<story><title>As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/article/professors-struggle-recruit-postdocs-calls-structural-change-academia-intensify</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>feet</author><text>I think this is a short sighted perspective. Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app. Just because you don&amp;#x27;t see immediate impact doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it isn&amp;#x27;t there</text></item><item><author>coldpie</author><text>&amp;gt; I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.&lt;p&gt;Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn&amp;#x27;t very interested, since I wanted to make things people will actually use. His response was there was a team in Utah that helped make part of the USB spec the decade previous. I was attending the University of Minnesota.&lt;p&gt;Yeah, no thanks.</text></item><item><author>arethuza</author><text>I stopped doing a PhD after about 5 years - I was a Research Associate in a UK university so I actually got a salary which wasn&amp;#x27;t too bad but quite a bit below the going rate (I had a few job offers during that time).&lt;p&gt;I left to co-found a start-up - never regretted it as I was &amp;quot;hyper cynical&amp;quot; (a direct quote from a colleague) about the whole academic world and how easy it was to play the &amp;quot;publish or perish&amp;quot; game.&lt;p&gt;I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.</text></item><item><author>baka367</author><text>I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high.&lt;p&gt;Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since.&lt;p&gt;Is casual coding more interesting than research&amp;#x2F;teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me.&lt;p&gt;I also still find how to get some of the joys of academia in industry, namely, mentoring&amp;#x2F;holding workshops&amp;#x2F;writing design specs&amp;#x2F;turning the cluttered documentation into a nicely flowing coherent one~</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arethuza</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not saying that people shouldn&amp;#x27;t do basic research, far from it, more that I learned that given the way basic research &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; works then I had relatively little interest in actually doing it myself.</text></comment>
<story><title>As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/article/professors-struggle-recruit-postdocs-calls-structural-change-academia-intensify</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>feet</author><text>I think this is a short sighted perspective. Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app. Just because you don&amp;#x27;t see immediate impact doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it isn&amp;#x27;t there</text></item><item><author>coldpie</author><text>&amp;gt; I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.&lt;p&gt;Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn&amp;#x27;t very interested, since I wanted to make things people will actually use. His response was there was a team in Utah that helped make part of the USB spec the decade previous. I was attending the University of Minnesota.&lt;p&gt;Yeah, no thanks.</text></item><item><author>arethuza</author><text>I stopped doing a PhD after about 5 years - I was a Research Associate in a UK university so I actually got a salary which wasn&amp;#x27;t too bad but quite a bit below the going rate (I had a few job offers during that time).&lt;p&gt;I left to co-found a start-up - never regretted it as I was &amp;quot;hyper cynical&amp;quot; (a direct quote from a colleague) about the whole academic world and how easy it was to play the &amp;quot;publish or perish&amp;quot; game.&lt;p&gt;I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.</text></item><item><author>baka367</author><text>I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high.&lt;p&gt;Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since.&lt;p&gt;Is casual coding more interesting than research&amp;#x2F;teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me.&lt;p&gt;I also still find how to get some of the joys of academia in industry, namely, mentoring&amp;#x2F;holding workshops&amp;#x2F;writing design specs&amp;#x2F;turning the cluttered documentation into a nicely flowing coherent one~</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>randomsearch</author><text>This is definitely false in many cases.&lt;p&gt;Source: I’ve worked on both.</text></comment>