>> If everyone were guaranteed a reasonably pleasant job, suited to their interests and needs and paying a living wage, who would do the grungy, difficult work? Austrian employers, like those in America, are currently having difficulty hiring people to take hard, poorly paid jobs; ma....

That the answer. Pay people more to do the jobs nobody wants!

I wonder where does the drop happen in the funnel. Probably the most troublesome part is writing cover letter? I remember that I have to create a template in LaTex for my cover letter which i can just change the company name and responsibilities.

At this point I’m not even sure if big companies read cover letters at all.

This is a case where I wish the person that downvoted me would leave a comment. What did I do wrong?

Not in my experience. The reason is because of funding. NIH grants are focused on biological discoveries and not so much around infrastructure. So you can get funding to build a tool, but not so much to maintain it. The downstream effect is that tools and websites are stuck in the era in which they were created, databases are not updated, and tools are broken because the grad student left and now there’s no one to respond to issues.

I've been trying to break into biotech for years...short answer is they want biologists, not programmers, and don't appreciate skillsets that aren't already secondary to PHD industry-relevant experience.

This is going a step further than what I always thought as being unnecessary: having your sex on ID and passport.

I don't see any real reason why this is still required, or why it matter that the sex of a person be present on an ID document. The purpose of the ID is to identify the bearer. Most ID are now biometric, meaning the identification relies on unchanged physical features, like geometric relationships of the face.

A simple photo should be enough to confirm the ID of the bearer.

Nice reminder of some general principles. I wonder how well it applies to young scientists given today's academic career prospects, though.

> If you want to make progress in any area, you need to be willing to give up your best ideas from time to time. [...] Medawar notes that he twice spent two whole years trying to corroborate groundless hypotheses.

Unfortunately, being willing to scrap your idea is only one part of the equation. Securing funding after 2 "failed" post-docs is an entirely different matter.