
Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories - danielmorozoff
http://www.nature.com/news/young-talented-and-fed-up-scientists-tell-their-stories-1.20872
======
hprotagonist
"if you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have
something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not
been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not
come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible
result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very
embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a
different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible
results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one
kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to
research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing
something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it.
"

\-- J. J. Thompson"

~~~
SilasX
Sorry if I'm missing the point of this quote, but it seems wrong to me that
you "can't point to something to prove the money wasn't wasted".[1]

You can always do some variant of "we tried this, it didn't work; in the
future, you no longer have to spend money to see if this will work." Right?

[1] Removing the triple negative: it should always be possible to prove the
money accomplished something.

~~~
hprotagonist
From a business perspective, you're right enough. Academic research is not
business oriented -- and Thompson was saying that it should not be.

When discovered, there was nothing particular monitizable about quaternions,
and they were not found as a consequence of any business enterprise looking
for new tools -- but Hamilton didn't starve to death because he failed to
capitalize on them. 80 years later, suddenly we rediscover the fact that we've
solved gimbal lock and can easily describe quantum states.

~~~
SilasX
The quote is referring to proof of _progress_ , not proof of _profitability_ ,
which is a separate issue.

------
jawilson2
I got my biomedical engineering PhD, and was a neurology professor at a top
children's hospital doing brain/epilepsy research for a few years. Literally
my dream job for most of my life. I left it two years ago due to many of the
reasons listed, and got a job going quant/algorithmic trading at a prop firm.
I have never been happier, it is a hell of of a lot less stressful, I may
actually pay off my student loans before I retire, we just bought a house, and
obviously don't regret it for a second. Most of my old friends at my old job
are jealous; they have psych or bio backgrounds, and have more or less hit
their ceilings in terms of where that skill set can take them. For engineers
who know how to code (I was a core contributer to www.bci2000.org for a
decade+), math is math, and it doesn't matter if it is doing real time
processing of brain signals or market data.

~~~
JDiculous
Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents to have society employing you
full-time to make rich people richer via gambling in the financial markets
rather than something more beneficial to society?

I don't blame you at all (I'm sure your quality of life is magnitudes of order
better, and I'd do the same in your position) and this isn't personal at all,
it just pains me that our brightest graduates are working in finance rather
than something like curing cancer.

~~~
jawilson2
I hope you aren't downvoted for this, as this is basically my exact thought
process for the last few years.

> make rich people richer

It is prop trading, so we are making ourselves richer, technically. We do a
lot of charity work and donations with schools, etc.

> Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents

Absolutely. However, I also like not having to beg my toddler to eat the food
in front of him because payday is 10 days away, every credit card is maxed,
and who knows how we will get to the grocery, which is what happened sometimes
during my postdoc 3-7 years ago. Student loans were coming in at ~$1500/month
when I'm making $2500/month. It was very difficult, and I was deeply
depressed. When I finally landed that professor position, my workload got
worse, and while there was a pay increase, I still wasn't going to be buying a
house anytime soon. This was NOT an expensive area. We ended up living with my
parents for a while (me, my wife, and 3 kids). The math just wasn't adding up,
and there wasn't an end in sight. Adding in trouble getting grants, not
wanting to restart the faculty job search, I started looking at industry. I
applied at a few prop trading firms on whim, and mine ended up being a great
fit.

I was pretty successful doing the actual research, but my particular niche
(neuroscience+software methods and tools) isn't really funded by grants. I
even got several rounds of good publicity for some of my PhD work, and did
international interviews, etc. I was a very good scientist, but that doesn't
cut it any more; new investigators are competing with established labs and
members of the AAS who are submitting 30 grants per cycle. I was doing some
very cool work with kids with epilepsy, which would greatly improve outcomes.
I was a very valuable member of our collaboration; that research more or less
came to a halt when I left, though I have been able to help out through
consulting from time to time. So, what I did was in high demand and highly
worthwhile, but there was a disconnect with getting the funding.

Am I being greedy? Maybe. There is that saying "you have to love yourself
before you can love others." I think that might apply financially as well,
particularly with regards to your family. It wasn't worth seeing my kids live
in the stress of living paycheck to paycheck, going to crappy schools in
crime-ridden areas that we can afford, with the added possibility of losing
their dad because everyday he wonders if today is the day he drives off a
bridge on the way home or something. If that means that my epilepsy research
doesn't get done...then so be it. Vote for people who will increase research
funding. So, when the offer came in and it was 3X what I was making as a prof,
without considering bonuses, the weight of the world left my shoulders.

