> Long hours and a lack of job security, combined with workplace bullying and discrimination, are forcing many to consider leaving science
I've never encountered any form of bullying or discrimination in my 15 years academic career (in three different countries).
What I witnessed a few times though where post-docs that just got disinterested in their work and unproductive for months. It's not uncommon for post-docs spending months looking for their next job, and usually, their advisors are fine with that. They understand well the difficulties of their students or post-docs.
Academia is hard because it's extremely competitive, not because professors are some kind of bullies harassing their students. I'm certain it exists but it's far from the norm.
It's competitive because you're competing with the whole world, and there are some people out there who are much smarter than you. And you are constantly reminded of this fact, when you go to a conference (or because you don't get to go because your paper isn't accepted), when you read your colleague's paper and so on. I've worked with well-known people (including a Turing award recipient), and even them were insecure at times.
And of course, it's hard because you don't know if you'll find a job after your current post-doc. The more average you are, the more insecurity, the harder it gets.
>> I've never encountered any form of bullying or discrimination in my 15 years academic career (in three different countries).
Great to hear that you've not encountered bullying in the academy, but it absolutely does exist and is unfortunately thriving. Often when it occurs, the university will side with the academic rather than postdoc or PhD students, which puts them in an extremely difficult situation since their manager is often the bully. In addition, you're likely in a position of power since you've been in academy for 15+ years ... It could be that you do not interact with certain circles to observe this behaviour.
An appendum: I acknowledge "thriving" is not the ideal word to use. However, bullying within academia exists and is increasingly more common than people release. Often because it's something that goes unsaid and unreported, in part out of fear of repercussions for the reporter rather than the bully because the academy protects the latter.
> but it absolutely does exist and is unfortunately thriving
I'm sure it exists. I may be wrong since it's based on personal experience, but I can't believe it's thriving (at least, in my field, computer science). These things are taken more and more seriously. If anything, I can only imagine they occur less and less frequently.
It’s not thriving in computer science because that field is competing against a tight supply of labor. Compare that to a field where you have an oversupply of PhDs, and I’m sure you’ll find different average experiences.
If people know they can walk out and get a job tomorrow making good money they are a lot less likely to tolerate abuse of any kind. That’s true in CS, most Engineering fields, Economics, a few other places. If you’re in a field like English literature or Anthropology with 10-100 applicants per tenure track job and shag all industry demand for your skills your exit options are substantially worse. And culture reacts to incentives. In the end people will treat others like garbage if they can with no consequences. Good labor conditions always come down to having a good BATNA, a good exit option.
I agree, but in practice this is rarely the case for multiple reasons depending if we're taking about PhDs or postdocs.
For PhDs, they've commited to a long project, so might feel defeated for quitting.
For postdocs, it's true that they could likely get a job if they left, bit at the same time, the may be half way through a role and want to pursue a job in academia. Switching careers is not an easy thing to do, and that's essentially what you're doing when leaving the academy.
In addition, it's worth noting that computer science is very diverse, including broad subfields such as HCI, so it's not necessarily correct in your framing of CS.
In my experience, and that of my colleagues within a UK institution, also in computer science, the university does indeed take it seriously. We've had external auditors come in and ultimately do nothing.
The problem is that the university is setup to protect itself when such reports are made, so rarely is anyone fired or such. It's a much worse situation for the student than academic.
I live in the U.K. and did my PhD in a big department.
A friend of mine got cancer and then was told by his supervisor after he returned that he wasn’t good enough anymore and he should quit. He found a new supervisor and is now doing fine.
A female colleague did her PhD in Sweden and got hit on by her supervisor who kept staring at her chest every meeting, and eventually led to her leaving academia entirely.
That’s a minority of people I know working in academia but it’s not small.
>Academia is hard because it's extremely competitive,
The issue isn't the level of competitiveness but the cost of losing.
Now that I'm outside academia, there's plenty of competition. For example, getting a good job at Google is just as competitive as getting a tenure-track position. The difference is that I can easily get a respectable job that pays the bills if I don't make the cut for Google. A nice side effect of this is that it enables me to take a rational view of how attractive these prestige jobs really are. And there are limits on what Google can demand of its engineers because they all have other options.
Academia these days is competitive in about the same way as gladiatorial combat.
Getting a job at google is nowhere near as competitive as getting tenure, you have to live in an alternate reality to believe that. I know several people that went there after their PhD one of them got the lowest possible grade on their dissertation (rete). Both published no papers as first author.
What are the actual odds? Last I saw for engineering, something like 10 percent of phd's find a tenure track job _somewhere_ (and it was double that ten years ago). You're comparing the difficulty of getting a job at a single selective company to getting in to any college in the country.
