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Too Few American Scientists? Maybe Not
An anonymous reader writes "We've been hearing about bad K-12 science education, too few American science and engineering students, and the real-soon-now employment nirvana in technical fields for, like, the last 20 years. The reality: rising undergrad enrollments and unemployment rates, long years as an underpaid postdoc for those who finish a Ph.D. The Chronicle of Higher Education article quotes Harvard economist Richard Freeman: 'They're not studying science,' he says, 'because they look and say, "Do I want to be a postdoc paid $35,000 or $40,000 at age 35, with extreme uncertainty working in somebody else's lab, and maybe getting credit for my work and maybe not getting full credit? Or would I rather be an M.B.A. and making $150,000 and hiring Ph.D.'s?"'"
I think this is the primary effect of copyright and patent law. It becomes more important to be the person who controls the output of scientists than it is to be a scientist yourself.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Possessing a Masters in Business Administration is not the end all be all of the world. There are a lot of people who have this degree - but could not manage their way out of a wet paper bag. What business truely wants, and needs are managers who are creative, intelligent, resourceful, unorthodox - not just people who have the book learning.
Yeah, you can make a lot of money having this degree - but unless your passion is management, it's a waste of time - and talent.
I know that the bleak employment opportunities for a Computer Science Ph.D. in a 50th ranked school were the main reason I left my program and finished with a Masters instead. Now I'm employed doing the same work I did while interning as an undergraduate 4 years ago. If I'm not able to move my way up through the ranks and get to some real development, going back for an MBA is a real possibility.
I get over 300,000 per year as ENGINEER (mass market utility software, (systems level engineer) but in spurts rather than steady income.
Steady income seems to be about 125,000 as a non contractor.
scientists have more fun at work, but make less money
capitalism is supply and demand
not all actresses make 10 million per year and not all MBAs make over 80,000 per year
but MOST systems level software engineers make over 80,000 because it is a profession based on merit, not luck or who you know
We've been hearing about bad K-12 science education, too few American science and engineering students, and the real-soon-now employment nirvana in technical fields for, like, the last 20 years.
Longer than that, actually. The beginning of all of this was the launching of Sputnik in 1957. It was the prospect of losing the Space Race against the USSR prompted the infamous "New Math" of the early 60's.
Let me rephrase that question.
"Do I want to do cutting-edge research, find out about new things, finding solutions to problems, maybe getting patents, work with colleagues around the world, travel to conferences and workshops, or do I like to manage people and an organization, come up with visions, conduct hundreds of interviews with applicants, go to fancy dinners with my lab's sponsors or the company's clients?"
Having managerial and commercial jobs valorised far above scientific and technical one is part of having a "work culture" moving away from excellence at science and development... and with the brightest students going into commercial courses, the cycle feeds itself since it ensures that the people in top positions tomorrow will overwhelmingly have had a commercial and not technical education. It's pretty sad and pretty worrying.
For some it is not the money that is the draw of technological feilds. The lack of money might be troubling, but, in the end, it is the science that is important.
Do I want to be a postdoc paid $35,000 or $40,000 at age 35, with extreme uncertainty working in somebody else's lab, and maybe getting credit for my work and maybe not getting full credit?
Yes, yes I do. I'd rather live in relative poverty and be happy doing what I like than having a lot of money, but waste my life doing something I don't enjoy.
Most of the hard science majors I know didn't get there because of their K-12 education. It couldn't come really even close to covering what they needed to know to do anything with it. I can look at schools' "computer science" classes and see basically identical results. Most of the real coders in my computer science classes are the ones who didn't waste their time with "computer science" classes in K-12. I tried taking one for fun and found it to be quite possibly the most asinine class there, even more so than PE. K-12 is designed to build up the lowest common denominator to a point slightly above dark ages superstitions about the world. Overall it is an abysmal system and I see no reason anymore to fix it or fund it more. Think of education like hemp rope. Some will use it for good and useful purposes, some will hang themselves with it, but the majority will do nothing with it except maybe try to smoke it and get high off of it.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I am not a scientist (yet), I do however read the musings of a real scientist at Note Even Wrong. Scroll down to "There They Go Again..." and enjoy what he has to say about the article.
What it came down to is this... I did what made me happy. I may never make much money at all, but I love what I'm doing. I made the choice to switch over to Physics, and I have never looked back.
Mike.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
Well, part of the problem is that these PH.d's are 35, and have no actual experience. I've seen this at GE - there were guys, who shall remain nameless, who were brilliant with the formulas, et cetera, but who were comepletly devoid of common sense and unable to deal with real-world problems, due to too much time in a academic environment. I imagine it takes some time and several jobs before one could acclimate to the real world.
;)
Nothing that a few good internships couldn't solve, to keep one grounded
Time for the Ph.Ds to form their own "scientist-union" and strike until they get their fair salaries. I believe that many Ph.Ds does not demand high salaries as aggressively as MBAs - because they have a reward in working in a field of interest. However - I believe that they should be entitled to AT LEAST the same salaries as those with an MBA.
After they have formed their union they should probably lay low and save money for a few years. Big unions have huge assets and can often take out hundreds of thousands of workers to strike for very long periods (like a year), and a strike like that, among the important scientists, would surely improve their situation.
(Disclaimer: I am an European)
I don't get paid that much. Do I work in a wrong lab?
Agreed, though about being a science slave... everything you do and publish depends on the higher ups. But I hated business since there are too much politics and questionable things. I just didn't realize that such things happen too in scientific world, albeit in lesser degrees. But if I had to do it again, I'd still rather be a lowly-paid post-doc than a greedy MBA.
Mr. Cohen argues that the United States should not look at those who do return to their own countries as a loss. "If they finish their Ph.D.'s and go back to their home country, then we have a friend for life," he says. "It's a win situation." That's true even in the case of China, he says: "We certainly are in some sort of a competition with China economically. But the people we train that go back, go back with many of our values."
I think this is only half true. IMHO, I see two types of graduate students, one, like the kind he is quoting, have a genuine interest in America. They want to absorb the culture and participate in it, without really forgetting who they are. However, I have also seen a lot of another type of foriegn grad student, the kind who wants nothing to do with anyone outside their community, and may even harbor animosity towards anyone who is not like them. They seem to be there not to learn, but only to promote their own ethnocentric view that they are the superior culture, and dealing with us little American heathens is the price they must pay to prove it.
We need to find more of the first kind, and don't let the 2nd into the country. If they don't want to become part of America, why use resources on educating them?
What I want to know is:
1. Does a typical MBA really make $150K?
2. If (as seems to be the implicit assumption) the science PhD could do the MBA's jobs as well, any company hiring PhD's can gain competitive advantage (lowers wage costs) by hiring science PhD's instead of MBA's. Don't companies realize this? Or is there more to MBA's than we all assume?
Yeah, this is a rather old story.
The good old' Lee Iacoca in his great book "Iacocca" (part I), in the last chapters, complained about the lack of intertest in fields such as engineering and science in american students.
They rather take on law, economics & finance because of the easy money. As a downside, America might be falling back in technological fields, hiring foreigner scientists ! In the long term it will hurt America.
Brothers, this book was written in mid 80's (about 20 years ago!!!) I guess i was 100% right, didn't he?
Bye.
After 25 years working as an electronics engineer, the last company I worked for went into technical bankruptcy, stopped meeting payroll, and I was forced to reconsider whether I wanted to continue in this line of work. Result? I decided to take the savings, 401K, and such and put it into a more sane business.
So my wife and I expanded her business (one of those "horribly overpayed wedding photographers") and now I work full time selling portraits, photographing weddings, doing bookeeping, and such. I couldn't be happier!
The life as an engineer was (excuse me) pathetic. Why should I spend all my life chained to a desk, living in a cube farm, and putting up with the Boss from Hell who figured he owned me as so much chattel property? Life is much better now.
So tell me again why I would even talk any teenager into becoming an engineer? They would be fools to do so.
Soli Deo Gloria
There should be no reason to recruit outside the USA for PhD programs. We should be able to have a good pool of undergrads in the USA to fill almost every PhD seat.
I think the fix to the problem is not undergraduate education or high schools, but what is taught in the elementary schools. I knew two people in elementary/high school who went on to get PhD's. One was a person who was always entering science fairs and was excited and interested in discovery. The father of that guy never pushed the kid to "excel", but allowed the kid to feed his appetite of wonder. The other guy I knew as a kid did not really get excited about learning, but had a dad who pushed and pushed and pushed for his kid to be the best. I can't tell you how many times I remember his father telling him "do you want to push a broomstick the rest of your life?". Both did well in high school, both got into good colleges. The one who was liked studying and did not look at school as work enjoyed his graduate school days. The one who looked at school as another hurdle to jump did not like it, and dropped out early getting a masters (and now works as a programmer because it paid the best, even though he hates it).
I think what needs to be done is schools needs to get fun at an early age. It should not be a pressure filled johnny is better than mike type environment, because johnny did well on some test (only to have mike kick johnnys ass after school). I had only one good teacher in my first 8 years of schooling (before high school), and what made that teacher great was not that he taught better but that he made everyone excited about what they were doing and made everyone feel good about their interests. Those who were interested in fiction books were no less important as people than those who were looking at leaves under a magnifying glass. The teacher always asked with an excited face "how did you like that" and "what did you learn"; and anwsered "wow". It might sound dumb, but he was one hell of a fifth grade teacher. Much better than the guy who taught me algebra in high school who always took off 1/2 a point off a right anwser just to show me who was boss (for shit like "can't read your handwriting").
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Every job I've worked at had at least one engineer (many times a Ph.D.) who couldn't get a job in his chosen field - especially aerospace. So, he becomes a programmer. There's a reason that nobody is getting these dgrees - no jobs!
Also, why should someone with that kind of talent "waste" it in engineering when they can go to medical school and make ten times as much?
And another thing, I once was talking to some Indians about why there's so many engineers that come out of their country. Their response: "Every parent wants their child to grow up and become an engineer. If not that, then a doctor." Granted my sample size is four, but it was interesting to hear their mindset. I'm not saying that they're right or wrong, just that Engineers are held in much higher esteem there then over here.