~~~
siddarthd2919
The cost of education (Fees) are going higher. Research/Researchers are not
getting funded. Where is the money going to? Infrastructure of the
universities?

~~~
SolaceQuantum
My younger brothers undergraduate research mostly focused on answering this
question in the University of California system. His conclusion is that
funding was overwhelmingly going to the administrative faculty and has been
doing so since UC let the administrative faculty have the most say in how he
universities are run.

~~~
JDiculous
What could be done to change this?

------
nonbel
I would say "stay as far away from academic research as you possibly can" is
the best advice someone can get these days. It is an awful, stressful waste of
the prime of your life.

From what I saw in biomed only 1/10,000 or so will end up with the time,
skills, and appropriately ambitious project to allow a decent job to get done.
The rest will be forced to produce BS (literally, most of it is just
misinformation at this point) or quit before even graduating.

~~~
BeetleB
>I would say "stay as far away from academic research as you possibly can" is
the best advice someone can get these days. It is an awful, stressful waste of
the prime of your life.

On the other hand, spending some years pursuing a PhD can be a great time to
build skills and introspect in life. I grew a lot in that time in a way I
don't think I would have with a job.

Of course, if you have a very stressful advisor, it isn't worth it.

~~~
nonbel
Actually, my adviser was quite laid back. As a result, I was _able_ to build a
lot of skills in order to complete my project. However, notice I said _able_.
I had to self-teach and self-fund to do it, the academic stuff was really just
an obstacle.

I think something like a basic income would allow the a certain type of person
to achieve the same, and do it much faster and cheaper than getting a higher
degree. I wonder if that is one reason why most of these problems started when
higher education/research became less of an "elite" activity, ie as discussed
in subnaughts link in this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805406](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805406)

------
kayhi
In the HN spirit, where's the opportunity? How can we help improve the life of
researchers?

Start ups trying to help:

Science Exchange (YCS11)
[https://www.scienceexchange.com/](https://www.scienceexchange.com/) :
outsource parts of your research to companies

Instrumentl (YCS16)
[https://www.instrumentl.com/](https://www.instrumentl.com/) : identify and
push relevant grants towards applicable research

Experiment (YCW13) [https://experiment.com/](https://experiment.com/) :
crowdfunding platform for scientific research

Transcriptic (YCW15)
[https://www.transcriptic.com/](https://www.transcriptic.com/) : a robotic
cloud laboratory for the life sciences

LabGuru [https://www.labguru.com/](https://www.labguru.com/) : inventory
management and lab notebook

Lab Spend [https://labspend.com/](https://labspend.com/) : tracks spending and
finds savings on supplies and chemicals

~~~
timr
As a former scientist, current startup person: please stop. This is crass.
Startups that sell services to scientists aren't helping with the fundamental
problem (i.e. there aren't many jobs, and there isn't enough funding once you
have a job). Crowdfunding is nice in theory, but just makes the problem of
vanity science worse than it is right now. Crowds don't know shit about
science.

If you want to help researchers, vote for people who will _increase scientific
funding_. Much of this crunch is _directly_ attributable to congressional
budgetary cutbacks since the early 2000s:

[http://www.faseb.org/portals/2/images/opa/Factsheet_Restore-...](http://www.faseb.org/portals/2/images/opa/Factsheet_Restore-
NIH-Funding-Graph2.gif)

(Oh also: encourage your local billionaire(s) to stop funding ridiculous
vanity projects, and do scientific good by giving grants to researchers who
are already doing peer-reviewed work. Or just encourage them to give their
money to the organizations that exist and do a great job of this, like HHMI,
or the Gates Foundation. How _refreshing_ it would be to hear a nouveau riche
Silicon Valley dudebro stand up and say: _" I want my money to have the
tiniest chance of curing cancer in my lifetime -- a task so impossibly large
that even my vast wealth and gigantic ego cannot possibly tackle it alone --
so I'm making a massive charitable donation to the National Cancer
Institute!"_ Alas...)

