[rednafi]

My spouse is a molecular biologist pursuing her PhD in RNA therapy. She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do, with only a third of the yield. You can only sustain that for so long. She's in academia solely because she's good at it. However, there are a few things I've observed from the sidelines:

- PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.

- The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.

- A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.

- Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.

- Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.

- PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.

- It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.

It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living. She plans to leave academia as soon as possible.

[probably_wrong]

With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company. And with the exception of irrelevant papers, a friend of mine went through all of those at a startup she joined after her PhD.

I am doing a postdoc now - the pay sucks (still good compared to non-tech salaries) but I like what I do, I can choose my own tools, and I'm not longer contractually obligated to put my name in papers I don't like.

The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family, but it can also be very rewarding.

[rednafi]

> With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company.

Same here. I've worked at grindy startups that made me want to leave the profession altogether—everything from gaslighting by small shop CEOs to firing threats, and even firing a colleague just to show "who's in charge."

But switching companies is always an option, as is switching domains. I did that multiple times without much trouble.

> The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family.

I thought stability was one of the reasons people choose academia. By stability, I mean a supervisor or program that guarantees a steady influx of cash for a certain period of time.

Yeah, but it comes down to what gives you fulfillment. For me, I need challenging work with a reward in pay that matches the effort and academia doesn't seem to fit that curve.

[goosedragons]

Is short term stability, really stability? I think it's pretty rare to get post-doc contracts longer than 3 years, renewal after that is unlikely especially for a long period of time. You can't really be a post-doc long term and it can easily have you bouncing across the country/countries following funding. It's more stable than freelancing perhaps or maybe a startup.

There's stability in academia as tenured professor but outside that, there really isn't.

[eli_gottlieb]

I've seen a lot of industry outfits fail to survive 18 months with everyone doing the job they were hired for.

[whatever1]

Poor pay is an understatement. Back in 2010’s when I graduated, I was making USD$21K per year! If you calculate the hourly rate it is probably close to $3/hour given that PhDs work every day, and specially in the holidays that the advisor has more free time.

We were jokingly say that they don’t dare to call it a salary, that is why they call it a stipend.

[deepsquirrelnet]

That’s exactly how much I was making in 2010 when I graduated. It’s even much worse than that because the benefits sucked and the school took back about about 1/3rd in the form of outrageous parking fees and outrageous student fees that required us to pay for tickets to every sports game we couldn’t even attend. Add overpriced books to that too.

It took a PhD to figure out how not to accumulate any new debt for those 6 years. I would have been first in line for food stamps, if they were available to us. I literally couldn’t afford to stay in student housing.

[ProjectArcturis]

That's awful! I was a postdoc then and the NIH standard was $40k.

[jasonfarnon]

are you in the US? that's surprisingly low as by the mid/late 2010's PhD students in stem fields were averaging 30k. for the many postdocs on nih-supported grants i seem to remember ~60k being standard at that time. eg https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipen... .

[jonshsjsb]

In 2013, I graduated from a top 3 school in my field of engineering. I was getting paid $23 000/year as a PhD student.

I hated it every second of it too. 11 years later I still loath everything I did then.

[fn-mote]

For readers still in a position to make a choice: interviewing and carefully selecting the lab / professor that you attach yourself to for the PhD is really a good idea!

Unfortunately, a lot of people enter the pipeline (in the US) not yet equipped to evaluate the possibilities.

If that’s you, get the masters degree that gives you enough knowledge to make an informed choice, then move if necessary.

[tmpz22]

> interviewing and carefully selecting the lab / professor

Worth pointing out supply can be slim in narrower fields of research or for location requirements, like being close to a significant other.

[jonshsjsb]

But careful. Many professors lie. And many of them are nasty.

Talk to the grad students of other professors

[aleph_minus_one]

> - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.

Rather: because they deeply love doing research.

[kleiba]

I've worked in academia for almost all of my adult life, although in CS/LangSci not in molecular biology. Either I got lucky or it is some other reason, but I have not had the same experience.

> She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do

Now, I don't know how long you work but most academics I've met do it because they love it. Mind you, it's not like there is no pressure to stay on top of your game, and endless administration tasks do eat up a lot of your time that you would like to spend otherwise. But I know a lot of people who work at the weekends not to make up for lost time, but because their work is their passion.

> - PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise making good progress.

That is true, although you can also have awful superiors in a regular job. And it's not easy to just switch jobs for a lot of people when that happens. Also, I've personally never had any issues whatsoever with my PIs, so the opposite can also be true: PIs can be very supportive and interested.

> - The pay is poor, and professors often joke about how cheap PhD students and postdocs are.

Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.

> - A significant amount of time is wasted on internal politics, such as deciding whose name appears on a paper and in what order.

In all my many years, there was never any case where the author issue has ever come up. Also, perhaps I was lucky (again), but I've almost only experienced collegiality across groups in the places I worked. I wouldn't say that "internal politics" is a bigger issue in academia than in industry.

> - Pursuing irrelevant papers just to secure tenure is common.

The pressure to publish is real, but irrelevant papers do not really help you a lot. Your time is better spent doing work that can make an impact. That said, not all ideas that you pursue lead to amazing output, and you cannot afford to let half a year of work go to complete waste. So, yeah, if worst comes to worst, you might opt for a lower-tier conference and squeeze at least some insight out of your failed work, but it is not common to specifically try to create irrelevant papers.

Also, over the years, the acceptance rate for main conferences has become increasingly hard to get over, as competetion is ever increasing. So, you do want your work to be relevant, or else it's not much you'll get out of it.

> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.

I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real. However, I cannot personally attest this, as my work places have always been different.

> - PIs often treat their subordinates like high school students, expecting them to work weekends for "research" and forgo vacations.

Not true in my experience, I and my colleagues, including PI, have always tried treating students and other group members respectfully. There is, of course, a certain expectation regarding your work ethics, but for the most part, I've never heard of anyone demanding from subordinates to forego vacations.

The only thing I can think of is when the deadline for an important conference comes up and everyone's really trying to get some final experiments done in time. Then it could happen that you're asking someone if they could do it, but I've also been in situation where the answer was "no" and that was, of course, accepted.

> - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.

Probably true.

> It's exhausting, and there are better ways to make a living.

"Better" is completely subjective. I loved working in academia but that doesn't mean that there were plenty of situations where I didn't like something and loudly complained.

The one thing that's missing on your list and which for me was the deal breaker in the end was that, depending on where you are, the prospect of getting tenure is very vague and insecure. When I was young and independent, I didn't care if I only had a two-year contract. But as you mature and eventually start a family and/or buy a house, your responsibilities and priorities shift.

So, in the end, I am one of the 40% or whatever that left academia, but it was not the work itself that I minded, it was the lack of a secure future. I mean, as secure as any future could ever be...

[jcelerier]

>> - Bullying from other academics happens more often than most are willing to admit.

> I've read about this on the internet to the point where I believe it's real.

My experience as a PhD student in France circa 2016: a professor comes into our office one morning, tells me "your work is completely stupid, irrelevant and useless anyways, you should just stop" and then leaves

[__loam]

Lmao when I was in a PhD program, my French advisor told me something pretty similar. I dropped out, but maybe that is a French thing instead of an academic thing.

[rednafi]

A PhD is one thing, but doing it in Europe is a double whammy. People there, in general, love to use culture as an excuse to be rude for no reason. Germans and the French seem to take the crown in that regard.

[__loam]

Gallic pride is a helluva thing

[rednafi]

> Not true in my experience, the pay in academia has always been more than acceptable. But again, I was in CS/LangSci, and I know that for instance in the humanities, pay is lower for similar jobs.

This could also depend on location, but from what I’ve seen, postdoc CS pay in most places is less than what you can earn as an entry-level frontend engineer at a medium-sized scale-up.

[kleiba]

This may be true - and I wasn't trying to claim that you can make as much money in academia than in the industry, I'm arguing that you often get paid a quite decent salary that allows you to live very comfortably.

Could you make more somewhere else. Quite certainly! But ask any Humanities grad what they're making in their first job outside academia.

[varjag]

> - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.

This is really the root of most other problems mentioned.

[eleveriven]

The cost outweighs the benefits