The pay is seriously lagging industry. In many cases, the resources at your disposal are substantially larger in industry as well.
Meanwhile, universities are increasingly run by administrators. Faculty have more service requirements and less autonomy than in the past. Overhead expenses are higher than ever, as well.
Furthermore! Tenured faculty are hard to fire, or even force into retirement. They draw large resources even after they retire in pensions and emeritus status. So open faculty positions are constantly hard to come by.
Last year I made a move to industry, from a research position at a well regarded program. I multiplied my salary by a nice integer, and I had multiple job offers from fortune 500 tech companies and a few of the HFT hedge funds that users are familiar with on this website. I wouldn't have had a shot at a faculty position at anything that I would have considered a tier-1 research organization.
Don't get me wrong, I loved my time in academia and I was very well treated, relatively speaking. But I was absolutely at a point of diminishing returns where I would have floundered around like so many of my incredibly talented and hard working friends who are still postdocs/non-permanent staff at these institutions.
I teach one course at a local university. I have near-total academic autonomy but I also have six different bosses, none of which actually teach. A new term just started. I show up at the staff room to learn that I cannot get on the wifi or classroom podiums until I "accept" my latest contract, which has yet to be sent to me. I taught the first class on my laptop wired (hdmi) to the projector and tethered to my phone. Too many people being paid to creating silly rules and pointless systems.
I'm starting a new job in another city next month (government). After explaining to my students that a different prof will cover the last half of the course they couldn't care less about the subject of my lecture. They wanted to hear about how I actually "got a real job". Interview processes and resume writing are more important to them than actual knowledge.
This should be unsurprising. For many, many jobs, the actual knowledge requirements are dwarfed by the importance placed on interview skills and a polished resume.
No surprise there! Look how much content on these forums is about, implicitly or explicitly, gaming coding interviews.
In addition, the average individual has most of their life decisions made for them via simple, accessible tools and the lower half has a fraction of the competence of their predecessors. I'd guess maybe 5% of my friends/peers spend any time reading. Maybe 60% over my friends outside of tech are seriously struggling financially.
Almost all of my coworkers are immigrants on O-1 visas and there's really nothing here for them long term, especially if they feel unwelcome. The moment another country provides a better offer, I bet 95% of them will go there instead. Probably many that are here now will go too.
On the other hand, the research salaries some of my friends are pulling in at the big companies are substantial. And everyone on this site knows what some of the premier software devs are pulling in. Similar dictomy in law, and I suspect many other fields.
This is why I'm currently obsessed with cyberpunk. There is a massive bifurcation happening in society right now. Haves and have-nots. Some who are reaping massive gains, and many who are barely getting by.
I know its common for TV to film up there for tax / government arts funding reasons. Is it a similar situation or something else?
Where would you (or other interested commentators) say the skilled jobs are going to?
The thing is, I'd really like the option to "retire" as a college professor after a decade or so in industry. Having a PhD in hand from early on in my career will make that much, much easier.
I still have a lot of thinking to do!
I've written more about this here if you're interested: http://johnhammersley.com/?p=381
I absolutely loved my PhD work and I'm happy I did it. But I'm also happy I was careful to consider how this degree might help my employment down the line. Which it did. I've got an absolutely amazing research position that is well supported in the research arm of a BigCo now. I wouldn't expect that the pay is optimal versus other paths, but I'm well compensated, the work is stimulating and I'm highly autonomous.
And as you implied, to is absolutely possible to come back to Academia after spending time in industry.
Between postdocs forced to spin their wheels in the mud (or quit) for untold years, the replication crisis, generally misaligned incentives between doing the best work possible vs. advancing one's career, and of course, funding difficulties, I think it's clear that we aren't anywhere close to making the most of our opportunities to advance human knowledge and understanding.
I'm not saying that we haven't acheived mind blowing things in the past few centuries, or even that we won't continue to do the same in the coming decades. I simply mean we shouldn't avoid the hard, grueling work needed to make progress on some of the obvious problems.
We also shouldn't be afraid to be honest about the failings of current approaches and processes. Although, I suppose in some political climates that may be a little trickier, given the apparent propensity for damaging misinterpretations.
I really think industrial R&D is the way to go, we just have to shift grant money there in the form of tax breaks in exchange for open access/patents that permit non-commercial use.
Quite the misinterpretation there :-)
+ (but like many beliefs, a study is needed)
1. It is very difficult to get rid of aging professors with a low output.
2. It is fairly easy to get postdoc positions (but hard to get a permanent position).
In a way, you can argue that point 2 is a solution for point 1 -- with two postdoc positions (two years each, which is common at least in computer science) and a 4-5 year long PhD, you get 8-9 years of work from a candidate who is in his prime at the start and around say 30-32 years old at the end. After that, if you hired the candidate, you would only risk point 1, so why do that?
(I agree that it's incredibly mean to take 9 best years of a scientist while they work for a small wage, and then throw them away unless they are a genius. I think it's also important to keep in mind that while postdoc researchers face an extremely difficult challenge of getting a permanent position, they likely enjoy their academic work quite a bit. Postdoc/PhD are not exactly a "drain" in the same way a factory job might be.)
At the same time, he says that if he had applied to the same school he studied at and worked at for all of his life, there's no way he'd beat the competition these days.
And that's before factoring in the cost of college now. No wonder.
Which brings us to the next question: can a modern college loan be repaid on typical academia pay?
Older scientists took all the positions and basically closed the doors to new entrants when it comes to any kind of contract (we work on scholarships), so most of us just changes jobs to industry (which is ratter easy) and don't pursue a scientific career.
Of course now that those older scientists should be retiring, there aren't enough younger scientists to do their work because they pushed so many of them away.
It's not so much about the funding as it is about a common, shared goal. Getting all the indians to shoot their arrows on the same target at the same time is quite powerful.
Yes, but perhaps only the next, and not this, generation of future stars, after supply and demand forces have worked themselves out.
