/attitudes/skillset of adjuncts fit into the workplaces you mention? Even if they could would it be useful? What side effects happen to the less intelligent who also compete for such jobs.

Whatever the answers are to this it does nothing to obviate the need for better labor market regulation.

>>A friend of mine with a Ph.D. in math and a Master's degree in electrical engineering works in industry in data science. He once told me that he would not want to hire people with a Ph.D. to do non research.

Does this mean that he considers himself an outlier (assuming he's also doing non-research activities), or that he feels that PhD holders need an extra high "tolerance" for many (most?) of us who don't hold a PhD?

I'm not sure where or how labour market regulation will help in this specific instance.

My reference to labor market regulation was aimed at adjunct labor. Such people should be paid better and I believe everyone should have affordable access to the healthcare system.

He considers himself and others with a Ph.D. in non research roles to need extra high tolerance. It's just his opinion and others may have better experiences. I was ABD in math when I quit (All But Dissertation). I spent one year in industry programming and it was hard for me. Obvious solutions were ignored and people tended to make issues seem bigger than they really were. I would be a bad employee and that's why I went to teach at a community college. I'll suffer the lower pay for greater autonomy and be in an environment were it's hard for really dumb decisions to ruin my day. I'm not an adjunct and in my system adjuncts are paid pro-rata and have pro-rata benefits too.

There are about 700,000 adjuncts and 60,000 pizzerias in the US.

PhD students tend to adopt the value system of their advisors mentors and others at their university.

Advisors value academic careers, partly because that is usually the only thing that they know, and look down on PhDs that go into industry or change fields as failures.

Advisors are also judged on the academic success of their graduates, who ideally go on to famous careers at notable universities. There is a branch of academic politics that governs how advisors place their best students where they will reflect well on them.

The net result is that graduate students have few mentors advising them on the possibilities outside of academe. The "failures" are left to make it on their own.

My guess is that it's not just about being smart. Running a restaurant (=managing people), is quite a different beast than studying or teaching medieval poetry. The few people I know that have chosen to pursue an academic career aren't exactly happy to take on a challenge, tackle new problems as they arise and lead a team.

Sadly, running a franchise business can become quite abusive too.

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