~~~
Bartweiss
Frankly, crowdfunded science scares the hell out of me.

Pretty much every time I've seen it, it consists of some fringe researcher
promising one weird trick to cure A, B, and C. They don't get funding through
traditional channels, because actual experts recognize the subtle-but-
inescapable reasons they won't succeed, so instead they go to crowdfunding to
squander a bunch of public money.

I'm sure this _could_ work, genuinely viable projects lack funding all the
time, but it's generally because they weren't sexy enough for the grant
committee. If the NIH thought it wasn't exciting enough, what are the chances
the general public will choose it over some guy promising to cure cancer with
nanomachines?

~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
Yes!

The problem with funding science is simply the size of the pot; the way it's
dolled out is actually quite reasonable given all the problems it could have.

Sure, you'll have cases of grants not getting funded because it runs contrary
to the prevailing wisdom, and that is bad, but the magnitude of this problem
is often overblown. You can swim against the current if you're careful about
it and make a compelling case, absolutely.

Compare this to the issues of having anyone other than scientific peers
judging the merits of work, and you'll see the easy advantage.

------
subnaught
In the mid 90's, Caltech's David Goodstein predicted an impending "Big Crunch"
in science, writing: "We must find a radically different social structure to
organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch."

The essay is long but well worth reading:
[https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html](https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html)

------
mpweiher
My comment from a few days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12717765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12717765)

When I was first exposed to the research "environment" during my Diplom
studies (undergraduate - graduate, early to mid 90ies), I immediately
recognised that if you actually love research and knowledge, academia was the
last thing you ever want to get into. No surer way to kill the spark.

Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I
consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student. Interestingly,
that's also the feedback I get, though as "helpful" advice that while what I
am doing may be both good and important, it is unlikely to lead to success in
academia. With the implication that I should stop doing it and concentrate on
something more reasonable. Fortunately, I am not particularly interested in
success in modern academia, so I get to do something I consider both good and
important.

A related issue is that there really is no such thing as a senior researcher.
Instead, professors are turned into research managers, responsible for helping
their charges' careers, who then also turn into research managers. Actual
research appears to be mostly a still not entirely avoidable side-effect. (And
this seems similar to the way the only real way to advancement in industry is
to switch to management, all dual-track equivalence rhetoric aside).

------
dekhn
I feel for these scientists. I understand what they went through- I went
through it myself during the run-up of biomedical training in the mid-to-late
90's. After being a PI at a national lab for a few years, trying to get funded
against more experienced scientists (some of whom copied my ideas!) I decided
to move to industry.

Now I have a job with a well-defined 20% time dedicated to research with
effectively no limits on what I can do. I don't need to ask for funding- the
resources I need are just expenses I charge against my company's effectively
infinite budget. If I want to write a paper, I do- and those papers get cited
far more highly than my previous papers, because my employer's name is gold.

My salary is high enough that I maintain a lab in my garage and self-fund most
of my experiments.

This path doesn't work for everybody (the number of positions in industry that
allow this freedom is limited) but in my experience it allowed me far more
time to be a productive researcher than if I had tried to be a professor at a
tier-1 university or a researcher at a national lab.

