Obviously not everyone can promote all the way up, and not everyone wants to. There’s nothing wrong with someone doing good competent work at the level of a postdoc for as long as they want. We have a postdoc in his 40s in the lab I used to be in and he does excellent work as part of a group. I don’t think he wants to run his own lab and why must he?
1) As postdocs get more experienced, their pay usually goes up.
2) As mentioned in the article, it's possible to "age out" of a lot of fellowships, which have limits like "5 years since your last degree" requirements.
Which means the burden then falls on the PI of the lab to support them as essentially a staff scientist.
If I pay a postdoc $60,000 a year, at 10% pay lines (which is not unreasonable for the NIH), I have to write about $600,000 in grants in expectation to be able to afford them. That's a lot of work, and unless they are significantly better than a new postdoc, potentially not worth it. They're also not a good speculative investment - they're not going to go on to be a PI of their own lab, which has benefits for their PI down the line.
The NIH scale doesn't rise that fast. A brand-new postdoc costs about $50k on NIH pay scales.
There is often also an assumption that more senior people will also bring on money, either completely by themselves or by enabling more projects. The (completely idiotic, IMHO) 2 or 5-year cutoffs on some fellowships makes this somewhat more difficult.
I also think experience is weirdly undervalued in academia. I would bet that, in many fields, three random students at $25k/ea are not appreciably better than one highly skilled staff scientist at $75k, especially if the lab actually paid full freight for the students instead of having them subsidized by training grants and time-limited fellowships. This is tricky to study though....
1 skilled research staff will out produce even 5 early PhD students, no doubt.
But I would be inclined to hire the students. There are more funding opportunities for them (NSF prioritizes students and departments fund TAs) and I’m expected to graduate students. In my field (CS), research staff and postdocs disappear too quickly anyway.
1) A brand new postdoc costs $48,432 on the NIH scale in 2018. This author of this article costs $59,736. Their benefits are also about $3800 more. It's not that fast.
2) I agree that experience is undervalued - and said staff scientist will almost certainly out produce them. But the burden often falls in different areas - I'm evaluated based on mentoring students for example, not staff scientists. Training grants exist. Etc. A senior staff scientist is always full freight born by the lab (barring like, really nice retention/recruitment packages).
But I think the real problem is the author isn't some sort of rockstar senior staff scientist (I've known some). Their productivity just isn't there enough to assume that they're 15 grand better than trying a new draw from the postdoc pool.
