Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their energy was going into cultivating relationships that would aid their career trajectories, rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research.
They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn't hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time.
The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there's a pool of funding available for something? That's not worth the bother. In that case it's just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that?
Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives, and maybe some politicians with special interests, and if they're not interested in supporting research into your field of interest, you might as well forget about it, unless you can finance a million-dollar-a-year research lab on your own. I suppose it's possible, but not very common.
Regardless, not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about, unfortunately. Overwork and risking burnout might be part of the price you have to pay to get there, at least in our rather dystopian modern American society. (Notably, the author of this piece relocated from UK to Norway...)
>rather than into doing groundbreaking innovative research.
We probably should first acknowledge that the vast majority of research is incremental and not groundbreaking.
>not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about
Depending on your interest, this may be a case of expectation management. We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case. If it's wildly interesting, chances are lots of people are also interested and the competition drives down wages. If it's truly groundbreaking, there may not be a viable market for it so it likewise wouldn't have high wages (as wages tend to be commensurate with the differential contribution to the economy). If you are lucky to work in a field you love and are such an outlier technically that you can command high wages, you must by definition be a low probability case. So most people are left trying to find the balance of making money and doing something they are truly passionate about unless you happen to be passionate about something valuable that most people dislike.
I'll second this, I've also seen a lot of people that like to brag about, e.g. working 80 hour weeks, but usually don't actually do much work. At any given moment they're likely talking to someone, or playing on a phone, etc.
As a single dad of a young child, and an academic, this is just impossible for me. I have a few precious hours to work, and need to get the most out of them. I end up being pretty socially isolated at work.
I don't agree with the "you might as well forget about it" thing you wrote. Funding in academia is about explaining why what you want to do actually furthers the agenda of the funding agency. If you can master this skill, you can fund almost any work from almost any funding source. It might sound dishonest, but I am convinced it's actually not- the phenomena in our natural world are all connected, and we don't understand them that well. To solve almost any random problem deeply requires work that translates to fundamental advances in almost everything else. Norbert Wiener explains this well in his book Cybernetics, where he talks about how work on missile guiding technology led to his concept of cybernetics, which was a revolutionary way to understand both engineering and biology.
Plenty of research doesn't need millions to do. If you're a mathematician or almost any kind of theoretician or computational scientist you need a laptop maybe the odd bit of cloud time on a bigger blob of compute, in the case of mathematicians you might need chalk. The millions you do need to spend though are on private per-paper viewing of literature, thats the real mind killer. If universities just had alumni access to literature they would rapidly just become subscription library services for theory people! I can work like 3 months a year and finance literally the rest of my time on theoretical work. But only if I don't have to pay £60 to read enough of a paper to realise its a worthless piece of crap.
I should add those 3 months would also pay me about 2x better than a postdoc working fulltime in a university. Thats the level of pay disparity with industry, and the level of pointlessness of a university as an institution if you dont need a wet lab to work. A genuinely good business idea would be a virtual institution with library services.
You're forgetting the cost of funding students, but also there are costs in securing prestige for your institution. The university benefits when your grants are large and plentiful, so they encourage research faculty to pursue those projects which earn more money, even if it's not exactly what they care most about.
Cannot you just get a library card at the university? I live next to a university where I have no affiliation, and if I pay $150 a year I can eat all I want. (Though I do think I have to be onsite as there is no remote access.)
Another trick is to sign up for the adult ed classes, or basically retiree classes to get access. I've even heard of people doing this to get cheap health insurance!!!
It depends on the field, but I don't think access to papers is such a big deal anymore. Preprints and open access mandates have become popular enough that relevant papers are usually available for free through legitimate channels. When I'm working from home, I rarely bother starting a VPN to access a paper, because it's usually not worth the effort.
A bigger issue that affects independent researchers (and academics who are the only ones working on some topic in their department) is the social context of doing research. Even if you are a big name in your field, your ideas are probably not that special, and neither is your ability to execute them. For most researchers, the real value comes from having regular discussions with other experts.
"Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives...."
This is not really true in the US. For example, NSF review processes are basically determined by peers, panels of PhDs who are experts in the field. While their expertise may vary, they generally do a reasonable and fair and scientifically meaningful review. To claim this is all "controlled by government burearcrats" is lazy and mostly wrong.
Maybe not in the most technical sense, but what funds most of the research projects? Government (with NIH being the largest funder of biomedical research in the world), private companies, and non-profits[0]. US government dumps absolutely enormous amounts of money on research funding.
The difference in numbers can be pretty stark. I don't have data on hand for the exact breakdown for all research funding in general, but I have numbers for health research specifically (and I expect the trend overall to stay the same regarding research funding overall). Top 3 funders in the world are NIH ($26.1bn), European Commission ($3.7bn), and UK Medical Research Council ($1.3bn). For comparison, the largest non-profit contribution comes from Welcome Trust and is sitting only at $909.1mil, with WHO coming in third at $135mil.
