Numbers-wise, something like 3% of phds lead to professorships: it's not quite as competitive as becoming a professional athlete, but not far. Peak competition. Most professors watching their interview candidates nowadays freely admit they wouldn't have made the cut. That is unhealthy levels of competition bc at that point it is more of a lottery.
But there is something valuable going on here for everyone else. Most eventually realize they are not in the 3% bucket one way or the other, so then it becomes whether they want to invest in themselves or not. (Good) Phd programs are rare opportunities to work with the best from around the world and not worry about $ as much as results and other impact, and with like-minded people. For example, in my cohort, as folks switched for entertaining the idea of continuing in academics, they used the environment to do other equally hard things, such as startups with their peers. In both cases, only as limited as your work ethic. Others got cushy jobs where they could work hard till 5p but then clock out, but it was rarer, and even folks with families generally pulled the long hours: this was their time to grow.
For people happy to clock out and try to convince others to do the same, that devalues the experience for others who ARE there to work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals. A big part of picking a PhD program is the students you will be exploring with. Masters programs are great for learning technical skills and doing semi-structured technical projects, and a 9-5 view there makes sense. The PhD, which is researching new things, often starts after that, and a different environment. Think an artist colony where someone asks everyone to only do sports & gambling as soon as the sun sets.
This also leads to a few bad outcomes for society at large.
- PhD programs can become abusive of their students/workers. Paying below subsistence or even charging money to study.
- PhD programs can become places where only those with no opportunity cost go.
- PhD students will stop caring about long term careers in their field - recognizing the impossibility.
- Science enters a hyper-competitive phase where scientists do not target ground breaking research. Instead focusing on small repeatable wins.
- Scientists adopt anti-competitive practices to secure their small slice of research funding including review kabals, and disuading research in conflicting views.
While I'm all for letting students take the risks they feel like taking, the current situation is the result of a systemic massive overproduction of PhDs through government funding. It's possible this overproduction of apprentices results in decreased productivity amongst those working in the field by introducing noise, and training costs to researchers.
If typical science PhD programs reduced their admittance by a factor of 3-10, you would still have a highly competitive field - but one where students, and in turn faculty have a career path should they produce results.
I found myself agreeing with much of your comment, except: "For people happy to clock out and try to convince others to do the same, that devalues the experience for others who ARE there to work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals."
Is there possibly a separation between PhD students who work 9-5 with a mentality of hard work but strong time boundaries, versus PhD students who work 9-5 but don't plan to make the most of the opportunity?
I'm also instinctively wary of any romanticization of a PhD program, especially when working long hours. From anecdotal reports, national labs also provide the resources to do great research, with far more reasonable hours and less of a pressure to work longer hours. I've read of too many reports, which exist even if they are minority situations, where advisors take advantage of the power they have over students, such as in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367099
I believe that doing "amazing things with like-minded individuals" is worthwhile, but can also happen in the private sector where the pay is commensurate to the value of the provided work. In general, I'm very wary of the idea that working longer hours should ever be romanticized, because the potential downsides are severe and should not be underestimated (including physical/psychological health problems due to burnout from long hours and failed relationships/divorce).
> For people happy to clock out and try to convince others to do the same, that devalues the experience for others who ARE there to work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals.
“Clocking out” is not incompatible with “work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals”, far from it. Particularly in academia, where inspiration and reflection is important. Getting out for a walk, a dinner with friends, watching movies, etc are all opportunities to broaden your outlook on things and be more productive in the long run.
Far too often I have seen people “working hard” spending way too much time working on something because they did not really take the time to think about where they were going (including amongst the PhD students I work with in my lab). This leads to tunnel vision and abusive behaviour way too often.
> Numbers-wise, something like 3% of phds lead to professorships: it's not quite as competitive as becoming a professional athlete, but not far. Peak competition.
This is a false conclusion since less than 100% of PhDs have the ambission of professorship. It probably varies a lot by field but from anecdote most PhDs I know don't aim at staying longer that possibly postdoc, and even those are in minority - most are aiming for industry or research.
I have no idea if it's a significant fraction or not but IMO you'd need to to at least have some estimate to follow that assumption.
AFAIK the wages PhD stipends are pittances and make it very difficult for someone without money to survive, especially for non-STEM programs. If anything doing a PhD makes you worry more about money because you can't earn enough to survive
> One point that was raised again and again was the fact of competition: (...) But at the same time, a lot of my friends in industry do not seem to feel the same guilt when taking the weekend off. (...) So there has to be something deeper going on here, since competition is not an exclusive feature of academia.
Come on, maybe not "exclusive" in an absolute sense, but the level of competition isn't even remotely similar. As an academic, I'm directly competing for something literally dozens of times a year (in each grant application, promotion application, evaluation application, salary complement application, grant/project request, paper submission). Each of these has an acceptance rate, we are competing directly among other academics. And each of these directly affects our career. Even when we are tenured professors we can't get away from it, because we have postdocs and students whose own careers depend directly on us and we can't let them down.
My friends in industry don't have an even remotely similar experience, of course competition exists in industry but it's not a constant pressure that you feel every day from several different sources.
The post makes an effort to argue that competition is just one factor among many, but I think it explains like 90% of the overwork phenomenon.
