Hacker News Reader

Comment by libraryofbabel | Hacker News Reader

Agree with you - but I think the author of the article wants to get back in as a tenure-track professor rather than a programmer or data scientist on a scientific project. They would probably see coming back in as “staff” as an unacceptable loss of status and prestige in their field. (I think that status distinction is a terrible and stupid feature of academic research but it is very deeply-ingrained as folks are socialized in PhD programs to believe that the tenure track is the only route to happiness and academic success).

I wish more people thought like you and very much agree that academia could benefit from an influx for folks with industry experience and programming best practices!

View on HN

It's not about status and prestige, it's about scientific freedom and possibilities. Of course, someone who was on tenure-track or had an otherwise promising career before they left will not want to get back as a staff member, and, by the way, these people also cannot get hired as such. Sometimes there are even explicit restrictions such as "maximum of X years since Ph.D." or maximum age for lower-level positions.

I don't think this essentially different in business, it is not uncommon not to get hired when you're overqualified or considered too old for the job. The reasonableness of such restrictions can be discussed but they also exist in academia in most countries. In my country, for instance, none of the national funding schemes accept "having been in business" as an excuse in the CV (only medical reasons and pregnancy), so you're expected to be fully comparable to anyone who has worked the same number of years since the Ph.D. in academia. It sounds ridiculous but that's the rule. So you will compete with someone who has 40 publications as someone with 20 publications, for instance.

> it's not about status and prestige, it's about scientific freedom and possibilities

Status and prestige confer power. Power brings resources. How one uses those resources is separate.

That said, status and prestige are only correlated to title. An essential staffer will get what they need to do the work they want to do the way they want to do it.

Coming back as staff really is a big loss in status and prestige. It's fun to lament the terrible and stupid feature of status distinction but it's very real in terms of socializing, how people see you, how you see yourself, the resources available to you, the freedom to do what you want, how much you get paid, etc.

I have a PhD in math but I often dream about how nice it would be to get paid to write simulations for big shot mathematicians. Usually this work goes to undergrad/grad students. Maybe it’s just not worth paying for professional code.

It’s often hard to get money to fund anything else than PhD students or post docs.

I suspect it may also be hard to swallow the idea that a professional engineer's skills are needed when such a person costs more than the researcher's salary.

I actually don’t think that is the problem. In addition to the shortage of funds, there’s often a culture of doing most things yourself. When I was a PhD student, I did everything from vacuum systems, electronics, high current equipment, plumbing for cooling water, setting up a real time control system for all the equipment, data collection and analysis, and programmed quantum Monte Carlo simulation that was run on a high performance cluster (on top of writing papers and a thesis). Each of these tasks would have probably been done better by someone specialising in it, but there was certainly no money for that. (I had almost forgotten how much fun I had.)

Doing it yourself is certainly very important to be sure you get at least some understanding of what's going on, and often you are doing things nobody else knows how to do anyway.

But it sure would have been nice to have some professional support programmer around for advice on design and help out with the gnarlier bits.

Programming was actually what I did best. I had been programming since I was eleven and also took some computer science courses at the university. In addition, the kind of programming that most physicists do isn’t really helped by the skill many so called engineers have. It’s not about organising large multitude of systems and their interaction (which is usually the hard parts today) as much as knowing things about efficient numerical packages and making sure that the computer’s finite precision don’t overwhelm your statistical uncertainties. And of course, to understand the model, with its limitations, of the system we are trying to simulate and efficient algorithms for that.

Yep, and even then they don't get paid super well. A typical "small" NSF grant is for $500K over 3 years, and the university takes 45-65% of that, so with one award a PI has ~$83K to spread on their annual summer salary and ~2 PhD students at a stipend of around $30K per year each (with the remainder on conferences, publication fees, equipment, etc.).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com