Here is a published paper[1] from 2016 containing all these numbers.
This sounds pretty similar to non-academic corporate life. People who show up to hang out, get mad at people who don't do the same, you're encouraged to work extra hours to get ahead, only able to work on things you get funding for (i.e. what clients will pay you for or projects that those above you will greenlight), being controlled by corporate executives, etc.
But you probably get paid more in the corporate world, at least.
> The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there's a pool of funding available for something? That's not worth the bother. In that case it's just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that?
This is how I tried to justified my poor work-life balance from working on things I am deeply and personally interested in. If we treated grad school like a 9-5 job like all of the internal forces told us to, there's little incentive to stay in a worse version of an industry position that actually has work-life balance and magnitudes-higher compensation.
There are certainly some pockets of academic circles that only try to appear to be working hard 12h every single day and only care for having you rub my back I'll rub yours kinda deals. But many of Ph.D students that are monkeying around in STEM doing seemingly useless stuff actually expand their areas of expertise and encourage each other, gain curiosity, become creative and it helps them to make progress. You have to look for certain clues, they can't be having too much fun -then they are not doing any good work, if they appear too bogged down -they don't know what they are doing and shouldn't be there in the first place.
> They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn't hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time.
The author is too optimistic. There are going to be continuous waves of mass firings of tenured faculty in the 2030s and 2040s.
The overwork and stress culture are going to get much worse over the next quarter century. The problem is structural, not cultural, and there isn't much that academics are going to be able to do in order to combat the problem.
Specific to the USA, but also true in much of the west:
1. Revenue is a huge problem, which means academia will become a zero-sum game even (especially!) for higher-compensated labor. Academia's revenue streams come from three sources that are decreasing in real terms. Those revenue streams will likely begin decreasing even in nominal terms even as inflation reaches a higher steady-state! Government budgets for higher education and academic R&D are more likely to decrease than to increase, and even if they increase almost certainly won't keep up with inflation. Meanwhile, due to demographics, the USA in particular is about to enter a period of decreasing college enrollments (unless the percent of the college-going population can increase substantially, which is unlikely).
2. There is an oversupply of academic labor and labor is the primary controllable expense.
3. Some of these problems used to be manageable because academics controlled the institutions that employed them. But the management culture of universities is becoming professionalized. This means that academics are losing institutional influence that would allow them to maintain good working conditions even in the face of unfavorable market conditions.
I don't think we should give young academics feel good advice like "don't work too hard". What we should be telling them is that even if they bust their ass and get tenure, it's very likely that their pay will languish and they will live in fear of layoffs despite being tenured and working at a steep discount to pay in other industries.
Academia is just another industry, and it's entering a period of secular decline. That situation is never fun for the foot soldiers.
> 1. Revenue is a huge problem, which means academia will become a zero-sum game even (especially!) for higher-compensated labor. Academia's revenue streams come from three sources that are decreasing in real terms. Those revenue streams will likely begin decreasing even in nominal terms even as inflation reaches a higher steady-state! Government budgets for higher education and academic R&D are more likely to decrease than to increase, and even if they increase almost certainly won't keep up with inflation. Meanwhile, due to demographics, the USA in particular is about to enter a period of decreasing college enrollments (unless the percent of the college-going population can increase substantially, which is unlikely).
On the other side, spending is a huge problem as well. Like... professional grade sports teams? As an European: WTF does that kind of shit have to do with universities? Yes, I get it, it attracts students, but you could also carve out the sports teams into separate commercial entities. And the bill isn't small either - the US government helped out with 6.5 billion dollars and student fees with another 1.5 billion dollars [1] in 2018! That is, frankly, insane.
Also, at least Ivy League universities have endowments valued at literally dozens of billions of dollars [2]. The US needs a complete reform of university financing.
> On the other side, spending is a huge problem as well.
Of course. But universities will 100% fire tenured faculty before they kill off a D1 football program or spend down endowment principal. So from the perspective of academic laborers, it's a moot point.
> 2. There is an oversupply of academic labor and labor is the primary controllable expense.
Can't say I agree with that statement. It was true for decades, but academic employment had been losing its status for years, and the pandemic greatly increased that. There are lots of examples of research positions having few or no applicants. Grad students these days are much less intent on getting academic jobs than even five years ago.
Now, that's not to say that deans across the country aren't continuing to plan as if that's the case, but they may find themselves with a serious problem a decade from now.
> There are lots of examples of research positions having few or no applicants.
I've mostly heard of this happening for two types of roles. The first are post-docs. The second are low-paying primarily teaching positions at exactly the types of places that will probably blink off the map in the 2030s.
In both cases, the hard truth is that the institution will simply leave the position unfilled before increasing pay or improving job security. Compensation is nearly perfectly inelastic and job security cannot be guaranteed.
> a decade from now
A decade from now their enrollments will have declined due to the post-2008 baby bust, in many cases by double digits. They'll be more worried about who they have to lay off than who to hire.
