Don't Become a Scientist (1999)(yangxiao.cs.ua.edu) |
Don't Become a Scientist (1999)(yangxiao.cs.ua.edu) |
I realized the career paths were limited to two options I did not like: option 1) try to shoot for a tenure position somewhere via a long series of post doc positions. Expect to be mostly busy managing postdocs and researchers and lobbying for funding by the time you get there. Tenured professors delegate all the fun bits (i.e. research). 2) Become a lecturer. That's what happens to all the post docs that don't make it all the way.
It sounds harsh and it's unfair to the great teachers I had in university. But that roughly is the pecking order at many universities. If you're not cut out for securing lots of funding, you get to do the chore of teaching. Those are the two main things universities need to get done. The pesky business of actually doing the research is something that gets delegated to young phd students and post docs. Tenure positions are for those with a proven track record of securing funding. Typically via getting others to do great research.
That's the reason I left. Because I liked the research part, didn't mind the teaching part but absolutely hated the dreary university politics and the endless stupid infighting for power, funding, etc.
So I moved into industry, worked at an industrial research center for a bit (Nokia Research) and then found my way into startups. Building startups is a lot like doing research. You are solving fascinating problems that haven't been solved before. It requires the same sort of skills, you are running experiments, theorizing solutions, learning about new problems to solve, etc. You don't get to write a lot of papers and articles. Which isn't something I miss that much. While doing my Ph. D. the pressure to publish was so high it barely left any time for the actual research. With a startup it's the other way around.
My fear of going the startup route is that it ends up more like being a PI and having to chase funding and so much of the success lies less in the tech and more in the execution of how you sell it.
So go for funding and get the money to hire a team to do the fun stuff or do the fun stuff yourself on the side…
Do you think if you manage to have an exit from a startup, you might be able to return to research (at a university) but then be your own funder, so that you could then research whatever you want?
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).
> The struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support, and again there is a glut of scientists. Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems.
I've always wondered how far this contributes to the apparent slowdown of fundamental breakthroughs in theoretical physics.
But completely wrong about the solution.
The PhD glut? Real. The postdoc treadmill? Absolutely real. The funding crisis? Still here.
But here's what changed:
The same skills that make you survive a PhD—deep research, systems thinking, hypothesis testing, data analysis—became the EXACT skills the market desperately needs.
2025 reality: - AI companies hiring PhDs at $300K+ base - Biotech startups led by former academics - Data science roles requiring scientific rigor - Deep tech ventures solving real problems
The trap wasn't the PhD. The trap was assuming the ONLY path was tenure-track academia.
The researchers who thrived? They took their training and built different careers: → Industry R&D leadership → Technical founding teams → Quantitative roles in finance → Policy and strategy positions → Scientific consulting
The irony: that essay discouraged a generation from science right before scientific thinking became the most valuable skill set in the economy.
The lesson isn't "don't get a PhD."
It's "don't limit yourself to one narrow definition of what a scientist does."
The best training for solving hard problems is still solving hard problems.
You just get to choose which ones.
So while this is only N=2 sample size / anecdotal, it would seem to me that even in red hot fields like AI/ML you'd be better off finding some good company / private research group that matches your interest, and go for that. Probably going to get paid 5 times more, and not have to think about research grants and tenure track.
I think this is just a matter of what position you want. A classmate of mine wrote one paper on machine learning (he basically barely know how to run the Python to train some ancient neural net), did a short 1 year postdoc with his advisor and got a job as a professor at some no-name university in Japan.
I'm sure your classmate could get a professorship somewhere if he wanted. If his goal is to be a professor at Caltech then it's a different story
I really think it is the closest thing I have to a religion. It alters how I see the world, defines the way I think about how to approach problems, and consumes every waking moment of my life.
Of course, I've had many failed relationships either directly or indirectly for my career, and it has taken my health (I sustained a spinal injury at work) and best years of my life. I feel deeply uncomfortable when I am _not_ working and it is difficult for me to relax. Intellectually I recognise that it is deeply unhealthy but every time I write a grant everyone else in the world who applies is ranked and objectively compared to me -- and I can't shake this feeling that _they don't sleep_, so why should I? It's an absolute obsession and I go into this hyper-focussed mode when I _actually_ get things done and, when an experiment reveals something for the first time in the world, the feeling is amazing.
I've just won an academic prize and have a tenured post. I'm deeply, deeply insecure and have a very unhealthy relationship with work. Many academics I know – especially in medicine – are likely diagnosable with very real conditions...
