[throw_away_777]

> It doesn't matter what people think they're motivated by. This is a capitalist economy. If you don't care about money, then you don't care about the reality you live in, and, sadly, that's true for a lot of day-dreamy scientists. How money flows is important, and people being exploited is a form of malfunction of such an economy that should always be mitigated.

This isn't really true - there are things other than money that are important, like happiness. A graduate student in the sciences gets paid enough to live on, and enjoys a good amount of job security. The work is for a good cause, and despite all the complaining most graduate students. You are pretty unlikely to get fired as a graduate student. A postdoc is a much worse job, I don't think anyone should take a postdoc unless they really don't have any other options (or are from a third-world country). With that said, when I started my PhD I didn't care about low pay, but later on this was no longer true, and having just finished a PhD if I could go back in time I would not do it again.

[tigershark]

I really can't see how working 14 hours a day and over the weekend can make anyone happy. Apart from the doctors that will be paid very good money to help these poor guys to recover from the extreme burnout obviously..

[cshimmin]

Just take the amount of time you spend per week on hobbies (whether that's reading hn, watching TV, whatever) and add that the the amount of hours you work at your "normal" job. Then you'll understand how (many) scientists can be pretty happy working 12-14 hours a day.