Particularly true for those instructor and other teaching-oriented positions.
> Why will academic R&D begin falling below the rate of inflation?
Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments. Academic R&D just doesn't have the constituency needed to save it from cuts.
I will be a bit astounded if NSF/NIH don't take nominal cuts during the debt ceiling negotiations, and they certainly won't get budget increases to keep up with inflation. Even defense spending, a massive sacred cow, might take a cut. There is just no way that base closures happen without DARPA et al. also taking it on the chin.
There may be one-time infusions into critical sectors here and there (CHIPS, probably energy, etc) and the STEM fields may benefit from a systematic defunding of humanities departments in certain states, but it's not enough to make up for secular headwinds.
The only saving grace for budgets might be if universities could create and capture the value that their R&D spend generates. But most research doesn't provide any value to society, and for the research that does capturing that value is often harder than creating the value in the first place. And even in that case, the change in management culture and workforce dynamics mean that the "relaxed tenured professor" is quickly going extinct.
The only thing academic hustle will get you in the 2030s and 2040s is a relatively low-paying job that requires even more hustle.
As an immigrant, I relate to what she says: feel pressure to work hard -> work hard -> achieve results -> benefit from those results.
As far as I can tell, the system works. She got an opportunity, worked her ass off, produced a lot, and attained a great position/life as consequence.
Those who chose an easier path, perhaps were less stressed but also didn't do or get as much. But I bet they are going to be more stressed as life goes on, while she's in a great spot:
Due to her earlier work, she's at a place to reflect and say "I am at level X, I can dial it back" which is great. But this is a luxury of being at X level to begin with and you mainly don't get there without hard work.
To some extent. My wife is about to finish her PhD. She's not even a top-level publishing academic and the amount of work she's had to put in for next to no pay (sometimes literally no pay) is insane. Hard work is great and but there is such a thing as too hard and I would argue academia takes advantage of some of the hardest working and most qualified people in the country (I'm in the US).
I don't know, it's a little bit different from the other side of the lectern. As a professor, I am mindful of keeping a work-life balance in my classroom. I try not to over-assign homework, and I'm mindful that students have lives outside of the classroom, so I'm flexible with deadlines and other minutia.
Even still, I'll have students emailing me for more work. They want to do research, get involved in competitions, write a paper, do independent studies. Every semester I have to approve overloads for students who want to take more classes. Individual institutions aren't forcing these students (who are often the most qualified of the qualified) to take on all this extra work. It's more like, the whole system is a race to the top for them. It's hard to disentangle that drive from industry and the economic system and blame it just on academia. After all, why do they want to take these extra classes? To be better job applicants.
The US does this in every instance where passion is involved. Passionate people, especially those who are passionate about their work, are more easily convinced to take less pay because they are "passionate" and want to see their work come to fruition.
Exploitation of youthful passion for profit is basically the centerpiece of how America beats its workers into submission and slowly breaks down their expectations for anything good in the workplace. The worse condition the workers are willing to accept, the more profit to be made off of their labor.
As a fellow immigrant, can confirm, hard work works. That’s the main reason I came to USA – hard work didn’t feel like it would work back home. Nothing nefarious, just tall poppy syndrome and general environmental influence or multiplicative factor.
In America, with a bit of luck, it feels like 1x hard work produces 2x result. 3x if you’re privileged. At home, it felt like 1x hard work would get 1.3x result.
BUT! It is important to realize you’re solving a cold start problem. The hustle and hard work only gets you so far. You have to switch to using leverage once you have it. Do not grind yourself to dust.
Yes, dialing back is a luxury. That’s what the hard work was for. Now you can focus on using that position to do more with less. I liken it to running an ultramarathon to get to the start line of the marathon. You now have similar footing to someone who grew up in the social class to which you now belong, just a little later. Good luck.
edit:
I’m not saying hard work guarantees anything. In life there are no guarantees. But I do think it’s a necessary input.
At the end of the day, if you want exceptional results, you have to do exceptional things. Such is life. Only 2% of Americans have a PhD. Getting into the top 2% of the population sounds pretty exceptional to me. Doing it in a population you weren’t even born into? Heroic.
> Those who chose an easier path, perhaps were less stressed but also didn't do or get as much.
This is could be true assuming that the goal of society is maximum production and not maximum well-being.
> But this is a luxury of being at X level to begin with and you mainly don't get there without hard work.
Most of the results of hard-work go to the owners of business, not to the people doing that extra effort. And that is also true for academia. To overwork human beings to increase profit in exchange of a fraction of the produced seems inefficient at least, evil at worst.
When it comes to research maximum output is maximum well being for society (assuming the research isn't garbage, looking at you large parts of the humanities department) because that research drives productivity increases through multiple avenues. This is true because the effect of research is usually broadly applicable (i.e. a more efficient engine can save trillions in fuel and environmental damage) while the costs of overwork are concentrated on a very few that are self selecting for that lifestyle.