It's a different skill set, though. Just because someone was a mediocre academic doesn't mean that they weren't a great candidate from Google's point of view. There are also lots of very successful academics who Google wouldn't hire.
For my part, I had a couple of decent shots at getting a tenure-track job, but I doubt I'd make it through more than a couple of rounds of Google's interview process. Perhaps it's easier than I think though (I've not tried it), but for sure there are vastly more people who want to work at Google than there are positions available.
The chance of getting a tenure track job can vary a lot from field to field, so it's not surprising that people are reporting very different views on this.
Overall, I'd say it's harder to get an academic position than a job at Google. But these are different skill sets as you say.
Getting a job at Google is "just" a matter of graduating from a good school, grinding 500+ leetcode problems, applying at the right time, and being somewhat lucky. I would say that anyone who managed to get a tenure-track job is able to do this (provided they are willing to spend the time preparing for the interviews - which is quite a commitment).
Getting an academic position is harder. Even though I've seen very average people getting one too...
> The issue isn't the level of competitiveness but the cost of losing.
I agree but only to some extent.
First, there are many research institutions in the world. The same way there is more than one software company. They are not all equally selective and prestigious.
There are also a lot of companies doing R&D. It may not be academic research, but it can also be pretty cool. In that sense, not getting an academic position isn't the end of the world. Even if it may seem so from the perspective of a post doc.
Yep, you can probably get a position at some backwater university that will pay (in the rich Western World) still enough to live a "normal" life. But of course everyone thinks they deserve a place at the top of the totem pole and anything less prestigious is a catastrophe. It's understandable. Many were always the top or one of the top kids in class or in school, won various local competitions but then it comes to competing against everyone across the globe and suddenly the story changes and it's no longer automatic and a given that you are at the top. It's a cold shower to many.
>Yep, you can probably get a position at some backwater university that will pay (in the rich Western World) still enough to live a "normal" life.
This is a bit of a misconception. Even if you're willing to take any tenure-track job anywhere, the odds are still against you. There are simply far fewer tenure-track jobs per year than there are graduating PhD students.
How could it be in any other way though? I just can't get into the viewpoint of people who are surprised. Did they think that getting to tenure is just a normal, default stage in life that you will progress to as a natural consequence of time passing? Do they also think that everyone who works for long enough at a company will become a manager, then a VP then a CEO and if not, then they either did something wrong and worked below expectations or the system failed them?
Who starts a PhD and believes strongly that they will with high likelihood become profs? You have one prof as your supervisor and the same prof has many more PhD students. Do people not notice this?
After a certain point of bloat, growth cannot be sustained. Especially in America the system has ballooned up to an unreasonable degree and will collapse when people realize that value is elsewhere and will refuse to pay into the system through tuition.
Prestige, status, attention, fame etc. are scarce resources. Not every garage rock band can become superstars, most will not even be able to sustain it as a job or even to earn nonnegligible money.
Prestige is zero sum because it is relative. If everyone can become a professor then being a professor will inflate its meaning (already happening). But be assured there will be new concepts to signal prestige and people will be disappointed that they aren't all getting that prestige.
Yes, you're totally right. I think in general people do these things because they think they're special. You could ask the same question about why people found startups or attempt to become olympic athletes.
> getting a good job at Google is just as competitive as getting a tenure-track position.
From my experience this is not true. I personally know about 10 classmates who either dropped out of the (pure math) PhD or left academia immediately afterwards and ended up at FAANG as generic SWE. They all said that a few months of DS and alg prep was enough.
I should have explained that I am thinking of a pure software engineering job. I.e., the kind that you can apply for if you're smart and can code, but don't have a research background that jives with the kind of research that Google is doing. If you want that kind of job you're competing against a lot of very smart people who've studied very hard for the interview process.
If you have an ML PhD or something like that, it may be a different story.
I've never encountered any form of bullying or discrimination in my 15 years academic career (in three different countries).
What I witnessed a few times though where post-docs that just got disinterested in their work and unproductive for months. It's not uncommon for post-docs spending months looking for their next job, and usually, their advisors are fine with that. They understand well the difficulties of their students or post-docs.
Academia is hard because it's extremely competitive, not because professors are some kind of bullies harassing their students. I'm certain it exists but it's far from the norm.
It's competitive because you're competing with the whole world, and there are some people out there who are much smarter than you. And you are constantly reminded of this fact, when you go to a conference (or because you don't get to go because your paper isn't accepted), when you read your colleague's paper and so on. I've worked with well-known people (including a Turing award recipient), and even them were insecure at times.
And of course, it's hard because you don't know if you'll find a job after your current post-doc. The more average you are, the more insecurity, the harder it gets.