<story><title>Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00241-8</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>photochemsyn</author><text>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&amp;#x27;d didn&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;They were often quite resentful of people who showed up, worked hard and got results, but who didn&amp;#x27;t hang around for the social interaction game as they had other things to do with their free time.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s a pool of funding available for something? That&amp;#x27;s not worth the bother.  In that case it&amp;#x27;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?&lt;p&gt;Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives, and maybe some politicians with special interests, and if they&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s possible, but not very common.&lt;p&gt;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...)</text></comment>
<story><title>Academia’s culture of overwork almost broke me, so I’m working to undo it</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00241-8</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thwayunion</author><text>The author is too optimistic. There are going to be continuous waves of mass firings of tenured faculty in the 2030s and 2040s.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t much that academics are going to be able to do in order to combat the problem.&lt;p&gt;Specific to the USA, but also true in much of the west:&lt;p&gt;1. Revenue is a huge problem, which means academia will become a zero-sum game even (especially!) for higher-compensated labor. Academia&amp;#x27;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&amp;amp;D are more likely to decrease than to increase, and even if they increase almost certainly won&amp;#x27;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).&lt;p&gt;2. There is an oversupply of academic labor and labor is the primary controllable expense.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think we should give young academics feel good advice like &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t work too hard&amp;quot;. What we should be telling them is that even if they bust their ass and get tenure, it&amp;#x27;s very likely that their pay will languish and they will live in fear of layoffs &lt;i&gt;despite being tenured and working at a steep discount to pay in other industries&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Academia is just another industry, and it&amp;#x27;s entering a period of secular decline. That situation is never fun for the foot soldiers.</text></comment>