

The Least Stressful Job for 2013? A Real Look at Being a Professor in the US - jvdh
http://factsandotherfairytales.com/2013/01/04/the-least-stressful-job-for-2013-a-real-look-at-being-a-professor-in-the-us/

======
_dps
The article, without being wrong exactly, is responding to a non-point while
missing what I consider to be a deeper problem (disclosure: was very briefly a
professor, now founding a startup, which is much more stressful for me ;-).

CNBC: "Being a professor is the least stressful job."

Article: "The first 7 years until tenure are hard."

Overlooked Fact: For the remaining 30+ years of your career, you have
unbeatable job security, summers without any externally imposed obligations,
sabbaticals, and the option to "take a slow year with your research" should
you decide to have children, or have a family/personal emergency, or just want
to, you know, live life and see the world.

Additional Speculation: The majority of people have a very tenuous
understanding tenure to begin with, and CNBC may have elided "tenured" in
their article for simplicity; it was, after all, a fluff piece designed to
generate ten page views to deliver ten paragraphs of text :-).

In any case, the much bigger problem faced by aspiring professors is not the
tenure process itself; it's that normal labor market mechanisms are strained-
to-broken for several structural reasons:

1) Regional oligopolies of reputable schools almost everywhere outside of
Boston (and Boston, while having several reputable schools, is still much more
full of, say, reputable law firms). This means that it's hard to have a lot of
negotiating power if you're not willing to uproot your life and move to
another city.

2) Another large switching cost arises from having your research program
embedded at a particular school (students, lab equipment, grants,
participation in "centers", that are all hard to move).

3) Universities don't directly capture value from professors' work, with the
important exception of collecting grant overhead. This exacerbates 1, because
as a candidate your argument is "I'm great" and not "You will benefit"

4) Because of 3, hiring is bottlenecked by "slots" in a department, rather
than by being able to find people who have net-positive ROI.

5) Because of 3 and 4, it's quite possible that highly qualified candidates
will float around the labor market as post-docs until a "slot" opens up at a
suitable school. I have directly seen colleagues choose to delay their Ph.D.
defense for a year because they knew that there were a lot of highly
impressive post-docs already competing for the few slots in their field that
year, and they wanted to wait for a more opportune time.

6) Again because of 3 and 4, the already existing time-scale imbalance between
institutions and individuals is exaggerated. "Not quite sure if a candidate is
a good fit? Just wait another year. No big loss. We only have the one slot
after all."

7) Highly discontinuous payoff curves: the present value of switching from
untenured to tenured is hard to estimate, but I'd put it at upwards of $1M
(see my calculation [1] in case this sounds implausible). There's no obvious
way to hand out fractional tenure, and once you have it most of the
university's negotiating power is gone, so universities have (rationally)
evolved mechanisms to maximize the value they extract until then.

[1] My calculation:

1) assume your market consulting rate is $150/hr

2) model tenure as the option to "slack" by only teaching ~10hrs/week for full
salary and doing no other work

3) assume $100k/yr salary

4) so tenure allows you to work 10 hrs/week for $100k, rather than the $75k
you'd make consulting

5) ergo, tenure can be made to simulate a risk-free $25k/year income stream

6) it's hard to get $25k/year risk-free without investing something like $1M,
but obviously this depends on interest rates

~~~
rmk2
> Overlooked Fact: For the remaining 30+ years of your career, you have
> unbeatable job security, summers without any externally imposed obligations,
> sabbaticals, and the option to "take a slow year with your research" should
> you decide to have children, or have a family/personal emergency, or just
> want to, you know, live life and see the world.

In many (US) universities though, _perish or die_ is still a very valid
concern, _even_ when tenured. You get yearly reviews, and if you score a "0"
(zero), you _can_ be fired, even from tenure. Futhermore, universities thus
value a number of small articles more than a book, because you are supposed to
publish continuously all over the place. While you write a book, chances are
you don't have time to deal with additional articles (on top of your other
obligations).

Add on top of that all the administrative tasks in the department, faculty,
university etc. and even a tenured professor doesn't exactly live the easy
life.

~~~
zimbu668
I don't get the big deal about publish or perish. Isn't that a core part of
the job?

