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Comment by a_bonobo | Hacker News Reader

You shouldn't shame the student, you should absolutely shame the system that wastes people's life-times like this.

7 1/2 years of being a PhD student means 7 1/2 years of missed career growth, missed retirement funds, missed personal growth (how are you going to start a family in poverty-wages?). In the US postdocs are also counted as trainees (another scam) so people enter their careers in their late 30s, early 40s, with empty retirement accounts, no savings, and vaguely applicable skills. This might have been possible 20, 30 years ago, when OP's PI was training, but nowadays it's just a huge loss that isn't worth the vague scientific gains.

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The system is the cult of academia, which indoctrinates students to go down the funnel of becoming a tenured professor, even though most won't make it to the end. It hides career alternatives because those in the cult are largely ignorant of them. Interactions with loudmouth professors with big egos reinforce the will to persevere and avoid the shame of quitting the cult.

I encourage every PhD student to get industry internships, one per year. This needs to be commonplace. It shows them an alternative, gives them a dignified exit (whether they graduate or quit), creates heavyweight competition for the professors with big egos, pays students a decent wage for a while, and injects some novelty on both sides.

I encouraged my GF to do an internship in the filled she ultimately wanted to work in. She wanted to do her PhD to be more desirable for biotech, and although the program was in bacterial systematics or whatever, it would teach her the tools.

Not only she was more capable than she thought, she’s considering not doing the PhD at all. Learning in industry when working with 100 people vs alone with you PI in a lab is IMO much better

Ty for saying this so true

The biggest issue is that 30 years ago the odds of getting a tenure track position if you stayed in academia were much higher, and you often didn't need to do a postdoc for more than a year or two at that. I'm guessing PhDs were more consistently finished within 5 years back then too.

The real problem in this specific instance isn't changes to industry/the economy, it's actually academia that has changed in a bad way.

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