> (in each grant application, promotion application, evaluation application, salary complement application, grant/project request, paper submission). Each of these has an acceptance rate, we are competing directly among other academics
I mean they're often very high acceptance rates though. The funding agency we use has a 90% acceptance rate. Basically you have to have some idea of what you are doing and they will accept you. It isn't as extreme as you are making out. There are many opportunities.
The main problem is that the opportunities are geographically constrained. I don't think there's a huge amount of competition for a given role, but the fact that it often requires uprooting your life (I moved from UK to Germany) is really bad
I think it depends to some degree on the compromises you're ready to accept. I have worked 12 years in academia, got my PhD but then realized it is a lottery to proceed further. Nonetheless, Postdoc positions are still available in Germany and often no one wants those because they are so unreliable. I enjoy my work, produce good science - and for this, I have to ignore deadlines and requirements. I have a small child and I need to stay healthy, if only because I am responsible, for my child, for my research.
In the corona situation, I switched to breaking almost all deadlines - what is not possible is not possible. No weekend work. I work from 7am to 2 PM. If that means loosing my job, then that is it. But the outcome was different: I did not loose my job - others quit, because they could not stand the pressure, but I kept healthy and produced stable, ongoing work. Slower than everyone else, but higher quality (this is subjective, of course). I reduced my contract to 75% time (30hrs), which also helped. My compromise: No security for long term employment and no money saved. We do everything by bike, no car, no travels outside the country, no restaurants etc. - really everything cut down to the bare minimum. This is fine and it works for us/me, but a lot of PhDs in our department have higher expectations and I think they are better to pursue their career outside science. Look at how scientists worked a century ago: Their life was often equally precarious, but still their motivations helped them sustain constant progress.
The following high-paying or high status (or both) careers seem to necessitate a very heavy workload: law, finance, academia, business or strategy consulting, VC-funded start-ups, medicine, certain media jobs, certain software development jobs. Although the author talks about competition, it’s hard for me to escape the conclusion this is the major factor in the long hours work culture. If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work.
If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work.
Just tell people you work really hard but don't actually do it. You'd be surprised how many seemingly hard-working and successful people use this strategy. Some of them even believe themselves.
I don't think my experiences follow this, I've had very cushy well-paying jobs both in VC-funded startups and FAANG.
I think there is this romantic notion that the software industry is this cut-throat free market utopia where the best ideas win, and I just don't think it's so. Most large companies have a sizable monopoly and most VC funded companies of certain size usually have years of runway. In both cases, people can and do coast.
Obviously the new economic realities will have something to say about this, but in my experience long hours is not required for high pay and status in software.
An academic position at an average no-name university is not at all "high status", nor does it pay well.
But the larger argument I have: It wasn't too long ago that you could have a good work-life balance in academia. The requirements to get tenure continue to increase. A common refrain is "The work I did to get tenure will not get anyone tenure in my department today." Quite a few professors I know said they worked regular 40 hour weeks to get tenure.
Fully agree with the author, though: No one is enforcing this from outside. This is a problem created by the academics themselves, and they alone have the power to fix it.
Imo, having worked in academia and industry (and having worked with academics transitioning into industry), phd students and profs have it way easier. (Versus the other careers the parent mentions)
Not only are the pace and pressure higher in industry, you're, to a large extent, doing what someone else wants you to do, which makes it much harder to push through. Academy is much more about doing the interesting stuff, even if you're working for a prof. Industry, someone has to do all the shitty, repetitive or uninteresting stuff, and that's mostly what the long hours are made of. Academics (including me) when they transition to industry often come in seeing all that stuff beneath them and think they are there because of their brain.
Industry work can be more interesting because you're working on high value problems, but it's way more work.
You're right. It's funny you mention law because my brother-in-law is a partner at a large law firm. He took family time: 3 hours away from work on a Sunday evening for an extended family dinner. The guy works crazy hard.
The odd thing is how John Maynard Keynes predicted that we'd have a 15 hour work week. If you translated everyone's salary at the dinner table from a 60 hour work week to a 15 hour work week, they'd be just fine (except for me, I'd need a 20 hour work week). But where are those jobs? It seems like you've got to work crazy hours for a crazy large amount of money.
Accounting is the same, at least at the big auditing and consulting firms for partners and employees on the partnership track. There are huge volumes of work to grind through, and partners don't want to dilute their profits by hiring more associates.
>> If you want a high paying or high status job, it’s not clear to me how you escape the requirement for very hard work.
This applies to almost everyone, so I agree. The counterexamples everyone brings up are people who are top 5th percentile in office politics / social skills or top 5th percentile in natural gifted ability, or simply luck. For the majority of what you're talking about, it's certainly accurate - very hard work at some point was required.
For some reason this is becoming very hard to accept in society, and popular discourse is trending towards "everything is mostly luck."
There's long hours, and hard work. Some of those jobs listed are mostly long hours, not so much hard work. Finance, consulting, and similar are good examples of such - there's A LOT of waiting as the work traverses up and down the hierarchy, combined with the fact that the work often fundamentally revolves around deals/projects with a finite (and quite short) window.
Actually doing long hours combined with hard work is not really sustainable. In the end you'll end up with burnouts, resignations, lower quality work, etc.