That most of the results of hard work go to the business owner is a result of capital being scarce while labor is more likely to not be right now (this is changing but it is a slow process). This is definitely true of academia with massive phd overproduction. If you want more benefit to accrue to phds you need to end the pyramid scheme that has been massively overproducing phds for decades or create broader non teaching/research demand for phds (ideally real demand, not manufactured credential requirement inflation because that causes massive dead weight loss)
The point you missed is she got where she is with a very very large amount of luck too. Most grants have about 100+ equally high quality applicants at this point in history. If you dont make it 8 years out of PhD (which is a huge investment of your productive life) you get shit canned forever on funding and "early career" opportunities. The system is exploitative in the extreme.
It's interesting you say this, I've realized it true in mine own life, I worked very hard, and admittedly was blessed with some wonderful opportunities early on in my career that led to me being far ahead of many of my peers age wise. I spent several years early in my career and life working very hard, working, full time school, full time parent, etc. Because of that I am now at a place where as my children have the ability to speak I have been able to dial it back a bit and still maintain my standing because of the foundation that was put in place long ago.
As my mother said "Life has to get hard at some point it can get hard now or it can get hard later."
// As my mother said "Life has to get hard at some point it can get hard now or it can get hard later."
She's wise. The way I express the same idea - I'd rather make my own life hard on my own terms, than deal with it just being hard and struggling.
Easy example - it's much easier to chose to save money when you have it (forgo something) than to somehow deal with not having money later. Or - it's totally fine and cute to have to live with roommates in your 20s so you can save and invest. Living with roommates in your 40s because you haven't saved and invested - less cute.
I am 100% certain that this rug is going to be pulled out from under any academic who is currently under the age of 45 or so. Tenure and seniority aren't going to mean much when budgets are tight and the admin is run by professional managers instead of senior-academics-on-admin-rotation.
Painful for anyone who's currently an Asst or Assoc Prof and was planning on retiring-in-place in academia, but I think it's a net good for academic culture in the long term.
Isn't a lot of the increase in costs coming from the admin side, where folks are easier to lay off? My understanding (married to an academic) is that it's pretty difficult to get rid of tenured folks, and much easier to eliminate admin positions. And in some cases, the admins make a lot of money, even in comparison to the professors.
Well I mean Einstein, Netwon, Maxwell, and Galileo were probably more valuable to advancing our understanding of physics than every one of their contemporaries combined.
The funny part is that Einstein wasn't even in academia until after he was famous. If anything this speaks to me that we want only those people in the field who would do it even if there was no reward for they will be the ones who produce earth shattering breakthroughs.
Maybe. But also it seems like there's some exponential benefits too. Who can produce the next earth shattering discovery: a 1000 researches who've only done one study, or one researcher who has done a 1000 studies? All that experience and context matters.
The woman who wrote the article is sought after today not because what she's produced over the past years, but because of what those efforts enable her to do next.
>> Due to her earlier work, she's at a place to reflect and say "I am at level X, I can dial it back" which is great. But this is a luxury of being at X level to begin with and you mainly don't get there without hard work.
This is pretty typical, especially on Hacker News. A bunch of people saying working too hard is bad who are rich primarily because they worked too hard while they were younger.
Mostly I think they don't get what they're saying. Though I suspect some of them actually say it to prevent competition.
I'm struggling with a pervasive culture of inverting this pattern. "I do nothing unless you give me a lot of privileges". And if you come with motivation and desire to achieve more (overachieving to an extent) you become the enemy.
I think about this as another of those "industries" in which a lot people want to get into. Similar to art, animation, acting, screen writing, recording artist music; I suppose any creative industries will be like this.
All these 'industries' become exploitative (possibly capitalism has something to do with how this happens. but let's stay on topic)
So then, I consider this pattern of exploitation -- of "put up with it or get out", to be a sort of collective (or cultural, organizational) trauma in the sense that it self-perpetuates.
People join, get overworked, become traumatized, and then some make it through. Now, once on the other side, they proceed to overwork newcomers.
It's very common to think "I made it through, and I've become what I am because of those experiences" a rationalization of the trauma.
But I wonder about them who make it... was it because of overworked abuse, or was it in spite of it?
Academic institutions are loaded up with people who are skilled at political manipulation and bureaucratic infighting, and who often have little real interest in their supposed field of research. For these types it's basically a game of getting in with the reviewers of grant proposals, rubbing elbows at scientific conferences, hiring technicians and postdocs and maybe some pHD students to generate a steady stream of papers, cozying up to university administration, attending dinners and so on.
It's gotten even worse since the corporations started getting exclusive licenses to university patents, now there's all the secrecy in those fields as well as the PIs start salivating about the possibility of getting a small percentage of the royalties on those patents.
Trofim Lysenko would have recognized the system, it's similar to the one he ran in the Soviet Union for decades.
