
So Many Research Scientists, So Few Openings as Professors - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/14/upshot/so-many-research-scientists-so-few-openings-as-professors.html?hpw&rref=upshot&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0
======
bane
I run a small industrial applied research lab (<100 researchers). The truth is
that, except in fairly specific cases, we don't need PhD level staff either.
Just like in a university lab, the bulk of the hard work is done by people
with Graduate (or in some cases Undergraduate) degrees. Practical experience
in the field is also about 50% of what we need (since we're ultimately
figuring out things that can go into engineering and deployed operationally,
knowing what the end-state environment looks and runs like is critical). The
role of PI is more often filled in our case by the corporate leadership.

I honestly think that the lack of large industrial research labs and the
drying up of good academic research positions is very much an issue of what
would be R&D funding going to other things that provide better near term ROI:
VC, stock market, etc.

R&D is very much an investment like anything else and for whatever reason
(patents, existing IP portfolios, etc.), it's just not a place that gets much
attention at the moment as the money handlers have found that they have more
ROI opportunity elsewhere.

I think the modern substitute for old fashioned R&D is the modern tech
startup. The siren call of these ridiculously inflated "valuations" is simply
too much for investment managers and it locks up more and more money that
could go towards other investments. There's more parallels there as well, R&D
and Startup investment is a high-failure game. But the outcome of successful
startups is likely to be much larger than the outcome of a successful R&D
venture (which still has very long tails of IP capture, product development,
marketing, etc.)

I think it's a shame in the sense that, while we end up with dozens of photo
sharing sites and social network startups, there's very few actual world
changing ones out there. Most of what we get are not "hard" technical areas
and their value derives from their faddish popularity - they're kind of the
Karashians of technology.

But I guess that's the way of the world.

~~~
selectron
The goal of research (at least for basic science) isn't to make money, it is
to increase knowledge about the universe. This knowledge is a public good, so
it makes sense that private industries motivated by profit do not support
fundamental research. Scientific progress is a rising tide that lifts all
boats.

~~~
danielweber
Price signals are how we tell people what research careers are worth
considering.

Unless they don't mind working for peanuts, in which case there's no problem.

~~~
tostitos1979
Well .. it is a tournament model so price is misleading. Top researchers at
industrial labs get paid a decent amount. The problem is (a) getting a coveted
job, and (b) mobility when things eventually go south at your employer and
they decide research is expendable.

~~~
projectramo
I think both these points are true:

1\. Society uses price signals to drive activity to areas "we" want to develop

2\. In research, the tournament model prevails so a few winners get most of
the gains

However, the question arises:

The tournament model prevails in many other domains including startups, the
movie industry and so forth. However, in those areas most people don't feel
that the enterprise is severely underfunded. (I am assuming this so if people
have contrary data, I will re-assess).

The question stands: in spite of the tournament model, why does society fail
to deliver enough reward for basic research when we as a society believe that
there should be more of it.

(We could ask the same of teachers, and so on.)

It could also be the case that "society", whatever that is, doesn't really
feel that science is underfunded.

------
Xcelerate
> Now, as a new crop of graduate students receives Ph.D.s in science,
> researchers worry over the future of some of these dedicated people; they’re
> trained to be academics and are often led to believe that anything else is
> an admission of failure.

As someone finishing up grad school, this doesn't seem quite accurate. To me,
it seems like a lot of the interesting research is being done in industry. I
remember scrolling through jobs online toward the end of my undergraduate and
seeing "PhD required" for all of the positions I was interested in. Most of my
friends working on their PhD are aiming either for industry or a research
scientist position at a government lab (like ORNL). So I'm not sure who
exactly constitutes this group that believes "not professor" = failure.

~~~
sliverstorm
What field are you in, though? I believe that attitude is tremendously
pervasive the more "theoretical" the field is, e.g. the closer it is to math &
physics, and the further it is from engineering.

~~~
delazeur
I studied chemical engineering: all of our PhD grads chose industry over
academia, and most of our young professors had come out of physics, chemistry,
and biology departments. It was an interesting culture mix, partly created by
the fact that ChemE is either disappearing as a field or changing to the point
of being unrecognizable (depending on who you ask).

~~~
Xcelerate
Yeah, the field has changed a ton. When my dad was working on his ChemE
degree, they had a class strictly on galvanization (which was barely covered
at all in my undergrad), and they were doing McCabe-Thiele diagrams by hand.

------
jostmey
Three big problems:

1) Emphasis on funding translational research using government grants, which
industry would otherwise be doing on its own. Hence, industry jobs have
evaporated while basic science has languished.

2) Institutional salary caps on Grad students/Post docs, so training funds
stretch too far resulting in an oversupply of entry level jobs. Better to pay
the best people at competitive wages.

3) Growing divide between industry and academia, making job hopping even
harder. Everybody is left worse off.

~~~
mattkrause
A _huge_ part of the issue, which you hint at in #2, is the "training" part.

Most research is actually performed by trainees: undergrads, grad students,
and some postdocs. This is silly because

1) the "training" is often pretty minimal (my PhD involved less coursework
than an undergrad masters) and

2) most of the people doing most of the work have no idea what they are doing.

Nevertheless, this still happens because there are TONS of established funding
mechanisms for trainees: REU (and similar per-university programs for
undergrads), and individual (NRSA) and institutional training grants (T31) for
postdocs and grad students.

In contrast, there are _very_ _few_ ways to fund more experienced individuals
who are not running their own lab. This is bad for those people, and also bad
for the institutions.

~~~
Fomite
There's more to training than coursework.

~~~
mattkrause
Sure, I don't want to sell my PhD program too short. There were lots of
visiting speakers (which needs $$$), journal clubs, workshops and things like
that. There was a terrific library, and an environment where many

That said, actual training on doing research was pretty damn thin on the
group.

------
HarryHirsch
What the article curiously doesn't talk about it the fact that the non-
academic job market at PhD level collapsed in 2007. In the news yesterday:
even more cutbacks at Merck. The degree of offshoring and outsourcing that
happened since 2003 in chemistry and the life sciences is incredible to anyone
not in the field.

~~~
srunni
More on the cutbacks at Merck: [http://endpts.com/merck-triggers-a-new-round-
of-layoffs-in-r...](http://endpts.com/merck-triggers-a-new-round-of-layoffs-
in-rd-reorganization/)

> Merck’s move follows a major trend in biopharma R&D, as the biggest
> companies concentrate more and more of their work in the big hubs. And
> virtually all of the major players have downsized at one time or another.

> Close to three years ago, Merck triggered a major reorganization in its R&D
> ranks, as the then new R&D chief Roger Perlmutter set in motion a plan that
> involved 8,500 layoffs, all of which were piled on a restructuring effort
> that was announced earlier.

> Those layoffs followed a years-long gap in significant new drug approvals
> and a string of clinical setbacks. Since then, though, Merck landed a
> landmark approval of Keytruda, now the number two checkpoint inhibitor on
> the blockbuster cancer market, along with an OK early this year for its hep
> C combo, Zepatier, which is being sold in a rival-infested field.

------
kneel
It's a real shame how the recession has hit STEM funding. There are a lot of
really exciting new technologies that are simply not funded.

The private sector cannot innovate until monetization is in sight and the
public sector is increasingly squeezed to publish papers with limited
resources.

The overall effect is less innovation and bad science.

~~~
cloverich
> The private sector cannot innovate until monetization is in sight

That feels like a sweeping condemnation of R&D in the private sector in
general. I know very little on the subject, is there a strong base for this
position?

~~~
Spooky23
It's a side effect of changes in the marketplace and the world.

When big conglomerates ran big horizontal and vertical businesses, they did
general R&D work that benefited their broader corporate mission. Bell Labs
wasn't there because AT&T was some sort of benevolent charity.

Now companies are mostly brokers between outsourcers and have a narrow focus.
We haven't "caught up" with the capability that we already have, so startups
have replaced corporate R&D, mostly using off the shelf stuff to make minor
incremental changes.

~~~
delazeur
I don't know if this was legally enforceable, but I have heard that the
existence of Bell Labs was essentially a quid pro quo with the federal
government in exchange for being granted a regulated monopoly on phone
service. More generally, I have heard that corporate executives in the golden
age of American industry had more of a sense that they owed a debt to the
public for all the free stuff they had been given (cost plus defense
contracts, government R&D, radio and TV frequencies, ect.). I think there are
some rose-tinted glasses involved in that analysis, but it was probably part
of it.

------
johan_larson
This story again. The oversupply of aspiring scholars is really _really_ not
news.

What would be news is any sign that things are changing, with applications to
grad school dropping, or maybe the expansion of graduate school degrees that
are explicitly not aimed at professorships.

~~~
projectramo
I had always heard that this was the case in philosophy, literature and so on.

Then, a few years ago, I heard it was the case in the sciences.

Now it is in the technical disciplines, and it is egregious. (4x oversupply).
The magnitude and the discipline is the news here (at least for me).

~~~
sseagull
The lack of scientists has been a myth for a long time, and probably comes
from the lumping of very different fields under the umbrella of "STEM".

Lots of good info from the IEEE Spectrum (2013): "The STEM Crisis is a Myth"

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth-
an...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth-an-ongoing-
discussion)

------
frozenport
I disagree with the bulk of this article. It certainly varies a lot of by
field but in biophotonics I've seen a lot of extremely poor candidates, people
who say things like "I don't do math", "I don't want to teach", "MATLAB is for
other people", "I'm not a biologist so I can't explain my work".

When I first started I thought these people sucked, and I was going to be
great. What I learned is that the graduate development opportunities are rare,
and many of the reason people suck are beyond their control. For example,
working on tedious projects or bullshit projects, do to your PI's conflict of
interest. Or simply put that your research rests on a foundation of lies.

So, on one hand we have many people on the other hand we don't have many
qualified people.

~~~
p4wnc6
Saying "MATLAB is for other people" isn't the sign of a poor candidate. Saying
"you will need to use MATLAB for this job" on the other hand is overwhelmingly
a sign of a bad job, in the same way that any usage of Excel VBA whatsoever is
a sign to run, run, run for the hills -- that firm is absolutely doing it
wrong.

I've also heard the opposite of your first example used as a criticism of
candidates too. After completing my undergrad degree in math and then grad
degrees in statistics, I was astounded how in industry, either describing
yourself more as an engineer or scientist who does not work on the abstract
math stuff _or_ describing yourself as someone who is very interested in
abstract math will _both_ cause you to get rejected.

The only way to win is to happen to have done a lot of difficult abstract math
in the past and remember it all well enough to pass tricky interviews, but
then to be overwhelmingly happy and satisfied with a job that will not ever
ask you to use it and will instead burn you out on dumb shit stuff like
fitting a regression to KPI data and using t-stats to directly do (fallacious)
model comparison.

The biggest career risk I've seen from having done very computer science-heavy
statistics is _underemployment_. Your math chops will be pure credential,
sometimes used by your manager to try to win arguments from authority about
e.g. that dumb shit KPI regression. But you will 100% never be given open-
ended modeling work that could actually have a positive impact on your
business's bottom line.

Essentially, you are hired to be some more senior person's sycophant political
darling. You function internally much the same way that a big consulting
company functions externally -- people already know what they want to hear,
they just want you to tell them what they want to hear, slap together some
plausible-sounding rationalizations for it, dress it up with buzzwords about
big data and "insights", and be a show pony for talking about it.

They emphatically do not want you for doing anything that would be called
"real" work.

There are occasional exceptions, especially in certain teams at certain
established tech companies. But then, landing a position inside one of those
teams is nothing but the same lottery as winning a professorship all over
again.

~~~
nradov
Welcome to the real world of being an employee. It's common in every field for
new employees to be academically overqualified and think their bosses are
incompetent and irrational. If you don't like it then try starting your own
company. I'm not being flippant; that's a serious suggestion and would give
you a more realistic perspective.

~~~
p4wnc6
Same tired, cliche replies as usual ... you're probably also assuming that my
opinions aren't based on job experience, yet they are based on several years
of experience in many positions, where I did the 40-hour grind, delivered
business solutions for months-long and years-long projects, etc.

I'm not talking about academic overqualification. I'm talking about someone
hiring you, talking at length about how you are being hired specifically to do
X because it matters to the company's bottom line, and then after you're hired
they switch it and say actually you're going to do Y but you're going to be a
political mouthpiece for X.

One common set of values is

Y = statistically invalid model fitting that actively causes the business to
lose money but which is easier to reduce to pliable metrics for political
jockeying

X = (deep) machine learning and/or Bayesian stats

It's not at all about academic overqualification. The actual business need,
_for reals_ , can benefit from the pragmatic and cost-effective use of the
tools, and the person is actually skilled in using to do exactly that.

Yet, they are prevented _politically_.

As for starting a company, I think I would guess that's one of the _least
plausible_ ways of doing important or useful work. You'll only get funding if
it is a trite variation on consumer bullshit -- even though consumers
themselves don't want that and would rather that your labor is allocated to
solving more fundamentally important social problems that there just isn't
money for solving. Plus, you'll be so burnt out over all the auxiliary stuff
like HR, marketing, sales, that you won't actually do any of the underlying
quant work that was the whole reason for starting the company in the first
place.

It kills me how people here seem to think that "start your own company" is
some kind of "put up or shut up" gauntlet to throw down to challenge someone
who is lamenting the shitty state that things are in.

"Start your own company" is not some venerated challenge-call for those brave
few who want to change the world. Starting your own company is just a
different format of the same bullshit phenomenon.

Fixing what's broken inside of companies and organizations that already have
huge leverage and capital to positively impact fundamentally important
problems -- _that_ is perhaps worthwhile, if you can manage to deal with the
political fighting without getting too burned out.

