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Comment by matmatmatmat | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see this from CERN, which is essentially an institution that enables young people to work unlimited hours for next to no pay and virtually no chance of ever attaining significant recognition of their work.

In my brief time there, it was not uncommon to hear stories of people who had moved there and not even unpacked all of their belongings after a year or more.

On the plus side, if you love particle physics and/or the surrounding context, it's one of the best places to be. On the minus side, you'll have to give up everything else and be quite smart in addition to move ahead.

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> not even unpacked all of their belongings after a year or more.

I stopped having any personal effects at work. Purely mercenary.

It makes it easier when I get walked out when the C-Suite decides they need higher bonuses.

My current as well as last two jobs, the only thing i brought in was a single coffee mug, and no other personal effects. (The mug was because i'm doing my little bit to help the environment by re-using my cup...I know, I know, its a very small bit, but still.) I have long seen myself as merely a mercenary. But, my latest job - started only 8 months ago - was supoosed to be the company where i retire from. That is, where i stop being the merc. But in just those 8 months, i already have seen the awful apporoach senior leadership takes towards its employees. So, i guess i stay as a merc. (and slowly plan my pivot towards being my own boss...charging these senior leaders exorbitant consultant rates. ;-)

Maybe I should've been clearer, but I didn't mean personal effects at work. The people I knew had not even unpacked their things in the apartments they were renting because they were too busy working, particularly professors.

And this applied to both tenured and untenured professors. Don't want to name names but one of the high up profs I chatted with there worked roughly 60 hours a week, 6 10-hour days. I mean, he loved it, and he had a lot of responsibility, but I think it's fair to say it's pretty much all he did. His wife mostly traveled and his daughter was already in undergrad by then.

It is genuinely unclear to me how a new prof could hope to compete with that or make a meaningful contribution when even the "old guard" have given up everything to just work.

I once had my temp contract terminated on my way home from work one day.

I was called by the staffing agency halfway back on my commute and they said "Don't go into work tomorrow. They'll mail you your things."

I'm not sure if I ever got those things back (to be fair, it was only like six things).

Also, I was so insulted that they didn't just tell me in person at the end of the day and let me pack up my stuff and take it home with me. But the staffing agency claimed it was the company's policy to do that with contractors.

...after that I stopped bringing much of anything to the office. Currently my office has a ton of crap in it, but it's a home office :).

Here's my anecdote to balance your anecdote:

I was getting paid very well in a junior position at CERN, rarely working more than 7.5 hours a day, doing interesting things, and with a hefty bonus when I took a three day long weekend business trip.

I'm not sure this is much of a counterbalance? I think you can generally expect junior positions to have less responsibility and stress, at the expense of virtually no chance of moving up unless you really, really grind, and even then, there's not a lot of space at CERN. I think you really have to love it to the exclusion of all else and be smarter than your already smart peers to succeed there.

These are the places where the person sitting next to you and doing pretty much the same job as you could be making half of what you are making simply because you have a CERN contract and they work for a contractor.

My company hired 2 Doctorate in Physics graduates who both did their doctoral work at CERN...

as SREs.

Let that percolate for a bit.

Yeah, you got a great deal. I've been hearing this story at least since I worked there, about 15 years ago.

We absolutely did. I’d pity CERN for the loss of some amazing, hardworking talent, but they had their chance.

I don't have any sympathy for CERN and neither do they have any for their employees. The people that run CERN are entirely focused on a particular path of scientific progress and their handling of the situation will only change if they can't find people to do the work that needs to be done.

An article like this is a nice alarm bell that maybe they should reconsider their approach, but nothing will really change until it impacts their bottom line, which is getting correct work done on a timely schedule.

That said, I think it's fair to say particle physics hasn't had any major discoveries since the Higgs and no sure-fire theoretical path toward one, either, so the best and brightest may start looking at other fields.

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