If it's as bad as portrayed, then those (alleged) poor underpaid PhDs have only themselves to blame for buying into the MBA's game. You shouldn't accept starting at the bottom of the employment ladder after getting a PhD.
:-)
Team together with other clever technical people (you don't even need to incorporate, though it helps), and make those MBAs that were allegedly getting your services on the cheap pay through the nose. It was hard getting a PhD, now it's time to profit from it.
I speak from experience, btw, as I went straight from academia to freelance contractor on pretty high rates (easy to do if you stick inside the field where you are a top expert). I made darn sure that those MBA wallets suffered.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The people who visit here tends to have "tech" under their skin (me included). But the average person who is considering college does not necessarily enjoy our enthusiasm for open source code, LINUX, cool science news, etc. That's just life. If someone were considering computer science I would tell them, "Unless it's something you think about an awful lot during your day, forget it." That is, unless computing is in your "blood" in some shape way or form, the prospects simply are not worth it. I went to a large Midwestern state university and left the area to be on the West Coast. I kept in touch with different people from my college days (I finished in '91). Nowadays there are quite a number of "engineers" in Chicagoland that are essentially at dead ends the changing dynamics of the tech industry. Unfortunately for them, Chicago had a rather telecom presence and the downturn in that space means there are probably lots of people who won't be in tech jobs anymore. Just yesterday (and also featured on Slashdot) there was a Businessweek article about consolidation in the software space. I see it as a given and it is something I have told people for a couple of years. You see, the railways saw huge growth in the second half of the 1800's then ther was consolidation. Then the auto industry went nuts during its inception, then it too went through consolidation in the first half of the 1900's. Frankly I don't see why the software industry would be any different or immune to these business dynamics. And despite the fact that software doesn't have a material cost, commodization directly (open source) and indirectly has dramatically altered the landscape from 10+ years ago.
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Here's a good article on Newsforge that makes my case, "There may never be another software billionaire":
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/03/2
Sure I'm only talking about computer science jobs but the prospects of studying some scientific field and making a living at it are rather grim. I've met my share of electrical engineers and physicists making a living by being code grunts vs. being in employed in their field of study. Nowadays there's a "nuclear engineer" on my team but the company I am currently at in no shape, way or form deals with that space.
So yeah, if I had to start all over and had the business savvy, mindset, drive and acumen I would go do something else.
After all, how many CEOs in corporate America have engineering and/or scientific degress?
Point made.
-M
True scientists wouldn't be so obsessed with the monetary gain from their work but rather the potential benefits to mankind. The ones who choose the MBA over the PhD are, in my opinion, not scientists at all but capitalists with scientific leanings.
Just another example of "capitalism gone wild".
The funny thing about the postdoc issue is that it is very much a damned if you do-damned if you don't. In science, if you want a good job, you basically have to have done a postdoc. However, I have known people that have done a postdoc for 5-7 years and then still can't find a job because many will view them with the attitude of "why can't this person get a job after having a postdoc for 5 years".
An unfortunately reality in science, as it is in most of life, is that you have to have connections and you have to have timing on your side. When I was near the end of my postdoc (2 years), the academic job market was good that year. So was the industrial job market. However, two years after that, the academic job market actually shrank as the economy began to wilt and state funding for many schools shrank as well. Timing on my part was critical.
I feel for all those postdocs out there stuck in the rut of that position. I felt it was critical to my development as a scientist but man oh man, there is no way I would ever go back to that.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
Amplifying the problem is the US's addiction to foreign graduate students. While they may work longer and harder hours, they're also cut off from their families or any social life, so they grind away in the lab early in the morning, late at night, and on weekends and holidays while us lazy Americans are off somewhere, complaining about how hard we have to work. The difference is that hard labor /= good results, and the papers these people crank out are often full of nonsense, repeat other people's work, or are completely superfluous. I've had foreign postdocs publish work with my contribution twice now, with no credit given to my input (which lasted for 15 months in one case), either out of ignorance or theft- I'm not sure which.
But, really- if you want to drive a ten-year-old car while it's your boss and administrators that roll in the big bucks (with benefits like retirement and that sort of thing), by all means- postdoc is the way to go!
7-8% growth and Biotech companies flocking there as fast they can (patents will not stop the advance of tech) really hi-lights it, Glaxo Welcome,Pfiezer are all heading there, the question is are you ?
This article seems to argue you can judge the state of "science" by looking at solely educational levels. And this is further narrowed by considering only classical sources of education. Just as there have been efficiencies in labor, people are doing more with less classical education. Is the output of scientific discovery slowed? Or are people doing more self-learning and simply doing more with fewer credentials.
If you were, you'd know that when you come to study in the US, part of the deal involves signing a statement whereby you promise you will leave the US immediately after getting your degree.
With this in mind, can you tell me why exactly would a foreign graduate student want to "be part of America"?
And to answer your question, we come here to study because this is where we can get a good quality graduate education for free. We don't really care about Americans, or the so-called American "culture". We don't hate you, and we don't love you. We just want you to leave us alone to get our education and get the hell out of here.
how this article says anything incompatible with there being too few American scientists.
What this article says is that there are too few job opportunities for american scientists.
I think it is possible there are both too few scientists and too few job opportunities for the ones that we do have...
I don't understand what's so confusing to the poster. There are no jobs. So, the path of least resistance is to find a area with jobs. Like screwing people over as a MBA and then cashing out.
Another aspect of the "too few scientists" paradox:
I'm an oceanographer, who just had two proposals turned down in the last round at NSF. Apparently, of submitted proposals in this last round, 12% were chosen for funding. While this may mean that only truly excellent proposals get through, it also means that many truly excellent proposals don't. There are those of us out there who depend on this sort of funding to get a paycheck. At the same time that NSF can't afford to sponsor a reasonable amount of research (leaving many promising investigators out in the cold), they are pushing hard to bring more people into the field, which will only serve to make the problem worse.
signed-
a 35 year old, $40k/yr post-postdoc
(still very happy with what I do)
Coming from one of the higher ranked engineering schools in the country, I find that Ph.D and masters enrollment seems to be quite up. I know most of the people I am around are not settling for just their bachelors - everyone wants to go to graduate school. I also am spending my summer in DC working for Boeing. Almost everyone here either has a Ph.D or plans on going back to get their masters or Ph.D. Engineering docotorates do not fall in to the $35,000 range and they actually get paid quite a lot. Now I am not so sure about "science" but it seems to me that getting a Ph.D doesn't leave you anywhere near shy on money. On top of that, if you're any good at what you do, you can always get a job as a Professor at a university. At Uof Michigan the Professors get paid very well and do a lot of research. I find it hard to believe that in an age so motivated and focused on technology, that a scientist or an engineer would have trouble finding work.
I have about three people who work "below" me, and each of them have their MBA's. I opted to smoke weed on the city college lawn and never even finished my first Computer Science classes... let alone college ! My "Master of Bong Acrobatics" will take me further than their "Master of Business Administration".
Check out this www site about 1st hand knowledge about science and academia type jobs. http://scijobs.freeshell.org/
I left a comfortable job position to try for a Ph.D. at a major US institution. I was offered a full stipend, and it paid for pretty much everything except car insurance and clothing costs.
Unfortunately, when I got there, I found myself outclassed, and without help. Once my advisor came to realize I was not a specialist in the areas he thought I was, he rarely saw me, while discouraging me to look elsewhere.
Finally, my advisor dumped me two months before my contract with him was due to expire, well after the point all the other Ph.D. advisors had already chosen their underlings for the next year. I later found one of my friends in that research group was originally under my advisor as well, and had been dumped just prior to this advisor taking me in.
But it was too late for me. I lost a large amount of personal funding taking out loans to pay for the next two quarters. The politics in the Engineering department there were much worse than those I ever encountered working for the US government. Eventually I received a very good job offer from a private firm, and dropped out with the Masters degree I already had received at another school. But by that point in time, I estimated I wasted well over $10,000 in my own funds waiting for a new advisor I liked to take me in (it is worth noting he did come up with some funds for me, but I left just after this point).
The paranoid should look at two professors' testimony before the US Congress for some insight. The first is the testimony of Dr. David Goodstein about how the US Ph.D. program attempts to only breed elite members like themselves. The second is the testimony of Dr. Norman Matloff (revised since 1998) on how there really is not a Software labor shortage in the US (one section of this paper discusses why American CS students tend not to go for Ph.D. degrees).
"Last fall the president of the University of Maryland found himself doing something that none of his predecessors would have dreamed of trying. While on a trip to Taiwan, C. Dan Mote Jr. spent part of his time recruiting Taiwanese students to go to the United States for graduate school."
....which means that we'll have a shortage of techs soon unless we start growing our own.
So, we're looking overseas for students to fill our tech programs....
"Current data suggest that the new predictions may fare no better than earlier ones. In fact, contrary to prevailing wisdom, which fixes blame on poor training in science and mathematics from kindergarten through the 12th grade, record numbers of Americans are earning bachelor's degrees in science and engineering. And unemployment rates in at least some sectors of science and engineering have topped the charts."
But we're turning out "record numbers" of AMERICAN graduates in those programs.
"University presidents, government officials, and heads of industry have joined together in a chorus of concern over the state of science and engineering in the United States. The danger signs are obvious, they say. Fewer U.S. citizens are getting doctorates in those fields."
And we seem to be producing fewer PhD's in those programs.
"In fact, even as science leaders opined about the alarming NSF report from May, the agency announced last week that graduate-student enrollment in science and engineering actually reached a new peak in 2002."
But we're enrolling more post-graduate people in those programs than ever before.
"As the number of those men entering science has declined, national leaders have sought to bring more women and minorities into the enterprise."
So fewer white men are going into tech and the difference is more women and minorities?
So is this about the decline of the white male in tech fields or is it about the rise of everyone else in tech fields or is it about how the US is declining in tech fields?
"And even if the visa difficulties fade, leaders both inside and outside academe say the education system in the United States must reform itself to maintain the country's technological edge."
So, we're in decline because we're graduating more techs than ever before, but they're mostly women and minorities and lots of them go on to post-graduate work, and that is the fault of the education system?
"The board noted in particular a rising reliance on foreign-born talent, a decline in homegrown brainpower, increasing difficulty in attracting overseas scholars, and a looming shortage of scientists and engineers."
So, we are depending more upon foreign engineers and it is becoming increasing difficult to get them to come here....
"Compounding the situation, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted in 2001 that the number of jobs in science and engineering would grow at a rate three times that of all occupations, on average, producing a 47-percent increase in science-and-engineering jobs by 2010."
So we'll have lots of jobs available for people with tech degrees.
""Despite recurring concerns about potential shortages of STEM [scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematics] personnel in the U.S. work force, particularly in engineering and information technology, we did not find evidence that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon," concluded the RAND Corporation in a report this year."
So there won't be lots of jobs available for people with tech degrees.
And the rest of the article continues in the same fashion.
Is there a current shortage of techs? Is there a current surplus of techs?
Are too many of the techs foreign? Are too few foreign students entering our schools?
The only thing to be found in this article is that US-born citizens are not all working towards their PhD's and even if they did, they might not make any more money than they do right now.
but then that is what i would expect from American school children
"So tell me again why I would even talk any teenager into becoming an engineer? They would be fools to do so."
Because someone has to do it...
At the risk of sounding too damn much like a archtypical communist (which I am not)...
At the moment, there are many jobs that are not compensated for very well. Stock brokers, advertising / marketing types, lawyers, and executives make a great deal of money. Scientists, Teachers, Police, Firemen, and the like probably contribute more to civilization then the types listed above, but they certaintly dont reap much of a benefit for it.
About the only profession that makes the kind of money they ought to are Surgeons. And that is only because they have a pretty compelling way to get the compensation they deserve. "Oh, you dont want to pay me that much? Ok. Let someone else perform that arterial bypass then."
Scientists / Inventors in theory can use Patents to generate their income. But research costs money. And they end up having to sign the patents over to the company that employed them.
I think that Patents / Copyright should never pass completely beyond the control of the creator for that reason. But Patents and Copyright are broken.
However, for all my complaints, its not like I have a solution handy either.
END COMMUNICATION
Too true.
:-)
Although nobody goes into science for the money. Many of the guys I know will take what they can get just to do what they love. My dissertation supervisor invented a whole new FIELD of study (in his 3rd year of being a postdoc) and still had to wait 6 more years or so to get a permanent position. Another guy I know, who's an excellent instructor and who does good work (but who is perhaps a bit socially underdeveloped) waited...geez...like 10 years for a position in cosmology.
Personally, I'm a little sick of research, and it's become more of "job" than a "love", but... I dunno, $37K suits me just fine. I get to make my own hours, travel around the world to conferences, have challenging work to do...and sponge off the state! It's a good life!
As for Ph.D.'s "not being able to handle real world problems" --- dammit, show me a business where I can get a job simulating black holes and I'll take it, you insensitive clod! (I doubt you've got any "experience" doing that.)
(and what was that crap about patent law??)
Well, I am a 36 year old post-doc, I am making under $50/yr, but I do not work in someone else's lab. Rather, I work with a group of great people who are very motivated and good at what they do. I wake up in the morning happy to have some real problems to solve. Life is too short to make it just about $.
Well, I guess I work for an unusual company... I have a Computer Engineering degree, and am workign as a senior programmer(which I love)... My company hires college grads with Masters Degrees as Senior Analysts (which is where I am after 10 years and a BS) at 70k, and PHDs as Tech consultants (next higher position) for around 80k - 90k... All in all, a very good company to work for!
Logic is the beginning of reason, not the end of it.
If you just look at the raw money, perhaps MBA excites you more. But being scientist has its own merits, specially as you enjoy. Here are few:
1) You get to keep the money, plus the "ownership" to your work. As a MBA, I can't claim ownership of single thing that I do. It is all company property, while the papers I publish will always bear my name.
2) I don't need to carry company cell phone on my vacation or a stroll to a local park.
3) Leave, vacation are easy.
4) No need to buy newspaper, computer, books etc. No need for gym membership.
5) At most places, you get subsidisized rental.
6) Many scientists I know are friendly. So when I travel abroad, I book my tickets for weekends too. Over the weekends, I stay with friends and do sightseeing. Thus no need for extra travel cost and vacation leave.
7) In most cases, the post-doc period is for about 6 years. I finished mine by the time I was 33. Most others finish by the time they are 35. Then you get assistant professorship. The pay here is typically 60k+ going upto 100k+. It is equivalent of 150k+ when comparaed with required lifestyle.
8) As an MBA, you will still be listening others. As a professor, others listen to you.
9) Can read slashdot without getting a weird look from your boss!
The real crisis may not be one of quantity but of quality.
I believe that this is the larger issue. In my experience many university science professors have a distorted view of the world beyond their walls. As a result the material they teach and their methods do not serve their students. This problem is not one of teching theory over practice. I am a big proponent of universities teaching theory only. Rather it is beliefs such as "If you want to do anything in field X you require a Ph.D." Or like my professor insisting that I would not be able to find a job with such a low mark in his course. (I was already employed.) Too many of my professors taught in such a manner that the highest marked students were the ones who memorized the material prior to an exam, and proptly forgot everything when they put their pencils down. This practice of encourageing memorization is a dumbing down of university curriculum. It is great for pumping out "scientists." But it dosen't encourage science.
I think in America we are losing this sense of adventure. I hear more people espousing their beliefs and superstitions as if it were The Truth. They are afraid of exploration and the unknown. Modern science does not exist to confirm personal beliefs any more that the CIA exists to promote political agendas. Both are there to discover what is, in a significantly tangible way, real about the world. Reality is often hard for us to understand and accept, but we are much better off when we have some assurance that we are close to the truth. The past few hundred years have shown one of the most reliable processes to get close to the truth is the scientific method.
But we have a few religious nuts afraid of anything that will contradict their carefully crafted fiction. These people subvert the educational process and teach our kids that the scientific method is wrong. Make no mistake. If one claims evolution is wrong on the basis of scripture, if one claims that the earth is a few thousand years old on the basis of scripture, if on claims that one can go from an a priori truth, construct a data set that fit those facts, and then claim that is science, then one is so wrong as to be the greatest enemy of science, progress, and even the free market.
When one makes these fantastic claims, that everything that does not fit your reality is wrong, even if a process that has proved successful for hundreds of years says it is correct, a thing called cognitive dissidence is set up in the mind of a child. I believe this often leads to the child falling on the side of superstition, and a scientist is lost. I believe that a whole generation of American scientists have been lost to this attack on science. An attack based on the assumption that it is preferable to get an MBA and oppress a workforce for personal profit, but not ok to challenge ancient superstitions for the sole betterment of the human race.
Let me state I am not anti-religion. I am quite for it and have seen organized religion to a great many wonderful things. I am, however, against the use of religion, or anything else for that matter, solely for the purpose of personal gain, and without respect of what it does to other people. Certainly Christianity tells us not to harm others, that the truth will set us free, and in the example of Jesus, that personal sacrifice is not only expected but necessary.
God may not play dice, but I am thankful every day for the quantum wells that make my life so much more convenient than my parent's.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Not only do students have to go through all the BS during their graduate student years, but they also have to compete with foreign students here, being paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.
I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with foreign students coming here at their own expense. I sure do have a problem when it's my own money which is paying for a foreign students' education. And knowing that they've squeezed out some US student for the slot they've taken.
How in the world is the US supposed to produce the best people locally when State and Federal Governments are against it, Business won't pay for it, and Academia actively discourages it?
This is not meant as a troll. I am just absolutely disgusted by this practice.
Ah yes - those wonderful people-skills that I remember from my grad school days.
And - FYI - before you write me off as a mental defect, I was generally considered as being one of the top students in my program, which was at a top-10 university for that program.
Among the many reasons that I left with an MS was because I've never seen so many inflated egos in a confined space. I wouldn't say the majority of my fellow students were that way - but there were so many that it was virtually impossible to avoid them. At my present employer there are certainly a fair share of super-alpha-(fe)male managers, but they are few enough that you can accomplish at least a few tasks without one trying to take credit and you can go through 4/5 workdays without having to personally interact with one.
Other reasons that I left included a lack of faith in my advisor and the project I ended up on, a lack of people who were willing to act as mentors, and the general super-competitive atmosphere where the guy who discovers something first gets 100% of the credit, and the guy who makes a parallel discovery two weeks later is lucky to even get published at all - and will certainly not get a Ph.D. out of it.
I'm all for a fair day's work for a fair day's pay, but I don't work for the sake of working, and I don't believe that most normal people set a goal of spending 100 hours a week working at their careers.
If that's what you want to do, that's fine by me. And I could care less if you want to be a jerk with an inflated ego on the side. Just don't be surprised that nobody wants to be around you. And don't be surprised when taxpayers aren't willing to fund your research. It isn't like most people feel a moral obligation to fork over their hard-earned cash to people whose main goal in life seems to be to prove that they are better than everyone else.
If more people at the top in academics were willing to invest a little time in helping those beneath them understand science, and to help them climb the academic ladder, then perhaps more people would find it an attractive career option. To me, it just seems like a way to be underpaid while having to deal with crazy egomaniacs.
In my present job I don't necessarily work on cutting-edge science, but I do have a little spare time to follow what is going on in the world of science. And, unless I got tenure at a top-20 university I probably wouldn't be paid much more than I am now (not bad considering my salary is likely to continue to rise). I still get to solve interesting problems, and I have coworkers who aren't out to prove that they are better than me - we actually can go out to lunch once in a while and enjoy ourselves...
I imagine one of the possible solutions to this problem would be finding out who has been killing a number of these scientists lately. The Mystery Of The Dead Scientists: Coincidence Or Conspiracy?
Honestly, I don't think people typically become scientists because they're chasing the dollars. They chase two things: 1) knowledge, and 2) fame, as it's always been.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Or would I rather be an M.B.A. and making $150,000 and hiring Ph.D.'s?
it seems to me that if you're only concerned with how much money you're going to be making when you finish school, maybe you shouldn't be going into a technical field anyway. we need more people who love their jobs and do good work, and less people who are only interested in the size of their potential salaries. the dot-com bubble should have taught us that.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
Do we really want our scientific community to be comprised of people who are in it for the money and attention? Given the choice between the guy looking for financial success and the geek looking to keep scratchin' that curiosity itch, I'm betting all my chips on the curious geek.....every time.
WTF people?!? How'd this even get on Slashdot? With all of the elitist attitudes espoused around here, I'm surprised you'd even consider encouraging the acceptance of bourgeois pricks into a field that should be filled with guys who are doing it because they're fucking CURIOUS!
[/end rant]
Anyway. Yeah, what's up with that?
My company needs people who know how to ship packages!
Fedex Commercial
why would anyone want to be part of a nation like USA ? with all its torturers and bullshit "intelligence" with a president who celebrates his own stupidity as if its something to be proud of. if i wanted to join a corrupt society i would go to China, at least they honest in their corruption keep reaching Mr American in your arrogance because i will need my car washed at the end of the week after i have milked you for what i want
Because you know, France isn't involved in any activities that violate UN resolutions(*cough* Ivory Coast* cough), and you know, the Japanese prime minister would never, ever visit a war shrine with Class A war criminals, and you know, Germany is acting so quickly to stop the genocide in Darfur, and India doesn't have 40% of it's population in abject poverty, and the current rovers on Mars are *obviously* European....the list goes on. Spare me your "America is evil" bullshit because you know what, there isn't a fucking country out there who isn't evil by your standards. And the whole ":washing your car", well guess what, if it wasn't for America, you may be worshipping the Nazi's or the Emperor of Japan right now.
Far too many pepople rely on the educational system alone to turn their obnoxious little brats into good upstanding citizens. They don't understand that the educational system is just a tool. It generally takes a good upbringing to get kids to take advantage of it.
Once someone wants to learn and sees the value in a good education, they'll get a good education, even in the "abysmal" system we currently have.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
What's your PHD in? Basket Weaving? I don't know what planet everyone else is living on, but the PhD's I know all live and work in the US and make over $200k a year. Of course not one of them has a degree in archeology, or Marine Biology. No, they have degrees in medicine or engineering. They design new integrated circuits or read MRI scans for a living. The company I work for builds SAN/WAN networking gear. The senior programmers and engineers who design the networking protocols we use all make over $150k. You better have a PhD in Comp Sci, or 20 years of experience before even thinking about applying for those jobs, and they are always hiring. Always. If you're an entry to mid level engineer you can nab a starting job of about $45k to $50k. If you have a MBA you might make $150k a year, I wouldn't know, I don't hang out with those kinds of people. However, if you got your degree in Underwater Basket Weaving you can line up and flip burgers with the rest of the kids.
1. The cost to produce a good and the price that good is sold for are not directly related.
2. R&D, if anyone, should have high salaries. They are the primal engine of company growth. However they are not the primary cost of operating the business. Drug companies in particular have tendencies to spend more money on things like marketing than they do on the actual drug research. Meanwhile you'd have to pay researchers MUCH more to equal the cost of, say, the equipment needed to do drug research.
I am sick of seeing this "OH WE CAN'T PAY ACTUAL MONEY FOR THE EXPENSES OF OPERATING AS A BUSINESS BECAUSE THAT WILL DRIVE UP PRICES!". I rarely if ever see the people complaining about how much workers get paid, or how much has to be paid for taxes, and how this drives up prices, then turning around and complaining about the high-level executives getting paid abnormal amounts of money to do not a lot.
Think of education like hemp rope. Some will use it for good and useful purposes, some will hang themselves with it, but the majority will do nothing with it except maybe try to smoke it and get high off of it. Is that a valid reason to ban hemp? Don't the benefits outweigh the negatives? Many people can use K-12 to their own advantage, especially people who couldn't afford any other type of education.
The problem as I see it is first, that educating students in PhD programs is the sole justification for a massive portion of modern academia. Further, these graduate students usually end up grading, teaching classes, etc. They are a source of cheap labor. So the benefit to the university is obvious. What's becoming apparent is that the generic PhD program isn't actually educating students for the jobs they are likely to get.
Much of academia is actually biased against non-academia. A new PhD who goes into the private work force is often considered "lost". Universities "educate" students, but there's still a bunch of departments that fail to "train" students (ie, give them actual working experience and skills). And of course, universities engage in the dubious practice of degree worship.
Why do I think this is a scam? First, the overproduction of PhD's is rarely mentioned. Aside from the occasional frank article like this, who discusses what happens to the mass of people who attempt a PhD program? In extreme cases, you can have failure rates (ie, don't get a PhD but might get a lesser degree) in excess of 50%. A portion of these people probably intended to get a Master's degree from the begining, but the rest changed their minds for some reason.
Of those who succeed, they have to find a job. In too many fields, there's no outlet other than teaching in academia. This is where we see the folly of basing your career on educating more people so that they have the exact same career problems that you have. It becomes a pyramid scheme. You need to bring in new graduate students so that you have a job.
But if these graduate students all theoretically acquired their degree, then they too would be in the same situation you are in except there would be fewer students to spread around. The hidden necessity is that most people must fail for this to work at all. Not everyone can have tenure.
Having said that, I don't see a problem with getting a PhD, if you have a realistic idea of your odds of success and what you'll end up doing afterwards. For example, I'm going for a PhD in mathematics at UC Davis. But I have a decent idea of the private working world (having worked out there a few years) and what they'll want. So I can add some experience (programming experience mainly) in addition to my degree to make me more attractive (relatively, of course).
I think worse situation is in Europe.
According to Gazeta Wyborcza (newspaper from Poland) by the 2010 year Europe will be lack of 700 000 young scientist. Every year in EU 2,8 mln people get master's degree (USA - 2,1 mln, Japan - 1,1 mln), but many of these scientists go to America or Canada. America provides better earnings, research equipment and less bureaucratic problems. To prevent this European Commision run ERA-MORE and The Researcher's Mobility Portal which helps European scientist.
I'm an American scientist, and I've been through this battle already. For you younger folks, back in the late '80s, many organizations, particularly societies like the American Chemical Society (whose main interest is keeping Ph.D.'s plentiful so the chemical industry can pay them $40K/yr forever) testified before Congress about the upcoming "shortage" of scientists. Many grad students, including myself, were told that this shortage would translate into good jobs when we graduated with a Ph.D. It was a complete lie.
In the early '90s, testimonies and hand-wringings were still going on. Only thing is, those of us who had graduated with a Ph.D. had learned of a new problem. It was called "The Glut". Most places, especially in academia, were averaging 300-400 applications for teaching and research positions. There were postdocs out the wazoo, and most of us were in a holding pattern. I was a postdoc for 6.5 years, trying to find a place to land (I finally did; many of my colleagues stopped trying and went off to sell computers or work for biotech companies as a marketer or salesman). I remember one position that I applied for in academia didn't even respond with a letter. They had so many applications, they just sent out a postcard that began "Dear Applicant:".
The Glut is still here. Don't believe the lies about getting research positions after you graduate. You may do it, but you'll need some luck. The shortage is in graduate students. Every faculty member would like 2 or 3 (or more) graduate students to work on their projects, mostly 'cause we faculty spend all day, every day writing grant proposals to keep our soft-money-funded postions on faculty. And the NIH and NSF budgets are tapped out, meaning the only way I get my grant funded is if my colleague loses his. This breeds a situation where every April, Sept., and Dec., everyone gets nervous, waiting for those grant scores to roll in. If your score isn't good, update your CV. And there's a pretty good correlation between the number of grad students you have and the score you get: more is better.
Science can be a fun occupation. I love it. But don't be deceived into thinking your going to go from graduation to a faculty position in anything less than 6 years, or that you're going to get some cushy job teaching or in academia. Trust me.
I have a MS in geophysics and am finishing a PhD. Some of my observations:
1) Public education is very bad. I've taught intro classes, and most students can't write a paragraph, let alone an essay. They can't do simple algebra. They don't know how to study or reason.
2) We live in a society where science/engineering is tolerated but not encouraged. The amount of money earned for time spent in school is very low. There are few incentives, other than enjoyment, for higher education.
3) We live in a society that either prays on ignorance, or is distrustful and intimidated by education.
3) Most universities care as much about money as education.
4) Many of the best students start with a foreign education.
5) Some countries are creating quality higher education themselves (India for example).
6) The NSF is a shining star in an otherwise mediocre research environment.
7) If you really want pay-dirt, do research in something defense related.
8) The tenure system is a good idea.
9) Both high school and community colleges should be given enough money to attract MS and PhDs. There are enough of them.
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
Lee Iococa made sure that his corporation was set up to pay a first year dealer carlot salesman a LOT more than an engineer. And that's the lowball pay structure, it goes way up from there, and it's skewed to the non innovators side. So he wonders why there weren't as many engineers as he wanted? The second point is, professional racing pays better and is more fun for an automotive engineer than working for one of the big car companies. They have more freedom to be creative, and the rewards -in all forms, not just financial-are better.
Here's an automotive engineering example,Smokey Yunick. Worked various pro racing because he truly could be creative, and he got paid well to do it. He even proved he could almost single handedly beat detroit in making a non racing car, but a commuter car that could get fantastic mileage and not be weird, just a normal looking car that worked much better. He did it,built it, proved it worked, that it could be done, when detroit was whining to congress it wasn't possible, and that detroit was being lamer about it,liars basically. Detroit-GM IIRC, offered him literally dick for it in terms of money, a quarter million, it was a joke offer for what he had, so he went back to racing.