The only way to undo the culture of overwork for academic professors, is to increase bottleneck somewhere upstream (e.g. cut the number of PhD students in half). Any time you have a situation where 300 people are applying for the same job (as is common for ladder rank professorships at research universities), the people who end up getting those jobs will inevitably have been overworked. Imagine if less than 10% of people who went to med school ended up landing a job as a physician - that's basically the situation with professorships.
To be clear, Ph.D. students are very expensive. I don't know where you would get the idea that they are "free labor". Sure they're not as expensive as software engineers, but they also can't (or shouldn't) be "fired" per se. There's a certain latitude you are afforded as a student, and that's something that I think a lot of Ph.D. candidates don't appreciate when they complain they are underpaid compared to their industry counterparts.
Source: was a Ph.D. student who complained about being underpaid, now a professor who sees how expensive they actually are.
The type of "career scientist" that the article portrays is part of the problem. In order to get ahead with a science career, one needs to pursue an extremely narrow specialisation. Otherwise it is impossible to build a stellar reputation. And reputation is the key determinant for being offered a permanent position at a high-ranking institution.
However, many interesting and relevant problems live at the interface of several disciplines. Unfortunately, those working between disciplines will have a hard time getting a permanent job at top universities: Whatever faculty they apply to, there will always be other applicants who are super-specialised and therefore appeal more to the super-specialised faculty members in the hiring committee. That is why true interdisciplinary research still doesn't happen very much, even though it has been praised and encouraged for more than two decades now.
Coming back to the article, in my opinion the solution to overwork is to cut back on elitism. Less famous universities tend to be more relaxed in their recruitment and tenure criteria. Less pressure means more mental flexibility, which can help maintain a wider network of researchers across disciplines. And the wider the network is, the better the chances of being invited to collaborative projects, especially when one has a record of successful interdisciplinary collaboration.
The price to pay is that one will not be able to impress with the name of one's university when doing small talk. But one will be a much more interesting conversation partner — and have free time to meet people outside work with whom to talk.
This just in - competitive people in competitive fields compete.
The only way to fix this is to make rules about how hard anyone is allowed to work. By definition this is a denial of freedom and stifles progress.
The real solution for an individual is to be satsfied with less. Just don’t expect that of anyone else lest you tread on the thin ice of communim, which is ironic considering the birthplace of the author.
This conclusion does not at all follow from the premise. The myth that more competition means you get a better result absolutely does not hold and needs to die. There's a fundamental equilibrium shift when you spend more resources competing than you do on progressing.
> The myth that more competition means you get a better result absolutely does not hold and needs to die. There's a fundamental equilibrium shift when you spend more resources competing than you do on progressing.
As an aside, I'm impressed someone treated Nature as their personal blogpage and now has a nature publication on their CV as a result. I would never have thought if that. Hell, I just saw it happen, and I still wouldnt have thought of it.
That's the tradeoff -- lifetime employment doing what you love should only go to those who are supremely dedicated and won't abuse the privilege.
Part of her issue though is that academic research and academic writing are two different skills, and being a productive researcher essentially requires you to spend a lot of time writing papers. I would think that a grant that allowed scientists (especially) to hire dedicated scientific writers would have a multiplier effect on the productivity of the scientist and would also improve the quality of the papers produced, as having to explain the concept to a non-expert tends to crystallize ideas on presentation.
> lifetime employment doing what you love should only go to those who are supremely dedicated
Should people give their lives for a profession? That seems prone to create unhealthy societies prone to conflict and cheating. In my experience self described meritocratic societies usually are just cynic nepotist societies. The children of the poor have to work their asses off to get much less that what the children of the rich get without effort.
Homo economicus is dead, and it is time to update the world views on work and economy.
I have recently begun to appreciate how much (in the US) we structure our entire existence around our jobs, and how we earn money. The puritan work ethic, extrapolated out across BS jobs encourages so many of us to identify as our jobs, and make that our sense of self.
Readit News
They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn't hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time.
The real problem with academics (at least for me) was the lack of any real academic freedom - working 24-7 on something and making sacrifices towards a goal you think is really useful and worthwhile is one thing, but doing it just because there's a pool of funding available for something? That's not worth the bother. In that case it's just a job, a means of earning a living doing some tedious repetitive work, and why spend more than 30-40 hours a week on that?
Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives, and maybe some politicians with special interests, and if they're not interested in supporting research into your field of interest, you might as well forget about it, unless you can finance a million-dollar-a-year research lab on your own. I suppose it's possible, but not very common.
Regardless, not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about, unfortunately. Overwork and risking burnout might be part of the price you have to pay to get there, at least in our rather dystopian modern American society. (Notably, the author of this piece relocated from UK to Norway...)
We probably should first acknowledge that the vast majority of research is incremental and not groundbreaking.
>not many people seem to end up making money doing something they really care about
Depending on your interest, this may be a case of expectation management. We should expect that the idea that one can eat your cake and have it too is a rare case. If it's wildly interesting, chances are lots of people are also interested and the competition drives down wages. If it's truly groundbreaking, there may not be a viable market for it so it likewise wouldn't have high wages (as wages tend to be commensurate with the differential contribution to the economy). If you are lucky to work in a field you love and are such an outlier technically that you can command high wages, you must by definition be a low probability case. So most people are left trying to find the balance of making money and doing something they are truly passionate about unless you happen to be passionate about something valuable that most people dislike.