But with that said, lots of sectors are plagued with the mentality of "That is the only way it works, always has been", combined with "if I could/had to do it, others should too".
Who knows, maybe change is coming. IIRC, investment banking analysts have gone through their tribulations regarding this. Everyone joining IB knows the hours are long, and the competition is fierce - but still juniors are saying enough is enough.
PhDs really are not high paying or high status jobs. They are most of the time passion projects, however, which makes it very easy for supervisors and the academic system to abuse them and gaslight them into working longer. The best students I have seen rarely stop thinking about their PhD, but they definitely stop working when it’s time.
PhD students are like startup founders. You're working for yourself, building something, racing against competitors, trying to get a foothold so that you can have the lifestyle you want in the future. That's why I think both groups get tempted to work a lot.
Are PhD students really racing against competitors? I can imagine that in some instances they might, e.g., in the race to discover the structure of DNA, but I don't think it's true in most cases.
There's another way to do a lot of work and get things done, but maybe it's not for everyone: it's basically three weeks on nonstop, one week off. However, this is more of a lab rat PhD approach, where you're working on ongoing experiments/procedures and your clock is kind of set by the experimental setup. Maybe it's more of a biotech thing, but I can see this being a fairly productive approach for compsci. You just have to make sure you take that week off. (*basically this means showing up in the morning, doing very little, leaving early and relaxing a bit and maybe reviewing the results a bit. If a PI or someone asks where you are, just let them know you're reviewing the results of your work binge).
It probably doesn't work as well for people with other commitments who want the stable 9-5 routine five days a week (I personally loathe that routine with a passion), but for some things this approach is really productive and allows you to focus without distractions. The ones who go nuts and burnout, though, they don't take that week off.
Out of my many friends who have gone into academia, the most successful one works the least by far: maybe 1-2 hours per day on average. He publishes more papers than the rest of his department put together. At 35 he had more citations than 90% of PhDs at the end of their career.
This individual chose his field of study, university, department, collaborators etc etc based on time leverage. Everything is done remotely and there are practically no meetings. Every paper written produces material for another three. Every sentence is recycled from publication to publication if possible. Automation (python scripts) performs most of the analytical work. Conferences are attended exclusively to find more collaborators to feed into the system. Tier 1 journals are pursued relentlessly. Extra-research commitments are brutally minimised. Most importantly his data collection methodologies are hundreds of times more time-effective than his peers. We're at the beach together most summer afternoons. Having read some of his work, it's much better science than most as well.
The fact is most people aren't tactical about their careers. They don't want to hear what it takes to be successful in the system and would rather treat their PhD as a hoity-toity vocation than admit they have more in common with a blue-collar miner than with Kant or Mendel. If you want to cosplay as Darwin then you need to get on a boat for 5 years on your father's money and cross your fingers you have a brilliant revelation. But if you see your education as a job and apply a hacker mentality academia is easy ground to till.
Your friend sounds like a remarkable person, but it's not really clear from your account whether he has hacked career success in the career field of academia, or has found more efficient ways to do great science. If you accept there's a difference between those things, and that the latter is more important to the world at large, it's concerning.
Honestly, it’s hard to imagine getting tenure without working on weekends. The demands are just too high. What finally broke me and forced me to draw a hard line was the pandemic Zoom shift, however: the stress of constant scheduling required me to set aside a little time just to be bored and recharge. I can do this because I’m post-tenure but I feel terrible for my more junior colleagues.
If the works not novel, there’s no PhD in it. So getting scooped can really suck…. And when doing wet work, access to the necessary machinery and getting enough time at the bench to make the desired white powder vs the undesired brown oil is critical. If you have to do x reactions to get good at doing reactions (ie you make what you set out to make), you can spent more time in a day or week running them and working them up. Or you can spend more months in the process.
I'm a postdoc in Physics and I have very rarely worked on a weekend. Actually I would say that my workload even during my PhD has been far less than most people in the industry.
IMO it is a combination of luck and "work smarter, not harder". Most of the people I know who worked extremely hard produced about the same amount of work as me, the difference was that they spent literally hundreds of hours down strange corners that are not very helpful to their work. For example, one guy I know when writing his thesis did a huge amount of research into the theory of gravitational waves, because his work was related to gravitational wave detectors, but it wasn't directly related to his work. I also worked on gravitational wave detectors, but I just left the theory out, because it has been covered so many times. No one asked about it. You could make the case that it was interesting or important to learn the theory of gravitational waves, but he didn't really seem to be enjoying it; actually his life seemed quite stressful at that moment due to the high workload.
I would actually make the bold statement to say that, outside of cases of time consumption that are unavoidable, e.g. a lot of time in the lab/experimental difficulties, a huge amount of time is spent in academia because the student simply doesn't understand what they should spend their time on. This is because academia feels directionless or self-directed and the future of the research is uncertain, however you really should pause repeatedly and consider whether what you are doing is actually relevant to your research, and if it is "extra-curricular", you should ask yourself whether you are actually considering it with that mindset. Too many academics take their "research for fun" far too seriously.
I agree with this, I have read the theory for context sake but it has already been done. I'm building/using an instrument - that's where my focus is during the week, 9-5.
All those interesting corners are my free-time reading, because I enjoy it.