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.
I was a great student who became a middling researcher. I come from a privileged background - my younger sibling has already achieved greater success than I ever will, largely from choosing to follow the family business. I've poured tons of extra time outside work into honing my software and ml skills. While I do like what I do, and I am respected at work, that doesn't translate into promotions, success, or justification for dragging my poor wife all over the country. What a fool I was.
Ugh. I didn't need to read this today.
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
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 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.
I have never seen such wisdom. In my neck of woods, PhD is about being hugely into some aspect of science, seeing value in it and being willing to work a lot on it even in bad conditions. The only that tracks is being competitive.
But, you can be introverted, you wont lead anything and no one expects you to.
“So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!” a.k.a. “Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school at the beginning but didn’t learn until later.”
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.
What’s an example?
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.
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.
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.
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...
During my PhD, we learned that about 1 in 10 PhDs got a permanent academic position. That's intentional - the industry wants way more PhDs than the university. If we only trained future professors, we'd train many fewer.
But PhDs have low unemployment, even in subjects like history and philosophy, and the jobs they get in industry are usually good. So getting a PhD is not exactly the career suicide that people paint it as.
The author is right about the whole grant game though. Fuck that.
I also don't remember seeing PhD requirement/advantage in who's hiring on HN. There may be, but they are for sure rare.
In my country, in some job positions, a company is also required to give higher salaries to PhDs, so they reject such candidates because of overqualification. I know of a few cases where people actually officially removed their PhD from their education list.
YMMV, and I am glad it's working out for you but, at least in my country, the reality is very different.
In many sciences, your primary job options are teaching and research. And if you are going to do research, employers generally expect a PhD. Physics is probably the most extreme case, as it's common to see physics departments award one PhD for every three bachelor's degrees.
Even when it is not career suicide, it usually is a pay cut in real terms compared to getting a job at a company earlier and accumulating experience on the job.
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...
> For many more details consult the Young Scientists' Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.
I feel the contract of academia has been broken. I'll give up high pay and gladly teach students if I am given the freedom to explore and define my own research path. But that is not the job of a professor. They spend all their days writing grants, doing service, mentoring grad students in how to write works that get the most citations, and build their connections. Little time is usually left for students and rarely is there time for research on their own. Why would I want to do all that when I can make 3x as much in industry, work fewer hours, and have access to better tools to do my own research? While industry will also not give me much freedom there's no doubt that I will actually have time to do research if I find the energy.
We fucked up. We let the bureaucrats take over. They care about metrics but not for what the metrics measure. Unfortunately this isn't unique to academia. But we lost sight of the whole purpose of academia. Academia was always supposed to be different. Not about profits. Research is high risk, but results in massive rewards. It research creates the foundation for trillion dollar industries. Sometimes it takes decades to see that reward, but the research is cheap.
--EAB, Why I Write
(The trick could be for some of us amateurs to preferentially attend to the preternaturally funny babies)
> Over and over again he tried, quite vainly, to explain to them why he would not yield himself to the servitude of a ‘good’ job. ‘But what are you going to live on? What are you going to live on?’ was what they all wailed at him. He refused to think seriously about it. Of course, he still harboured the notion that he could make a living of sorts by ‘writing’ ... The next seven months were devastating. They scared him and almost broke his spirit. He learned what it means to live for weeks on end on bread and margarine, to try to ‘write’ when you are half starved
And there's also this other passage from Why I Write:
> The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
The training otherwise is a bit of a joke.. you can write some janky Python to shit out crappy plots. You learn to skim papers.. and some bare-minimum stats. It's not worth doing for some nebulous "scientist training"
Demand is where people are willing to pay you at the right price, and you aren't struggling to find work. Need is where they aren't, and you are struggling, and people only get jobs when there is suitable demand.
Jobs where there is great need but distortions that cause zero or extremely low demand, you don't get people. These jobs have great need, but there is no economic benefit that justifies the people development cost for that crop. These resources are wasted resources after demand is met.
A lot of this is basic economics, and the tragedy is that just like in science, structure dictates function. Distortions beget more distortions, and when they are not based in the core principles that determine wealth of a nation, then they may become chaotic at which point structure fails.
The lesson the OP author is trying to make is, make sure the juice is worth the squeeze, and be extremely discerning because there are a lot of people that will lie for imaginary personal benefits. Enough that he says don't do it, and that's coming from an insider who has known and seen how it goes bad in detail, but was still successful.
It’s not hard to do but you have to let go.
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....).