But you’re not eating it, salaries suck in STEM academia compared to private jobs. If you don’t have freedom either, what’s the point?
The way we fund research heavily skews the research attempted so that that's even more the case than it otherwise would be.
As a single dad of a young child, and an academic, this is just impossible for me. I have a few precious hours to work, and need to get the most out of them. I end up being pretty socially isolated at work.
I don't agree with the "you might as well forget about it" thing you wrote. Funding in academia is about explaining why what you want to do actually furthers the agenda of the funding agency. If you can master this skill, you can fund almost any work from almost any funding source. It might sound dishonest, but I am convinced it's actually not- the phenomena in our natural world are all connected, and we don't understand them that well. To solve almost any random problem deeply requires work that translates to fundamental advances in almost everything else. Norbert Wiener explains this well in his book Cybernetics, where he talks about how work on missile guiding technology led to his concept of cybernetics, which was a revolutionary way to understand both engineering and biology.
Another trick is to sign up for the adult ed classes, or basically retiree classes to get access. I've even heard of people doing this to get cheap health insurance!!!
A bigger issue that affects independent researchers (and academics who are the only ones working on some topic in their department) is the social context of doing research. Even if you are a big name in your field, your ideas are probably not that special, and neither is your ability to execute them. For most researchers, the real value comes from having regular discussions with other experts.
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This is not really true in the US. For example, NSF review processes are basically determined by peers, panels of PhDs who are experts in the field. While their expertise may vary, they generally do a reasonable and fair and scientifically meaningful review. To claim this is all "controlled by government burearcrats" is lazy and mostly wrong.
Maybe not in the most technical sense, but what funds most of the research projects? Government (with NIH being the largest funder of biomedical research in the world), private companies, and non-profits[0]. US government dumps absolutely enormous amounts of money on research funding.
The difference in numbers can be pretty stark. I don't have data on hand for the exact breakdown for all research funding in general, but I have numbers for health research specifically (and I expect the trend overall to stay the same regarding research funding overall). Top 3 funders in the world are NIH ($26.1bn), European Commission ($3.7bn), and UK Medical Research Council ($1.3bn). For comparison, the largest non-profit contribution comes from Welcome Trust and is sitting only at $909.1mil, with WHO coming in third at $135mil.
Here is a published paper[1] from 2016 containing all these numbers.
0. https://undsci.berkeley.edu/who-pays-for-science/
1. https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
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But you probably get paid more in the corporate world, at least.
This is how I tried to justified my poor work-life balance from working on things I am deeply and personally interested in. If we treated grad school like a 9-5 job like all of the internal forces told us to, there's little incentive to stay in a worse version of an industry position that actually has work-life balance and magnitudes-higher compensation.
did they piss you off or something?
The overwork and stress culture are going to get much worse over the next quarter century. The problem is structural, not cultural, and there isn't much that academics are going to be able to do in order to combat the problem.
Specific to the USA, but also true in much of the west:
1. Revenue is a huge problem, which means academia will become a zero-sum game even (especially!) for higher-compensated labor. Academia's revenue streams come from three sources that are decreasing in real terms. Those revenue streams will likely begin decreasing even in nominal terms even as inflation reaches a higher steady-state! Government budgets for higher education and academic R&D are more likely to decrease than to increase, and even if they increase almost certainly won't keep up with inflation. Meanwhile, due to demographics, the USA in particular is about to enter a period of decreasing college enrollments (unless the percent of the college-going population can increase substantially, which is unlikely).
2. There is an oversupply of academic labor and labor is the primary controllable expense.
3. Some of these problems used to be manageable because academics controlled the institutions that employed them. But the management culture of universities is becoming professionalized. This means that academics are losing institutional influence that would allow them to maintain good working conditions even in the face of unfavorable market conditions.
I don't think we should give young academics feel good advice like "don't work too hard". What we should be telling them is that even if they bust their ass and get tenure, it's very likely that their pay will languish and they will live in fear of layoffs despite being tenured and working at a steep discount to pay in other industries.
Academia is just another industry, and it's entering a period of secular decline. That situation is never fun for the foot soldiers.
On the other side, spending is a huge problem as well. Like... professional grade sports teams? As an European: WTF does that kind of shit have to do with universities? Yes, I get it, it attracts students, but you could also carve out the sports teams into separate commercial entities. And the bill isn't small either - the US government helped out with 6.5 billion dollars and student fees with another 1.5 billion dollars [1] in 2018! That is, frankly, insane.
Also, at least Ivy League universities have endowments valued at literally dozens of billions of dollars [2]. The US needs a complete reform of university financing.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2020/03/11/college-sports-financing-st...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
Of course. But universities will 100% fire tenured faculty before they kill off a D1 football program or spend down endowment principal. So from the perspective of academic laborers, it's a moot point.
