I've posted this before and will post it again: any discussion like this should include a link to Philip Greenspun's "Women in Science": http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science . Ignore the borderline sexist stuff about women and pay attention to the institutional structure of science and the opportunity costs of potential scientists.
Stuff like this: "Although the overall unemployment rate of chemists and other scientists is much lower than the national average, those figures mask an open secret: Many scientists work outside their chosen field" should demonstrate why the smartest or most economically aware people who are interested in science might want to think about ancillary fields (like hacking).
I sent Greenspun's article to one of my students last semester, after he expressed an interest in academic research. He reported that the article was incredibly discouraging, and he shifted his career plans back to medicine.
Pointing out the landmine in his career path was my most rewarding moment as a teacher in the last two years. I'm relieved that he won't waste seven years getting a Ph.D. like I did.
You would have better served your student by telling him to follow Phillip Greenspun's example rather than take his idiotic advice: do what you love and let the rest sort itself out. Success is seldom far behind.
I agree there are constraints on each possible outcome (we can't all be actors or astronauts) but I believe it is possible to do what you love in an intelligent way and still court success. If what your actors really love is film, there's plenty of ways to apply ones self to that pursuit without standing in front of a camera. The same is true for a PhD: even though not every graduate can get tenure many other alternatives exist.
Besides, I don't know what things are like in your neck of the woods, but around here, I don't know too many starving PhDs.
Unions in Hollywood have made it so that an actor can get non-leading roles semi-regularly and still be able to make an OK living. The adjunct and post-doc system in academia is exploiting the hopes that an ever-shrinking pool of tenure track positions are still in your future so you should keep working away for less than you're worth to stay in the running.
Hollywood is still largely an exploitative, winner-take-all system but there are some built-in protections in the system to make it more sustainable. Academia seems to be on the verge of coming undone if they don't do something to keep the exploited class from revolting or just quitting en-masse.
> do what you love and let the rest sort itself out
Do what you love that could realistically pay the bills. Otherwise the rest may well not sort itself out. It's okay to try something with little chance of success for a short time, though, especially during youth.
Vague platitudes like "we need more scientists!" or "a college degree will get you a good job" are misleading and dangerous.
Data scientists are in huge demand, anthropologists not so much. Although there are few jobs in physics, physicists are some of the most brilliant general problem solvers that I have met.
Students with a specific and informed plan can ignore articles like this. But few students have such a plan. The biggest problem within the education bubble is the complete absence of guidance about what any given degree program really can do for you.
China tracks the employment success rate of each degree program. Successful degree programs get more funding, and failing degree programs get less.
Perhaps my sample is a bit off, but I haven't seen economic evidence for a demand for data scientists. The wages just aren't competitive with writing code at big corporations. Academic labs in particular seem to harbor a bizarre belief that they can hire and retain good people at enormous pay cuts.
Data scientists have big opportunities in tech startups. Data scientists create that magic spark to give a fragile startup a strong competitive advantage, and share in the upside. Many many startups are trying to learn how to build a data science team.
Trevor Hastie at Stanford told me that Google revolutionized the outlook for stats PhDs. Prior to Google, statistics was an important field but jobs were scarce, and at places like research labs. But since Google taught the world where the magic lies, Stanford stats grads are inundated with offers from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo - and most importantly - countless startups.
Many of the best data scientists I have met studied physics. After the dry complex problems they have faced, commercial applications are human, exciting, straightforward, and a way to make an impact. (yes all our basic advances came from physicists doing physics. Im just saying Data Science could be a great alternative for some people).
I know that I'm biased, so take this with a grain of salt, but tech startups can be an exciting place for a data scientist, where you can make a major impact on the financial success of the business and share in that success.
Happy to give anyone specific suggestions via email.
I work with an ex physics major now doing planetary geology, at a university. Above all else, scientists should be problem solvers, and gravitate to where they can solve problems of interest to them. Too many fixate on one thing without consideration to where they can actually contribute something meaningful. Money/employment is not exactly equal to where you can meaningfully contribute, but there's a correlation.
My "field" = nuclear physics. Since the Russians turned into a bunch of cowardly wusses the opportunities in the 'converting Moscow to a glowing crater' field have diminished somewhat.
Fortunately I have since managed to use those 4years of experimental physics experience to design big bits of the Airbus A380, laser eye surgery machines, automated remote mining operations and now 3D medical imaging systems.
My colleagues who stayed in academia - at least those that missed out on being the 10,000th author on an LHC experiment paper - are grinding out a series of temp posts doing feasibility studies on what experimental result a new series of detectors would produce IF they were ever funded. Which they wont be in their lifetime.
