This is 100% true but by the early 1990s computer science Phds were ALSO in the shitter because of all the 1990 layoffs and the total shutdown of industrial basic research and so every industry CS PhD was trying to get a professorship job so they could continue to do research after all the researchers in industry had been laid off!!! Science is a pyramid scheme and a very shallow pyamid with 80-90% cuts at every level !!!
Computer science has become the worst profession of all now because all the OTHER scientists say, "it's okay if I can never have a career in a scientific field I'll just switch and become a computer scientist!" And most of them will work for food ...
I graduated in 1993 when there were 20 usa positions for the 1000 CS PhDs. "That's okay" you say? "How many were from top schools" you say? 200, thats how many PhDs were from top 10 schools ... So, 10:1, a 90% cut ...
I did get a tenure track job (outside the usa - in canada) but could not afford the incredibly low pay in the most expensive city in north america (income vs housing costs ratio).
What he says is still correct for academics. There are too many candidates for too few positions. The pay is lousy. The hours are long. You don't really get to follow you best creative instincts. You spend an inordinate amount of time writing grants. Teaching, particularly pre-meds, can suck.
Now with Trump, the problem has only been compounded.
That isn't to say that there are no non-academic jobs for PhDs that can be satisfying. Just you may be a glorified engineer. No shame in that if that is what you want.
It feels like part of the problem is that society has failed to provide alternatives. There are two many academics for too few jobs. However, there aren't really alternatives for intellectually stimulating careers.
The oversupply has extended from phds down to bachelor's degrees. With 37% of Americans getting bachelor's degrees it doesn't mean anything anymore and is wasteful overtraining. I'm no Trumper but somebody has to stop the greedy life-wasting that academics have created by overfunding a lot of stupid duplicate research and excessive college educations by people who never have an impact...
Very few people say that. Overwhelmingly the rhetoric one hears is that the purpose of higher education is to get a better job.
Personally, I think it would be great if we educated people to cultivate an engaged citizenry. But if we're going to do that we have to be up-front about it an work on an economic model that supports it. So, for example, you can't have student loans that are predicated on being able to obtain a certain level of income on graduation, and you certainly can't make those loans impossible to discharge even in bankruptcy. If you lie about it, as we have been for decades now, it all unravels sooner or later.
I can retrospectively look back at folks in my (non computer science) PhD cohort, and say that this bearish outlook is only true for folks who stay in science too long or pursue actual academic careers.
The vast majority of folks I know flipped into more lucrative careers in industry... some of which require PhDs or Masters degrees.
Furthermore, it really depends on your track. You can wind up in a lab studying something totally obscure or you can be in a lab with multi-million dollar funding and state-of-the-art equipment you can't find elsewhere.
Sadly the most well funded scientific research right now is actually being bankrolled by techbro oligarchs for tax deduction purposes, even more so with the cuts to US funding.
"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."
This seems a bit hyperbolic. In the mid to late 2000s, only 5 of the 15 close grad student friends I had at Caltech didn't get a tenure track position somewhere. Four of the five work in tech, and the fifth is a government electrical engineer. 4/5 were homegrown, the fifth is an immigrant, and all ten tenure track (now mostly tenured) profs are immigrants.
The capitalist box is the best box there is, for better or worse.
It may also be worth pointing out that many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in human history were either achieved before institutional science existed in a modern form, or were achieved outside the formal system. We may have been better off with a system in which science was left to a tiny elite of eccentric geniuses with academic freedom. It certainly doesn't seem as though society is bettered by cranking out 1,000 government funded PoliSci Phds each year.
I'm not sure that's really relevant. If capitalism fails to allow people to live worthwhile lives, then I don't think it helps much to say some other system is worse. That doesn't change the fact that capitalism is a failed system.
> "The capitalist box is the best box there is, for better or worse."
Only because on the whole we've been utterly resistant to every attempt to try any other way since inventing "<$money>". Bottomless greed is a real thing, and it's deeply dangerous to us all...
> Democratic socialism, also called social democracy, has been dramatically more effective than America's late stage capitalism.
> The heavily unionized capitalism that we had in the decades after WW2 also worked much better than our present system.
^^^ This. ^^^
What I'd really like to see is pick all the various bits and pieces from all the things that have been tried that do work well and try to build something around using those bits to build a solid foundation, using the mistakes of the past to learn from and avoid; not repeat ad-nauseam throughout history until it brings about our eventual end as a species. Clearly not gonna happen though. We're all too hell-bent on actively not seeing any sorta "big picture" future for humanity beyond "he who dies with the most money wins".