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2495](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2495)

~~~
rmk2
I'd disagree both with you and the comic.

The problem with _publish or perish_ is that it leads to people gaming the
system. If pay rises (or employment) solely hinge on the amount of (however
graded) publications you have achieved, this leads to people essentually using
parts of books they are writing as articles etc. This in turn leads to a
doubling of information, inconsistencies etc, alongside the fact that not
every topic can be adequately dealt with in a journal article.

The system _actively punishes_ big projects and thoughts in favour of small,
more easily digestible (and thus publishable) projects. If a university only
looks at the number of publications and not _at their nature_ , they shift
from quality to quantity, which in turn is bad, because it fundamentally
undermines the purpose of academia.

edit: I just saw _dps also linked to the gamification bit, but the rest holds
true nonetheless (and I _do_ agree with him)

~~~
zimbu668
I'm not saying that publish or perish is an optimal solution, just that
there's nothing special about it. Plenty of people have "file your TPS reports
with cover-sheets or perish", but there's not special jargon for it.

~~~
rmk2
_Publish or perish_ is _not_ just about _doing_ your job, rather it limits you
in how to do your job, and that limitation runs counter to what your job often
requires.

It's not so much "publish" in itself that's the problem[1], it's how
publishing is defined and handled, and that a certain form of publishing is
seen as right to the detriment of any other form of published material,
whereas the preferred method is often not the best method for a given project.

[1]: though it certainly is a big part of the overall problem of uniting
teaching, research _and_ publishing

~~~
lmkg
And I think the point that zimbu668 is making, is that such situations are
still not unique to academia. Perverse or misaligned incentives are the norm
in quite a few industries.

For example, sales guys are compensated based on sticker price, not profit
margin, which means that the guy who sells $2MM of work for $1MM (i.e. at a
loss) gets more commission than the guy who sells $0.5MM worth of work for
$0.75MM. For another example, grading programmers by lines of code... 'nuf
said ;). Another totally ubiquitous example: grading office workers by ass-in-
seat time rather than value produced. Another also ubiquitous example:
Departments in a company encouraged to spend as much money as they can at the
end of the quarter, so their next budget doesn't get cut.

I could go on, but I'll stop here. The point is, even if "publish or perish"
refers to misaligned incentives, that still means it's basically the same as
90% of other jobs out there.

------
patio11
I'm related to a few professors, and they largely carry massive chips on their
shoulder about this. For example:

 _And for those of us whose research directly translates to the real world
(e.g., in my case — persuasion, crisis communication, strategic
communication), the so-called professionals look down their overpriced noses
at us. That means that even if we did want to move back to the ‘real world’ —
we have to basically apologize for our PhD, our time spent training them
(Where do they think new professionals come from? Are they hatched?), and kiss
their asses for handouts. So, basically until we write our book and ‘become’ a
pundit or consultant later in our careers we’re stuck because Americans are
scared of smart people._

is a great example of the genre. There's huge amounts of rank jealousy
directed at classmates who took a look at the (readily available) evidence of
what a PhD's career track looked like and decided against it.

(Amazingly, despite hearing terrible complaining about the stresses of tenure-
track professors every time I meet my family, they always ask "So when are you
going to grad school?")

~~~
jibjaba
I'm sorry but this is a very ignorant assessment. I spent 5 years doing
research in academia and none of the professors on our team had as easy of a
work life as 99% of the software developers I have worked with do. I am in no
way criticizing developers, being a professor is just damn hard and very
stressful in comparison.

The demands of the sink or swim nature of academia, the need to be constantly
seeking grants, teaching classes, participating in running the department and
being an active member of their research area (organizing conferences, editing
journals, etc.) are enormous. A good academic is expected to do all these
things and do them well.

I grad school I was mostly a night person and so would frequently be at school
around midnight. So would several professors on our team, except they would
also be there at 8:30 in the morning every day, and work at home on the
weekends. In the 7 years I have been a developer I have never seen a workplace
that puts as much demands on it's employees. Not even close.

~~~
carbocation
Your comment doesn't strike me as being in tension with patio11's. Rather, it
seems to underscore his point.