Many of my other ex-students had to demean themselves to using their physics/chemistry PhD to earn a fortune in the city as quants or analysts.
I agree. Many "work outside their chosen field" doesn't equate to "Many are flipping burgers." I have a degree in electrical engineering, but I write software for a living. And not the cool stuff I used to do at Caterpillar, but websites and applications. Thing is, I'm good at it and I enjoy it.
I know of many classmates who got degrees in EE but went to work for a petroleum company, or people with degrees in Mech. Engineering who graduated and started writing code day 1.
I know of none of my classmates who got out and went into counseling or marketing (although I'm sure some exist.)
There's a global Great Recession, and the arguments that its due to a mismatch between available jobs and worker skills are just smoke to rationalize the growing inequality. Peter Thiel argues that its due to the cost of energy.[1] A recent article about the price to import coal to India supports his argument.[2] The Superbubble has popped, and every sector is cutting back for private equity to make inroads.
I am really curious about how the biotech industry might be restructured to actually pay scientists.
I know people in both academic and corporate lab jobs making minimum wage or nearly minimum wage. These are really smart, hard working people. And the best we can do is employ them as cheapo alternatives to purchasing lab robotics?
On the other hand: this is really cheap, low cost, excellent labor. Are you paying >$xx,000/mo on drugs? Just hire some scientist to make the drugs for you, you'll give someone a job and probably save a bunch of money in the process. (This is particularly relevant for individuals with rare blood diseases; their medicines cost many 10's of thousands of dollars a month in some cases.)
If I can get a postdoc for $39,000/year, what can I get for $100,000/year? How much is a novelty Soviet scientist? And what about a mad scientist (preferably one with a couple postdocs completed)?
I've always found the whole "Get a STEM degree if you want ample employment" argument to be a bit specious. It implies that all degrees that fall under this rather large umbrella are of equal worth, but the reality is that prospects are better for those under the "TE" portion of this umbrella.
Even within that smaller subsection, those working on, say, Aerospace Engineering degrees are likely envious of the prospects of Computer Science guys, and the Computer Science guys are looking at their upper-division coursework wondering if they shouldn't just bail out and test the waters of whatever startup hotspot is on their minds.
It's better than worrying about what you could possibly do with your Theater degree, but it's still stressful for the people under this giant umbrella of promise.
At the end of the day, I guess everyone feels like the grass is greener somewhere.
I have yet to meet someone with decent software development skills and a degree in a scientific/engineering field that had any trouble finding good work. I have seen a lot of unfilled postdoc and higher positions due to inability to find competent people.
I'm now three years out of college, still trying to get a tech job (during the middle year, I was otherwise employed and not trying). My degree is a double major in CS / math; I obviously can't provide an objective evaluation of "decent software development skills", but I worked at CreateSpace for six months during college with no complaints in that regard, and I got that position by winning the contests they'd hold at my school. It's getting to the point where I wonder if I should go back to college so I can be eligible for internships...
Certainly, I'll take a portion of blame here for being totally incompetent at seeking and landing jobs. But I'm so, so sick of the memes that "tech hiring is super hot right now / it's a seller's market in tech labor / look how easy it is to get work".
Is it, in your opinion, possible to have decent software development skills without years of experience under your belt? Do you meet many such people?
So, those memes are true descriptions of the market right now. You have presented persuasive evidence that you have sufficient programming skill to be marketable at present. How about spending the next six weeks in a self-directed boot camp for learning how to be better at seeking and landing jobs? Treat it like you're learning a new language: wake up in the morning, go to it, pound on it until evening, stop.
There's a billion things you can do to start here. In general, read Ramit Sethi on the topic. Specifically, who do you know that has hiring authority? (Buddies at CreateSpace? Have any moved on?) Who can they introduce you to?
Do you like coffee? I actually don't, but they often sell chai tea at the same places, and you could drink pretty much infinite chai tea right now just by saying "I can FizzBuzz, interested in getting coffee or something?" Hiring directors at most companies needing engineers are desperate and they'd love to hear you out, if for no other reason than you maybe be Starcraft buddies with their next hire.
I don't see anything that mentions where he is...it's entirely possible that he's in the middle of nowhere tech-job-wise. If that's the case, the first move should be "go somewhere with a tech job market".
One reason why patio11 suggests the whole "coffee" angle is that a coffee meeting is a better way to provide personalized advice. Otherwise we're reduced to playing HN Twenty Questions. ("Startup or not a startup? Bay Area or not Bay Area? Is your CV bigger than a breadbox?")
