
I am a postdoc and I think I just realized I have been screwed for years - crocowhile
http://gilest.ro/2011/i-am-a-postdoc-and-i-think-i-just-realized-i-have-been-screwed-for-years/
======
apl

      > Sure, some postdocs may realize too late they don’t
      > really want to be independent and they would gladly keep
      > doing what they are doing for some more time: this is
      > what positions in industry are for², and this is what a
      > lab tech position is for. No need to invent new names
      > for those jobs.
    

a) Industry positions require and offer very different things when compared to
mid-level research positions. Lab techs don't do original research and often
earn even less than their junior faculty colleagues. What the authors of the
blog posts in question were going for is simply a sustainable middle ground in
academic research; something between "up" and "out." Realistically, not
everyone will find a tenured professorship. It'd be much more efficient to
keep these (often well-trained) researchers in mid-level positions where they
can do original research without having to manage a huge lab or being
drastically underpaid.

b) Moreover, the industry/lab tech idea completely ignores anything other than
life sciences and certain physical sciences. There are industry jobs and well-
paid lab techs in microbiology, engineering, some areas of physics, chemistry.
Other than that? Not many alternatives to the standard career path, really.

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galadriel
I am a masters student in an developing economy, who will soon join a PhD
program in US, and I will do that after rejecting an analyst position at major
banking firm.

For me, PhD makes sense because it would give me 4-5 tension free years of
research with my PI worrying about the grants while I worry about science.
Sure, job prospects might not be great for saturated market in US and Europe,
but I hope I will be able to get a academia job back home or some place
nearby.

I think system needs an overhaul to create jobs, and first step should be to
decouple teaching from research. As there are only so many teaching jobs a
university can provide, why not create independent labs? Max Plank institutes
seem a fine model to me.

~~~
DuncanIdaho
Then its not an university any more is it? You could always go and start an
independent R&D company.

Fucking around with uni's to employ people that nobody wants to employ is just
fucked up.

Correct me if I'm wrong - but with PhD's its the usual affair - softer the
field, bigger the unemployment - meaning that there aren't nearly as many
jobless PhD's in physics, medicine and chemistry as there are in economics,
literature,...

So what really should be done is maybe stop educating so many people that
nobody wants to hire?

~~~
galadriel
I can only tell about my field, which is Physics, and a hard science field.

No, it is still increasingly hard to find a job (in US) from what I saw. Even
getting to tenure track is achievement in itself. For example, any major top
school (like Caltech, MIT, etc) train as many as one and half to two times the
PhD students each year compared to department strength. MIT Physics, for
example, intakes roughly ~25 PhD students/year for faculty strength of ~80.
That's almost 125 PhD graduating every five year. There is no way all of them
would find an academia job. Doing two postdocs is increasingly normal, and I
know people doing three-four of them.

So yeah, there are surely lot of good people who are sucked into this broken
system, and we sure need some fixes to it.

------
galadriel
They link seems to be down. Anyone has a transcript?

~~~
crocowhile
While I am trying to cope with load, I copied ans pasted it here:
<http://pastehtml.com/view/1dimuph.html>

------
idknow
sorry, your website-blog.css is written to disallow me the ability to resize
my window to make a less-wide column.

I hate stupid systems. stop writing concrete widths in CSS

I'm very sorry for the off-topic content but i'm old-enough now and I dont
have to give a crap anymore. idknow at google's mail

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JoachimSchipper
I liked the linked article by Katz
(<http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html>) better; previous discussion
at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122106>).

------
VMG
dead

~~~
crocowhile
I have my own webserver on a micro Amazon instance. It seems it's dying under
hackernews pressure :/ Any suggestion on something I could do? It's a
wordpress blog on apache.

~~~
patio11
Find the line which says KeepAlive and _turn it off_.

Out of the box, the configs which ship with Apache on e.g. Ubuntu are
virtually engineered to fail if your blog ever gets a traffic spike.