Interestingly, my PhD training (in biomed) turned out to be ideal for being a
data scientist, and my personal interests that I pursued during my training
turned out to be ideal for working at my firm. In some sense, PhD programs
produce the best programmers and researchers in industry, along with teaching
a fair amount of how to deal with politics, which is critical in both academia
and industry.

~~~
joshu
OT: pics of lab?

------
neumann
I am finishing up my postdoc now. I went back to do a PhD from IT because I
loved the field I was entering and ended up really enjoying my PhD. I learnt a
lot, got exposed to some great minds, and raised the bar for my own standards
of quality, efficiency and intellect. But now, after two years of a postdoc
for a tenure track professor in the US, my academic dreams have unravelled. I
am looking for jobs in industry even though I am being encouraged for academic
track.

From my experience, it seems like the classic scientific research method of
the old guard who I was mentored by is fading. The greats in my field would
concentrate on one topic, work slowly, wrap it up, move to a new topic, and
cultivate protoges. Now, the people securing tenure-track and tenure all seem
to have half a dozen diverse projects to start with (to see which one suceeds
and look hungry) - I see a lot of corner-cutting in their research - being
bold is rewarded over detail and care.

Most of my peers whom I respect for their research output and well-roundedness
haven't made the cut for academia. A cynical sure fire recipe for making
tenure in academia? 1. Have a great knack for politics; 2. put yourself ahead
of your students by treating them as monkeys for publishing with no regard for
their scientific development; 3. cut corners (tell yourself you will fix it
when you get tenure); and 4. be a narcissist - you can't afford to do anything
that doesn't impact your track record positively (outreach counts!). That is
not to say there are not some great people who have got positions - but the
criteria for who makes the cut has changed sufficiently that it feels like it
is being played by those who are willing to play the rules of the game. The
worst part is that there is rarely any consequence down the line - once you
have secured enough funding the community overlooks all but most severe
transgressions.

------
Balgair
I'll put my 2 cents in here too.

PhD in bioeng. Not planning on academia. Unfortunately, most of my cohort of
grad students are ... blind?... to the data that we all know is out there. I'm
part of 2 groups on campus that specialize in industry networking and start-
ups. We do monthly happy-hours where we pay for the beer and nachos and we
also bring in speakers that have PhDs in industry to talk about the transition
and network with them too. We get a lot of people (30+) to show up to these
events.

But they are ALL 2nd or 3rd round post-docs. Almost no actual grad-students.
I've talk to them. They all know that they have no real shot, they all know
the odds in the lottery. They do not care. The only thing I can think is that
these 22-27 year olds really think they can out-work each other and 'make it'.
Past data in their lives says that they have always done so, and the next time
should be no different. It's amazing that such smart people can be so damn
bullheaded. Scientists are people too, including the stupidity.

------
hasbroslasher
I'm curious why this field hasn't been "privatized" to some degree. Why
doesn't division of labor apply? Why not have scientists go off and do their
research and rely on a team that is skilled at hoarding grants or publishing
works from raw data? I imagine it's probably due to some institutional
barriers (e.g. you can't get funding outside of a university context).

I imagine the reason is as always - our leaders are two-faced in their support
of science. They claim that it's a national issue but fail to make
professorship even remotely competitive in the hard sciences. This kind of
thing raises the most righteous indignation in me. We have a nation of know-
nothing politicians claiming "We need more kids in STEM!" without doing
anything to address the quagmire academia has become, largely because of over-
competition for resources.

For all of this myopia around STEM it's largely a misnomer. No one in industry
cares about climate science, geology, theoretical physics, abstract algebra,
topology, combinatorics or number theory - at least not in the dollars and
cents view. They may care insofar as there's a cash benefit, but not to the
degree that they care about building better oil pipelines, faster algorithms
and more efficient fabrics. So what we end up with is a world where Nike,
Facebook and Exxon Mobil attract the best talent - a world where PhD's are
basically forced to quit their jobs in order to go make money for the
bourgeois.

~~~
sseagull
> Why not have scientists go off and do their research and rely on a team that
> is skilled at hoarding grants or publishing works from raw data?

Partly because science is very specialized. If I work on something new, then
it's possible there is very few people in the world that know it or will
easily understand it. I couldn't have someone else write a paper or grant
proposal based on it - either they wouldn't understand it, or they are a
fellow scientist who wouldn't want to do it either.

The mistake, in my opinion, is making the number of papers published a metric
on which you determine a scientist's worth. Just like most metric-ization of
society today, it's a bad idea.

~~~
neuromantik8086
I disagree on your first point- I think that there could be someone else who
could write a grant proposal for me, provided that they a) expressed an
interest in grant writing over benchwork / data analysis and b) were fluent
enough in the field's literature to be able to translate my ideas into
bureaucratic prose more elegantly and efficiently than me. Such a hypothetical
individual might have some overlap with the "scientific popularizer" roles
that we see cropping up with figures like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye, in
the sense that they could serve as a conduit between scientists and funding
(whereas popularizers serve as links between scientists and the general
public).

The issue is that this kind of idealized division of labor can't exist in the
current climate- there just isn't enough money to distribute a researcher's
load across multiple specialists. This results in researchers being expected
to juggle advising, grant writing, committee work, publishing, coding,
analysis, and teaching, which creates more stress on researchers and poorer
quality results.

I do agree with you on your second point though- publish or perish is
academia's equivalent to rank and yank.