Having said that, "are you looking for your dream job in Zanesville, Ohio, or in SoMA?" is a fine entry in the Twenty Questions game. My own contributions would be:
A) "Could you put some contact information in your HN profile?"
B) "Can you describe something you've actually built? And if you haven't built anything yet, could you build something this week and send us the link to its Github page?"
But, of course, this is Twenty Questions, so either of these could turn out to be silly questions once we know the context.
(A) yes, I was bitten by the "your 'email' setting doesn't show" feature. It got me even though I'd been warned in the past. :(
(B) (1) This past week, as part of an interview, I've built a django project that provides text and video chat to logged-in users. This is, I would say, small-scale.
(2) Some years ago, I wrote a quick scraper to download Peanuts archives from comics.com. The main thing I learned from that was that, years afterwards, I encountered the web page for Beautiful Soup and immediately understood what problem it was dealing with. I'd call the scraper tiny in scale. I'm not too sure what qualifies as a "project", but, as you guess, I haven't done much.
(3) If you have hiring authority, or even if you just know someone who does, I'm happy to build something for you. I'm less happy to think of something to build myself. :/
As to the pre-questions, I don't have much of an opinion on startup vs non-startup, I'd prefer to be in the Bay Area, and my CV is, unfortunately, smaller than a breadbox. I'm apprehensive about moving somewhere just on spec; as a cousin post illustrates, that seems like a great way to exhaust all your cash and still not have a job. I'm only too happy to move for a job, since Santa Cruz could be charitably described as a "dead end".
I'm apprehensive about moving somewhere just on spec;
One can do this by couchsurfing. That was my technique, back when I was in your position. It needn't be expensive. Just don't wear out your welcome by staying on any particular couch for more than a week or so.
The fact that you're in Santa Cruz, though, makes me wonder if even the couch is strictly necessary.
Your projects sound just fine. (If that word sounds too highfalutin, call them "hacks" or "scripts". Whatever.) Put one or more of them on Github if you can. I have interviewed CS majors with good GPAs who had literally never built anything that they weren't assigned to build for a class, who had (e.g.) never deployed a page live on the web. The skills and disciplines required to build and ship things are largely orthogonal to what they teach in undergraduate school - it's like the difference between being an art historian and painting a portrait, or between having a Ph.D. in linguistics and delivering a lecture in Hungarian - so any chance you have to demonstrate them, even at small scale, adds depth to your qualifications.
I have no hiring authority at the moment (and am on the wrong coast, alas for both of us) but I'll give you this link to my colleagues:
There's still plenty of work for Drupal developers, and PHP programmers in general, if you have (or can develop) the personality to deal with it. You will probably need a sense of humor. ;) It's not a great job for perfectionists. But it is a job where a little knowledge can go a long way. If you learn how to analyze queries and create strategic indices in MySQL, for example, people will think you're some species of wizard. The wizard bar is low.
Think of something to build yourself. It's a good thing to practice doing. Start small and develop the habit. Heed the words of Ira Glass:
>So, those memes are true descriptions of the market right now.
I can't agree. I made my move to SF largely motivated by Ramit's info products (which I owe $400/month for). I've been engaging in exactly this kind of networking for 2 months while watching my savings dwindle to critical levels.
Inviting people out for coffee is good for networking and networking is useful. It's not sufficient for getting a job and hiring managers aren't that desperate. I've managed to bypass some HR filters, which is a good thing. However the market is hot for very specific skills and for 100x programmers. It's not so hot for those with more modest experience, especially those over 30.
I am far beyond fizzbuzz. I got all the cookies on Hacker Rank with a pure JS solution. I've been coding a little here and there for several years, and have 1 year of work experience at a start-up in China. The thing is, the bar is a bit higher than that.
True example #1: I met a YC founder at a meet-up had a great chat with him, and was invited to visit a start-up. I bypassed some of the normal HR process and got a chance to write a UI widget (as a pre-interview challenge). It was to read a bunch of user data from JSON and make a list with pagination, with user selection by clicking anywhere on their LI and a select all/none box. Here's what I wrote (modified to obscure the identity of the company in question):
I thought I was awesome for building it on top of jQuery pajinate and separating all the CSS and JS customization I made from the libraries. In reality they were looking for a something with a lot more abstraction, maybe built on backbone.js or angular.js with handlebars. That's stuff I'd never even heard of until moving to SF!
Example #2: A 4-5 year old company aggressively recruits me, goes over code I've written in the past, gets me to go in to meet them, all is going well and then they ask how many years of professional experience I have with ruby (answer 1 month). End of interview.