------
lisper
I was never in academia, but I was a researcher (at NASA) so I played the
publishing game. And if you look at my record, I was relatively good at it.
Not only was my publications list fairly long, but my work was also pretty
widely referenced. But since my career no longer depends on it, I am now free
to say that I credit my success almost entirely to gaming the system. This is
not to say that I didn't do good work (I think I did), but there was virtually
no correlation between what I thought was quality work and what I actually got
rewarded for. The vast majority of my publications were minor tweaks on
previous work that were specifically engineered to get past the program
committees of key conferences. My best work (by my own quality metric) either
went unnoticed, or could not get accepted for publication at all. When it got
to the point where I was faced with a very stark choice between continuing to
produce bullshit and get rewarded for it, or to do what I thought was good
work and eventually get fired, I quit.

~~~
Evbn
Industry isn't so different. My salary is determined by 2 days of interviews
and negotiations, and only slightly perturbed by my performance over the next
several years.

------
dfc
_"loads of us finish our Ph.D.’s (which is what you have to have to be a
‘regular’ professor) with between $75,000 and $160,000 in debt"_

The link/citation for this statement never mentions 75,000 or 160,000. In fact
it says:

 _"According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), individuals earning
research doctorates in academic year 2009-10 did so owing over $20,400 on
average in education-related debt, of which about $14,100 on average was
graduate debt and about $6,400 on average was undergraduate debt"_

Granted this NSF data is limited to research doctorates but it certainly does
not support the statement that "loads of us" have 75k to 160k of debt.
Moreover the NSF data says that 52% of the research doctorate population
graduated with no debt.

------
edtechdev
Pre-tenure, it all boils down to just being above average on 3 numbers:

* how many journal articles have you published

* how much grant money are you bringing in

* what is the average rating you get from students

Interestingly, there does not appear to be much validity behind those numbers.
Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with
student learning: <http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf>
[http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1...](http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1105)

And the 'impact' of journal articles has been criticized more ways than I can
count: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Criticisms> I've seen blog
posts with more impact than average journal articles.

Lastly research grant money - I don't know the research on the impact of grant
money - but in many fields, when you have an original, new idea, you usually
get a smaller grant, maybe even just a seed grant at first (just like how
little money startups usually get), or you do it on your own in grad school.
The large grants are for large scale collaborations and scaling up of well-
trodden ideas. 55% of the grant money doesn't even go to the research project
- it goes to the university's administrative overhead.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
_Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with
student learning:_

Well... duh? Obviously students are going to give higher ratings to professors
whose courses seem easier.

------
mitchi
I just woke up from an all-nighter of correcting exam papers for my professor
here. I'm being paid $15 an hour to grade all the homework assignments and the
exams. I'm a regular teaching assistant at my university, I can usually handle
the load of correcting assignments in time but correcting exams is actually
the worst thing in the world. Depending on how the exam is made of course. If
you care about being fair to everyone, you will usually have to backtrack
through your first copies (when you were more severe) to add points. Any
professors who grade their exams here? Do you use any heuristics (if you know
what I mean) to correct faster? That being said, as you can see, professors in
Canada can "offshore" the job of correcting to students. After that, you are
left with the best part of the job. Preparing the course material, preparing
the presentations and giving it every week. It's a high paying public sector
job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with
80% salary.

I'm in Canada though, I don't know how professors are treated in the US. I
know that for students it's shit! Graduating with mountains of debt, I don't
know if I could celebrate that.

~~~
anonymouz
> It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can
> take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary.

Nobody in Canada does research then? No classes does not mean vacation.

~~~
mitchi
yea, I never said that. I was just describing what the vacations are. If you
think that they don't do research you are partially right because of a lot
them don't do it after their permanent status.

~~~
anonymouz
Do Professors really have three months of vacation in Canada? I assumed you
meant 3 months without classes (which is totally different from vacation). I
find it hard to believe that they would get 3 months of vacation.

I am from Austria, and here and in some other European countries typically one
has about 5 weeks of vacation per year, so 3 months sounds like a lot. How
many weeks of vacation do other people in Canada have, for comparison?

~~~
mitchi
You are required to give 4 classes a year. If you give 2 in the Autumn and 2
in the winter you have your summer free.

~~~
anonymouz
Interesting. That seems to be quite different from any other system I've
encountered so far. Hereabouts being a professor is an all year job (with
usual vacation times), with the two-fold task of doing research as well as
doing teaching.

The time periods in which there are no classes are usually used by professors
to focus more on their research and take their vacations (5 weeks per year
like everyone else). Similarly, these time periods are not strictly holidays
for students, with many students taking exams.

