You're only getting one side of this, and before you find yourself in complete agreement ask yourself this: Are you agreeing because it confirms your bias and opinion of the academic system?
I got a PhD from Cambridge. Everyone I worked with was helpful to a fault. Everyone shared credit when it was due, and declined offers of credit when they felt they hadn't contributed enough.
I got my PhD, got a 3 year post-doc, changed fields into another 3 year post-doc, then got head-hunted into industry.
My experience of academia couldn't be more different from the one described here.
There's a story told of an elderly gentleman sitting sunning himself outside the city gates when a traveller came by. "What are people like here?" asked the traveller. "What were they like where you came from?" asked the elderly gentleman. Then no matter what the answer, he'd always say: "You'll find people here pretty much the same."
I'm not saying that this individual didn't have bad experiences, I'm not saying he deserved them, I'm not saying academia is all roses, and I'm not saying manipulative sociopaths don't exist. They do.
If I remember correctly you studied math, didn't you? Competition for a job in math is way lower than it is for biological sciences. The reason is that the current model of a successful biology lab is that of a PI leading a number of students and postdocs anywhere from 5 to 20. There is NO WAY that all of them are going to find a job in academia. Germany alone produces in one year the same number of PhDs as there are professors in the country. Ratios are not very different in UK and US. Most of the competition happens in the biological sciences: you can run math or CS research by yourself. Difficult to do the same in biology.
"Competition for a job in math is way lower than it is for biological sciences."
Actually, the opposite is true, at least in the United States. Many more Biological Science PhDs are granted relative to mathematics, but there is also a lot more funding in the life sciences relative to mathematics.
The mathematics job market is more similar to the notorious humanities market than to the life sciences.
You hardly have postdoctoral positions in math, physics and social sciences. Lots of people still manage to get an assistant professor position after PhD. Postdocs emerged only recently and they are a buffer for those who cannot get a TT job after PhD. In biology it is absolutely normaly, in fact necessary, to go through ~5 yrs of postdoc before dreaming of applying. The estimates I know about math is that 1/5 of graduated get a job in academia. In biology is about order of magnitude more difficult (some less backed up estimates even claim is 1/300).
"You hardly have postdoctoral positions in math, physics and social sciences."
I don't know anything about the social sciences. In physics, I know that postdocs are absolutely necessary and expected, to the same degree that they are in the life sciences.
Mathematics is a little different. There are a very small minority of prodigy-types that go right from graduate school to the tenure track. However, post-doc's are still the norm, although they don't go by the name 'postdoc.' Usually they are pronounced 'visiting assistant professor' or 'instructor.'
Here's an example of a 'postdoc' in mathematics. All of the big universities have them:
I second this. My experience getting a PhD in grad-school (biochemistry) was a wonderful time in my life where I was surrounded by bright, helpful, passionate people. While I was in that lab I saw lots of people get nice academic jobs and other people get nice jobs in industry. Now I'm in a post-doc in a happy lab full of bright passionate people. I regularly see people around me get good academic jobs. It is not easy, and does require a lot of devotion, skill, and luck (what doesn't?) but no-one should read this article and think that everyone in science is miserable. It works out for some people and not for others... just like everything else.
Exactly - it sounds like he might have stumbled into the wrong lab. Like you, my experience has been very different, but I've certainly heard stories like his from house mates. It seems we were lucky.
The other thing that occurred to me when I read this, was that he's constructed a false dichotomy for himself: work in a world-class place, which is probably indeed much like being an olympic athlete, or work in an absolutely rubbish place, which can't really support your research. Anything missing in the middle??
I complain about the state of academia all the time and went straight from my PhD to a startup, but I completely agree with you. My experience was rather wonderful.
That's the hard part about things like this. It's almost completely subjective, so doing a study would be difficult. We're left with dueling anecdotes from credible people.
Different fields vary a lot also, so it's probably not that useful to try to talk about "academia" as a whole. Not only do we have dueling anecdotes, but they aren't even anecdotes on the same subject. =] Imo, the pros and cons of being a physics versus a philosophy versus a CS academic just aren't that similar.
I can believe that the 'hard' sciences are roughly like he says, at least at many places. It's common for there to be a sort of "lab" mentality, with a lot of grad-student cogs in a famous-professor-lab machine, and credit tends to go to the head of the lab (especially if the paper has 50 authors or something, as is common in some areas). Partly that's because it takes a lot of money to set up a physics/chem/bio lab, and there is a lot of grunt-work to be done.
That's less common in CS, I think. Not inexistent, but you can find a research group that isn't like that. It's even less common in the humanities, but then you have a whole different set of problems (less money, fewer jobs).
I think it varies drastically by subfield. I'm a physicist, and while there are some subcommunties that are cutthroat, there are many that are small and where people are pretty helpful to each other. I think a lot of it may also depend on the size of the community and the amount of money involved. The stories my ex-girlfriend told me about pharma research sounded pretty horrible...
I got a PhD from Cambridge. Everyone I worked with was helpful to a fault. Everyone shared credit when it was due, and declined offers of credit when they felt they hadn't contributed enough.
I got my PhD, got a 3 year post-doc, changed fields into another 3 year post-doc, then got head-hunted into industry.
My experience of academia couldn't be more different from the one described here.
There's a story told of an elderly gentleman sitting sunning himself outside the city gates when a traveller came by. "What are people like here?" asked the traveller. "What were they like where you came from?" asked the elderly gentleman. Then no matter what the answer, he'd always say: "You'll find people here pretty much the same."
I'm not saying that this individual didn't have bad experiences, I'm not saying he deserved them, I'm not saying academia is all roses, and I'm not saying manipulative sociopaths don't exist. They do.
But my personal experience is different.