Ten years ago the cleaners in the labs at The University of Otago had job security most of the scientists could only dream about.
I was in the business school (very low rankings!) and I was amazed at the infighting, back stabbing and general lack of collegiality amongst the academic staff.
“The cleaners have job security the scientists could only dream of” is pithy, but is it actually saying much? Cleaning is an essential, low-prestige, and potentially quite unpleasant job… I bet the cleaner is the most secure job in a lot of places.
I think it could be better titled "Don't Become an Academic Professional or Professional Scientist." They have good reasons for this.
Whereas, you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget. You can publish whatever you want on your web sites, social media, etc. You can often get advice or peer review from professional scientists by asking them. You might pay them for their time if you feel your work was worth it.
I came to a similar conclusion as a computer scientist working in industry who ended up transitioning to a community college teaching career. I remember being inspired by the stories of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC as a high school student and undergrad, wanting to follow in the footsteps of researchers like Dennis Ritchie. However, the industrial research landscape has changed in the past 15 years. It's very difficult to find truly curiosity-driven places with long timelines and little pressure, and industrial researchers these days are pressured to work on projects with more immediate productization prospects. I've seen this firsthand at a few companies. The tenure-track at a research university route requires playing the "publish-or-perish" game, which is also a curb on freedom and is also filled with pressure.
Being a tenure-track professor at a California community college is a happy situation for me. I love teaching, and for roughly 8 months of the year I'm dedicated to teaching. Tenure at my community college is entirely based on teaching and service; I'm not required (or even expected) to publish. I also get roughly 4 months of the year off (three months off in the summer, one month off in the winter). I spent much of the past summer in Japan collaborating with a professor on research. The only serious downside is not being able to afford a house within a reasonable commute from work, but I had the same problem in industry; not everyone in industry makes FAANG-level salaries. In fact, my compensation is effectively a raise from my previous job when factoring in going from roughly 3 weeks of PTO per year to 4 months off plus 10 days worth of sick leave; I took a roughly 10% pay cut in exchange for greater freedom and roughly 5-6x the annual time off.
I've learned that being a hobbyist researcher with a stable job that provides summers off is quite a favorable situation, since I don't have to worry about my job security being tied to my publication and fund-raising counts. Most of my computer science research can be done on a mid-range laptop with an Internet connection and access to textbooks and academic databases; I don't need equipment that cost five- or six-figures (though it would be nice to have a GPU cluster....).
> you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget
Not in many fields/subfields, unless "chosen budget" is some unattainable amount of disposable income.
Most people who want to do science have a specific field they are interested in. Your proposal is fine for theoreticians (and some computationalists, depending on the compute they require), but not many others.
This is like saying you can study CS using pen and paper. It’s possible for certain rare edge cases but absolutely nobody is going through the process of applying for grants if they don’t need the money to work on the problems they’ve specialized for. People in the past were just as smart and motivated so the low-hanging fruit is gone.
Even for fields that can be done entirely with pen and paper, grad students and postdocs don't work for free, and often the only way a professor can keep up with a research university's publication expectations is to hire grad students and postdocs to contribute to research. Grants help pay for their stipends. Additionally, there are many universities that require their professors to raise grant money as a condition of tenure, since grant money is a significant source of revenue for research universities.
Feels to me a combination of old web with new web tricks is the key. People used to update obscure hobby details but there really was no way to donate. Creators didn't even think to bother to ask. All this democratization talk seems to be the solution.
I don't think crowdfunding is a good funding source for science in general. Crowdfunding's going to overemphasize already popular and easy to explain science at the expense of everything else. Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed.
I disagree. There's a guy that doesn't have much attention that's creating fuel from burning plastic. He got crowdfunded. I also recall finding a website way back when of a dude that explored the old railroad tunnels of downtown Chicago. I would have 100% funded that guy for content.
> "Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed."
"Boring sounding" to anyone who don't have a "passion" for that particular area of science as you must if you're wanting to research it. The (hard) trick is to get your crowdfunding request in front of the specific eyeballs that will understand (and be excited by) your motivations and interests enough to want to finance advancing that research.
I don't know from where I sit "don't be a crank" might be better advice.
Not to say it's impossible to do science as a hobby (there's some good stuff coming out of e.g. the ham community and amateur astronomers), but sadly most of my interactions with "hobbyist scientists" have been crackpots (ok, there is some selection bias here, crackpots go to all sorts of lengths to try to contact you).
What it boils down to is that these are fields with a supply glut of people and/or product.
My take is: never try to enter such a field unless you really think you have a chance at performing in the top 20% of all entrants in that field. Anything else is a dice roll. A few people get lucky, but statistically it won’t be you.
