It's a violation of labor laws. Universities argue that they can bypass labor laws by calling it education but there have been some recent rulings against that argument in postdoc unionization cases.
Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment.
Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night. And it took you 10 months to figure out that this is the correct procedure, and now you have one year left in your contract, and you probably ought to be publishing and getting ready to give lectures for academic positions... So that's a straight month of 6 nights a week 100 hour a week work.
You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen.
> You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen.
I experienced this as a grad student, too. You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life.
But you can extend this all the way down to high schoolers (or before?), where the kids out partying/socializing would be at a disadvantage to the kid studying alone in his room.
Shanghai is completely different from the rest of China.
Comparing Shanghai education to US education is like comparing the best school district in the US to the average school district of China.
As with many things the communists parade around, you will be shown the front gates, but you won't be shown anything past it lest you realize you're seeing the facade of a movie set.
Parents paying for their children to get additional lessons to get an educational advantage isn't something you'll see 'communists parading around'. In fact the article makes it clear that the official position is that kindergarten teaching should be low pressure and using cramming classes is discouraged.
> You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life.
I actually think that is an incorrect myth. You can have a social life, you just have to pick social activities that are compatible with the grueling schedule. For example, I took up social dancing, which meets with a regular weekly pattern, and I was able to plan my experiments around it.
If you expect to have nonscientist friends that want to impromptu go out all weekend every weekend, well, that's maybe not going to happen, but I think that a lot of scientists use the process as an excuse to justify their social anxiety - the causal arrow here is in the wrong direction.
> You can have a social life, you just have to pick social activities that are compatible with the grueling schedule.
This was something I was never able to find. Maybe it was just me trying to justify my social anxiety, but the alternative to being in the lab always seemed to be all-night benders or similar. Envious you were able to find something. I should've been more proactive.
I was lucky enough to a postdoc pull me aside and say, "look you need to not be that guy" and pointed to another postdoc that was... embarassing. Scared the shit out of me. Up till that point in my life all of my social engagements had been handed to me on a platter (high school, and esp. college), and although I'm a social person, it was very good rude awakening to tell me that I had to work for what I wanted in life.
"The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night."
I don't get it. Why can't this be done by multiple people in 8 hour shifts?
The medical profession is also pretty insane for making its residents work crazy hours and get almost no sleep for 24, 36, or even more hours a shift. It never made sense to me, especially as these people are risking their and other people's lives by going without sleep for so long.
Of course it can (and should) be done by multiple people, but there is an essentially unlimited supply of postdocs and graduate students from China and India who are willing to work long hours. A graduate student salary is peanuts for a US citizen compared to industry, not so for someone from a third-world country. This isn't hyperbole - more than half of the graduate students at my University were not born in the US. Graduate students 3-4 years into their PhD face tremendous pressure not to quit, and you usually make the decision to go into graduate school very early in your career.
Often times at the bleeding edge of research, that one postdoc is literally the only person in the world who can do both tasks.
Also, most research projects are short enough on funding as it is. So what if you declare that this lab either has to 1) hire two people do to this job in shifts or 2) simply not do the research at all?
You get back to the same situation dnautics mentioned where the truly passionate/competitive researchers are going to be doing whatever it takes to get it done (or, with strict enforcement, the science just doesn't get done).
> Often times at the bleeding edge of research, that one postdoc is literally the only person in the world who can do both tasks.
I thought we just said earlier how easily replaceable this post-doc is.
Not buying it. Bleeding edge of research doesn't really exist, it just doesn't move fast enough to have any sort of "bleeding edge". It's slowed down by lack of money and poor management and too much bureaucracy far more than it is by someone not working long hours. As has always been true with these things.
This is why startups will, sadly, end up beating academic science over time. Because startups are bleeding edge.
"It has to be this way!" is a very difficult claim to verify, you can't expect others merely to accept it, you must prove it, and I have seen very little evidence so far, including from my own experience with people who did research at university.
> Not buying it. Bleeding edge of research doesn't really exist, it just doesn't move fast enough to have any sort of "bleeding edge". It's slowed down by lack of money and poor management and too much bureaucracy far more than it is by someone not working long hours. As has always been true with these things.
You're thinking of bleeding edge as "new drug that at least shows up in some pop-sci stuff". People working in labs come up with new methods of doing X in situation Y all the time because X and Y can both be crazy specific to a certain line of inquiry. A thousand of those lines of inquiry will likely be explored before anyone outside of their extremely specific area of study notices. Your sampling bias is pretty irrelevant to the process.
As a concrete example, maybe you need to apply a novel algorithm to a high frequency data source (e.g. a single photon counting module). So you need to program an FPGA with a deserializer to do the processing (in lieu of wasting money on a DAQ that can pump data into your computer at a few GHz sampling rate), and only one postdoc understands the algorithm and FPGAs well enough to do it. Does that sound like a crazy, unusual, made-up scenario?
> This is why startups will, sadly, end up beating academic science over time. Because startups are bleeding edge.