So, for a high school student, the lesson there was not just to do great science but to join or start a business that is or soon can be "awash in money" and then do whatever you want, e.g., Jim and Marilyn Simons, including "great science".
In more detail, now in practice, one of the main motivations of a company "awash in money" is to pursue research for luster, e.g., AI, quantum computing.
Ah, Lesson 101 in US life and money!
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.
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).
in asia many many international professors and postdocs work 100% in English. Its the norm. Extremely rare to meet the exception. Many dont even have a conversational grasp of the local language
Even if you aquire the local language, getting to a proficiency level where you can discuss scientific topics is nearly impossible (bc in the meantime youre doing all your work in english)
As far as Jane Jacobs (not a professional) is concerned, this is the hardest problem for any tribe of humans: how to survive as a culture?
On values (some say fumes) or on money. Values vs value. Academia back in the days of Athena was a "solution" on the values end of the spectrum. Religion, too, until they figured out they could appeal to the "charity" of the spiritually hungry rich (& later, everyone)
(I appreciate the Benedictine orders for limiting their offer of spiritual goods to some devilish brews )
https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-solarpowered-plastic-to-f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Brown_(influencer)
He gets $36K from about 800 donors for a project that seems pretty easy to explain ("creating fuel from burning plastic") and is something probably millions of people are interested in. Wikipedia says he has millions of followers!
The stuff I'd like to do would probably not have even 800 people interested in it after I carefully explained it. And $36K is not a lot when it comes to experimental research in the physical world.
In my view, working a day job and taking periodic sabbaticals would have better ROI for this guy and myself.
"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.
Is there some way you're thinking of that has not been tried?
The heavily unionized capitalism that we had in the decades after WW2 also worked much better than our present system.
Depends on how you look at it, and which categories you measure, obviously? Why hasn't it caught on other than Nordic countries?
> 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".
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.
It’s not very fashionable on HN because of the faux-tough utilitarian outlook, sure. I’m the real life, there might be such a thing as over-education, but the US are certainly not there.
And in the early 19th century near to 100% of Americans lived in rural areas where access to centralized information was minimal. There was no internet, radio, or other means of centralized communication. For that matter, there wasn't even electricity. The closest they'd have had would have been local newspapers. So people without any education would have had very little idea about the world around them.
And obviously I don't mean what's happening half-way around the world, but in their own country, their own rights, and so on. Among the political elite there was a raging battle over federalism vs confederalism, but that would have had very little meaning to the overwhelming majority of Americans. Jefferson won the presidency in 1800 with 45k votes against John Adams' 30k votes, when the country's population was 5,300,000!
[1] - https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/history-publ...
Which has historical precedent: the French revolution wasn't a well planned transition to a better system, the Russian revolutionaries overthrowing the Tsar weren't much interested in the specific details of communism.
If the defense you have for the suffering of people is "well it could be worse" you are rather gambling that they are not yet sufficiently unhappy that the effort to be rid of you won't seem worth it.
(I happen to think there are cultural changes and political and economic reforms that could improve the quality of our lives, but these will not be found in the the narrow and superficial debates about capitalism and socialism. The key is to begin with the right questions: "what does it mean to be human?" and "how should we live?/what is the good life?" The first is a question belonging to philosophical anthropology, the second to ethics, and these further presuppose a good basic knowledge of metaphysics, at least. Until you have a good grasp of these, you are not in a position to effectively approach the question of what kinds of political and economic orders and arrangements should be fostered, as these depend on the answers to the former. If you cling instead to the categories imposed by modernism, whose inherent tensions and contradictions are now coming to the surface and playing out in a slow-motion death rattle, then you're wasting your time.)
Revolution: Fight to change the system.
Rebellion: Ok with the system. Fight to be at the head themselfes.
But it makes sense that in reality it isn't as black and white.
Had he been born a few years earlier, it would have been unlikely for him to even graduate. 1940 was the first year that the graduation rate hit 50%.
Jefferson, in modern parlance, would probably be a 'pragmatic libertarian.' He envisioned independent self-reliant people, and in fact (like many of the Founding Fathers) was somewhat opposed to 'economically dependent' people, including wage laborers, voting - for fear that their vote could be coerced too easily, and that they might otherwise be irresponsible. That's where things like property ownership came from as a voting requirement.
And a major part of self reliance is an education that is both broad and fundamental which is where the 'pragmatic' part comes in, as I think fundamental libertarianism would view education as exclusively a thing of the private market, whereas Jefferson supported broad and public education precisely as part of this formula to independence.