Discouraging people from trying is a good filter for these fields, since the only people who will ignore such advice is people who really deeply love it or are really driven. Those are the people most likely to ascend to the top 20%. Nobody gets that good at something they aren’t driven to do.
It’s also a way to maybe make things better for people in those fields in the future. If the only people who enter the field are those who are deeply driven, it might cut down on the overpopulation problem.
Edit: some fields are worse than others of course. Glance at up and coming Hollywood actors and actresses for a worst case. Of the ones who are not nepo babies, look into how much work and hustle and luck (combined) it took for them to make it. Most are insanely good looking talented people who started acting as kids and hustled for years and then got lucky. It’s wild.
Physics is not that bad, but it’s not great. Fiction writing might be that bad, especially since the money is less even if someone does make it.
The same timestamp at the bottom of the essay can be found on other pages by Professor Katz, such as his list of publications which includes papers from 2019. I suspect that the timestamp of 1999 is incorrect.
While this is clearly an old post, I'm not sure about the actual date. On the bottom it says 1999, but there's also a citation for an article from 2001.
> For many more details consult the Young Scientists' Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.
This is 100% true but by the early 1990s computer science Phds were ALSO in the shitter because of all the 1990 layoffs and the total shutdown of industrial basic research and so every industry CS PhD was trying to get a professorship job so they could continue to do research after all the researchers in industry had been laid off!!! Science is a pyramid scheme and a very shallow pyamid with 80-90% cuts at every level !!!
Computer science has become the worst profession of all now because all the OTHER scientists say, "it's okay if I can never have a career in a scientific field I'll just switch and become a computer scientist!" And most of them will work for food ...
I graduated in 1993 when there were 20 usa positions for the 1000 CS PhDs. "That's okay" you say? "How many were from top schools" you say? 200, thats how many PhDs were from top 10 schools ... So, 10:1, a 90% cut ...
I did get a tenure track job (outside the usa - in canada) but could not afford the incredibly low pay in the most expensive city in north america (income vs housing costs ratio).
Vancouver mentioned!
Scientist here. It's certainly not always an easy path, but if it's what you want, it's what you want. It's not something you fall into though...
A family friend who has a PhD in math told us that PhD stands for Permanent Head Damage
Previously on HN:
Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789844 - Aug 2018 (2 comments)
Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836622 - July 2015 (4 comments)
Don't become a scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8702841 - Dec 2014 (33 comments)
Don't Become a Scientist (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763737 - May 2014 (159 comments)
What he says is still correct for academics. There are too many candidates for too few positions. The pay is lousy. The hours are long. You don't really get to follow you best creative instincts. You spend an inordinate amount of time writing grants. Teaching, particularly pre-meds, can suck. Now with Trump, the problem has only been compounded. That isn't to say that there are no non-academic jobs for PhDs that can be satisfying. Just you may be a glorified engineer. No shame in that if that is what you want.
It feels like part of the problem is that society has failed to provide alternatives. There are two many academics for too few jobs. However, there aren't really alternatives for intellectually stimulating careers.
The oversupply has extended from phds down to bachelor's degrees. With 37% of Americans getting bachelor's degrees it doesn't mean anything anymore and is wasteful overtraining. I'm no Trumper but somebody has to stop the greedy life-wasting that academics have created by overfunding a lot of stupid duplicate research and excessive college educations by people who never have an impact...
Some would say you educate people to cultivate an engaged citizenry
Very few people say that. Overwhelmingly the rhetoric one hears is that the purpose of higher education is to get a better job.
Personally, I think it would be great if we educated people to cultivate an engaged citizenry. But if we're going to do that we have to be up-front about it an work on an economic model that supports it. So, for example, you can't have student loans that are predicated on being able to obtain a certain level of income on graduation, and you certainly can't make those loans impossible to discharge even in bankruptcy. If you lie about it, as we have been for decades now, it all unravels sooner or later.
Thomas Jefferson said that a bunch
Wow, and things have gotten even worse in academia over the last 25 years.
I can retrospectively look back at folks in my (non computer science) PhD cohort, and say that this bearish outlook is only true for folks who stay in science too long or pursue actual academic careers.
The vast majority of folks I know flipped into more lucrative careers in industry... some of which require PhDs or Masters degrees.
Furthermore, it really depends on your track. You can wind up in a lab studying something totally obscure or you can be in a lab with multi-million dollar funding and state-of-the-art equipment you can't find elsewhere.
Sadly the most well funded scientific research right now is actually being bankrolled by techbro oligarchs for tax deduction purposes, even more so with the cuts to US funding.