Beyond the sheer competitive aspects of modern academia, it is also a hodgepodge of ancient tradition and the reappropriation of the universities as schooling for the masses.
I bought in on the romantic dream of “monastic” pursuit of wisdom, where my whole being was dedicated to the search for tryth. That fits well with working most of the time.
Then, next to me sat the career professional, she wanted good grades and as little impact on her personal life from the “research experience” as she knew McKinsey was waiting.
The came family and the monastic dreams turned into work :)
I worked at the weekends when I was in academia and I work at the weekends now that I'm a software engineer. Why? Because I chose both careers because they were my area of intellectual interest and I do them for pleasure, not just money. It's not that complicated, for me at least.
I have yet to find the highly successful person who did it without working long hours. Sure you might not have to work weekends but the weekdays are very busy. Eventually you can coast on your past accomplishments but the path to get there requires a lot of effort, regardless of the field.
I don't know if I'm highly successful but I am probably a great PhD outcome who got a great postdoc position and I did it without working long hours. Extremely happy to be your counterexample :)
Yeah this is probably an unpopular opinion here. But weekends and 40 hour work weeks are for employees. If you want to spend your life as an employee, more power to you. I don't.
From the outside it seems academia is an end, not a mean. Which in itself could be the full explanation. Also explains why even in "industry", as the author calls it, there's plenty of people willing to work (or appear to) a lot more than expected/required: to acquire more money/status/position/power/etc.
When you don't care to have your name plastered on numerous publications or on some company report, saying "no" to peer/company pressure is much easier.
Bonus point: Propaganda. Movies and tv shows are full of hard working heroes with impossible schedules and deadlines (literal most of the time) which makes for interesting entertainment but terrible lives.
> I started my master's degree in 2018 and my PhD in 2020, and one of the most important things I learned during my master's was how NOT to work on weekends. I learned how to structure my time, deadlines and classwork in such a way that everything actually fits in an eight hour workday. I was also quite proud of this achievement, and barring my master's thesis and other major deadlines, I was moderately successful in defending my freedom. Not working on weekends seemed like a graduation from the messy life of an undergrad into the more structured life of an adult.
The rest of the article talks about the various pressures leading the author away from the disciplined 5-day work week. Competition and a desire to get ahead is the obvious one. The competitive pressure is especially prescient for academic jobs, where universities are busy churning out huge numbers of grad students but the number of open academic positions can never accommodate more than a small percentage of them.
Anecdotally, I've noticed two types of weekend workers: The first type simply works all the time. Instead of going idle, they gravitate toward their task list and start working on the next thing. For whatever reason (drive, anxiety, perceived pressures, boredom) they are wired to return to work by default and the 40 hour work week doesn't contain them.
The second type of weekend worker is not actually producing or even "working" more than 40 hours per week, but they struggle to contain their work into the Monday-Friday bounds. Their weekend work isn't to get ahead or go the extra mile. They work weekends because they spent half of their weekdays doing fun things (meeting up with friends, exploring hobbies, exercising, messing around online) and the only way to accomplish their work is to repeat this half-focused schedule 7 days per week.
Much like the author, they could contain their work neatly within a M-F, 9-5 schedule if they made an effort, but at every juncture they choose to follow spontaneous whims or to relax or procrastinate instead. Some of them may even like the eclectic and flexible work schedule that allows them to do the things they want when they want and to get their work done in the boring gaps in between.
There's also a 3rd type of person who doesn't really work much on weekends, but will wait until Saturday or Sunday to send out important e-mails and type up a storm in Slack so that it looks like they're working hard on the weekend. Frankly, this is the type I see most frequently at tech companies in the past few years: Try to engage with their messages on a Saturday and you won't get a response until Monday, but they'll go to great lengths to look like they were working hard all weekend or tell you that they worked all weekend on something.
Nicely said, I think this is a mostly accurate assessment. A lot of grad students are type A, a lot are type B, and plenty are both. Still, I do think a fourth kind exists (or a sub type of B) which is people who struggle to balance all the things in their lives and despite their best efforts end up with work on the weekends. Not everyone "choose[s] to follow spontaneous whims or to relax or procrastinate instead.", many people do their best to not procrastinate or to plan things out well, but particularly when there are deadlines it's simply hard to do.
I can also tell you from experience, although this is not regularly the case, when it comes time to try to submit a paper to a conference it's definitely possible that there is so much work that there is no way to contain the work to M-F. Which is of course how people get burned out, depressed, etc. And it's all too common in academia, with grads students having to balance teaching, research, classes, and more.
The competitive insentive is why social pressure not to work is important. It's a basic zero sum game: If you work more, I also have to work more, and the competitive advantage evens out.
If we can collectively decide (and enforce) not working weekends, we all benefit.
In my field, often times weekend work is needed to get actual work done, as most of my day is filled with meetings or other random things that require my attention — answering important emails, mentoring, managing the backlog, etc. Sure I have time in between these things, but rarely enough to focus uninterrupted for several consecutive hours. On a weekend I can knock out or catch up on things that would otherwise take me a full week or two under my normal week load. It’s just the way it is.
Huh. What I miss about being a grad student is working whenever I wanted and not working when it didn't make sense. Sometimes that meant working on a weekend, because I had an idea I was making progress on. Other times, even if it was Wednesday, I'd just not work.
The article seems to focus on working too much due to fear of competition. I would add that working in a fast-paced field (the author is doing ML at the Vector Institute) can feel like you're always in competition, but that it's important to remind yourself that you can choose your topic of research (if you have some horrible advisor that dictates what you do, I'm sorry, but recommend you find someone / someplace else). Even within ML, there are tons of pockets that nobody is really working on. That does make it harder to publish though, as your work will be "weird" or "not very hot".
tl;dr: people should choose topics and fields that fit their desired work profile. If you decide to compete in a heavily competitive subject, expect a competitive environment.
I worked as a software engineer for 20 years in a computer science department and there are several reasons it is often necessary to work on weekends:
* Paper deadlines. If everyone planned well there would be no need to work on weekends, but nobody plans well, so a lot of the work is done last minute. Also research is international and as a result many conference paper deadlines are set randomly so as not to always be convenient for USA and inconvenient for everyone else. Hence some deadlines are on weekends. Again, if the work was well planned there would be no need even then to work on a weekend, you could submit the paper before the weekend, but no one plans well.
* Students time schedule. Students have classes. They sleep late and work nights. They go to parties and drink. They have exams and assignments that take all their attention during the week and then they get back to the research on weekends. If you are collaborating you often have to be connected in real time, even if it is remote work. This means working nights, weekends, really any time of the day. It can be like being on call.
* Profs and advisors try to get you to cram as much as possible into the paper to make it better. This means working up to the absolute last minute continuing to make minor revisions. I've seen changes made to papers in the last seconds before a deadline, and changes continue to be made for the hours grace period some conferences offer after the deadline. As long as the paper submission portal is open changes continue to be made. It's a stupid way to work, but it is common.
That said, since I was an employee I had more freedom to restrict my hours. Grad students on the other hand are slaves and are expected to work 80+ hour weeks. They are essentially almost always working. So they will try to access other people any time they encounter an issue. It's difficult to not interface with them during "off" hours because you know it might mean they can't get anything done until they talk with you, which can mean wasting days of time for them. They'll mention this at meetings, which makes it look like YOU are blocking the project. And you are, but for reasonable reasons. But that doesn't look reasonable to the student. And profs used to be students and in many cases that's basically the only life they know so they tend to sympathize with the students and not with you.
Some things that would help:
Plan for papers, posters, meetings so it's not all last minute. The conferences happen around the same time every year. It's not like it's a big surprise when the date is set.
Get grad students to form unions so they are not so overworked.
Set rules on what profs can task grad students with. Getting coffee, creating lessons for the profs classes, getting the profs laundry, being volunteered for work, being assigned more than 40hrs work/week, should not be on the list. This is a large part of why grad students are overworked.
Require management courses for profs so they learn that people are not machines. There is a reason we have a 40hr work week, and while going beyond 40hrs is _sometimes_ required, working longer hours continuously just damages productivity and is actually making the work go slower and burning people out.
[+] [-] lmeyerov|3 years ago|reply
But there is something valuable going on here for everyone else. Most eventually realize they are not in the 3% bucket one way or the other, so then it becomes whether they want to invest in themselves or not. (Good) Phd programs are rare opportunities to work with the best from around the world and not worry about $ as much as results and other impact, and with like-minded people. For example, in my cohort, as folks switched for entertaining the idea of continuing in academics, they used the environment to do other equally hard things, such as startups with their peers. In both cases, only as limited as your work ethic. Others got cushy jobs where they could work hard till 5p but then clock out, but it was rarer, and even folks with families generally pulled the long hours: this was their time to grow.
For people happy to clock out and try to convince others to do the same, that devalues the experience for others who ARE there to work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals. A big part of picking a PhD program is the students you will be exploring with. Masters programs are great for learning technical skills and doing semi-structured technical projects, and a 9-5 view there makes sense. The PhD, which is researching new things, often starts after that, and a different environment. Think an artist colony where someone asks everyone to only do sports & gambling as soon as the sun sets.
[+] [-] lumost|3 years ago|reply
- PhD programs can become abusive of their students/workers. Paying below subsistence or even charging money to study.
- PhD programs can become places where only those with no opportunity cost go.
- PhD students will stop caring about long term careers in their field - recognizing the impossibility.
- Science enters a hyper-competitive phase where scientists do not target ground breaking research. Instead focusing on small repeatable wins.
- Scientists adopt anti-competitive practices to secure their small slice of research funding including review kabals, and disuading research in conflicting views.
While I'm all for letting students take the risks they feel like taking, the current situation is the result of a systemic massive overproduction of PhDs through government funding. It's possible this overproduction of apprentices results in decreased productivity amongst those working in the field by introducing noise, and training costs to researchers.
If typical science PhD programs reduced their admittance by a factor of 3-10, you would still have a highly competitive field - but one where students, and in turn faculty have a career path should they produce results.
[+] [-] coastflow|3 years ago|reply
Is there possibly a separation between PhD students who work 9-5 with a mentality of hard work but strong time boundaries, versus PhD students who work 9-5 but don't plan to make the most of the opportunity?
I'm also instinctively wary of any romanticization of a PhD program, especially when working long hours. From anecdotal reports, national labs also provide the resources to do great research, with far more reasonable hours and less of a pressure to work longer hours. I've read of too many reports, which exist even if they are minority situations, where advisors take advantage of the power they have over students, such as in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26367099
I believe that doing "amazing things with like-minded individuals" is worthwhile, but can also happen in the private sector where the pay is commensurate to the value of the provided work. In general, I'm very wary of the idea that working longer hours should ever be romanticized, because the potential downsides are severe and should not be underestimated (including physical/psychological health problems due to burnout from long hours and failed relationships/divorce).
[+] [-] kergonath|3 years ago|reply
“Clocking out” is not incompatible with “work as hard & creatively as they can to do amazing things with like-minded individuals”, far from it. Particularly in academia, where inspiration and reflection is important. Getting out for a walk, a dinner with friends, watching movies, etc are all opportunities to broaden your outlook on things and be more productive in the long run.
Far too often I have seen people “working hard” spending way too much time working on something because they did not really take the time to think about where they were going (including amongst the PhD students I work with in my lab). This leads to tunnel vision and abusive behaviour way too often.
[+] [-] 3np|3 years ago|reply
This is a false conclusion since less than 100% of PhDs have the ambission of professorship. It probably varies a lot by field but from anecdote most PhDs I know don't aim at staying longer that possibly postdoc, and even those are in minority - most are aiming for industry or research.
I have no idea if it's a significant fraction or not but IMO you'd need to to at least have some estimate to follow that assumption.
[+] [-] andreilys|3 years ago|reply
AFAIK the wages PhD stipends are pittances and make it very difficult for someone without money to survive, especially for non-STEM programs. If anything doing a PhD makes you worry more about money because you can't earn enough to survive
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|3 years ago|reply
Come on, maybe not "exclusive" in an absolute sense, but the level of competition isn't even remotely similar. As an academic, I'm directly competing for something literally dozens of times a year (in each grant application, promotion application, evaluation application, salary complement application, grant/project request, paper submission). Each of these has an acceptance rate, we are competing directly among other academics. And each of these directly affects our career. Even when we are tenured professors we can't get away from it, because we have postdocs and students whose own careers depend directly on us and we can't let them down.
My friends in industry don't have an even remotely similar experience, of course competition exists in industry but it's not a constant pressure that you feel every day from several different sources.
The post makes an effort to argue that competition is just one factor among many, but I think it explains like 90% of the overwork phenomenon.
[+] [-] bowsamic|3 years ago|reply
I mean they're often very high acceptance rates though. The funding agency we use has a 90% acceptance rate. Basically you have to have some idea of what you are doing and they will accept you. It isn't as extreme as you are making out. There are many opportunities.
The main problem is that the opportunities are geographically constrained. I don't think there's a huge amount of competition for a given role, but the fact that it often requires uprooting your life (I moved from UK to Germany) is really bad
[+] [-] j7ake|3 years ago|reply
But stability and money on average is still better in academia than being a musician.
[+] [-] Helmut10001|3 years ago|reply
In the corona situation, I switched to breaking almost all deadlines - what is not possible is not possible. No weekend work. I work from 7am to 2 PM. If that means loosing my job, then that is it. But the outcome was different: I did not loose my job - others quit, because they could not stand the pressure, but I kept healthy and produced stable, ongoing work. Slower than everyone else, but higher quality (this is subjective, of course). I reduced my contract to 75% time (30hrs), which also helped. My compromise: No security for long term employment and no money saved. We do everything by bike, no car, no travels outside the country, no restaurants etc. - really everything cut down to the bare minimum. This is fine and it works for us/me, but a lot of PhDs in our department have higher expectations and I think they are better to pursue their career outside science. Look at how scientists worked a century ago: Their life was often equally precarious, but still their motivations helped them sustain constant progress.
[+] [-] currycurry16|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Biologist123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|3 years ago|reply
Just tell people you work really hard but don't actually do it. You'd be surprised how many seemingly hard-working and successful people use this strategy. Some of them even believe themselves.
[+] [-] billllll|3 years ago|reply
I think there is this romantic notion that the software industry is this cut-throat free market utopia where the best ideas win, and I just don't think it's so. Most large companies have a sizable monopoly and most VC funded companies of certain size usually have years of runway. In both cases, people can and do coast.
Obviously the new economic realities will have something to say about this, but in my experience long hours is not required for high pay and status in software.
[+] [-] BeetleB|3 years ago|reply
But the larger argument I have: It wasn't too long ago that you could have a good work-life balance in academia. The requirements to get tenure continue to increase. A common refrain is "The work I did to get tenure will not get anyone tenure in my department today." Quite a few professors I know said they worked regular 40 hour weeks to get tenure.
Fully agree with the author, though: No one is enforcing this from outside. This is a problem created by the academics themselves, and they alone have the power to fix it.
[+] [-] version_five|3 years ago|reply
Not only are the pace and pressure higher in industry, you're, to a large extent, doing what someone else wants you to do, which makes it much harder to push through. Academy is much more about doing the interesting stuff, even if you're working for a prof. Industry, someone has to do all the shitty, repetitive or uninteresting stuff, and that's mostly what the long hours are made of. Academics (including me) when they transition to industry often come in seeing all that stuff beneath them and think they are there because of their brain.
Industry work can be more interesting because you're working on high value problems, but it's way more work.