Example #3: I get a phone screen at another cool start-up doing something similar to the one I worked for. I'm open for any position, but apply as a junior level front end guy. I get a phone screen in which I do okay on algorithms, but not so well on obj C memory management...
I'm not saying that networking isn't worth it. I am getting a steady stream of opportunities and sometimes miss by the slimmest of margins. Hopefully I've made a sports or starcraft buddy from it as well, who I'll meet up with after getting my cash flow in order.
But the market isn't nearly as hungry as you believe it is from your perch as a fairly well known expert who does highly paid consulting. I say this as someone who has a business background and who has invested heavily in exactly the techniques you suggest. I had a much, much easier time getting a tech job in Beijing.
I'm still hustling for odd jobs to hopefully make rent and pay Ramit, but in the remaining time I'll be working on the hard skills (as well as stuff to show off on github since that seems to be so huge here). That means doing everything I can on codeschool and building a project on a JS framework so that next time I have an opportunity like #1 above, I seize it.
But the market isn't nearly as hungry as you believe it is from your perch as a fairly well known expert who does highly paid consulting.
Sidenote (and it is Ramit-y in character): if we have this conversation again in two years, what will you be a fairly well-known expert in, since you have (correctly) noted that it gives one attractive options in terms of career growth?
Meat of post: I do not believe that the hiring market is on-fire because of my little one-man slice of it, but rather because it has been reported as on fire in the media, because people who are extraordinarily credible to me on the matter describe it as on fire, because I talk to startupers like it is my hobby and they are in virtually unanimous agreement that it is on fire, and that my paid-for clients say things like "Dude if you can find us an engineer then forget about actually doing what we hired you to do and play League of Legends for the next two weeks and we'll both walk away happy from this consulting engagement."
Popularity and fame are highly self-reinforcing, thus not nearly so deterministic as you might think. There is some luck and a lot of volatility involved since people tend to copy each other's decisions (even when the signalling quality is poor).
Did you have a plan two years before BCC to be well-known for it? I think it's more common for people to stumble onto a first hit, but there are things you can do to increase the chances. My meta-strategy is to work on multiple projects and stay close to new, emerging things where there is a lot more space up for grabs.
If what you say is true then send startupers or clients or both this way and go play League of Legends. No, really. Do it right now.
Do you have any social proof to speak of? Testimonials from previous employers or even just a well-designed case-study of the work you did for them?
In any of your interviews did you engage the client in terms of their value proposition to customers and suggest improvements above and beyond what you were being hired to do? Anything from 'What have you tried to get more information about your users?' to 'I've had success using #{some_tech} for managing complexity in #{something} codebases, what have you tried so far?'
Can you demonstrate technical skill beyond what the clients are expecting of you? For example, if you didn't use backbone.js or some higher level abstraction around your paginated list, were you able to discuss the tradeoffs of using that sort of framework? If you have only one months professional experience with ruby, did you at least send an example rails application over to them for their developers to look at?
If I click on your HN profile or a link in your email signature, do I get linked to your portfolio website that clearly outlines your value proposition to potential hirers? What is it exactly that you can do for me? Your LinkedIn profile for example is mostly about your non-technical experience, which is great, but doesn't make me feel better about hiring you. You have a list of technologies but what exactly is it that you're a specialist at?
As someone who is charging a hefty daily-rate, with nowhere near the level of acclaim as patio11, with comparable technical skills to you living in a city with a substantially smaller tech scene, I get the impression that your lack of secured work is more to do with your communication/sales skills than it is with your technical ability or connections.
>Do you have any social proof to speak of? Testimonials from previous employers or even just a well-designed case-study of the work you did for them?
Yes some social proof, but none in SF and most of it related to EFL, running a small-business and sales.
>In any of your interviews did you engage the client in terms of their value proposition to customers and suggest improvements above and beyond what you were being hired to do?
Yes. Many, many times.
>Can you demonstrate technical skill beyond what the clients are expecting of you?
No. My technical skills are fairly modest. If the market is "on fire", though, surely there are places looking for junior developers as well as experts, no?
>For example, if you didn't use backbone.js or some higher level abstraction around your paginated list, were you able to discuss the tradeoffs of using that sort of framework?
No. As I written in the GP post, I'd never even heard of backbone.js. Also there was no discussion after sending the widget. It was just a "we regret to inform you that we won't be continuing this". I did however re-engage and ask what I could have done that would have been better and they were kind enough to give some solid feedback, which is why backbone.js is on my radar now.