Have you seen how hard it is for startups that actually work on bleeding-edge scientific work to take off? Is that not something that Y-Combinator (for example) has specifically been looking for a more hybridized model for? Most research done at university is a very risky bet even for startups, especially if you want not just a result but a marketable result.
Want some concrete examples of the system working? Take a look at the envelope that quantum information research has pushed in the last 5 years. On the theoretical computer science side, you've got people like Scott Aronson answering significant open questions at a dizzying rate (read his blog for some basic, well-explained evidence). Meanwhile you've got groups like Martinis'[1] making the first quantum computer that can accurately simulate a different quantum system. All with a huge amount of collaboration in a social network of scientists that spans the globe.
Where's your evidence that startups are the hammer-screwdriver-impact-driver combo that solves all of humanity's intellectual problems with but one institution? Because that's a much stronger claim than "academia does moonshot research that wouldn't get done otherwise and its not the scientific equivalent of another day another CRUD app".
Bleeding edge means time is important. Because time being important is the only thing that would make the argument. Since time is not important, it's not bleeding edge. So there's no actual rush, and any claimed one is artificial.
There's no justification for rushing in science in general, in fact, and all the rushing for publications and other rubbish is going to make all the research worse, not better. It should be a careful, deliberate process. If you are working 16 hours and are constantly worried about what your professor thinks of you, I am forced to be wary of your science.
> only one postdoc understands the algorithm and FPGAs well enough to do it.
I'm not going to go into problems of poor knowledge transfer obviously present here (bus factor 1?), but if this was the case, the post-doc would have negotiation power and this entire situation wouldn't be an issue. Clearly the post-doc is extremely replaceable, as the letter in the article implies, so you should have like 10 of those. If not, why are you threatening the post-doc? This sounds like a situation of not enough people, not too much people.
This asymmetry concerns me, and I am rather confused by it.
> Have you seen how hard it is for startups that actually work on bleeding-edge scientific work to take off?
It's hard, and overall, I would say it's worse (hence the sadly). But it's a lot better than the nonsense that academia is engaging in right now. It at least provides some competition and puts pressure on academia. If academia doesn't fix its act, eventually, private will have to take over. It's the same situation as it'd be nice if all the big, well-equipped companies would create and promote the electric car, but if they won't, someone else will have to do it, even if it's less preferable.
Something tells me that the big name post-docs can actually dictate their own terms and are not the same post-docs we're talking about. I'm having a hard time imaging that post-doc getting emails like this.
There's lots of ML research on the startup side right now, I wouldn't be surprised if the demand for quantum research will rise with time. The main advantage academia has isn't the system, but the government money... which is not at all indicative of the system working well. ahem government contractor companies ahem And seems like private can also grab government money.
We got a lot of good results from the "guy just goes on his own and is left alone by everyone and just sits there and studies alchemy for a bit" system, too. Consider how much was accomplished before with very little effort and how much people are working now, and how many people. I understand the problems are harder now, you need better equipment, etc., but that doesn't mean I'm not going to call a spade a spade. I've seen the time of so many post-docs wasted that I'm not going to just ignore that.
You can't expect everyone to just accept that, it needs to be justified. That's what I mean by "not buying it". It may be true, but the evidence is not there, not there at all.
well, when you do that, the second post-doc does the enzyme work, and doesn't notice one little thing that the first post-doc does that messes up the experiment, 30% of the time. It's like why do hospitals make doctors and nurses pull long shifts? One of the major sources of errors is handoff error, where passing a patient from continuous care by one person to another results in loss of experiential knowledge accumulated over that time, which is why medical staff tend to pull 16 hour shifts instead of 8 hour shifts (which would double the handoff error).
Yet we have a movement toward shorter hours for hospital staff right now due to all the errors committed by overworked people and burnout issues. Expecting mere humans to keep track of logistical things is already a mistake - use computers, use checklists, etc., medical issues due to expecting a human to remember things is already a problem. It's not like these policies are chosen by nurses themselves, they're chosen by those whom it does not affect.
I very much doubt that this reason you claim has been properly looked at. Every single time I look at a situation like this it never happens for a good reason, but because someone was greedy and was trying to cut costs somewhere. The main reason this gets written off as OK is because nobody cares about nurses, or post-docs, or whatever other group of exploited people. They're replaceable and interchangeable and are just thrown through the grinder because it's cheaper than figuring things out properly. The cost of burnout is never considered because the implementers can get away with not bearing it.
16 hours is shorter than the past. I mean your exploitation rhetoric is very facile. For what it's worth, I think there are more postdocs exploiting the system than get exploited by the system. My personal feeling is that the median postdoc is worth negative science.
There's nothing facile about it, I'm not so filled with learned helplessness that I can't objectively look at 16 hours and say that it's too much without having to turn to an imaginary god and thank him that it's not 24 hours while standing on one leg.
When you are making use of a person's time and you are not properly compensating them, and the improper compensation is a result of a huge imbalance of power, incentives, and options, that is exploitation.