These big companies, with a few exceptions, don't want to pay for the class A brains, they want to pay for snakeoil salesmen, because it's a better way for them to make profits, sell the sizzle, which is cheap and easy to do, rather than building a better cow and selling a better steak. They also tend to reward the memebers of their clique, the other managers and sales people, because that's who they grew up with and hung out together with and went to college with. It's a good ole boys network. Why share the pot with people not in your clique? that's what they think anyway. They think anyone not in their cliqie is a loser, or a nerd, sonmeone to make fun of and to soak for everything they can get from them. They put themselves in the position to do that, so they do that. They also go WAY out of their way to make sure the nerds never have an effective union, they keep telling them from day one they are different from the blue collars, they are "white collar" and despite the fact they get treated like the blue collars, the nerds keep thinking they are somehow part of that management/sales clique, even though they never will be, so they get shafted. It's almost impossible for the nerds to use collective bargaining,in most cases,because of that indoctrination, and they also make sure the government-which they control because lawyers and legislators are closer to their clique than the blue collars or nerds-always passes laws that favor them, and no one else, except for the occassional non meaty bone toss.
I am speaking in very general terms now, I know there are exceptions to the rule, but in those general terms that's how I see it being run, and it's been run like that for a long time now.
BUT,
I can quote from my dad's experience. He studied science & biochemistry @ a university in Indianna just after WWII when everyone was clamoring for scientists. Being one of those over-achiever nut-job types, he also minored in business.
After graduation his major wasn't worth much, there were just too many freakn' scientists available for hire. In the end his minor in business got him a job, he went on to become the director of research at Valley National Bank.
Ultimately he used both his scientific training and his business education. He had 'just enough to get started'. More importantly, he had the courage to take a risk, and it paid off handsomely.
When in doubt, go for the major you enjoy, your career will give you all the 'on the job training' you need.
I have a solution: make it illegal for companies to own patents.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
With the goverment and business folks advocating more PhDs, this looks just like an underhanded way to flood the labor markets with more high skilled labor. With already a huge flood of unemployed hi-tech/computer folks after the dotcom fallout, adding more skilled labor and PhDs to the flood may very well put another huge wet blanket on white collar job wages.
...) the 2nd best thing business folks would desire is to turn many skills and jobs into "commodities". Eventually they want white collar wages to be driven down to the same wages or lower wages than blue collar workers. In effect turning most jobs into "commodities" where everyone gets paid almost the same low wage, was one of the desires of many Marxist/communist countries. Except in the present situation, it's done by manipulating the labor markets via the educational system, and not by legal decree.
In countries where slavery is nominally illegal (ie. America, Europe, etc
Nicely put - but you probably won't get modded up because not enough mods have the experience to detect hard-core truth when they see it.
I find that science has one factor in common with most other businesses - contacts are just about everything. Obviously you have to be able to put out or you won't get a seat at the table, but all the same I've seen plenty of very talented people go nowhere because they don't play the politics very well or at all.
I agree completely with your numbers - I've seen one or two 2-year postdocs (and those had some very special circumstances which were *all about* politics), but just about everyone else is in it for at least a solid 5-6 years, as you say.
People seem to have forgotten what the abbreviation Ph.D. stands for... Doctorate of Philosophy in an area of study. These are no longer people who are going to school to learn the existing processes of their study, but are instead contributing to the processes at hand.
You have your normal Batchelor of Science or Arts, who goes to college to learn a specific trade, to learn the base knownledge (vast though it may be for some areas) that will get them employed as a person qualified to make important decisions in their workplace. Then you have people that go back, and study even more things about their area of interest, and gain a Masters degree; they should now be considered to have full understanding of the existing processes, and may have contributed a bit to exploring a thesis at the fringes of their area. Then you have your Ph.D.s, who have Mastered their areas of study, and now spend their time finding new ways of doing things, contributing to the science of things.
Now here's where the problem is. In the education systems, you can jump from one to another to another without actually spending time putting your knowledge to practical use, and you end up with people who are very book-wise but have no idea how to actually produce. So, off the bat, many Ph.D.s in science have no marketability, even if they were unionized...
Let's look at Slashdot, where their idea of science is Computer Science. What does a Ph.D. in computer science do? they develop new algorithms, new optimizations. But what does industry need? interoperability, tested equations, deliverables. Yes, creating a new audio compression layers like MP3 is a great thing, but it is now 10 years since it first appeared on the outskirts of colleges... companies complain about the 7 years it takes to bring new drugs to market... Now, they may have odd ways of thinking that may give a company an edge, but then that's the skillset of the individual, not of PhDs in general.
Unions are definitely not the solution to things, and its a mind-set that many people need to get out of. What a union would do is stifle the desirability of companies to consider hiring Ph.Ds. Why bother, when you can find gifted graduates, and hire them at normal salaries, then give individual bonuses based on performance. New "discoveries" would no longer be done at colleges, but instead in the industry realm, where the new processes can make money (and unfortunately are not as open to society). This is the market solution to the situation, if a Ph.D. actually has something to offer to the company, then they will be paid what the value of their work is worth. What we need to do is stop flooding the companies with Ph.D.s who don't actually know anything about practical work. If there is a drive for such philosophical learnings, then it is best served with grants from the government and let them stay at college where they can contribute to the nation's body of knowledge. Let the companies pay what they are able to and willing to pay, for if the individual is worth it, then they will earn it.
Sounds like you had more of problem with your particular circumstance than your industry.
Yes, I'd recommend a teenager into training to be engineer: Choosing the employer/boss is up to him/her.
I'm getting a masters in Robotics right now from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon.
I don't want a PhD because I fear becoming too specialized, rather than learning something that will actually be able to solve an immediate need through job experience.
For a PhD candidate, while the advisor certainly has a large say, he student has control to choose a topic (and advisor) that has some relation to the practical world of business.
Why become a postdoc at a university if you can do serious research at a biotech company or apply new algorithms at a tech firm?
Hell, even my brother, who is getting a PhD in physics, can get a job in Wall St. any time he wants. (and you thought there was no way to apply the Levenberg-Marquardt Method to the real world!)
Maybe I'm biased because most of the PhDs I know are in computer science related fields. I have heard being a Bio of Chem postdoc sucks ass.
Either way, I'm not worried about American Education in the world of free trade and immigration. People should compete, and if parents aren't teaching their kids proper values, it is their fault. Vouchers would heal shitty schools.
Also note that the acceptance rate for PhD programs is continuously falling. This implies to me that there are more than enough people to fill the positions
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
Most of the hard science majors I know didn't get there because of their K-12 education.
I wholeheartedly agree. I remember as a child *hating* science classes. Up until 14 I wanted to be a musician, after that a writer.
I went to college to be a science teacher, and was appalled. They concentrate more on the teaching than the science (now, i am not saying that being able to effectively communicate an idea is wrong to learn) but these idiots were getting D's in their science classes. Maybe the problem that no one goes into science is because of this phenomena.
Happily to say, I am pursuing a Ph.D in the sciences. It has nothing to do with my experience as a child. It has everything to do with the women who taught me calculus. She was a real encouragement to me going on to grad school.
And for all those people who say that women don't go into sciences: you should check out the men:women ration at schools of public health. All of the ones in the US have more women.
Well, according to NSF statistics, US science and engineering is pretty clearly heading for an extinction-level event!
Here are total doctoral degrees by US citizens (or permanent residents) for the years 1995 and 2002.
The physics and math communities, in particular, need to recognize that companies hiring few American engineers will be hiring no physicists or mathematicians. Conversely, the engineering communities need to recognize that in the long run, US companies need several PhD-level engineers to justify employing even one physicist or mathematician.
The present system is like an ecosystem with plenty of sea otters (the physicists and mathematicians), but far too few abalone (the engineers). All very beautiful, no doubt, except the young sea otters starve to death. Meanwhile, the senior sea otters -- who are in secure possession of resources protected by tenure -- are slow to recognize that an extinction-level event is underway.
Thus, unless dramatic breakthroughs occur, the numbers seem to indicate that a US techno-Ellie is irreversible and inevitable.
but I think I know better what *I* would do. I know perfectly well what my rights are, and believe me, I'm aware that an education in the US is not one of them. Chinese students can protest all they want, the fact remains that if your government wouldn't offer a free education to foreigners, they wouldn't come. What do you think the Chinese students would do if you made them pay $30,000 a year for their grad studies? Vote for someone else? Ha.
So really, stop blaming others for what is essentially your problem. It's your politicians who made the decision to sponsor foreign students, and it's you Americans who made the decision to vote for them. Just vote for say, Pat Buchanan, and smelly foreigners who can't speak English will no longer be a problem. It's that simple.
As someone who holds both a bachelors and masters in computer science from the school of engineering from U.C. Berkeley, one huge problem is too many "para-engineers."
If only licensed engineers were allowed to be employed as engineers then this problem would not exist. The problem is there are too many high-school graduates, history majors, and every other discpline imaginable practicing being software engineers. And this causes untold problems with software because of the lack of formal training.
Yeah, maybe we have too many lawyers, but you know they are all licensed to practice law. A para-legal cannot be hired as a lawyer. A nurse cannot be hired as a doctored.
The problem in computer science is too many hacks are being paid and labeled as engineers when they are not. And yeah, there are lots of good programmers without degrees, but guess what, there could be lots of good lawyers and doctors without degrees too if we didn't insist on licensing them. But as a culture we realize the benefits and trade offs of licensing these professions and the same logic needs to be applied to engineering.
If we don't do this then an engineering degree isn't worth the paper its printed on. Today thousands and thousands of people filling jobs labeled as *engineers* have no formal education or have a degree in a different field.
Either an engineering degree matters or it doesn't.
BZZZT wrong again , its us currency and this year I expect 320,000 US but i did not want to boast.
How many top 10 unit selling software programs have you written or contributed on?
i have done several, some entirely by myself.
these things generate many millions per year for the companies that sell them, surely 10% for the programmer is not too unreasonable for you to comprehend
why the fuck do i care if you doubt me or not?
its all true, and its been that way for many many years
That's not a problem for the really passionate. I realized rather early that I had to choose between science and a family, and I chose science. Let someone else perpetuate the species, I have more important stuff to do.