Can't say I agree with that statement. It was true for decades, but academic employment had been losing its status for years, and the pandemic greatly increased that. There are lots of examples of research positions having few or no applicants. Grad students these days are much less intent on getting academic jobs than even five years ago.
Now, that's not to say that deans across the country aren't continuing to plan as if that's the case, but they may find themselves with a serious problem a decade from now.
I've mostly heard of this happening for two types of roles. The first are post-docs. The second are low-paying primarily teaching positions at exactly the types of places that will probably blink off the map in the 2030s.
In both cases, the hard truth is that the institution will simply leave the position unfilled before increasing pay or improving job security. Compensation is nearly perfectly inelastic and job security cannot be guaranteed.
> a decade from now
A decade from now their enrollments will have declined due to the post-2008 baby bust, in many cases by double digits. They'll be more worried about who they have to lay off than who to hire.
Particularly true for those instructor and other teaching-oriented positions.
Debt-to-GDP ratios and the cost of servicing existing debt together mean that there are difficult budgeting decisions on the horizon for many western governments. Academic R&D just doesn't have the constituency needed to save it from cuts.
I will be a bit astounded if NSF/NIH don't take nominal cuts during the debt ceiling negotiations, and they certainly won't get budget increases to keep up with inflation. Even defense spending, a massive sacred cow, might take a cut. There is just no way that base closures happen without DARPA et al. also taking it on the chin.
There may be one-time infusions into critical sectors here and there (CHIPS, probably energy, etc) and the STEM fields may benefit from a systematic defunding of humanities departments in certain states, but it's not enough to make up for secular headwinds.
The only saving grace for budgets might be if universities could create and capture the value that their R&D spend generates. But most research doesn't provide any value to society, and for the research that does capturing that value is often harder than creating the value in the first place. And even in that case, the change in management culture and workforce dynamics mean that the "relaxed tenured professor" is quickly going extinct.
The only thing academic hustle will get you in the 2030s and 2040s is a relatively low-paying job that requires even more hustle.
The R01, the workhorse grant of the NIH, has had the same "modular" budget since 1999.
As an immigrant, I relate to what she says: feel pressure to work hard -> work hard -> achieve results -> benefit from those results.
As far as I can tell, the system works. She got an opportunity, worked her ass off, produced a lot, and attained a great position/life as consequence.
Those who chose an easier path, perhaps were less stressed but also didn't do or get as much. But I bet they are going to be more stressed as life goes on, while she's in a great spot:
Due to her earlier work, she's at a place to reflect and say "I am at level X, I can dial it back" which is great. But this is a luxury of being at X level to begin with and you mainly don't get there without hard work.
Even still, I'll have students emailing me for more work. They want to do research, get involved in competitions, write a paper, do independent studies. Every semester I have to approve overloads for students who want to take more classes. Individual institutions aren't forcing these students (who are often the most qualified of the qualified) to take on all this extra work. It's more like, the whole system is a race to the top for them. It's hard to disentangle that drive from industry and the economic system and blame it just on academia. After all, why do they want to take these extra classes? To be better job applicants.
Exploitation of youthful passion for profit is basically the centerpiece of how America beats its workers into submission and slowly breaks down their expectations for anything good in the workplace. The worse condition the workers are willing to accept, the more profit to be made off of their labor.
In America, with a bit of luck, it feels like 1x hard work produces 2x result. 3x if you’re privileged. At home, it felt like 1x hard work would get 1.3x result.
BUT! It is important to realize you’re solving a cold start problem. The hustle and hard work only gets you so far. You have to switch to using leverage once you have it. Do not grind yourself to dust.
Yes, dialing back is a luxury. That’s what the hard work was for. Now you can focus on using that position to do more with less. I liken it to running an ultramarathon to get to the start line of the marathon. You now have similar footing to someone who grew up in the social class to which you now belong, just a little later. Good luck.
edit:
I’m not saying hard work guarantees anything. In life there are no guarantees. But I do think it’s a necessary input.
Also there’s studies showing immigrants have the highest class mobility in USA. I’m sure “the immigrant work ethic” has something to do with it. -> https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/intergenerati...
At the end of the day, if you want exceptional results, you have to do exceptional things. Such is life. Only 2% of Americans have a PhD. Getting into the top 2% of the population sounds pretty exceptional to me. Doing it in a population you weren’t even born into? Heroic.
You can confirm that hard work can work. Or seem to work.
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This is could be true assuming that the goal of society is maximum production and not maximum well-being.
> But this is a luxury of being at X level to begin with and you mainly don't get there without hard work.
Most of the results of hard-work go to the owners of business, not to the people doing that extra effort. And that is also true for academia. To overwork human beings to increase profit in exchange of a fraction of the produced seems inefficient at least, evil at worst.