~~~
neuromantik8086
As an aside, I doubt that psychology would be experiencing nearly the number
of issues that it is now with replicability if psychologists were able to
delegate their analysis to an in-house statistician for verification. Or maybe
it would (assuming that the poor application of statistics is more of a socio-
political issue, which might very well be the case).

~~~
nonbel
>"the poor application of statistics"

It is actually statisticians who are at the root of the problem. There is no
proper way to apply the statistics most people are taught (NHST). However,
everyone tries (and fails) to come up with some way to use the stats because
they can't believe they were taught to perform such a waste of time ritual.
See here for a decent overview: [http://library.mpib-
berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf](http://library.mpib-
berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf)

------
javiramos
None of my research friends that have gone to industry regret it... Some of my
friends that have gone on to academic jobs regret the decision.

------
markkat
I've been in biomedical research for 15 years, and I am leaving the lab atm.
Many of my peers are as well. It's not a viable or enjoyable career anymore.
Funding is extremely political, and proposal reviews border on arbitrary.
Typically, the funding has been decided by seniority and politics, and the
review is justification.

I imagine that it will get better eventually, but I can't wait for that to
come to pass, and I can't in good conscience advise others to do so.

~~~
seanopedia
If you don't mind me asking, are you moving to somewhere in the biomedical
industry?

~~~
markkat
Yes, I started my own company. Doing something that I have wanted to for a
while.

------
martincmartin
Many of these people will leave for academia. Some of them have spare time, or
maybe will have spare time after their kids are grown, or will be able to
retire early. Then they could become citizen scientists [1], independent
scientists [2], etc.

Like independent film or video games, they couldn't compete head-on with big
budget research. But they could presumably make progress in areas ignored by
them: longer term, more fundamental research for example.

When I was a postdoc at MIT, it was common for the grad students to want to
have a "lunatic fringe" track at conferences or an "unconvential ideas"
seminar. But once you're in the heirarchy/buerocracy of academia, you
understand why those don't exist. Perhaps independent scientists could
actually do them?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist)

~~~
neuromantik8086
This is why I'm a fan of open data / data sharing, and why I wish federal
grants would more emphasize intermediate steps that could lead to papers
rather than the production of papers themselves. The barriers to data
collection are quite large (it's at least $1 million to acquire an MRI scanner
in my field, neuroimaging; a huge fixed cost that most individuals would never
be able to afford), but the cost of hosting those data once they're acquired
is trivial. Once up on the net and publicly shared, anyone can take a crack at
the the data and see what they can find.

~~~
alex_hirner
Funding bodies emphasize data sharing more and more. However, that is along or
after a publication.

No one has figured out academic attribution of data-only in a satisfactory way
yet, but some noteworthy attempts exist. E.g.
[https://www.elsevier.com/connect/new-data-journal-lets-
resea...](https://www.elsevier.com/connect/new-data-journal-lets-researchers-
share-their-data-open-access)

------
bluetwo
I understand this article is mostly about the pressure of finding grants and
doing research, but the role also includes teaching. I would be curious to
hear, based on the experience of others, how much of the money generated by
teaching a class goes to the professor.

Something like:

% = ($ Professor paid per Class) / (Students per Class * Number of Credits for
Class * $ Charged per Credit)

At least by my calculations based on my own experience, 90% of the revenue
here gets sucked up by overhead with only 10% going to the person teaching. If
a non-profit was run this way, it would get shut down.

------
xamuel
Pure math phd here, now working in finance.

On a personal level I wish I could've been a research professor.

But on an objective level, in pure math the invisible hand of the market is
acting correctly. There's already so much amazing pure math published, you
could devote your whole life just to understanding 1/100th of the math
published in the 1990s, to say nothing of the stuff published in 2016.

We don't need more basic researchers right now.

Sucks though that a lot of people (like me) have to watch a life dream
crumble, though.

~~~
Chinjut
Do we need more finance people? I wouldn't say we "need" much of anything; we
could go any which way.

So who says the invisible hand of the market is acting correctly if it makes
your life dream of being a research professor crumble and forces you into
finance work instead?