>If you have only one months professional experience with ruby, did you at least send an example rails application over to them for their developers to look at?
I've never used rails at work. I used some ruby server-side scripting for my previous employer. If you look at my LinkedIn profile, you'll see projects I've worked on and links to the code and in one case video.
>If I click on your HN profile or a link in your email signature, do I get linked to your portfolio website that clearly outlines your value proposition to potential hirers? What is it exactly that you can do for me? Your LinkedIn profile for example is mostly about your non-technical experience, which is great, but doesn't make me feel better about hiring you.
I'm working on building a site like what you mention, but to be honest, my value proposition isn't that I've already built amazing technical things.
>You have a list of technologies but what exactly is it that you're a specialist at?
I'm not a specialist! There is no technology that I'm an expert in, but we all have to start somewhere, right?
>As someone who is charging a hefty daily-rate, with nowhere near the level of acclaim as patio11, with comparable technical skills to you living in a city with a substantially smaller tech scene, I get the impression that your lack of secured work is more to do with your communication/sales skills than it is with your technical ability or connections.
I find this odd since I've done a lot more communication and sales than tech stuff in my career. FWIW, I also had a much easier time finding a tech job outside CA. I did it with no professional experience at all in Beijing, on the basis of selling myself and my hobby projects. It took about 3 weeks.
Since, I'm successfully "getting my foot in the door" about 70% of the time, but having a harder time with the technical interviews and challenges, I have 3 alternate theories:
1) The bar is higher in the bay area. There are lot of companies looking for talent, but their definition of talent is more demanding than it would be if I lived in Colorado or Texas.
2) I've lived for so long in the Chinese-speaking world that I've adapted in ways that are good for marketing myself there, but bad here. Maybe my vibe is off for job hunting in the US.
3) Maybe age is a factor. Lots of fresh grads who know even less ruby or objective C than I do are getting hired as interns or junior devs. It's possible that companies are subconsciously grading me against what I could have been if I'd had a straight and narrow technical focus for the past 10 years.
Writing good libraries seems to take a reasonable amount of experience. Of course if you have been doing a significant amount of software as a student, you'll have a head start. My skills improved a great deal when I transitioned from one-off projects to research-driven projects (where the project lasts longer and requests for new capability appear as research progresses) and open source development.
What sort of math background do you have? Any experience with numerical methods for PDEs, discrete optimization, uncertainty quantification, graph analysis? If you pick up an issue of SIAM J. Scientific Computing, J. Computational Physics, or Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, can you make some sense of the articles? Academic faculty and many senior industry research positions want to see PhD, but there are plenty of places just looking for a software person that "speaks the language".
What sort of places have you tried applying?
After years of going to research conferences and getting several offers at each one (despite not "looking"), knowing colleagues with unfilled positions, etc, I'm certain the demand exists.
> Is it, in your opinion, possible to have decent software development skills without years of experience under your belt? Do you meet many such people?
This is going to sound mean, but have you considered doing entry-level programming jobs that aren't so great to get that experience? Digital agencies that don't know any better are always looking for people to build CRUD websites, and it's where a lot of other experienced developers I know cut their teeth.
I don't know about the average programmer on HN, but most of my ability to deliver value to clients comes from the battle-scars and horror stories of working at not-so-great jobs, along with learning from the few exceptionally bright people I happened to be working alongside. You can't pick that up at university, via online tutorials or even dare I say it, by reading HN.
If I were in your shoes, I'd either work on my own startup, or create some demo projects in a hot area like IOS or Rails. Register as a DBA (Doing Business As) and put your side project/startup as a job on your resume.
Then put your resume up on monster.com. If you become proficient in an in-demand skill, jobs will find you. If the skill is hot enough, remote jobs will be available. Now you have to pass the interviews, but that is another matter. Note that you need to learn all the ancillary technologies to be a strong candidate (git, for example).
I'm now three years out of college, still trying to get a tech job (during the middle year, I was otherwise employed and not trying). My degree is a double major in CS / math
My deepest sympathies about your job search. The "double major in computer science and mathematics" part of what you wrote sounds scary, as I have a large circle of acquaintance among young people who are pursuing similar studies. I don't have comprehensive information about how the general mass of such students is doing, but I'll relate a few anecdotes that may suggest some paths forward for you.
Anecdote 1, a scary anecdote: A few years ago, that is BEFORE the financial system crash threw the world into recession, I had occasion to meet a young man who had been on his state's all-state mathematics team to compete in the ARML contest
during high school. Rather than stay in-state for his computer science degree, he went to another state to attend its state university (presumably on financial grounds). The other state's state university is a Big Ten university that ought to have a decent reputation for its computer science department. But as I met this young man, he was four or five months out of college, and living in his parent's basement while still looking for work.