That most of the results of hard work go to the business owner is a result of capital being scarce while labor is more likely to not be right now (this is changing but it is a slow process). This is definitely true of academia with massive phd overproduction. If you want more benefit to accrue to phds you need to end the pyramid scheme that has been massively overproducing phds for decades or create broader non teaching/research demand for phds (ideally real demand, not manufactured credential requirement inflation because that causes massive dead weight loss)
As my mother said "Life has to get hard at some point it can get hard now or it can get hard later."
She's wise. The way I express the same idea - I'd rather make my own life hard on my own terms, than deal with it just being hard and struggling.
Easy example - it's much easier to chose to save money when you have it (forgo something) than to somehow deal with not having money later. Or - it's totally fine and cute to have to live with roommates in your 20s so you can save and invest. Living with roommates in your 40s because you haven't saved and invested - less cute.
I am 100% certain that this rug is going to be pulled out from under any academic who is currently under the age of 45 or so. Tenure and seniority aren't going to mean much when budgets are tight and the admin is run by professional managers instead of senior-academics-on-admin-rotation.
Painful for anyone who's currently an Asst or Assoc Prof and was planning on retiring-in-place in academia, but I think it's a net good for academic culture in the long term.
The funny part is that Einstein wasn't even in academia until after he was famous. If anything this speaks to me that we want only those people in the field who would do it even if there was no reward for they will be the ones who produce earth shattering breakthroughs.
The woman who wrote the article is sought after today not because what she's produced over the past years, but because of what those efforts enable her to do next.
This is pretty typical, especially on Hacker News. A bunch of people saying working too hard is bad who are rich primarily because they worked too hard while they were younger.
Mostly I think they don't get what they're saying. Though I suspect some of them actually say it to prevent competition.
All these 'industries' become exploitative (possibly capitalism has something to do with how this happens. but let's stay on topic)
So then, I consider this pattern of exploitation -- of "put up with it or get out", to be a sort of collective (or cultural, organizational) trauma in the sense that it self-perpetuates.
People join, get overworked, become traumatized, and then some make it through. Now, once on the other side, they proceed to overwork newcomers.
It's very common to think "I made it through, and I've become what I am because of those experiences" a rationalization of the trauma.
But I wonder about them who make it... was it because of overworked abuse, or was it in spite of it?
It's gotten even worse since the corporations started getting exclusive licenses to university patents, now there's all the secrecy in those fields as well as the PIs start salivating about the possibility of getting a small percentage of the royalties on those patents.
Trofim Lysenko would have recognized the system, it's similar to the one he ran in the Soviet Union for decades.
Source: was a Ph.D. student who complained about being underpaid, now a professor who sees how expensive they actually are.
However, many interesting and relevant problems live at the interface of several disciplines. Unfortunately, those working between disciplines will have a hard time getting a permanent job at top universities: Whatever faculty they apply to, there will always be other applicants who are super-specialised and therefore appeal more to the super-specialised faculty members in the hiring committee. That is why true interdisciplinary research still doesn't happen very much, even though it has been praised and encouraged for more than two decades now.
Coming back to the article, in my opinion the solution to overwork is to cut back on elitism. Less famous universities tend to be more relaxed in their recruitment and tenure criteria. Less pressure means more mental flexibility, which can help maintain a wider network of researchers across disciplines. And the wider the network is, the better the chances of being invited to collaborative projects, especially when one has a record of successful interdisciplinary collaboration.
The price to pay is that one will not be able to impress with the name of one's university when doing small talk. But one will be a much more interesting conversation partner — and have free time to meet people outside work with whom to talk.
The only way to fix this is to make rules about how hard anyone is allowed to work. By definition this is a denial of freedom and stifles progress.
The real solution for an individual is to be satsfied with less. Just don’t expect that of anyone else lest you tread on the thin ice of communim, which is ironic considering the birthplace of the author.
This conclusion does not at all follow from the premise. The myth that more competition means you get a better result absolutely does not hold and needs to die. There's a fundamental equilibrium shift when you spend more resources competing than you do on progressing.
Source?
Also, it's citable, if I'm not mistaken. Still counts.
Part of her issue though is that academic research and academic writing are two different skills, and being a productive researcher essentially requires you to spend a lot of time writing papers. I would think that a grant that allowed scientists (especially) to hire dedicated scientific writers would have a multiplier effect on the productivity of the scientist and would also improve the quality of the papers produced, as having to explain the concept to a non-expert tends to crystallize ideas on presentation.
Should people give their lives for a profession? That seems prone to create unhealthy societies prone to conflict and cheating. In my experience self described meritocratic societies usually are just cynic nepotist societies. The children of the poor have to work their asses off to get much less that what the children of the rich get without effort.
Homo economicus is dead, and it is time to update the world views on work and economy.
I have recently begun to appreciate how much (in the US) we structure our entire existence around our jobs, and how we earn money. The puritan work ethic, extrapolated out across BS jobs encourages so many of us to identify as our jobs, and make that our sense of self.
It's ridiculous.