And for those of us whose research directly translates to the real world (e.g., in my case — persuasion, crisis communication, strategic communication), the so-called professionals look down their overpriced noses at us. That means that even if we did want to move back to the ‘real world’ — we have to basically apologize for our PhD, our time spent training them (Where do they think new professionals come from? Are they hatched?), and kiss their asses for handouts. So, basically until we write our book and ‘become’ a pundit or consultant later in our careers we’re stuck because Americans are scared of smart people.

is a great example of the genre. There's huge amounts of rank jealousy directed at classmates who took a look at the (readily available) evidence of what a PhD's career track looked like and decided against it.

(Amazingly, despite hearing terrible complaining about the stresses of tenure-track professors every time I meet my family, they always ask "So when are you going to grad school?")

The demands of the sink or swim nature of academia, the need to be constantly seeking grants, teaching classes, participating in running the department and being an active member of their research area (organizing conferences, editing journals, etc.) are enormous. A good academic is expected to do all these things and do them well.

I grad school I was mostly a night person and so would frequently be at school around midnight. So would several professors on our team, except they would also be there at 8:30 in the morning every day, and work at home on the weekends. In the 7 years I have been a developer I have never seen a workplace that puts as much demands on it's employees. Not even close.

Let me offer an analogy: when veterans are badly treated, everyone's angry because society isn't valuing their contribution enough. If scientists and professors contribute at least as much (and think of how far we've come in just the last 50-odd years), I think it's fair they're miffed if you trivialize their jobs as "least stressful" when they're not.

The problem being that in most of the natural or social sciences, there are few job-options for researchers, or even for applied scientists, outside of the Academic-Governmental scientific complex.

Yes, yes, yes, everyone is about to point out their favorite example of a profitable industrial firm doing Real Science. Very nice for you at Microsoft Research or your chosen pharmaceutical company.

Problem is, those companies can only afford to do a small piece of the total research load every year, and only in subjects where research can translate into profits in the next 10 years or so.

So it becomes a decision of society's values: should scientific research be done without a prospect of profits in the next 10 years? And at the moment, most people hate being so much as confronted with a question like that, let alone actually paying taxes and engaging in the political-budgeting process to make sure allocations to science happen so that scientists can do their/our jobs.

The link/citation for this statement never mentions 75,000 or 160,000. In fact it says:

"According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), individuals earning research doctorates in academic year 2009-10 did so owing over $20,400 on average in education-related debt, of which about $14,100 on average was graduate debt and about $6,400 on average was undergraduate debt"

Granted this NSF data is limited to research doctorates but it certainly does not support the statement that "loads of us" have 75k to 160k of debt. Moreover the NSF data says that 52% of the research doctorate population graduated with no debt.

* how many journal articles have you published

* how much grant money are you bringing in

* what is the average rating you get from students

Interestingly, there does not appear to be much validity behind those numbers. Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with student learning: http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1...

And the 'impact' of journal articles has been criticized more ways than I can count: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Criticisms I've seen blog posts with more impact than average journal articles.

Lastly research grant money - I don't know the research on the impact of grant money - but in many fields, when you have an original, new idea, you usually get a smaller grant, maybe even just a seed grant at first (just like how little money startups usually get), or you do it on your own in grad school. The large grants are for large scale collaborations and scaling up of well-trodden ideas. 55% of the grant money doesn't even go to the research project - it goes to the university's administrative overhead.

Well... duh? Obviously students are going to give higher ratings to professors whose courses seem easier.

I'm in Canada though, I don't know how professors are treated in the US. I know that for students it's shit! Graduating with mountains of debt, I don't know if I could celebrate that.

Nobody in Canada does research then? No classes does not mean vacation.

I am from Austria, and here and in some other European countries typically one has about 5 weeks of vacation per year, so 3 months sounds like a lot. How many weeks of vacation do other people in Canada have, for comparison?

The time periods in which there are no classes are usually used by professors to focus more on their research and take their vacations (5 weeks per year like everyone else). Similarly, these time periods are not strictly holidays for students, with many students taking exams.