I've seen a few professors simply neglect their research and take the whole
time period where they don't have classes as "vacation", but this seems to be
limited to a few older professors who are still state employed, basically
untouchable and seem to have lost their motivation over the years. They
usually seem to not do much research at all anymore, but are often willing to
pick up additional teaching duties to ease the load on their colleagues.

Most people however do actually work on their research in this time period.

------
idm
Doubtless this poll is capturing the essence of something interesting, but
when I look at that list of professions, a host of statistical moderators come
to mind. I claim this list isn't measuring what they think it is measuring.

I think the reason "professor" ranks first is that the compensation seems to
be proportional to the responsibility, whereas most other jobs appear to
under-compensate. People are sensitive to this, but they misattribute it as
"lower stress."

Well, the job itself (professor) is really hard, but the lifestyle (everything
outside work) is really great. It's a great damn job. That's different from
being "stressful."

Where does the stress come from? Well, I bet the HN community knows professors
better than most, but between publication and grant writing, there's a ton of
professional evaluation that directly impacts your quality of life. Your
personal and private lives will blend much more than in other professions, and
being rejected professionally (i.e. being denied a major grant) will mess with
your personal life as well.

There's no free lunch here.

------
DanielBMarkham
A slightly tangential observation: I've had the good fortune to meet and work
with people in all walks of life. Oddly, I've found the amount of stress they
feel at work is hugely related to the type of personality they have.

I'm not discounting external factors: surely those bomb disposal guys have it
tough. But some folks just seem naturally sunny and light-spirited, while
others seem to be on the verge of a monstrous breakdown. I've seen people who
were stressed who were moved from a stressful situation to a much less
stressful situation stay just as stressed as before. Perhaps, like weight,
there is a "set point" for the amount of discomfort you feel in your job, and
over time you can train yourself to become more and more stressed, regardless
of the externalities?

Beats me. Interesting subject, though. Definitely falls in the nature versus
nurture arena.

~~~
matwood
Good point. I tend to operate under a certain level of self imposed stress
plus whatever actual stress there is with the job. Not monstrous breakdown
type stress, but definitely a heightened sense of urgency most of the time.
Personally, my self imposed stress comes from my desire to make things perfect
and my fear of failure regardless of the job at hand. I attributed most of my
personal stress to nurture, and the lack of a family to fall back on should I
fail.

------
michaelochurch
Academia's the biggest fucking scam there is. Look at the prize. Around age
35-40, if you work 80-hour weeks and don't make any mistakes, the prize is
_getting a job that you can't be fired from_. Meanwhile, the same kind of
exertion (and political luck) in finance or software will have you able to
retire: not in luxury, but at a middle-class standard of living that could be
described as "making your own tenure". Also, you get to live where you want,
instead of rolling the dice on where in the country you will end up living.

It's billed as "the life of the mind", but the reality is that a lot of the
work is mindnumbingly boring: writing grant applications, grading papers,
attending committees. Every industry has some boring work and vicious
politics, but most industries are honest about it. In software, having been
fired once because of political bullshit is par for the course. Yep, that
happens. In academia, getting shot down for tenure is this huge mark of shame.

Finally, the academic industry has a _huge_ underclass of people who spend
lots of time between adjunct gigs on teaching work that is viewed as a
commodity and paid extremely poorly.

I'm sorry, but this industry has sold out a generation and a half, while
tuitions have shot toward the moon, and that's fucking inexcusable. University
leadership: stop building fucking ziggurats and colossuses and get fund some
goddamn research and teaching. In other words, do your job.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I'm not sure I agree with this bit:

 _Meanwhile, the same kind of exertion (and political luck) in finance or
software will have you able to retire: not in luxury, but at a middle-class
standard of living that could be described as "making your own tenure". Also,
you get to live where you want, instead of rolling the dice on where in the
country you will end up living._

In this realm, I really don't think software, finance and academia are all
that different. You go where the work is, and on average, the best you can do
is to nicely secure a comfortable, upper-middle class position for yourself
with plenty of job security.

You're right that being _lucky_ enough to get a tenured position, but
"applying that luck" to software or finance, can make you a millionaire.
Problem is, that kind of luck is not a known probability on which we can set
rational expectations. If I go work 80 hours/week at a software start-up, I
can't _expect_ even a 3% chance of becoming a millionaire. It's just _not_ a
random process with a set probability distribution. So you can't "apply your
luck" to software _instead_ of academia, because we're talking about two
different kinds of luck.