------
exox
The problem I faced - and still am, to an extent - was that during my PhD I
was given no support or really any information at all about the possibility of
a life and career outside of academia. I was fortunate enough to be offered a
postdoc position in the same group that I did my PhD (particle physics) before
I’d actually submitted my thesis. However 6 months later I desperately needed
a change and managed to find another postdoc as a research scientist in the
Medical Physics department of a cancer hospital.

Medical physics research has felt more fulfilling than particle physics, but
I’m now in a position where my current contract expires in around 9 months,
and with a mortgage to pay and a family to support I have to decide between:
looking for yet another short-term postdoc position (in a hopefully related
field of physics) - ending up in exactly the same position in 2-3 years;
starting to apply for grants and funding with my current research group - a
very stressful process with no guarantees of anything; moving into industry /
private sector - assuming that it’d be possible to find a company that had a
need for the very specific knowledge base and skills that developed over the
past 7 years.

Or all of the above, at the same time, while trying to continue working my
current research projects.

As someone that has always had an interest in computing, data analysis and
software, but has ended up approaching them from a physics-based direction, I
don’t feel qualified to compete with computer science/statistics grads for
most of the software development or data science jobs that I see advertised.

I'm sure that there are other fields out there that would suit me, but having
never had a non-academic-research job, I'm struggling to know where and what
to look for. Does anyone have any practical advice for moving away from an
academic career path?

~~~
platform
>I don’t feel qualified to compete with computer science/statistics grads for
most of the software development or data science jobs that I see advertised.

I suspect you are more qualified than most oracle-developer-turned-data-
scientists

Give it ago. review some of open source projects that can leverage your math
or data understanding skills. Contribute to those. Use that as your
experience/resume

~~~
hash-set
I hate to burst your bubble, but outside of the major metros, there are few
data science type jobs that are any good. It's an up-and-coming field, maybe--
but as someone with a PhD and a lot of software development experience, making
the transition has been tricky (am still working on it). It may be a good
track or it may fizzle out, we'll see.

A few superstars will do well, the rest will be an urban myth of potential
prosperity and happiness.

------
cryoshon
yeah, i left science for the reasons the article outlined.

it's a big weight off of my shoulders. i tell people who are thinking of going
into science not to do so, now.

~~~
hash-set
Me too. I loved it. I could not think of a better way I could have spent my
20s. But I was going broke and had to get out.

------
rubidium
"as a young researcher moving to the private sector, he’s had to prove himself
all over again."

This is true and is worth anyone making the switch keeping in mind. Commercial
companies want a commercial track record before they trust you with important
decisions.

------
debt
i hear this is the same problem in politics. a ton of fundraising and very
little politicking or whatever it is politicians use to do normally during the
day.

------
pvaldes
"mediocre science", that line says it all.

------
santaclaus
The main problem with science is the lack of agile methodologies -- the
scientific process is ripe for disruption.

~~~
meech
Is this sarcastic?

~~~
santaclaus
Satire :)

~~~
meech
Excellent.

------
hash-set
Having gone through a lot of what is discussed in the article, I have
concluded that academic research careers are for rich people only. I didn't
even have student loans, but the pay was ridiculous given how many years of my
20s I spent in school, i.e. not making any income. Retirement is a real thing
you know? So is getting old and having poor health.

The comments on the nature.com page are interesting, too. No matter how much
you love your career and your research, there is more to life.

Also, you can see how climate research has become a total echo chamber--the
people fighting over the scraps of funding will gladly sell their souls to a
communist lie if that's what it takes to get by.

~~~
pvaldes
> I have concluded that academic research careers are for rich people only.

100% correct. There is a lot of artifitial barriers with the only purpose of
deter the poor, introverted, physically disabled, unable to lie convincingly,
or coming from incorrect countries to pass.

Maybe we should warn young people to not spending too much time doing science
until reaching 50 years old or so. Science, as we understand it currently, is
not much different to doing drugs. Will slurp all your money with some
glimpses of a promised paradise, isolate you from friends and family, will
boost your stress levels, increase your probability of having cancer and will
damage your health. Your opportunities of having children or a good life will
be seriously handicapped. I wonder why is not forbidden still.