I've seen a few professors simply neglect their research and take the whole time period where they don't have classes as "vacation", but this seems to be limited to a few older professors who are still state employed, basically untouchable and seem to have lost their motivation over the years. They usually seem to not do much research at all anymore, but are often willing to pick up additional teaching duties to ease the load on their colleagues.

Most people however do actually work on their research in this time period.

I actually made a web application for grading exams which alleviates this somewhat. Basically you grade by creating a rubric, which is a list of items and how many points to deduct for each item (could be additive too, but the professor I wrote it for didn't want that so I never implemented it). When grading you just check the boxes for the items that apply to a specific submission. You can change the weights in place and have all the scores update. Also, since all the exams are scanned and each question is cropped out you can much more easily go between instances of one problem. It's not completely releaseable to the outside world unfortunately but maybe in a month or so it could be. A lot of other professors have asked to use it but unfortunately we had to turn them down for now since there are still a few steps that are somewhat manual, and my time is currently prioritized for research work so I can't really clean up that last 10% and make it releasable right now.

I think the reason "professor" ranks first is that the compensation seems to be proportional to the responsibility, whereas most other jobs appear to under-compensate. People are sensitive to this, but they misattribute it as "lower stress."

Well, the job itself (professor) is really hard, but the lifestyle (everything outside work) is really great. It's a great damn job. That's different from being "stressful."

Where does the stress come from? Well, I bet the HN community knows professors better than most, but between publication and grant writing, there's a ton of professional evaluation that directly impacts your quality of life. Your personal and private lives will blend much more than in other professions, and being rejected professionally (i.e. being denied a major grant) will mess with your personal life as well.

There's no free lunch here.

CNBC: "Being a professor is the least stressful job."

Article: "The first 7 years until tenure are hard."

Overlooked Fact: For the remaining 30+ years of your career, you have unbeatable job security, summers without any externally imposed obligations, sabbaticals, and the option to "take a slow year with your research" should you decide to have children, or have a family/personal emergency, or just want to, you know, live life and see the world.

Additional Speculation: The majority of people have a very tenuous understanding tenure to begin with, and CNBC may have elided "tenured" in their article for simplicity; it was, after all, a fluff piece designed to generate ten page views to deliver ten paragraphs of text :-).

In any case, the much bigger problem faced by aspiring professors is not the tenure process itself; it's that normal labor market mechanisms are strained-to-broken for several structural reasons:

1) Regional oligopolies of reputable schools almost everywhere outside of Boston (and Boston, while having several reputable schools, is still much more full of, say, reputable law firms). This means that it's hard to have a lot of negotiating power if you're not willing to uproot your life and move to another city.

2) Another large switching cost arises from having your research program embedded at a particular school (students, lab equipment, grants, participation in "centers", that are all hard to move).

3) Universities don't directly capture value from professors' work, with the important exception of collecting grant overhead. This exacerbates 1, because as a candidate your argument is "I'm great" and not "You will benefit"

4) Because of 3, hiring is bottlenecked by "slots" in a department, rather than by being able to find people who have net-positive ROI.

5) Because of 3 and 4, it's quite possible that highly qualified candidates will float around the labor market as post-docs until a "slot" opens up at a suitable school. I have directly seen colleagues choose to delay their Ph.D. defense for a year because they knew that there were a lot of highly impressive post-docs already competing for the few slots in their field that year, and they wanted to wait for a more opportune time.

6) Again because of 3 and 4, the already existing time-scale imbalance between institutions and individuals is exaggerated. "Not quite sure if a candidate is a good fit? Just wait another year. No big loss. We only have the one slot after all."

7) Highly discontinuous payoff curves: the present value of switching from untenured to tenured is hard to estimate, but I'd put it at upwards of $1M (see my calculation [1] in case this sounds implausible). There's no obvious way to hand out fractional tenure, and once you have it most of the university's negotiating power is gone, so universities have (rationally) evolved mechanisms to maximize the value they extract until then.