All bad systems are and will be exploited, that actually only confirms my argument. When bad systems exist, it's a signal that they're not actually doing useful work, and are miscalibrated and inefficient. These inefficiencies are then very easy to exploit by other parties, because the thing that we claim to value (good science) is false, and the thing we actually appear to value (doormatiness) is true, so it is not surprising at all that people who can appear doormatty are benefiting from this system and science has nothing to do with it. That's exactly what you set up! If you measured for the science, you'd detect the rest and kick them out in a short while.
This is simply bad management. This task should be handled by a team that is managed by simple tools available since people stared to write shit down. So your paper have a few more authors and the Prof can claim he rightfully needs more postdocs, more postdocs get employed, have real lives and will by simply being able to sleep be vastly more productive. Real science will get done faster, better, with better paper trails and attract smarter people to the field that will currently simply not stand for this kind of shit.
Further people working 100 hour weeks make so many mistakes their work flat out can't be trusted. And should automatically be rejected by any sane review board on that basis alone. Not that it will be but as has been shown many times 'modern' science is fairly broken.
when you're at the bleeding edge, if you try to automate your way out of a solution, you will develop poor judgement. One of my grad student cohorts worked on a project where she automated large swaths of her project (which still required about 40-60h prep time). Early on during one of her group meetings, I urged her to take a closer look at her findings and not use automation for her work, but she didn't. I specifically warned her that "she might be chasing ghosts for years", and to not take my warning as any sort of judgment on her character. Later, she found that the thousands of observations she made were artefactual, a result of the automation kit she was using. Nonetheless I have a lot of respect for her for twisting the arm of her PI to allow her to publish the retraction report.
You are correct that automation would help out a lot technically, at least in some science fields.
There are two cultural issues, though:
1) Automation won't be used in many cases since automation is not how the advisors did things when they got their PhD. They usually don't care if the student has a better idea for how to do things than theirs, even (especially) if the student is technically correct.
2) Even in cases where they do automate some procedure and save a lot of labor, the grad student is simply expected to use that time to do that much more new / additional work.
Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment.
Living under a bridge would be better than enduring this kind of stress. People have to take a step back and look at their lives. Nobody can work so much consistently without mentally and/or physically damaging themselves in significant and lasting ways.
To say nobody can do that is overgeneralization. Some people can (A surprising number of scientists are ultramarathon runners). But also, a lot of people going through the scientists do wind up mentally damaged, and many of them become PIs.
I believe it's extremely harmful for science to assume that the only people who can contribute meaningful science are those that a) put up with awful work conditions and b) can be ultramarathon runners. You don't see a problem with that selection process? Does that correlation not alarm you?
May want to consider how many people would not have survived that kind of environment.
I think you're missing the deep cynicism there. I don't think the stress or long hours can be done away with, but there are ways that the reward can be made worth it. I don't think that the monetary situation can be changed by fiat. The problem there is that there is an oversupply of labor, and trying to wave a magic wand to fix (monetary) compensation without recognizing the supply/demand curve is going to cause problems: Namely, that the demand for scientists will go down, and the promotion of scientists will become increasingly arbitrary. Instead of getting better scientists, we'll be paying a smaller number of bad scientists more money.
I'm just suspicious, because I've seen the "we NEED to work this many hours" argument so many times, in so many different fields, in so many different situations that I generally suspect it to be a reflexive response rather than a real reason. There's a giant propaganda machine out there running right now to convince everyone that hard work is the purpose of mankind.
The only situations I've seen where this was actually true is some extremely esoteric ones like certain military occupations and some emergency services. Even then, a lot of the time you can still use shifts, or reorganize the system entirely.
In fact, an oversupply of labor should have made the time problem evaporate. I've seen what some students waste their time on sometimes and it made me seriously scratch my head. I think part of the problem is that nobody is really looking for good labor, which is why there's so much for it. You're not going to get "special forces" people here, like Musk likes to pretend, because that number is so low they have other things to attract them. You'll get people who lost their self-respect somewhere and who will sit pointlessly for too long before they realize how much time they're wasting, burn out, and leave. They're often looking for people who will agree to sit there 24/7 and be the professor's little servants, rather than actually trying to screen for scientific ability. People who are actually as amazingly good as everyone claims scientists should be prefer to work on their own terms, they would never allow someone to boss them around and put time constraints.
There's an oversupply of labor, but I think that oversupply is already not very high quality at this point due to the fact that you are treated better and paid more in private industries. So, I disagree with you, treating people better would actually result in better people going back in and some work actually getting done, and treating people better, as in, paying them more and being more cognizant of their time, would also put an incentive on the payers to be careful with what they throw their money on so they're not going to think it's OK to waste a PhD's time to go grocery shopping (professional housekeeping is a thing, if you want some of that, maybe hire some. Oh, too expensive? Yeah, that's how much you're underpaying the PhD).
Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night. And it took you 10 months to figure out that this is the correct procedure, and now you have one year left in your contract, and you probably ought to be publishing and getting ready to give lectures for academic positions... So that's a straight month of 6 nights a week 100 hour a week work.
You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen.