[pedrobeltrao]

I started a group leader position (not tenured) since about 1 year ago in bioinformatics (UK). The trend only got worse since this article was written. It is particularly bad in biology but physics and chemistry are not much better off. There is an ongoing debate about what to do about it. A good overview of the debate can be found in this recent perspective published in the PNAS journal (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/09/1404402111).

If you have a passion for research and have a solid back-up plan that you are sure can always fall back then feel free to try. Keep in mind that your salary will go down. Also, age factors in and there is some bias towards people that have always been on a straight path of high academic success. This should not be a big issue for the PhD but it will start to matter for postdoc and tenure track positions.