~~~
S4M
You seem to be missing the parent's point. He's saying that it's very common
to be told that you are hired to do X and made to do Y (for the record, it
happened to me once, for X being stochastic calculus for derivatives pricing
and Y being excel jockeying), and if the reason for that are the politics
caused by a big structure, then move to a smaller structure. You can create a
company that does consulting in a quantitative field, so you don't have to
seek funding to hire a team to build product.

~~~
p4wnc6
I disagree. I think the parent is trying to say that businesses hired
overqualified people and then give them less engaging work _for valid business
reasons._

What I'm trying to say is that you're told you'll be hired for X, and,
crucially, that it's easily verifiable that X actually would help solve the
business problem better than Y. Failing to do X actively hurts the business.

Yet you're still forced to do Y. It's _not_ because in the real world you only
needed simple, trustworthy Y to get the job done. No, you're failing to get
the job done, need X to get it done, are told you're the one to bring X to the
table, and _then_ you're made to do Y for destructive political reasons.

The point I'm trying to make is that there's no defensible "real world"
pragmatism to support the focus on Y nor the bait-and-switch to hire someone
who knows X. Whatever the reasons for that, they are not about improving the
firm nor making money for the firm. They are about optimizing a bonus or
promotion or whatever for a single individual or some small faction, even at
the expense of the organization's overall progress.

------
bradleyjg
I don't see any particular reason to tie research generally, and scientific
research specifically, to institutions primarily organized around
undergraduate education.

~~~
HarryHirsch
When you are working at the coalface of research you are intimately aware of
which concepts are relevant and which are not. That directly feeds into
undergraduate teaching. You can't teach today what you taught 30 or 50 years
ago, but at the worse undergrad-only colleges you can get away with it.

~~~
bradleyjg
Even if this is true, and it seems much more aspirational than something that
actually occurs with any sort of frequency, that's merely one benefit to be
weighed against all the disadvantages. To name just a few such: worse average
teaching ability than a selection method that focuses on teaching ability,
reduced research output due to splitting researchers' time between teaching
and research, and of course the issue pointed out in the article that the
needs of undergraduate education in large measure limit the number of research
scientists.

Were it not for the historical accident that we do things this way, I strongly
doubt anyone would suggest we adopt it for whatever tiny educational benefit
it may impart to undergraduates -- most of whom won't even go into the
academic fields they are studying.

------
pc2g4d
It all feels like a market signaling problem. When people are choosing majors
and how far to go in school, they don't seem to have the right information.
Lack of understanding of the marketability of different degrees surely harms
the students/future workers, but would seem to be in the interest of certain
employers who benefit from the glut of overqualified workers. Of course,
oversupply in one sector is likely accompanied by undersupply in others.

~~~
gozur88
I don't think the colleges are keen for students to have that information.
College budgets depend on people getting degrees using debt they will have
severe difficulty repaying.

------
sliverstorm
_Every year the market grows tighter, and federal money for research grants,
which support most of this research, remains flat._

This makes me think we (as a country, a people), having trained all these
scientists, have a market opportunity for inexpensive research, and we aren't
taking advantage of it. Sure, the best and the brightest might fight their way
to the top, but we can get perfectly good science out of the middle of the
bell curve too.

~~~
danielweber
You can't have a million researchers do a 4000 man-year project in a day.

There are decreasing marginal returns from throwing more people at a problem.
Especially if they are publishing, because now you need more people to curate
their publications. And if you throw enough researchers at something, they are
going to find a bunch of spurious results simply because of the luck of large
numbers.

I don't know if we are at that point. But adding a bunch of average people to
a project can easily slow it down.

If you want to help the existing researchers, mow their lawns and buy their
groceries and take care of their house maintenance problems. Let them
concentrate.

~~~
sliverstorm
Not faster research, more scope. Things that we neglect today. Hell, form a
paper review branch whose sole purpose is review/reproduction of results.