Anecdote 2, a lot less scary: Another young person I know, nineteen years old (barely) just now, accelerated his high school studies by doing two years of dual enrollment (college studies as part of his high school program) with a grade skip or two thrown in besides. He did not participate in any formal mathematics competition programs. He then transfered to our state university as an advanced standing undergraduate, and finished up an undergraduate degree in computer science (with a few but not a lot of elective courses in mathematics beyond the computer science major requirements) before he was eighteen years old. Since he turned eighteen, he has been out on the west coast, and is now in Silicon Valley, telling many of his friends that there are a LOT of jobs for anyone who is a decent programmer. He programs for fun and has apparently always done well in his school programming assignments and in technical interviews. He is convinced that anyone who can get through a technical interview with coding work-sample testing can find a good job in Silicon Valley.
Anecdotes 3-5: I know several other young people who got various summer internships during various phases of their recent undergraduate studies in computer science at various universities, and once they made a good impression on one company by their work in the internship, they started looking around at other possibilities around the country. All of the better job opportunities seem to use the research-based process of work sample tests as part of hiring. One young person I know who is in the job search phase just now while wrapping up a summer internship has had full-day technical interviews with multiple work-sample tests and discussion of each phase of the work samples after each test. It's gratifying to hear that some of the young people I know are getting to the second interview phase at multiple companies and some others have started career jobs at Google (if that's the kind of job they like) or at brand-new startups (if that is what they like).
The crucial thing seems to be being able to do on the spot what industry jobs expect programmers to do. In the extreme case, people who can do that who haven't finished their college degree programs seem to be able to find career jobs. It doesn't sound like the degree as such is really the crucial hiring criterion in most places.
Is it, in your opinion, possible to have decent software development skills without years of experience under your belt? Do you meet many such people?
It is possible to have strong development skills without years of full-time employment in career industry jobs if one does the right kind of recreational reading and takes on challenging programming tasks "for fun." I know a few such people. For them, where they went to college, what they majored in during college, and whether or not they finished college seem to be almost incidental details about their biographies.
It's all very well crying out for this and that but without defining the path and in this case the jobs, there sentiment is nothing more than a soundbite.
Anybody can say:
(1) More Scientists.
(2) ???????????????
(3) Profit.
Its the number two aspect the goverment needs to focus upon as well as allowing others to focus.
How can they do that. Well they could offer TAX incentives for R&D. Tax incentives for recruiting new people into the feild. Many many ways, though all of those involve the carrot approach without any sticks.
Sadly there is no golden answear/solution for this and soundbiting "we need more scientists" is not a solution unless you want to soundbite and then read other peoples comments in the hop[e of finding that magic solution you need to inact. good luck too them.
It's not that we need more scientists in the traditional Phd -> academic track sense necessarily, but rather more technically trained individuals. Folks with science degrees can find lot's of interesting work that others from humanities backgrounds have trouble competing for and can open up new business spaces by being part of innovative fields.
It's certainly a mistake to think most science-trained folks work as stereotypical lab-suit-wearing scientists. Science-trained individuals have fruitful careers across the map, and we benefit from more of that, that's all!
I totaly agree but there again I grew up with computer studies being about learning how computers work and writing code. As apposed to this is how we do mail-merge type of computer studies they have today in schools.
I also suspect Wallmart have more scientific degree's working for them than NASA does employee wise, but thats just a sign of our times.
Maybe the standards need to be raised more so that a degree means something, though that is another issue, although related. Another related issue would be World-wide standards. You can get a fully trained brain surgeon from say russia who could be the best in the World and have all the top end Russian qualifications. Though in say the UK or USA etc he would not even be allowed to change a IV drip or a bandage and would have to redo all those exams again to the local standard.
Education needs to be unified more perhaps world-wide so a degree from china is the same standard as a degree from America or from France or Africa. Then perhaps the true quality and abilities are allowed to shine thru. Again a seperate issue though something that is relavent.
I also think that TV has over the past decade or so done wonders in removing that sterotypical image of lab-coated scientists, though maybe they have dumbed that image down a little too much when your cleaner calls herself a dirt abstraction scientist!
> “She’s very good at everything, very smart,” Haas said of her daughter. “She loves chemistry, loves math. I tell her, ‘Don’t go into science.’ I’ve made that very clear to her.”