Considering the low pay of PhD's, maybe there's actually an oversupply. We are importing an awful lot of PhD's. To me it doesn't matter where the PhD's come from as long as they come here but others are more nativist.
Possessing a doctorate degree in science is not the end all be all of the world. There are a lot of people who have this degree - but could not research their way out of a wet paper bag. What business truly wants, and needs, is scientists who are creative, intelligent, resourceful, unorthodox - not just people who have the book learning.
Yeah, you can make a lot of money having this degree - but unless science is your passion, it's a waste of time - and talent.
20 Years Of School Bashing
By Gerald W. Bracey
Friday, April 25, 2003; Page A23
In the spring of 1983 the National Commission on Excellence in Education produced a report titled "A Nation at Risk" deploring the state of American education. Although there was argument among President Ronald Reagan's advisers as to whether the report should even be accepted (the arguments centering mostly on whether it would be of political benefit), it was, on April 26.
The 36-page report soon became known as the "paper Sputnik," recalling the 1957 launch by the Soviets of the first man-made satellite. That small globe riveted attention on American schools, which took the blame for letting the Russians get into space first (an absurd charge). "Risk" also captured the nation's attention. And it restored to popularity the sport of pummeling the public schools.
The problem with the report, though, was that it was all wrong -- then and now. Written in stentorian Cold War rhetoric, it declared that "our nation is at risk . . . [from] a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. . . . If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Whew.
The report followed these rhetorical flourishes with a list of indicators that illustrated the risk. A larger treasury of selected, spun and distorted statistics is hard to imagine. For instance, the booklet declared, "There was a steady decline in science achievement scores of U.S. 17-year-olds as measured by national assessments of science in 1969, 1973, and 1977."
True? Maybe, maybe not. The numbers for 1969 and 1973 didn't really exist. They were extrapolations from the 1977 assessment. Their accuracy was not verifiable. But even if the trend was true for 17-year-olds, it was not true for 13-year-olds or 9-year-olds, the other two ages assessed. Nor was it true for any of the three ages tested in reading or math. Those scores were stable or inching up. The commissioners thus had nine trend lines to look at (three ages by three subjects), only one of which could be used to support crisis rhetoric, and that was the only one they used.
Similarly, "A Nation at Risk" reported: "The College Board's Scholastic Aptitude Tests demonstrated a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980." This was true. But the College Board's own panel assembled to analyze the decline did not see it as a failure of schools. The fall occurred because of changes in who was taking the SAT and therefore aspiring to go to colleges that required it: more blacks, more women, more students from low-income families, more students with average high school records. All of these changes are associated with lower test scores.
And what, exactly, were we at risk of? According to the report, the danger now was not that the Red Menace might blow us off the globe but that our friends, especially Germany, Japan and Korea, whose students had high test scores, would outsmart us and end our dominance of the world economy: "If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system."
One must admire the sheer audacity of the commissioners for writing such hokum. But this snake oil served school critics well when they blamed our "lousy" schools for the recession of the 1980s. The economy came roaring back, of course, while those of high-scoring "Asian Tiger" nations faltered. Japan's students continue to ace tests, but the country has languished in recession for 12 years. By contrast, the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report 2002 ranked average-scoring America No. 2 overall (behind Finland) and No. 1 in innovative competitiveness.
Blaming public schools for social ills has a long and dishonorable history, of which the 1983 report is only one particularly egregious example. Yet in the international r
My life as an engineer is fantastic. I love staying indoors at a desk and exercising my mind. I don't have to suck up to my boss because my industry is a meritocracy. I enjoy the freedom that comes from being able to switch jobs anytime because good people are always in demand. Life couldn't be better.
I am happy that you have finally found your calling in life. But, don't put down my industry. Leave those teenagers alone; let them find their own way. They just might enjoy engineering. I know I do.
I rather take the MBA and be happy making $150,000 a year than slave away in somebody elses lab or teach disinterested undergrads who take your class only because they are forced to.
I am a fourth year graduate student getting my PhD in Cell Biology at a top univeristy in the US and the situation is not as bleak as people make it out to be. Granted, there are way too many post-docs for the amount of tenure-track faculty positions that become available every year, but most of the folks I have worked with have landed decent jobs at good schools(stanford, georgetown, UT austin). In our program there are NO foreign graduate students, but there are a fair amount of foreign post-docs. It is always going to be that way as long as the US continues to be the world leader in funding. I believe that the solution to our problem is to grant fewer to PhDs-thats right. Restrict the number of people getting their doctorate and eliminate the glut of people stuck doing multiple post-docs just to land a position at nowhereville state university. The pool of talented scientists is always going to remain constant-you cannot train someone to have scientific insight. If people really love the science they do they will stay the course-unfortunately this course now involves doing almost 10 years of post-graduate work before you can even apply for a faculty position.
Go fuck yourself
bitch
When I graduated with a BS in Physics, my intention was to go on for my PhD. I started working in a climate research lab while pursuing graduate work part-time. But as I watched the PIs (principal investigators) who ran the lab, I started to realize I didn't want their life. They spent huge chunks of their time basically doing NSF (National Science Foundation) paperwork associated with getting grants, justifying the grants they currently had, and so on - much more time than seemed reasonable. In addition, the younger PI was bringing in million-dollar grants every year, but the university establishment didn't want to give him tenure! He eventually left for Germany where a university spent huge sums of money creating a lab just for him.
On top of all this, I saw numerous recent PhDs coming into our lab, applying for grunt-work jobs that were intended for undergraduate students.
Eventually the elder PI retired, and the lab closed. I became a Web-head, and haven't looked back. But I doubt that I'm unique - I suspect my experience is pretty typical inside the US scientific establishment.
#DeleteChrome
I think this is the primary effect of copyright and patent law. It becomes more important to be the person who controls the output of scientists than it is to be a scientist yourself.
People who specialize in making money are called "businessmen" [or "entrepreneurs," or "the self-employed"]. Their careers require freedom from intervention, and a system of property rights which protects the fruits of their labor.
Oddly enough, the vast, overwhelming majority of almost every population of people to be found in any locale on the face of the earth, at almost any point in human history, want nothing whatsoever to do with freedom. Rather, they choose, of their own free will, to live in a state of slavery, i.e. they choose to be employees, rather than entrepreneurs ["employment" being a polite euphemism for slavery]. As long as Massuh keeps the checks coming every two weeks, they're happy.
Entrepreneurism is terrifying - an entrepreneur never knows where his next meal ticket is coming from, and he lies awake at night worrying about little more than revenue streams [or waking up in a cold sweat when he's had another nightmare about them]. And biweekly paychecks? One of the entrepreneur's greatest worries is not that he won't get a check, but that the checks people write to him will fail to clear the bank.
The left, which would encompass pretty much 100% of all university professors, and a substantial number of those who claim to worship at the altar of the pagan religion known as "science," is terrified of the very idea of freedom - they want nothing to do with it.
But you've got a choice - if you don't like the intellectual property agreement that your employer is trying to shove down your throat, then don't sign it. Take your ideas and set out on your own. Start your own company. Own your own ideas. Tell "the man" to go screw himself.
Of course, the vast majority of people reading this missive won't have the balls to take me up on my challenge. I know who you are - you're the wage slaves who just want Massuh to keep your belly full. Well screw you - move to North Korea and let Kim Jong Il be your fearless leader.
Listen folks, despite what the left would have you believe, you've still got freedom of the will. Exercise it.
More pictures like this please!
Think of education like hemp rope. Some will use it for good and useful purposes, some will hang themselves with it, but the majority will do nothing with it except maybe try to smoke it and get high off of it.
Now, to be fair, some of us put our high school years to good use AND got high!
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
...quotes Harvard economist Richard Freeman: ..."Do I want to be a postdoc paid $35,000 or $40,000 at age 35, ....Or would I rather be an M.B.A. and making $150,000 and hiring Ph.D.'s?"
If everyone took this attitude, where will these newly minted $150K MBA get Ph.D.s to hire?
This is the same narrow thinking that jumps from country to country for the bottom-dollar wage slave not realizing that eventualy someone has to make a decent salary so that they can buy the widget or service that the cheap labor is creating.
I guess that all these rich MBAs think that Ph.D.s will just 'magic" themselves into existence.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Mod parent up. Scientists also like cry to Congress about shortages so they can get increased funding for training grants. More training grants means more money for grad students/post-doctoral fellows. Grad students and post-docs make great slaves for the people who already have secure jobs.
I don't have to suck up to my boss because my industry is a meritocracy
Is that red lipstick you're wearing or is that the LSD-laced Kool-Aid on your lips.
Every company is a "meritocracy" just like every company only hires the "best and brightest". It's in the yearly pep rally.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Even though admittedly grad school was kind of a pain in the ass, the idea of submitting to the pain in the ass for years with nothing but bleak employment prospects at the end of all the trouble was not acceptable. Sometimes the practical 'do I want my life to suck forever? no.' part of your brain overrides the part that likes studying Topology until your brain is full.
The local garbageman with 2 years experience is making $90,000 bucks. Or the local cop making over $94,000 with 3 years experience and 6 months of training.
The doctors and nurses are the only people who need to know what drugs are available. It's their job.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
I debated on whether I should study biology or physics in school but after doing a little research I realized that the salaries they offer are piss poor and the competition is extreme (braniacs galore). I decided to make money instead. I ended up as a drug rep. for Bristol-Myers Squibb. Basically, I spend the day visiting doctor offices and telling them about some of the drugs we sell. I get to learn a little bit about medicine and biology and spend most of my day socializing. The best part is that I started at $50K/year and a couple of years later I now make a base salary of $100K with bonus for extra sales. Last year I made $180K.
The funny thing is that a friend of mine decided to stick with the med school thing. She is now a doctor and has about $120K in debt while I am debt free and making $180K. And, that is after 8 years of hard work in medical school. Fuck that shit!
My other friend stayed in chemistry and is still a postdoc making about $20K/year at 35 years old. Man, is he a loser or what.
