Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

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It's naive to expect that just because you choose academia, that you have a reasonable expectation to gain your freedom without a lot of path-blazing. It was naive before and it's definitely naive now. Just look at the numbers. How many post-docs vs how many tenured professors?

If you looked at the numbers and decided to try it anyway, you only have yourself to blame if you fail after throwing away years of your life. You didn't blaze a path, you didn't do things substantially different than your forebears.

If you naively didn't look at the numbers and kept going out of blind faith, then sorry, you wasted your twenties and got only hard experience to show for it. Don't feel too bad, 90% of your academic peers are doing the same thing. I wasted my twenties too doing stupid things. Probably most of us did. Just don't pass your thirties the same way and you should be fine.

Not everyone is an entrepreneur. We shouldn't predicate scientific progress on the ability of our most brilliant minds to also be brilliant entrepreneurs. It would be a huge disservice to mankind. Some people know how to look at an atom and unlock the universe. How do we change the system to let them do that?

It may be naive today but it wasn't a generation ago, when the numbers were more favorable to a young PhD. Something has changed, which is why people write articles to say, "Hey, stuff's changed!"

It was still naive then. Students should have seen the huge numbers pouring in. They should have done the soul-searching then. You have to keep your head up and nose to the wind if you want any success at all in this world. It's always been that way, you're naive if you believe an institution can engineer success for you. No matter how many of your peers believe the same way you do.

In the 1950s-1960s, the university system was expanding, in part due to the post-WWII GI Bill. Anyone with a PhD was pretty much guaranteed a decent job.

A pyramid scheme works well when the pyramid is expanding. It doesn't work so well when the tip of the pyramid is shrinking.

If EACH tenured professor has 1 graduate student per 3-5 years, that's nowhere close to the rate at which new tenure track jobs open up. There are some private sector jobs for Math PhDs, but even those have an oversupply.

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