I've made this clear to my kids also. The cynical side of me says that the push for more scientists is mostly about lowering wages for companies lobbying the gov't for that.
So what are you suggesting they go into? Math, physics, science train the mind, and I would argue, open opportunities like no other disciplines do. If you can do these, you can do anything, CS and programming included. The push for more scientists, misdirected or not, is a realization that the future of our country (speaking about the US here) will be built on science and technology.
Sometimes I look at other people's resumes and I see their finished PhD, their publications, their prestigious postdoc positions - and I feel a pang of jealousy. I feel like I have little to show for my unfulfilled years of toil in a doctoral program. Then I wonder why they are working outside of academia, and I begin to ponder the possibility that they may be jealous of me for understanding the system and leaving when I did.
I don't know. I'm going to keep on coding in any case.
Funny story? Back in the mid-1960s the Feds said there'd be a shortage of scientists. Then in the early 1970s the Apollo program ended, and 40K+ people with years of hard experience were dumped on the market.
There really needs to be a YC-style company for scientists. Costs have come down - e.g. DNA sequencers are a lot more affordable today. What is needed is mentorship and some kind of exit that leads to employment.
Unless the jobs appear quickly then presumably the US might see a lot of the scientists move abroad. According to the Royal Society in London, China is set to spend more than the US on scientific research by the year 2020 and already publishes nearly as many scientific papers. - http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/...
They may spend more and write more eventually, but until they fix the quantity vs. quality problem, the numbers mean very little. According the Reuters, the money Beijing is pouring into research is incentivizing low quality science articles.
"According to data gathered by the OECD, China produced 285,000 papers in 2009. That's about 0.2 papers per 1,000 head of the population. Just 0.05 percent were published in top journals.
By comparison, the United States published 473,000 papers, or 1.6 for every 1,000 people. More than half made it into top journals."
Will China eventually surpass the US? Probably. They're modernizing quickly and they have 5 times our population. If they can't one day surpass us, something is deeply wrong. Of course, with their government the way it is today, there could be major hurdles along the way.
I recently did some copyediting for a chinese econ PhD student in the US. She isn't a student at my university, or even a research assistant. She's just a guest, who is being partially supervised by professors in our econ department.
Why is she here? In order to graduate from china with a PhD, you have to publish a paper in a specific list of journals. If you're unable to do so in a certain time period, you either aren't awarded a PhD, or you have to find a university in the US which will take you for 2 years. After those two years, you have to have your dissertation completed, and the US professors have to vouch for you in lieu of publication.
This is just an example of some of the problems you're talking about. Each PhD student (as far as she's described to me) who gets their degree without going abroad MUST have their dissertation published. This is totally contrary to how it occurs in the US where you simply have to come up with a thesis and defend it--there are rarely requirements about publishing.
Whats more is, if you asked a US professor to talk about the problems with academic publishing in the US, or with tenure, or whatever, its that all these incentives line up for people to publish publish publish. Its not about substance--its publish publish publish. Throw enough papers at the wall and you hope to god one sticks long enough for you to get tenure.
If this is a major complaint in the US, you can just imagine how bad it must be in Asia, where theres an (at least this is my understanding) real problem with 'faking it until you make it', with the hope that you'll learn enough to keep up with the Jones', while doing the bare minimum of substance or risk taking to meet expectations.
Ha. [Hollow Laugh] If only that were actually true. Even in departments were there is no "official" requirement, in practice there is. Your advisor will tell you baldly publish well or don't find a good job afterwards. Most students who are not on track drop out instead of getting a pity degree.
"Its not about substance--its publish publish publish."
Sometimes true, in practice grants are far more important than quantity of publications. To get grants you have to be respected and known in your field. That means not dumping a bunch of bad publications out, it means making meaningful contributions. It also helps to be a persuasive writer.
"Throw enough papers at the wall and you hope to god one sticks long enough for you to get tenure."
I know specific people who were denied tenure even though they had great publication records. Once again it is about grants, not publications.
I don't mean to try to sum up the entirety of academia in my post, just some issues relevant to the topic at hand. Your experience, much like my post, isn't exhaustive. Have I said something wrong that should be debunked?
You can make "top journals" quantitative with metrics like impact factor. And even though that's not a perfect system, having a difference of three orders of magnitude (.05% to 50+%) means that there really is a meaningful difference in the quality of papers.
Is there a language issue? (I assume all the top journals are international and English, but are there also Chinese language journals which are influential in China but not considered "top" globally?)
Some material might also be most relevant within China, or where the users are Chinese language primarily, so it would make more sense to publish locally -- Chinese history, current politics, maybe some specific economic articles around China, potentially things related to major Chinese engineering works like the new space program, etc.
