>The task of standing out is nearly impossible. Usually it comes down to informal factors, like having an influential advisor or coming from a “top program.” My school was ranked ~25–30ish (in the world) for its philosophy PhD program, and it would be polite to say most grad students struggled on the job market. “Struggling” doesn’t begin to describe the pain and anguish of sending hundreds of job applications and not landing a single interview. That’s not uncommon.
As a PhD dropout and research assistant in a large lab filled with overworked students, it hurts me to think about their futures. Because of my position I can't say much, but I would love for them to look around and take note of the ratio of post-docs to PhD students. If every lab has 5 students for each post-doc, then the odds can't be good.
I don't think he's talking about professorships, just research positions in general. My institution is ranked about 50th in the world in computer science. And basically all of our PhD graduates can get good research positions.
There are PhD research subjects and then there are PhD research subjects.
Of course you can. Maybe not at work, "on the record", but if there's a social gathering, you might, say, offer your view in a frank conversation about their future prospects.
No, it's far worse. For one thing, the people who do actually get professorships do very valuable research,at least a large proportion of them, whereas the philosophy professors are mostly doing junk.
For another, there are lots of biology jobs in industry and government, but basically none outside academia.
I agree fully that education for educations sake is valuable, but that line of argument generally explicitly rejects first class consideration of commercial applications. Just don't be surprised when there turn out to be no commercial applications (or very, very few, and those few getting snapped up by the top members of the field).
There can only be oh so many philosophy professors. Assuming a professor career lasts 40 years and each of these programs produces 10 graduates a year, how can they fit in academia? Maybe before you enroll you need to be made to sign a disclaimer that the opportunities are very scarce in the field.
Is it really helpful to talk about an exchange of "goods" to explain the poor treatment of PhD students in academia?
I don`t see much else, sure there is the section on sexism, but she spends more time talking about how boring her chosen subject was.
Even by an analytic philosopher’s standard, your summary is rather uncharitable and reductive.
Also, the number of people that have to read it should be more like 5: yourself, your supervisor, and the examination committee that is at least 3 other people.
In the 1990s in Computer Science people were well aware that being an academic could result in Professors getting less money than their graduates first jobs.
Is it because everyone still thinks they are a special snowflake and they will get great prizes immediately or something?
(edit) Should have added. Some of the smarted people I know also went into academia and some have really made it. It's just that well, there are so many academic 'refugees' who leave because the job prospects are dire and this has been the case for decades. And so many of those people are very bright and hardworking too.
There's no magic way to determine, years in advance, that someone will become disenchanted with their career choices.
Or an even better explanation which also explains STEM disparities: men tend to like subjects that deal with things, women tend to like subjects that deal with people (things vs. people is well studied gendered phenomenon). Notice how she seems to spend a lot of time talking about how boring, unimportant and disconnected her topic is from the real world...
Middle management.
(Disclosure: I was a middle manager).
> As an end-result, academic papers usually end up popularity contests, a game of who’s-who where the goal is to develop incestuous citation networks so that your impact factor will look better for hiring and/or tenure committees.
Not specific to IT: This description applies to management behavior in large corps as well. In fact, a lot of things humans do end up popularity contests.
> I could hear [the protesters outside the lecture hall] chanting; the stark contrast between the esoteric subtleties of meta-ethics vs. the concrete realities of what would be considered “applied ethics” — a term usually uttered with slight contempt — made me deeply uncomfortable.
Programmers arguing about indentation styles while their inventions drastically change how society works on all scales.
> [Image]
> An accurate representation of your average philosophy grad student.
Also an accurate representation of your average Silicon Valley startup "C" "E" "O" if you add a Macbook and a Starbucks cup.
I recognise at least some of the points, although I'm much less bothered by philosophy having little connection to the pragmatic purposes of many people. The abstract she uses to illustrate her point is also a infelicitous choice. It is from Sinhababu's "Possible Girls" and that guy is a weirdo, in the best sense of the word, even for philosophy.
At the same time, it's true that academic careers are surprisingly terrible on average and fewer people should choose them.
But then the field got taken over by Logical Positivists and Analytic philosophers following Russell and early Wittgenstein,and they tried to turn it into a rigorous and mostly irrelevant science. And in the meantime in the humanities people turned to continental philosophy and eventually postmodernism,and in political science there were the Straussians. All of these went off in very different directions from the country, and as a consequence attracted followers who didn't have much useful or persuasive to say to the vast majority of people.
There are exceptions, like Martha Nussbaum or Peter Singer. But academic philosophy today is mostly irrelevant.