[+] [-] noobermin|3 years ago|reply
Also, being a grad student is hardly "high status" tbf.
[+] [-] abirch|3 years ago|reply
The odd thing is how John Maynard Keynes predicted that we'd have a 15 hour work week. If you translated everyone's salary at the dinner table from a 60 hour work week to a 15 hour work week, they'd be just fine (except for me, I'd need a 20 hour work week). But where are those jobs? It seems like you've got to work crazy hours for a crazy large amount of money.
[+] [-] nradov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icelancer|3 years ago|reply
This applies to almost everyone, so I agree. The counterexamples everyone brings up are people who are top 5th percentile in office politics / social skills or top 5th percentile in natural gifted ability, or simply luck. For the majority of what you're talking about, it's certainly accurate - very hard work at some point was required.
For some reason this is becoming very hard to accept in society, and popular discourse is trending towards "everything is mostly luck."
[+] [-] TrackerFF|3 years ago|reply
Actually doing long hours combined with hard work is not really sustainable. In the end you'll end up with burnouts, resignations, lower quality work, etc.
But with that said, lots of sectors are plagued with the mentality of "That is the only way it works, always has been", combined with "if I could/had to do it, others should too".
Who knows, maybe change is coming. IIRC, investment banking analysts have gone through their tribulations regarding this. Everyone joining IB knows the hours are long, and the competition is fierce - but still juniors are saying enough is enough.
[+] [-] kergonath|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] copperx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
It probably doesn't work as well for people with other commitments who want the stable 9-5 routine five days a week (I personally loathe that routine with a passion), but for some things this approach is really productive and allows you to focus without distractions. The ones who go nuts and burnout, though, they don't take that week off.
[+] [-] zemvpferreira|3 years ago|reply
This individual chose his field of study, university, department, collaborators etc etc based on time leverage. Everything is done remotely and there are practically no meetings. Every paper written produces material for another three. Every sentence is recycled from publication to publication if possible. Automation (python scripts) performs most of the analytical work. Conferences are attended exclusively to find more collaborators to feed into the system. Tier 1 journals are pursued relentlessly. Extra-research commitments are brutally minimised. Most importantly his data collection methodologies are hundreds of times more time-effective than his peers. We're at the beach together most summer afternoons. Having read some of his work, it's much better science than most as well.
The fact is most people aren't tactical about their careers. They don't want to hear what it takes to be successful in the system and would rather treat their PhD as a hoity-toity vocation than admit they have more in common with a blue-collar miner than with Kant or Mendel. If you want to cosplay as Darwin then you need to get on a boat for 5 years on your father's money and cross your fingers you have a brilliant revelation. But if you see your education as a job and apply a hacker mentality academia is easy ground to till.
[+] [-] rm445|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewdgreen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jleyank|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bowsamic|3 years ago|reply
IMO it is a combination of luck and "work smarter, not harder". Most of the people I know who worked extremely hard produced about the same amount of work as me, the difference was that they spent literally hundreds of hours down strange corners that are not very helpful to their work. For example, one guy I know when writing his thesis did a huge amount of research into the theory of gravitational waves, because his work was related to gravitational wave detectors, but it wasn't directly related to his work. I also worked on gravitational wave detectors, but I just left the theory out, because it has been covered so many times. No one asked about it. You could make the case that it was interesting or important to learn the theory of gravitational waves, but he didn't really seem to be enjoying it; actually his life seemed quite stressful at that moment due to the high workload.
I would actually make the bold statement to say that, outside of cases of time consumption that are unavoidable, e.g. a lot of time in the lab/experimental difficulties, a huge amount of time is spent in academia because the student simply doesn't understand what they should spend their time on. This is because academia feels directionless or self-directed and the future of the research is uncertain, however you really should pause repeatedly and consider whether what you are doing is actually relevant to your research, and if it is "extra-curricular", you should ask yourself whether you are actually considering it with that mindset. Too many academics take their "research for fun" far too seriously.
[+] [-] was_a_dev|3 years ago|reply
All those interesting corners are my free-time reading, because I enjoy it.
[+] [-] lokimedes|3 years ago|reply
I bought in on the romantic dream of “monastic” pursuit of wisdom, where my whole being was dedicated to the search for tryth. That fits well with working most of the time. Then, next to me sat the career professional, she wanted good grades and as little impact on her personal life from the “research experience” as she knew McKinsey was waiting. The came family and the monastic dreams turned into work :)
[+] [-] da39a3ee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seibelj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bowsamic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramesh31|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readerbaza|3 years ago|reply
When you don't care to have your name plastered on numerous publications or on some company report, saying "no" to peer/company pressure is much easier.
Bonus point: Propaganda. Movies and tv shows are full of hard working heroes with impossible schedules and deadlines (literal most of the time) which makes for interesting entertainment but terrible lives.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|3 years ago|reply
> I started my master's degree in 2018 and my PhD in 2020, and one of the most important things I learned during my master's was how NOT to work on weekends. I learned how to structure my time, deadlines and classwork in such a way that everything actually fits in an eight hour workday. I was also quite proud of this achievement, and barring my master's thesis and other major deadlines, I was moderately successful in defending my freedom. Not working on weekends seemed like a graduation from the messy life of an undergrad into the more structured life of an adult.
