[abdullahkhalids]

That's mostly reasonable. But for some people at least, the PhD doesn't give them all the skills they are looking for, so they might do another post-doc (2-3 years at slightly better than PhD lifestyle), before jumping ship.

[wesselbindt]

It's entirely anecdotal, but in my experience in academia (which consisted of 4 years of post-master's PhD), I've seen this happen exactly 0 times.

[maiar]

In a lot of fields, postdocs are required if you want a shot at a tenure-track position.

For the most part, it’s just another artificial rung the system uses to justify exploiting people.

[musicale]

Most of the pyramid's growth is at the bottom.

[KingMob]

Crazy to think that 50 years ago, postdocs were rare.

[maiar]

They should have stayed rare, but they’re a way for universities to get free money from the government as well as a temporary (but sadly permanent) fix for academia’s deep structural problems.

[musicale]

Why pay for more of those expensive, unruly, hard-to-fire professors when you can hire cheap adjuncts and postdocs to do teaching and research?

The administrative organization continues to expand, and it must be paid for somehow.

[KingMob]

Bureaucracy has gone up, sure, but not nearly as much as the number of people seeking PhDs.

That also used to be much less common back in the day.

[ForOldHack]

63 years ago, they were rare, but my father was able have his professor and department secure funding within a few months. ( yes, Engineering has a lot of money available from the defense department ).

50 years later, the Molecular Biology postdocs were not so lucky. Not even an honorarium. "Maybe in a few years..."

[onli]

Just to raise the number from 0, I did exactly that. The post-doc was in a research institute, a department that focused on usability. It seemed worthwhile to learn how to really do user tests and usability evaluations in practice, in the best way possible academically (or so I thought) but with real enterprise projects. Contrasted a lot with the quite theoretical PhD.

We can always argue about whether it was worthwhile ofc. Moneywise, definitely not (though the pay wasn't all that bad compared to industry compensation in my countries). But I learned what I wanted to learn, and the issues the position had were speficic to the place, not the concept of the position, if that makes sense.

[ziofill]

That’s what happened to me: PhD in UK -> postdoc 1 -> postdoc 2 -> faculty -> industry.

[foobarchu]

A postdoc can also act as temporary employment when one can't immediately find a position outside academia. They tend to be very low commitment as a result of the laughable compensation.

[ForOldHack]

Nope. All it takes is the first tenured professor to say "Well, yes, this was all good work you did for the last year... but we are not going to put your name on the paper... wait... where are you going? Are you leaving?"

"The door will not hit me in the *ss on the way out."

I have seen this TWICE. B.M. and M...