[1] My calculation:

1) assume your market consulting rate is $150/hr

2) model tenure as the option to "slack" by only teaching ~10hrs/week for full salary and doing no other work

3) assume $100k/yr salary

4) so tenure allows you to work 10 hrs/week for $100k, rather than the $75k you'd make consulting

5) ergo, tenure can be made to simulate a risk-free $25k/year income stream

6) it's hard to get $25k/year risk-free without investing something like $1M, but obviously this depends on interest rates

In many (US) universities though, perish or die is still a very valid concern, even when tenured. You get yearly reviews, and if you score a "0" (zero), you can be fired, even from tenure. Futhermore, universities thus value a number of small articles more than a book, because you are supposed to publish continuously all over the place. While you write a book, chances are you don't have time to deal with additional articles (on top of your other obligations).

Add on top of that all the administrative tasks in the department, faculty, university etc. and even a tenured professor doesn't exactly live the easy life.

I am not aware of such a thing, and if it were offered to me I would say "That's not really tenure.", but I believe you that some schools do it. Similarly, real [1] tenure does not usually include administrative requirements because those requirements are, in my experience, not mandated by your employment contract. They are mandated by social pressure to be a good university citizen.

> even a tenured professor doesn't exactly live the easy life.

I agree that the typical tenured professor is a hard working busy professional; I just mean to say that in principle tenure could be used to merely teach (holding up the formal obligations of your contract), and I have certainly known people who have chosen that path at one point or another in their lives.

[1] I realize it may seem I am defining-away your point, but I take the definition of tenure to be "You cannot be fired as long as you continue to fulfill the formal requirements of your employment contract, and those formal requirements cannot meaningfully restrict your personal research agenda (academic freedom)."

Apparently a common tactic is to increase your teaching load so high that no reasonable human can do it. These people either go to a different university or leave academia disgruntled.

Another problem I see, however, is that tenure can be redefined and is changing depending on subjects. There are subjects where, realistically, your only chance is to either take that one job, whether it offers real tenure or not. The universities of course know that as well and are thus in a position where they can put significantly more into your employment contract than a tenured position would normally entail. If for example the above mentioned grading system would work, then it would get rid of the possibility of "just teaching", however, as can be seen in another reply of mine below to another poster, the grading system is fundamentally flawed.

As an aside: UArk has the above mentioned system of "tenure" in place for all professors

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2495

The problem with publish or perish is that it leads to people gaming the system. If pay rises (or employment) solely hinge on the amount of (however graded) publications you have achieved, this leads to people essentually using parts of books they are writing as articles etc. This in turn leads to a doubling of information, inconsistencies etc, alongside the fact that not every topic can be adequately dealt with in a journal article.

The system actively punishes big projects and thoughts in favour of small, more easily digestible (and thus publishable) projects. If a university only looks at the number of publications and not at their nature, they shift from quality to quantity, which in turn is bad, because it fundamentally undermines the purpose of academia.

edit: I just saw _dps also linked to the gamification bit, but the rest holds true nonetheless (and I do agree with him)

It's not so much "publish" in itself that's the problem[1], it's how publishing is defined and handled, and that a certain form of publishing is seen as right to the detriment of any other form of published material, whereas the preferred method is often not the best method for a given project.

[1]: though it certainly is a big part of the overall problem of uniting teaching, research and publishing

For example, sales guys are compensated based on sticker price, not profit margin, which means that the guy who sells $2MM of work for $1MM (i.e. at a loss) gets more commission than the guy who sells $0.5MM worth of work for $0.75MM. For another example, grading programmers by lines of code... 'nuf said ;). Another totally ubiquitous example: grading office workers by ass-in-seat time rather than value produced. Another also ubiquitous example: Departments in a company encouraged to spend as much money as they can at the end of the quarter, so their next budget doesn't get cut.

I could go on, but I'll stop here. The point is, even if "publish or perish" refers to misaligned incentives, that still means it's basically the same as 90% of other jobs out there.

A software engineer can commit his code when it compiles and/or when the unit-tests pass. An academic might spend months writing and revising a paper, only to be successively told, "Too many examples", "not enough examples", "there's a bug in your proof", "I can't understand this so it must be brilliant", and finally "too long, didn't read". The paper is then not published, and at minimum the academic must revise the paper and resubmit, taking several more months.

After maybe 6 months, the academic might have succeeded in getting one publication out of one project, and he has to be running multiple papers' worth of projects concurrently throughout the whole year to make sure he produces enough papers each year.

Most academics see themselves as being tasked with expanding the frontier of human knowledge, not with documenting it and persuading other people that it's important (which is seen by many as a vulgar popularity and marketing contest, not an intellectual one).

> Expanding knowledge without communicating it is useless

Perhaps controversially, I'm not sure I agree with this, at least not on the timescale of a singe person's career. Recording new knowledge is absolutely essential, and many important ideas in science were discovered or rediscovered by reading old personal notes of great scientists that never made it into a letter or article. Not even the most ardent publish-or-perish critics argue that researchers shouldn't record their ideas and findings somehow, and make those recordings available.

But actually communicating the work in the present, rather than merely making it available in a recorded form, requires a willing recipient and a crafted message. So the focus on publication conflates the creation of good ideas with the ability to persuade others (and the readiness of others to be persuaded).

You might say "Sure, that's also true everywhere else". Having been on both sides of the fence, my experience is that it's actually much less true everywhere else, precisely because research is so future-oriented. In most lines of work you are trying to get results today/tomorrow/this-quarter, and, while you always need to persuade in order to advance, you don't have to persuade about hypotheticals beyond your lifetime like "This theorem could become the basis for an entire field of mathematics someday". See, for example, the originally unpublished works of Karush (now at the heart of optimization theory) or Lyapunov (now the basis of much research on nonlinear systems). Both pursued their ideas for love of the ideas, and both were met with indifferent audiences.

Changing the subject slightly, I submit that in many cases journal publications have evolved to be more advertising and less communication, particularly in the most prestigious journals which, for Moore-defying reasons, impose page limits and will not allow you to attach large images, data files, or programs. While not nearly as bad as patent descriptions, journal publications are almost never as useful in reproducing results as simply having the work artifacts of the research process: procedure pages from someone's lab notebook, program source code, raw data files unaltered by "smoothing for visualization", sensor/instrument configurations, the 20 line informal proof that inspired the 20 page formal proof that gets to a journal, etc. These kinds of artifacts are recorded by any researcher in the workaday process of doing research. Assuming basic archiving ability, there is no risk of these ideas being lost to society even in a journal-free world.

But if you don't believe me that journal articles are not isomorphic to shared knowledge, the proof is in the pudding: a fellow researcher will happily share his journal article (advertisement) with you, but ask for a copy of the lab notebook pages and you may be in for a chilly response.

Similarly, being "a movie star" is a pretty sweet gig, but that doesn't mean being "an actor" is all that great as a career option.

The thing is, unions don't represent workers. They represent the kind of workers who run the unions - senior workers.

I'm not discounting external factors: surely those bomb disposal guys have it tough. But some folks just seem naturally sunny and light-spirited, while others seem to be on the verge of a monstrous breakdown. I've seen people who were stressed who were moved from a stressful situation to a much less stressful situation stay just as stressed as before. Perhaps, like weight, there is a "set point" for the amount of discomfort you feel in your job, and over time you can train yourself to become more and more stressed, regardless of the externalities?

Beats me. Interesting subject, though. Definitely falls in the nature versus nurture arena.

It's billed as "the life of the mind", but the reality is that a lot of the work is mindnumbingly boring: writing grant applications, grading papers, attending committees. Every industry has some boring work and vicious politics, but most industries are honest about it. In software, having been fired once because of political bullshit is par for the course. Yep, that happens. In academia, getting shot down for tenure is this huge mark of shame.

Finally, the academic industry has a huge underclass of people who spend lots of time between adjunct gigs on teaching work that is viewed as a commodity and paid extremely poorly.

I'm sorry, but this industry has sold out a generation and a half, while tuitions have shot toward the moon, and that's fucking inexcusable. University leadership: stop building fucking ziggurats and colossuses and get fund some goddamn research and teaching. In other words, do your job.

Meanwhile, the same kind of exertion (and political luck) in finance or software will have you able to retire: not in luxury, but at a middle-class standard of living that could be described as "making your own tenure". Also, you get to live where you want, instead of rolling the dice on where in the country you will end up living.

In this realm, I really don't think software, finance and academia are all that different. You go where the work is, and on average, the best you can do is to nicely secure a comfortable, upper-middle class position for yourself with plenty of job security.

You're right that being lucky enough to get a tenured position, but "applying that luck" to software or finance, can make you a millionaire. Problem is, that kind of luck is not a known probability on which we can set rational expectations. If I go work 80 hours/week at a software start-up, I can't expect even a 3% chance of becoming a millionaire. It's just not a random process with a set probability distribution. So you can't "apply your luck" to software instead of academia, because we're talking about two different kinds of luck.

My issue with academia is that it has minimal job risk but high career risk. So, while it's rare that someone actually gets fired (I've seen 9th-year grad students lose funding; I guess that counts) the risk of ending up in a ruined career is high. On the other hand, in software and finance getting fired is practically a rite of passage-- happens to everyone, especially ambitious overperformers-- and it's painful but it doesn't end your career.

On the other hand, one thing academia has going for it is career coherency. In industry, you serve a boss and have to make it look like you value his political aspirations over your own career development. In academia, your job is to invest in yourself-- to publish and develop a reputation, to attend conferences, to improve your skills. So that's one thing that's nice about it.

Because I've programmed for a hobby since age 11, and I've programmed a few times "for reals" in actual paid work, and while I've every bit of respect for the craft of programming, merely doing that every day under industrial production conditions drives me a little out of my mind.

I won't finish my research-track MSc for a while, so I don't have to definitely choose industry or academia for a while. Still, I'm back doing this because I found that without a higher degree or industrial experience in such, you really can't get into the cooler, higher-level jobs in "the real world" either. If you get out of school and code for a living, you will eventually find yourself locked out of the deep wizardry of computing (systems programming, programming languages, networking protocols, security, etc.)... unless you find just the right company willing to take a chance on you.

It's rather frustrating.

CS academia is less scammy than other disciplines, because of the high-quality exit options. You're not doing wrong by going for the MSc. That's a good call.

Regarding being "locked out", I think the new rules are:

* network aggressively at all times. When you join a big company, network internally so you can get a decent transfer after 6+ months. You won't get hired on to the ML project at the front door. Nor will you get it through official channels. Network aggressively and find someone who will request you.

* keep learning. Eventually, you'll stand out as the guy who's 30+ and keeping abreast of cutting-edge software trends, and that has its own kind of impressiveness.

It's harder than it should be to get interesting work, because the world is run by idiots, so there isn't much tolerance for interesting stuff. I'd love to see that change, but for the mean time, you just have to figure out how to play the world that is. Stealing an education from work is usually a good idea (don't consider it "deception"; honest people mouth off and get fired.) Keep Learning and Carry On.

CS academia is less scammy than other disciplines, because of the high-quality exit options. You're not doing wrong by going for the MSc. That's a good call.

Actually, in this case I think it's a good idea because even the coursework here seems very devoted to building artifacts. This semester's project in my Coursework Course is building a static analyzer for LLVM IR of C code. Next semester I'm going to try to take Advanced Operating Systems, in which project groups build a small OS from the ground up.

These aren't exactly start-ups, but they're the kind of coursework that generates project code which you can throw on Bitbucket and use as proof not only that You Can Code but that You Can Do Advanced/High-Level Work.

Surprisingly, my undergrad institution wasn't very good at that.