> Sadly the most well funded scientific research right now is actually being bankrolled by techbro oligarchs for tax deduction purposes
What’s an example?
"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."
This seems a bit hyperbolic. In the mid to late 2000s, only 5 of the 15 close grad student friends I had at Caltech didn't get a tenure track position somewhere. Four of the five work in tech, and the fifth is a government electrical engineer. 4/5 were homegrown, the fifth is an immigrant, and all ten tenure track (now mostly tenured) profs are immigrants.
Maybe he just doesn’t know many people whose life was ruined by drugs.
To be fair, Caltech is a top school for physics.
I wonder if this is a parallel trap for people who study PoliSci and want to go into government to make a difference.
Regardless, each career has a disillusionment curve — although yes in this case the financial reality of it (still is) is super unfortunate.
If I had to guess, probably mostly because it doesn’t fit in a nice capitalist box of money in / money out.
The capitalist box is the best box there is, for better or worse.
It may also be worth pointing out that many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in human history were either achieved before institutional science existed in a modern form, or were achieved outside the formal system. We may have been better off with a system in which science was left to a tiny elite of eccentric geniuses with academic freedom. It certainly doesn't seem as though society is bettered by cranking out 1,000 government funded PoliSci Phds each year.
It's certainly an effective lawnmower, I just wish it didn't run over so many feet!
Capitalism has created a hell world where anything that makes life worth living has long since been stripped for profit.
You should read about the history of communism. Until you do, you have no idea how utterly horrible life can get.
I'm not sure that's really relevant. If capitalism fails to allow people to live worthwhile lives, then I don't think it helps much to say some other system is worse. That doesn't change the fact that capitalism is a failed system.
> "The capitalist box is the best box there is, for better or worse."
Only because on the whole we've been utterly resistant to every attempt to try any other way since inventing "<$money>". Bottomless greed is a real thing, and it's deeply dangerous to us all...
Many other ways have been tried. They have been abject failures with a little mass murder, famine, and war for bonus points!
Is there some way you're thinking of that has not been tried?
Democratic socialism, also called social democracy, has been dramatically more effective than America's late stage capitalism.
The heavily unionized capitalism that we had in the decades after WW2 also worked much better than our present system.
> Democratic socialism, also called social democracy, has been dramatically more effective than America's late stage capitalism.
> The heavily unionized capitalism that we had in the decades after WW2 also worked much better than our present system.
^^^ This. ^^^
What I'd really like to see is pick all the various bits and pieces from all the things that have been tried that do work well and try to build something around using those bits to build a solid foundation, using the mistakes of the past to learn from and avoid; not repeat ad-nauseam throughout history until it brings about our eventual end as a species. Clearly not gonna happen though. We're all too hell-bent on actively not seeing any sorta "big picture" future for humanity beyond "he who dies with the most money wins".
Has anything changed for the better?
Ten years ago the cleaners in the labs at The University of Otago had job security most of the scientists could only dream about.
I was in the business school (very low rankings!) and I was amazed at the infighting, back stabbing and general lack of collegiality amongst the academic staff.
I could not wait together out of there
“The cleaners have job security the scientists could only dream of” is pithy, but is it actually saying much? Cleaning is an essential, low-prestige, and potentially quite unpleasant job… I bet the cleaner is the most secure job in a lot of places.
Not really because there’s an oversupply of people that will do it and petulant bosses
I think it could be better titled "Don't Become an Academic Professional or Professional Scientist." They have good reasons for this.
Whereas, you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget. You can publish whatever you want on your web sites, social media, etc. You can often get advice or peer review from professional scientists by asking them. You might pay them for their time if you feel your work was worth it.
I came to a similar conclusion as a computer scientist working in industry who ended up transitioning to a community college teaching career. I remember being inspired by the stories of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC as a high school student and undergrad, wanting to follow in the footsteps of researchers like Dennis Ritchie. However, the industrial research landscape has changed in the past 15 years. It's very difficult to find truly curiosity-driven places with long timelines and little pressure, and industrial researchers these days are pressured to work on projects with more immediate productization prospects. I've seen this firsthand at a few companies. The tenure-track at a research university route requires playing the "publish-or-perish" game, which is also a curb on freedom and is also filled with pressure.