Meanwhile, I have $300K in my retirement account, a big house with a pool, an H2, and all the pussy I care to lick.
Yeah, science can give me a rim job. (Still, I enjoy prowling slashot on my copious spare time).
R & D goes where manufacturing goes. Its a long article but worth reading. Relevant to the topic.
Also, read the article today itself.. tomorrow(sunday) it'll be moved to the archive section.
Hey, I can pay you $5K/year to work on my yard. Maybe that will help you make ends meet.
Yeah, I decided to become a drug rep. I make $200K and I don't know science.
On the plus side, I get to read physics books besides the pool on my beach house, and I get all the pussy I want.
I simply HAD to become an engineer, not much choice in the matter. I was fiddling with things before I could read, and didn't stop after I learned.
One year at the ISSCC I attended and evening session about the Future of Engineers, and left partway through the Q&A. Leaving, I bumped into Dick Foss, and we spoke about the session. My question - how many of the engineers got there from the hobby, and how many for the money. (This was in the dot-com days.) His take - as an employer he looked for applicante who had an outside interest in electronics that led them into the field.
Isn't that best for any field, to do you calling?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
John Taylor Gatto's book The Underground History of American Education explains a lot of the problems with the American educational system.
Let me give you another example. I interviewed for a job as a computer scientist to work on advanced cluster architectures. In Nice, probably the most expensive city in France. The salary for 10 years experience in that field was a ridiculous 17000 Euros, with still taxes to pay off that. I was making 3 times that in the US last year. For this once I told them to shove it, but do I really have a choice ? You do make more waiting tables.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I think what we're really lacking is extremely talented scientists. It is the same issue within the computer field. 5 or so years ago you had a huge influx of people who saw the get rich quick marketing of certification and training houses. Just because you have the education or certification doesn't mean you are worth two cents. The bulk of the work is done by people who don't make the high end of the scale. Your job and your personal output has to be worth your salary. The flood of medioce talent is now realizing they aren't going to make the big bucks they were promised. Eventually MBA's will have the same problem too, if everybody goes in that situation.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Preach it brother,
after 10 years as a E.E (with a masters, mind you), I've come to the same conclusion, as have my fiance - a Sivil engineer.
No way in 7 hells I'll EVER encourage my children into engineering of any sort...
Science can be profitable but it takes time, foresight (luck), and perservereance. Just like a career in publishing or starting your own buisness. Just because you have a PhD and a good idea, doesn't mean you'll be making bank; or you may not be making bank immediately, but everything you do adds up.
A post-doc doing research as a 9-5 job can make 40 grand a year. But in time, with more effort, and a little luck: articles, lectures, appointments in academia, grant funding, patents, consultancy, and faculty posistions can make a sizable income. I should also add that there is some social respect for having a PhD that can often get you breaks in terms of loans and housing.
That said, lets contrast this with a public k-12 teacher with a masters degree in the state of Washington. You walk out of college. As a student teacher, credit is earned, but it is unpaid and you can't hold down a paying job while doing it. At the end of the tenure you are welcomed to a job with okay benefits but a salary of 23-26k a year. At the end of 10 years, you are getting close to the 40k a post-doc makes. By the end of tenure, assuming you are able to make it, it'll be 55-60k a year, with a decent retirement check.
Why the slow pay gradient? Because ther is almost no risk involved.
The post-doc is a closer parallel to writing, though, a little less dramatic. You get a masters in fine arts: writing. You graduate. Nothing is handed to you until you have a finished product. Then, after an unspecified amount of time and a lot of criticism, someone might offer to publish your work. You take the offer, but most of the money you expect to recieve is royalties, and as a first-time writer, the buzz may but most likely won't be there. The object of the game is to write, promote, write, promote, and then, hopefully, a breakthrough occurs which will get your catalog reprinted. This can take decades, if it happens at all. You are probably all familiar with Philip K Dick. Well, during his life, he made very little money, but NOW the copywrites are paying off to his estate.
Maybe I'm just extremely well adjusted and willing to work for what I want because I believe in it, not just because of the economic gain to be had. Or maybe I'm a fool. Either way, if you love what you are doing, there are ways to make anything pay (except k-12 teaching) but there are always risks. I've met rich tatoo artists and guys who are well off selling custom hubcaps. They didn't start out with a huge income or respect. They took an idea and did everything they could to promote themselves and promote their interests. A lot of scientists don't have this kind of chutzpah or initiative. Carl Sagan did, and he got funding for SETI, of all things. I don't think he ever complained about money.
There should be an inventors tax on all patents such that the original inventors get 10% of the patent evertime it's sold.
No doubt this would be gamed, but opening up an avenue and a reason for original inventors to do lawsuits would restrain the gaming somewhat.
Check out Philip Greenspun's Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists. It is very insightful. In particular check out the graph that shows the relationship between your salary and education level. The pictures in the Achievement Gallery are just priceless.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
For example, I am currently a physics graduate student. I get paid a little less than $20K a year, but have no fees.
My brother is going to law school. He gets paid nothing and will have around $150K in loans to pay off when he's done.
The balance is that he'll get paid more after he gets out, right? What happens if he can't find a good job? Not all lawyers (or MBAs for that matter) make a lot of money. What happens if he can't find any job? Unemployment among physics PhDs is always very low, almost never higher than 4%. Can MBAs or lawyers say the same?
The numbers of $40K a year for a post-doc may be right for biologists and organic chemists, but many of those guys are being replaced by robots and combinatorial chemistry. That's led to some poor job markets for them. Here are some actual numbers (as opposed to vague generalizations). While you don't make six figures as a physicist, you're doing pretty well.
When it comes down to it, science is changing now in the same way everything else is. Computers are cheap, easy to use and more powerfull, allowing students to be replaced by a few good Labview programs. The revolution in nanoscale characterization allowed by AFM and STM has lead to new, better ways of doing chemistry and biology. Should science NOT use these tools because it means some people are now obsolete?
The article is right on when it takes Universities to task for not teaching the skills which will be needed. Grad student labor is cheap, and some of this equipment is expensive. It's not even that more money is needed. It just needs to be spent smarter. Buying used equipment, testing prototype technology and forming collaborations with other groups to pool resources are ways of providing your research group with cutting edge tools (all of which are used in the lab I work in). Of course, there's nothing wrong with building your own equipment either (what I am spending a Saturday doing, after posting here, of course). In any case, it's dishonest for a University to hand out PhDs to people who are not able to get jobs for lack of training.
At the risk of sounding too damn much like a archtypical communist (which I am not)...
That's what all you commie-pinkos say, you communist!
Unfortunately, this USED to be true. Now even most doctors are having a harder time making ends meet. Increasing pressure and restrictions put in place by the insurance industry have forced many private practice doctors (surgeons being some of the hardest hit) to fold their practices and join hospitals where they are paid less to do two or three times the number of surgeries they used to. Now just because your average heart surgeon is making 60% of what he was 10 years ago, doesn't put him in the poor house. But regardless of your income level, taking a 40% hit is noticeable no matter where you are. The problem in medicine is with the MBA's running the insurance companies. Medicine isn't about patients or care anymore. It's run by giant corporations concerned with nothing but the bottom line.
"I think that Patents / Copyright should never pass completely beyond the control of the creator for that reason. "
They are, when said creator has invested his own time and money into the development of the invention. If he's using someone else's money to live on, he owes that someone the patent/copyright.
I should have followed the money. I finished my BS in Music Education and found out that nothing really interests me that much.
I should have went for the money and then enjoyed whatever time off from my job as much as possible.
Now I am in a situation where my only option is a job I don't like, that pays almost poverty levels, and makes enormous time demands.
Life sucks... then you die.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I tried that - Wedding photography. It's a very competing business, where a weekend work probably only net you $600.
The phrase I think your are looking for is cognitive dissonance
I find that the article was rather rambling.
Certainly I see more foreign grad students(Asian usually) that I do undergrads.
I am concerned: what will happen when these graduate students really hit their professional stride in 10 or so years down the line; when they are experienced and have done something beyond their theses ?
Is US having a problem?
Yes: there is a disconnect between the scientist and the rest of the world. The geeks pride themselves on being non-users, and the users think geeks are peculiar people who play D&D, etc.
The engineer is a boring old person, terrifically pedantic, etc, etc, etc.
So hard science attracts a segment of the population, and the rest of the population goes off and becomes teachers, english majors, etc.
Let me ask a question: Why should I go into physics/chemistry/biology? I have to buy $BIGNUM amount of equipment and learn hideous amounts of difficult math to even get a handle on the state of the subject and do somthing with it.
That's why I like computers. I actually have a chance of doing something never done before with only my mind and some studying. With most other disciplines I have to have a Ph.D.
Now think about popular perceptions.
What do people want? Well, what is advertised on TV? (If companies can afford to have high-end ads, they sell something people want)
They want cars, sex, beer, toys, fast food, and music.
In other words, basically material goods.
(Side note)
Check out wallpaper sites with hit counts attached to wallpapers- the high hit count is the bikini girl.
And naturally, the US K12 education system is cruddy. Thats well-known enough.
/b
|f(x)dx = F(b) - F(a)
Yet another thing that the entrepreneur must fear: Someone who builds a better mousetrap and sells it at an even more aggressive price.
There's always gonna be something to worry about when you're free: There will always be someone who's smarter, stronger, faster, prettier, or better-financed than you.
People who love freedom shrug these things off, and figure out a way to adapt. People who hate freedom get down on their hands and knees and beg Massuh not to take away their hot grits and chitluns.
This is one of the reasons I'm going into the field of finance instead of teaching.
.... won't."
When I started grad school (I'm a second year student in math), they told me, "When you're done you will almost certainly have to teach. Really good students will be able to land a post-doc right when they get out. You
Then, after slaving away at a three-year post-doc (or, more ilkely, multiple one-year post-docs), I could maybe get a teaching job. That's a big maybe, too. People fight tooth and nail for teaching jobs.
Even if I could get a job, the pay is relatively low. Don't get me wrong, even bad teachers at mediocre colleges make enough money to get by, but the pay that you're getting for having a Ph. D in Math is lower than you would think is fair for the amount of effort you put into the degree.