The rest of the article talks about the various pressures leading the author away from the disciplined 5-day work week. Competition and a desire to get ahead is the obvious one. The competitive pressure is especially prescient for academic jobs, where universities are busy churning out huge numbers of grad students but the number of open academic positions can never accommodate more than a small percentage of them.
Anecdotally, I've noticed two types of weekend workers: The first type simply works all the time. Instead of going idle, they gravitate toward their task list and start working on the next thing. For whatever reason (drive, anxiety, perceived pressures, boredom) they are wired to return to work by default and the 40 hour work week doesn't contain them.
The second type of weekend worker is not actually producing or even "working" more than 40 hours per week, but they struggle to contain their work into the Monday-Friday bounds. Their weekend work isn't to get ahead or go the extra mile. They work weekends because they spent half of their weekdays doing fun things (meeting up with friends, exploring hobbies, exercising, messing around online) and the only way to accomplish their work is to repeat this half-focused schedule 7 days per week.
Much like the author, they could contain their work neatly within a M-F, 9-5 schedule if they made an effort, but at every juncture they choose to follow spontaneous whims or to relax or procrastinate instead. Some of them may even like the eclectic and flexible work schedule that allows them to do the things they want when they want and to get their work done in the boring gaps in between.
There's also a 3rd type of person who doesn't really work much on weekends, but will wait until Saturday or Sunday to send out important e-mails and type up a storm in Slack so that it looks like they're working hard on the weekend. Frankly, this is the type I see most frequently at tech companies in the past few years: Try to engage with their messages on a Saturday and you won't get a response until Monday, but they'll go to great lengths to look like they were working hard all weekend or tell you that they worked all weekend on something.
[+] [-] andreyk|3 years ago|reply
I can also tell you from experience, although this is not regularly the case, when it comes time to try to submit a paper to a conference it's definitely possible that there is so much work that there is no way to contain the work to M-F. Which is of course how people get burned out, depressed, etc. And it's all too common in academia, with grads students having to balance teaching, research, classes, and more.
[+] [-] thomasahle|3 years ago|reply
If we can collectively decide (and enforce) not working weekends, we all benefit.
[+] [-] temporallobe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boulos|3 years ago|reply
The article seems to focus on working too much due to fear of competition. I would add that working in a fast-paced field (the author is doing ML at the Vector Institute) can feel like you're always in competition, but that it's important to remind yourself that you can choose your topic of research (if you have some horrible advisor that dictates what you do, I'm sorry, but recommend you find someone / someplace else). Even within ML, there are tons of pockets that nobody is really working on. That does make it harder to publish though, as your work will be "weird" or "not very hot".
tl;dr: people should choose topics and fields that fit their desired work profile. If you decide to compete in a heavily competitive subject, expect a competitive environment.
[+] [-] rapjr9|3 years ago|reply
* Paper deadlines. If everyone planned well there would be no need to work on weekends, but nobody plans well, so a lot of the work is done last minute. Also research is international and as a result many conference paper deadlines are set randomly so as not to always be convenient for USA and inconvenient for everyone else. Hence some deadlines are on weekends. Again, if the work was well planned there would be no need even then to work on a weekend, you could submit the paper before the weekend, but no one plans well.
* Students time schedule. Students have classes. They sleep late and work nights. They go to parties and drink. They have exams and assignments that take all their attention during the week and then they get back to the research on weekends. If you are collaborating you often have to be connected in real time, even if it is remote work. This means working nights, weekends, really any time of the day. It can be like being on call.
* Profs and advisors try to get you to cram as much as possible into the paper to make it better. This means working up to the absolute last minute continuing to make minor revisions. I've seen changes made to papers in the last seconds before a deadline, and changes continue to be made for the hours grace period some conferences offer after the deadline. As long as the paper submission portal is open changes continue to be made. It's a stupid way to work, but it is common.
That said, since I was an employee I had more freedom to restrict my hours. Grad students on the other hand are slaves and are expected to work 80+ hour weeks. They are essentially almost always working. So they will try to access other people any time they encounter an issue. It's difficult to not interface with them during "off" hours because you know it might mean they can't get anything done until they talk with you, which can mean wasting days of time for them. They'll mention this at meetings, which makes it look like YOU are blocking the project. And you are, but for reasonable reasons. But that doesn't look reasonable to the student. And profs used to be students and in many cases that's basically the only life they know so they tend to sympathize with the students and not with you.
Some things that would help:
Plan for papers, posters, meetings so it's not all last minute. The conferences happen around the same time every year. It's not like it's a big surprise when the date is set.
Get grad students to form unions so they are not so overworked.
Set rules on what profs can task grad students with. Getting coffee, creating lessons for the profs classes, getting the profs laundry, being volunteered for work, being assigned more than 40hrs work/week, should not be on the list. This is a large part of why grad students are overworked.
Require management courses for profs so they learn that people are not machines. There is a reason we have a 40hr work week, and while going beyond 40hrs is _sometimes_ required, working longer hours continuously just damages productivity and is actually making the work go slower and burning people out.
[+] [-] tiahura|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] throwaway98797|3 years ago|reply
either path can lead to good life and success
u r who u r, accept it
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|3 years ago|reply