~~~
michaelochurch
This is a good point. The types of people who thrive in one environment are
not necessarily going to do well in another.

My issue with academia is that it has minimal job risk but high career risk.
So, while it's rare that someone actually gets fired (I've seen 9th-year grad
students lose funding; I guess that counts) the risk of ending up in a ruined
career is high. On the other hand, in software and finance getting fired is
practically a rite of passage-- happens to everyone, especially ambitious
overperformers-- and it's painful but it doesn't end your career.

On the other hand, one thing academia has going for it is career coherency. In
industry, you serve a boss and have to make it look like you value his
political aspirations over your own career development. In academia, your job
_is_ to invest in yourself-- to publish and develop a reputation, to attend
conferences, to improve your skills. So that's one thing that's nice about it.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Ok, so here's the question: what options could I have in software, where I can
actually have a career and get comfortable and eventually even raise some
kids, that don't involve me in awful levels of politics/deception
(particularly regarding my own "career coherency", as you put it), and don't
bore me to death?

Because I've programmed for a hobby since age 11, and I've programmed a few
times "for reals" in actual paid work, and while I've every bit of _respect_
for the craft of programming, merely doing that every day under industrial
production conditions drives me a little out of my mind.

I won't finish my research-track MSc for a while, so I don't have to
_definitely choose industry or academia_ for a while. Still, I'm back doing
this because I found that without a higher degree or industrial experience in
such, you really can't get into the cooler, higher-level jobs in "the real
world" either. If you get out of school and code for a living, you will
eventually find yourself locked out of the deep wizardry of computing (systems
programming, programming languages, networking protocols, security, etc.)...
unless you find _just_ the right company willing to take a chance on you.

It's rather frustrating.

~~~
michaelochurch
Yes, getting the Master's degree is a good call, for the reasons you
mentioned. PhD bigotry is pretty severe in a lot of places.

CS academia is less scammy than other disciplines, because of the high-quality
exit options. You're not doing wrong by going for the MSc. That's a good call.

Regarding being "locked out", I think the new rules are:

* network aggressively at all times. When you join a big company, network _internally_ so you can get a decent transfer after 6+ months. You won't get hired on to the ML project at the front door. Nor will you get it through official channels. Network aggressively and find someone who will request you.

* keep learning. Eventually, you'll stand out as the guy who's 30+ and keeping abreast of cutting-edge software trends, and that has its own kind of impressiveness.

It's harder than it should be to get interesting work, because the world is
run by idiots, so there isn't much tolerance for interesting stuff. I'd love
to see that change, but for the mean time, you just have to figure out how to
play the world that is. Stealing an education from work is usually a good idea
(don't consider it "deception"; honest people mouth off and get fired.) Keep
Learning and Carry On.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Well, bizarrely, my internship hunt for this summer is actually going pretty
well. Got about 4 companies I'm interviewing with at this point, one of which
is The One that I absolutely want to work for. Not as a Final Career
Destination or anything, but I think they do some of the best and most
interesting work on Earth, so I'm very interesting in seeing how they've built
a _business_ out of the stuff.

 _CS academia is less scammy than other disciplines, because of the high-
quality exit options. You're not doing wrong by going for the MSc. That's a
good call._

Actually, in this case I think it's a good idea because even the coursework
here seems very devoted to _building artifacts_. This semester's project in my
Coursework Course is building a static analyzer for LLVM IR of C code. Next
semester I'm going to try to take Advanced Operating Systems, in which project
groups build a small OS from the ground up.

These aren't exactly start-ups, but they're the kind of coursework that
generates project code which you can throw on Bitbucket and use as proof not
only that You Can Code but that You Can Do Advanced/High-Level Work.

Surprisingly, my undergrad institution wasn't very good at that.

------
eli_gottlieb
My adviser is rather lucky: he commutes to Technion via carpool, which puts a
strong limit on the amount of time he _can_ spend in the physical office
everyday. Of course, he works plenty from home, but physical office-time
limits things like committee drag and teaching load. And we get TA's here.

------
drblast
Plus you have to add the 8-10 hours a week of complaining about all the
sacrifices you're making to be a professor. That can really add up.

~~~
jibjaba
HN needs down votes for crap like this.

~~~
glenra
HN has downvotes (and the post you refer to did get downvoted) but you don't
get access to that feature until you have a certain level of karma.