(Still no idea if language is even a factor, but it seems plausible.)
Surprisingly enough not every one of your prof's dozen grad students gets to be a prof. Fortunately there is a use for STEM PhDs outside the lecture hall.
It's like saying nobody should do math in school because there aren't enough math teacher jobs for every student
The difference is that these people have spent large fractions of their lives preparing for careers that they can't get into. And they are generally very smart people, so it is to nobody's benefit for them to waste their time.
You might also say, that they are very smart people, so they should know what they are getting into. That's valid, but it takes articles like this to spread the word. Many very respected people are not being fully honest about the situation, including Obama and everyone else at the top. Professors have every incentive to lie to prospective students; they need multiple grants to get tenure and every grant agency wants to be funding multiple students. It is certainly a pyramid scheme.
In the short term, it is very efficient, because we get good science done for very little money. But in the long run, it might backfire; I honestly don't know.
Universities are still extremely expensive, just with the people (grad students and post docs) who do most of the actual science getting very little of the money. It's just extremely unfair and calling it a "pyramid scheme" is charitable.
Overall universities are just extremely inefficient. Where does all the money go to?
The person in the article who went into an administrative job may have been onto something.
Part of the problem is also the biology/chemistry bubble.
In the 90ies these areas expanded extremely and now they are downsizing to more reasonable levels again.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: College has become the most effective means of wealth transfer from Generation Y kids to the Baby Boomers...financed by the government, of course.
The University of California system has actually decreased its per-student spending in real terms by around 25% over the past 20 years, so there isn't really a case of where the money has gone there (they never got it!). It's true that there are likely to be future problems with pensions, but they don't at all explain the current increases in tuition. Those are due to state funding cuts.
More specifically, if you take the total UC system budget and divide by the total student population, the result for 1990 (inflation-adjusted) was $21,000 spent per student. The result today is $16,500 spent per student.
Tuition has gone up anyway, because taxpayers stopped funding it faster than that rate of per-student cost decline. In 1990, state funding amounted to $16,000 per student (inflation-adjusted) out of the $21,000 total cost, leaving $5000 to be made up by tuition, donations, and other sources of income. Today the state contributes only $9,500 per student, and is in the process of cutting that to $8,500. So even with a more frugal $16,500-per-student cost, that now leaves $8000 to be funded out of non-state funds. So it's not surprising that tuition has gone up significantly.
I heard a report on NPR once that mentioned that the increase in "administrators" has been the major driving force in the increase in tuition. The system, hiring its own graduates in order to fudge the employment rate while increasing the cost of tuition to pay for those administrators, seems like a clear Ponzi scheme.
That's the most infuriating part of it, and lines up with my own experiences in university. During my years there tuition exploded, but the faculty saw little to no additional hiring, and certainly our profs weren't getting major raises.
Instead the administration exploded, with new assistants and managers appearing every day. The worst part was that it was still impossible as a student to get anything done. It took me literally 6 months to reschedule an exam (through processes clearly spelled out by school regulations, in fact). This was at the University of Waterloo, FWIW.
In the end I had to threaten to sue the school to get them to do anything. In hindsight, it was entirely an empty threat, but it seemed to get me on an escalation chain somewhere. It took an additional month to get the exam set up.
I have zero respect for the administration at my alma mater, nor any institution of higher education. As far as I am concerned, they are all leeches, subsisting off the good will and good work of the profs, post-docs, TAs, and students who are actually doing anything.
"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" - to this date the post-secondary education system is the most egregious example of this quote I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with.
What do university administrators do? Schools seem relatively simple to manage, since most of the labs are small scale enough to run themselves, with the university providing some basic infrastructure.
So failure is going to industry and creating technology that makes money and benefits millions. While success is to lock themselves away in a university teaching the next generation of smart people that the only thing they should aim for is to create the next generation of ......
While this is true, the article also highlights the fact that many STEM PhDs are forced to work outside of their field, forcing them to throw away years of education. And also consider the statistic that a recent American Chemical Society survey indicated that 38% of new PhD chemists were unemployed.
Stuff like this: "Although the overall unemployment rate of chemists and other scientists is much lower than the national average, those figures mask an open secret: Many scientists work outside their chosen field" should demonstrate why the smartest or most economically aware people who are interested in science might want to think about ancillary fields (like hacking).
I've also co-written a longish guide for undergrads interested in science: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/how-to-think-about-... , since many of them don't fully understand how science really works in an institutional setting.