Being a tenure-track professor at a California community college is a happy situation for me. I love teaching, and for roughly 8 months of the year I'm dedicated to teaching. Tenure at my community college is entirely based on teaching and service; I'm not required (or even expected) to publish. I also get roughly 4 months of the year off (three months off in the summer, one month off in the winter). I spent much of the past summer in Japan collaborating with a professor on research. The only serious downside is not being able to afford a house within a reasonable commute from work, but I had the same problem in industry; not everyone in industry makes FAANG-level salaries. In fact, my compensation is effectively a raise from my previous job when factoring in going from roughly 3 weeks of PTO per year to 4 months off plus 10 days worth of sick leave; I took a roughly 10% pay cut in exchange for greater freedom and roughly 5-6x the annual time off.
I've learned that being a hobbyist researcher with a stable job that provides summers off is quite a favorable situation, since I don't have to worry about my job security being tied to my publication and fund-raising counts. Most of my computer science research can be done on a mid-range laptop with an Internet connection and access to textbooks and academic databases; I don't need equipment that cost five- or six-figures (though it would be nice to have a GPU cluster....).
> you can do science as a hobby in your spare time for free or up to your chosen budget
Not in many fields/subfields, unless "chosen budget" is some unattainable amount of disposable income.
Most people who want to do science have a specific field they are interested in. Your proposal is fine for theoreticians (and some computationalists, depending on the compute they require), but not many others.
Biology can be studied by observing outside in any park.
This is like saying you can study CS using pen and paper. It’s possible for certain rare edge cases but absolutely nobody is going through the process of applying for grants if they don’t need the money to work on the problems they’ve specialized for. People in the past were just as smart and motivated so the low-hanging fruit is gone.
Even for fields that can be done entirely with pen and paper, grad students and postdocs don't work for free, and often the only way a professor can keep up with a research university's publication expectations is to hire grad students and postdocs to contribute to research. Grants help pay for their stipends. Additionally, there are many universities that require their professors to raise grant money as a condition of tenure, since grant money is a significant source of revenue for research universities.
Feels to me a combination of old web with new web tricks is the key. People used to update obscure hobby details but there really was no way to donate. Creators didn't even think to bother to ask. All this democratization talk seems to be the solution.
I don't think crowdfunding is a good funding source for science in general. Crowdfunding's going to overemphasize already popular and easy to explain science at the expense of everything else. Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed.
I disagree. There's a guy that doesn't have much attention that's creating fuel from burning plastic. He got crowdfunded. I also recall finding a website way back when of a dude that explored the old railroad tunnels of downtown Chicago. I would have 100% funded that guy for content.
> "Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed."
"Boring sounding" to anyone who don't have a "passion" for that particular area of science as you must if you're wanting to research it. The (hard) trick is to get your crowdfunding request in front of the specific eyeballs that will understand (and be excited by) your motivations and interests enough to want to finance advancing that research.
I don't know from where I sit "don't be a crank" might be better advice.
Not to say it's impossible to do science as a hobby (there's some good stuff coming out of e.g. the ham community and amateur astronomers), but sadly most of my interactions with "hobbyist scientists" have been crackpots (ok, there is some selection bias here, crackpots go to all sorts of lengths to try to contact you).
This reminds me of numerous pieces I’ve read by authors on why not to try to become an author, like this: https://www.elysian.press/p/publishing-industry-truth
What it boils down to is that these are fields with a supply glut of people and/or product.
My take is: never try to enter such a field unless you really think you have a chance at performing in the top 20% of all entrants in that field. Anything else is a dice roll. A few people get lucky, but statistically it won’t be you.
Discouraging people from trying is a good filter for these fields, since the only people who will ignore such advice is people who really deeply love it or are really driven. Those are the people most likely to ascend to the top 20%. Nobody gets that good at something they aren’t driven to do.
It’s also a way to maybe make things better for people in those fields in the future. If the only people who enter the field are those who are deeply driven, it might cut down on the overpopulation problem.
Edit: some fields are worse than others of course. Glance at up and coming Hollywood actors and actresses for a worst case. Of the ones who are not nepo babies, look into how much work and hustle and luck (combined) it took for them to make it. Most are insanely good looking talented people who started acting as kids and hustled for years and then got lucky. It’s wild.
Physics is not that bad, but it’s not great. Fiction writing might be that bad, especially since the money is less even if someone does make it.
(1999)
The first copy of this essay captured by the Internet Archive was in October of 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20011013031756/http://wuphys.wus...
The same timestamp at the bottom of the essay can be found on other pages by Professor Katz, such as his list of publications which includes papers from 2019. I suspect that the timestamp of 1999 is incorrect.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191206233227/https://web.physi...
While this is clearly an old post, I'm not sure about the actual date. On the bottom it says 1999, but there's also a citation for an article from 2001.
> For many more details consult the Young Scientists' Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.