We're not out of work to be done

~~~
danielweber
This is a good idea.

------
lifeisstillgood
The thing is we could double the science budget in most industrialised nations
without really noticing. Compared to all the other very low ROI work being
done by government spending and the almost free cost of borrowing it's
probably something we _should_ do.

Throw enough tenure against the wall and eventually something will stick

~~~
mattkrause
Any chance you are running for Congress? :-)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Running _from_ Congress, yes :-)

------
wrong_variable
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/ti...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/tileshop_pmc_inline.html?title=Click%20on%20image%20to%20zoom&p=PMC3&id=4309283_nihms562644f1.jpg)

Right,

What is the difference between Civil/Environmental and Environmental ?

It seems the best bet is to study something like mining since the R_0 is so
low there.

~~~
aab0
Petroleum engineering regularly makes the list of degrees with highest pay...

~~~
nradov
The petroleum industry goes through boom / bust cycles every few years. Make
sure to graduate during a boom.

------
pvaldes
Please choose 2 among the 2000 problems that you need to be solved as soon as
possible. Wait patiently whereas 1998 urgent problems unexplicably rot and
spawn 50 new problems each. Learn how to live with the new situation. Talk
about the old good times when life was much easier and you had plenty of money
to spend. Repeat.

------
sjg007
It would be wise to do an MD/PhD. The MDs have all the data.

Also Business schools need professors.

~~~
vibrio
I agree, but broadly stated, the path doesn't generally train good scientists.
The MD/PhD is more like a MD/MS. They frequently are pushed through 'phd' more
rapidly under the eye of Med School deans and to optimize MD/PhD training
grant slots. A not insignificant number of MD/PhD trainee simply do it for the
free med school also, with little interest or intent to pursue research.

------
api
... yet tuition has increased dramatically in the past 25 years.

Where is the money going?

~~~
fdgh
_Where is the money going?_

Buildings and administration. The "undergraduate experience" that involves
24-hour gyms and subsidized restaurant-quality cafeteria food.

The truth is that professorial salaries are low and tuitions are high (for
full-price payers) for the same fundamental reason: universities set the
levels where they are, because they can.

------
asimuvPR
This is one of the reasons I founded asimuv. You are better off founding your
own project.

------
FatAmericanDev
This is a good problem. The solution is to raise the bar: in order to be a
professor you have to make a tangible advancement in your field, something
that advances the state of the art by an order of magnitude.

~~~
FatAmericanDev
Also, pay them more.

~~~
nradov
Where is the money going to come from? Undergraduate tuition has already
reached ridiculous levels.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
You can start by disbanding the football teams.

~~~
jessaustin
That's a great idea, but at many schools it wouldn't actually raise much
money. It's not as though the idiot boosters will be just as happy to see
their money going toward lab equipment as toward e.g. barbells.

------
brador
The cream of the crop will still rise to the top, so it's simply a case of the
bar for Professorship is rising. Which is a good thing.

~~~
GuiA
The counterpoint to that is that universities are moving more and more
teaching positions to short term contracts with terrible pay and benefits. So
skilled people might instead choose to go in the industry/pursue other
opportunities, and the students find themselves with instructors who end doing
what they do because they can't go anywhere else.

~~~
brador
And that's ok. If the Professorships have value to anyone they'll get paid. If
some positions are being removed then maybe they just weren't that useful.

~~~
deong
That ignores a huge amount of evidence that we routinely shoot ourselves in
the foot by making flawed assessments of the relative benefits of short vs.
long-term rewards.

------
untilHellbanned
The world is about people selling crap they don't need to each other. If you
can be honest with yourself enough to accept that, you realize there is no
place for learning in this worldview.

Getting money today (GMT) is all that matters, so until the govt finds a way
to take everyone's not hard-earned money and redirect it toward more noble
pursuits, I'm confident the trend will worsen.

~~~
tostitos1979
This seems to be a sarcastic off-shoot of the discussion but I gave u an
upvote. Your point is completely valid ... a stable research environment needs
government funding. I think this might be a US statistic but I recall reading
that we spend more on any one of the top 3 sports than we spend on all forms
of cancer research. This should be a no-brainer but it isn't. There was an ACM
Communications article a few years ago by Moshe Verde where he pointed out
that computation has radically altered both theory and experimentation - the
two pillars of science. As a professional scientist, I firmly believe we are
at the precipice of great discoveries that will benefit all of humanity -
except we are squandering time, and the resources of the planet on stupid
bickering.

~~~
untilHellbanned
Thanks. Somebody appreciated my point. The world is consumed by trivia. People
with influence and money, who sadly are the often the ones most consumed with
trivia, need to die, undergo brain transplants, or some other miracle in order
to change the direction we are headed.

