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In my experience, if it's research that gets you up in the morning then a postdoc is the sweet-spot - you're experienced enough to make good progress but not too senior that you're sat in meetings all day. It's just a shame the salary is so bad you're almost forced to move on.

Another issue (at least here) is that most positions are limited to 3-4 years and permanent positions in academia are quite rare and hard to get.

This is why I am so pissed off at academic hypocrisy currently. Labs were shut down for months. For what? To protect whom? The senior faculty who did their Ph.D. in the early eighties and refuses to transition to emeritus status?

Junior researchers were absolutely shortchanged in the pandemic shutdown, and nobody is bothered about it. For all the talk about keeping people safe, why were younger scientists denied access to experimental facilities, and yet almost no funding agencies extended grant contracts? Almost zero institutions extended their timed postdoc contracts too. And to add insult to the injury, most academic institutions had hiring freezes in 2020, effectively kiboshing careers of young scientists caught in this trap.

Honestly, I am disgusted with university faculty right now - all fancy talk, no action.

An example of the hypocrisy: a prominent university in the Boston area that announced that they will suspend on campus childcare from January. Labs are still open, and the population of lab workers most likely to have benefited from on campus childcare were postdocs. Now they have to find at home childcare at their own expense. Postdocs also tend to be overwhelmingly foreign nationals who want to avoid rocking the boat.

Higher ed is an industry in crisis. Get out and be happy that you realized this before it was too late to leave that hell hole of a sector. The grass is greener. I promise.

Some hiring freezes have actually continued even to today. I applied to one postdoctoral fellowship in the Bay Area in March 2020, and the organization still sends me a monthly update that they have suspended all hiring due to the pandemic and will resume hiring once the pandemic is over (as ill-defined as that may be). That's almost two years at this point. That is a lifetime for young scientists. I agree that decisions like these do effectively end the scientific careers of many young scientists, or at least push them out of science as a career choice. It's sad but true.

Thing is - we don't really know at this point whether this wilful destruction of the scientific careers of a cohort were avoidable or not. And zero scientific administrators will face zero consequences for this.

Whatever it is, the reverse will actually be trotted out, scientists saved lives and pat themselves on their backs.

> It's just a shame the salary is so bad you're almost forced to move on.

UC Berkeley, for example, pays its postdocs $60k to $65k per year. It's challenging to live in the Bay Area for that money. Also, remember many postdocs have kids or are planning to have one. Child care is at least $2000 a month in the Bay Area. Asking bright, motivated individuals to delay their life decisions in pursuit of ill-defined scientific ideals is something I have a tough time defending.

The thing is, a postdoc is a classic case of credential inflation. You don't really need a postdoc, especially if an industry job is your goal. The purpose of an academic postdoc is to strictly increase the items in your CV to make you more marketable for academic employment. Industries are hiring senior postdocs strictly because more postdocs are applying for such jobs. And this is a side effect of poor mentorship in academia in general, with freshly minted PhDs drifting into postdocs just because.

Very few graduate students think seriously about their destination during their doctoral program and are happy to be in the lab all day meeting goals their advisor sets out for them. And advisors are also happy to let this be the state of affairs since you are getting highly trained, motivated workers for pennies. This passivity starts dissipating only during a postdoc and not always. Poor mentorship can be excused in industry, but this is inexcusable when academics are paid to be mentors; it's literally in a professor's job description. NSF/DOE/NIH grants all have significant mentorship sections - and they are there for a reason.

Exactly. But this is very variable across fields. In CS or Math, it is feasible to get a tenure-track position or the equivalent in industry without a postdoc.

In Biology for instance, inflation is so insane that most tenure-track positions demand you have significant postdoctoral experience. Same applies to many industry jobs.

> In Biology for instance, inflation is so insane that most tenure-track positions demand you have significant postdoctoral experience.

“Senior job demands significant work experience” what am I misunderstanding?

The issue is the inflation of requirements in some fields due to competition. A postdoc is generally understood to be further training in running your own lab as a PI - you might manage and guide doctoral students, for example, or learn how to write and apply for grants. With that in mind, a lot of people are happy to commit to a few years of postdoctoral work. In some fields, however, the extreme shortage of tenure track positions has made very long postdoctoral stints a requirement, rather than as something to sweeten the deal. Like others have pointed out, in CS a PhD is enough to get you a tenure track academic position, while industry jobs abound. Meanwhile, in biology I commonly see 5+ years of postdoc experience being typical just to be in the consideration for an industry job that 10 years ago would have happily hired a fresh PhD. The general thinking is that a postdoc only makes sense if you want an academic position, but the glut of PhDs in the market has pushed up the requirements for all kinds of jobs.

I still don’t really get it sorry - why isn’t being a postdoctoral research assistant a valid career by itself?

I know people who don’t want to teach or lead a group or work in industry so they do postdoctoral RA work. That’s their career. Why’s that not seen as a valid thing to do in the US? People are saying ‘because you might not get tenure.’ Ok but not everyone wants that career.

Because it's time limited. National lab postdocs are valid only upto 5 years from PhD. Many grants won't fund you if you are X years since PhD.

That's why the position of Research Assistant Professors exist - the way around the postdoc time limit loophole.

However, RAPs are significantly more expensive than postdocs, which is why faculty are more eager to phase out senior postdocs and hire fresh blood rather than convert them to RAPs.

The problem is we train way more PhDs than there are tenure track positions available. Most PhDs won’t be lucky enough to get one of those academic positions, and a postdoc is just delaying the inevitable transition to an industrial job. Postdocs are for all-star students with a good academic pedigree and publishing track record who have a good shot at tenure. People who were less then that (such as myself) are often better served starting their career outside academia.

From a pragmatic perspective that is how the calculus worked for me. It’s probably where the stigma arises from as well. Although I wish it weren’t like that, I never thought the purpose of a college/university education should be so limited to ‘job training’ (that’s what trade schools are for). That’s the American perspective, anyways.

> a postdoc is just delaying the inevitable transition to an industrial job

I don’t understand why - are postdoctoral jobs age-limited or something? Why can’t you keep doing them?

I think the point parent is trying to make is that the majority of postdocs will move to an industry job simply because that's where most of the jobs are, even if they'd prefer to remain in academia.

While postdoctoral jobs aren't age limited, they are defined in the US as a temporary training position, and it's not possible to remain a postdoc for very long. The vast majority of postdocs in the US are foreign nationals, on a visa scheme that limits their stay to a theoretical maximum of 5 years. The salary is low enough that it dissuades postdocs from remaining in these positions for very long anyway. Some institutions may support transitioning senior postdocs to a more semi-permanent "associate" position, but that's not usually the case. The visa scheme also disallows postdocs from applying for a green card (while maintaining status), which complicates matters further.