So, I've decided to get a job in finance. There's cooler jobs than you think. For example, my bachelor's degree was in math and computer science. Well, there're these jobs called 'quantitative developers' that combine your (very high level) understanding of math with C++ or JAVA development skills. You get to do math and code, and all for pay that is (on average) much higher than what people got at the height of the tech boom in the late '90s. It's not just the money, either. You wouldn't believe how much great theoretical math there is finance. Most academics will tell you that they're in it for the science, and that's why they can put up with lower pay. I say, why bother if you can do the science in the private sector? It's not quite as nice an environment as academia, but it sure pays well enough to help blur the distinction.
With the scarcity of academic positions, people from lots of different fields, such as math, physics, and engineering are heading to the finance sector. Hopefully, I'll be at the front of the pack.
... turning to the 3-D map, we see an unmistakable con
Check at any university- the number of applicants for each position is huge. In many cases, what they look for are people that can bring in the grant money, rather than teach. Our schools are becoming state- and federally-subsidized research facilities, despite their inability to produce tangible products. This isn't to say that inventions don't come from school, but I'd sure like to know which gives us the bigger bang for the buck- industry or academia (dollar for dollar).
Now schools have decided the big way to go is with patents- come up with some idea, patent it, and hope the bucks roll in. Few patents (something like 5%) produce any money, but there's always hope, right?
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the schools continue to decay as emphasis is placed on research over education- faculty that have nothing to do with teaching, just research. It's great that non-profit research can go on, but it's more successful outside of the academic framework (such as Southwest Research Institute, that sort of thing). Schools are for teaching! What happens is that the old profs are forced out to make room for the new guys that can churn out grant applications. Not always a bad thing, but sometimes it is. Older profs have experience that the new guys (who don't necessarily know anything) won't have for 15 years- by which point in time THEY get pushed out, too.
Small story to tell: Old friend from college, one of the brightest people I've ever known. Soared through her MS degree, went off to a big state school, got her PhD, and landed a position teaching at a small college in the northeast. She quit a year or so later- departmental BS she couldn't put up with. So now, with a PhD in the hard sciences, she works as a caterer. I think she enjoys it more, but I can't help but feel that those seven years of postgraduate research- not to mention the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars the state and feds subsidized her education- could have been put to better use.
I love how the article says 6.3% unemployment in the computer sector is a huge problem....no 6.3% isn't a problem 20% is a problem....I also like how 3-4% unemployment in chemistry is a problem. WTF that is lower then the national average of all unemeployment.
This article is so biased and pointless that it should be ignored...nothing to see here folks but a bunch of buerocrats trying to get funding for their division....if there is no problem then they can't high more people and become lords over little tax eating fiefs...the people who conducted this study then wrote such bullshit conclusons about it should loose their jobs...
stendec@gmail.com
All too true, the sad fact is at the age when people are figuring out what to do with our lives we tend to be not terribly cynical and able to consider the self serving falsehoods that people can promulgate.
I find myself in between now, and in what for me is something of an ethical dilemna. Do I cut my losses (all the time and money) spent getting this far get out into a field that is more productive. Or do I leverage the education and get a teaching position somewhere that is solely designed to churn out more people that will find themselves in my own current position.
Yes there's a need for PhD researchers in almost all fields. But it's a damnable lie that we need them in the quantities that are being produced. Some fields more so than others of course.
I suspect the number of American scientists will not be growing. Young people in the States are taught to idolize singers/rappers, movie stars, and sports players not scientists or people of above-average intelligence.
"Look kids! An American scientist just discovered a way to make low cost energy in near limitless amounts. Isn't he a hero?"
"Quiet dad! The new Fifty-Cent video is on."
still stinks when by politicians or HBS PhDs.
God bless US, we are screwed by delusions.
OldHawk777
"Reality is a self-induced hallucination."
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
This article posting is timely since I am now entertaining a postdoc offer to leave a pretty good paying job in industry. Why am I considering leaving the corporate world? Idiots that why. Not to say that there are not idiots in academia. As a scientist working in industry you are paid for your expertise. The joke around our company is pick the best solution to a particular problem or issue and management will choose the exact opposite. At least in academia I do have some intellectual freedom and will be allowed to publish the research I pursue. Yes it will be less money. Yes the benefits are not as good. And yes I will have not have as good equipment and resources. For me it is primarily about a sense of more freedom at the sacrifice of financial security.
As my to do list gets longer (as an engineer), the only recourse is to hire someone to help me fulfill the tasks. If they do well, then my team expands to handle more. Management is a natural progression because divying up the tasks, setting schedules and checking work is *time consuming*!
.... the whole patent fiasco...... I mean if the uinventor doesn't gain anywhere near what his employer does off the inventors work....
Where the hell is the incentive to invent, and wasn't that the main point of granting patents?
I don't work 70+ hours a week 50 weeks a year for 30K/yr (what my fellowship pays). I do it because I love it. I know that I could sell out, go get an MBA, and become a consultant making bank. Why the hell would I want to do that? Being a graduate student involves lots of time to explore problems I find interesting.
Others may make more money, but they don't have the opportunity to improve themselves that I do. Every day, I am actively encouraged to learn and grow. It's true that productivity is important, but, having worked in industry (before going to grad school) I can say that the emphasis on meeting deadlines, satisfying customers, and the bottom line in general is greatly lessened in an academic environment.
I'll take the freedom of thought and action I have over your Hummer, big screen TV, and expensive car ANY DAY
mod parent up!
You can't replace the specialized knowledge of PhDs with anything else. If there really was a shortage of PhDs and huge need for more, the salaries would be much higher.
I have a BS degree and work in process development. Half of my department is PhDs, but their skills are underutilized. Theoretical work takes you to a certain point, then comes more practical application. Many of the PhDs I work with are unhappy since they are involved more in simple troubleshooting activities, than truely creative and more specialized research.
I would suspect many PhDs are underemployed, and not getting full use of their very specialized skills.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Really, it does not matter what sort of degree you hold. The key to making a lot of money is to own your own business. Being an employee means you are always making someone else money. Money is just a symbolic representation of value. If you are able to produce value for a massive amount of people, such as a business or entertainer, you deserve massive amounts of money. Being an employee usually means you are providing value to one person, your employer.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Looking back in history it has been great individuals that mold our future. Edison, Gates,( I know he's crook, but he is still rather bright), Einstein ...the list goes on and on. Some brilliant freek could come up with an AI algorythm in his basement while 20 PHd's are working on a statistical analysis regarding properties of horse shit for the government. "No great idea has ever come from a team". I have a partial MBA and CS degree and Iconsider them both equally worthless. If you are truly smart you will burn your overpriced college books and study the masters (Gates, Jack Welch, Ellison, etc.) Success comes from studying those that are successful, not from listening to tenured asses that use big words to sound smart. If you want to learn how to succeed in business, listen to people that have actually had jobs....not profs, any job that: you cannot be fired from, have more time off then work, and leave by 2pm every day.....is NOT a job!
I like learning but the structure of school is NOT fun or much of the time even relevant. Half the time the people teaching you what you'd really want to be learning aren't qualified or have no idea beyond the basics in elementary and highschool and I think this is a real problem.
I wish there was some "open source" learning project that wass funded by businesses about subjects you can learn on your own over the internet (Math, physics, etc) that is maintained and updated by people working in their field for businesses so you have people right on the cutting edge giving out free class material, tests, etc, subsidized by those who are willing to work for it on their own after school or on their own time.
Another problem is our schools exist to serve the economy and the people that own major corporations or "the means of production", basically schools produce workers for people who are major business owners and reap the most rewards from their work in a lot of fields. Schools are little different then worker farms for kids. Even by the time they get out of highschool they still need to take on huge amount of debt to go onto higher ed to even get a decent paying job to survive beyond 'subsistance' level. So they've been working day in and day out for at least 12-16+ years of their life by the time these people get out of highscool or college. I wish they could identify kids "Trade skill kids" or kids that will never make it academically and find something else for them to do because they're wasting time on kids who can't succeed or for whom learning x subject is beyond their abilities.
I think theres a huge problem with the way we live our lives as a culture around the monetary unit. How is life truly 'better' today then it was 100 or 1000 years ago? You have more toys and convenience and more luxury but you still have to work like a dog and it still costs you (in work) the same amount of time taken away from life. You still have to work to eat and put a roof over your head, the only difference is that you're constantly being held up for cash by either the government or businesses just so you can live. We've advanced to the point where the efficiency of food production requires less then 3% of a (modern) countries population to take care of the food needs of an entire nation but yet we still have homeless people and millions of people slugging it out at minmum or just barely above minimum wage jobs for 40+ hours a week who can't even afford food and a place to live let alone the cost of kids and many of these people WERE educated beyond highschool the problem is we keep inventing ourselves out of jobs and raising the bar, but the human brain and condition is not keeping up. We have a surplus of people and not enough 'good' jobs, and by good I don't mean good paying. I mean good as in you and your wife dont spend 50+ hour weeks at the office and barely have time to do anything else but live at work while your child is raised by babysitters, entertainment devices, or the school system. I think the problem is the fast paced consumption driven life.
It's hard to get exited about learning and school when you're born with limited abilities and struggle with school. I don't believe it's just liking learning vs. not liking learning determinin the success of the person. Many teachers will tell you "hard work" or loving learning alone is not enough. Their are tonnes of university professors who will tell you differently that some people CAN'T meet the expectations or requirements in skill, knowledge abilities.
People are born with talent and potential to compete in today's world or they aren't. Most people will never attain or are able to develop skills to a level where they can be competitive and I don't believe they are stupid or uneducated it's just our system is too achievement oriented and revolves too much around money and serving those who own the means of production. As a culture we are forced to take jobs that currently exist or new ones when our current ones become ob
I have a PhD an roughly 7 years post-PhD work expreience. I now make 3/4 of a million and still going up. PhD definitely pays, just find the right industry (oh, and learn a few interpersonal skills along the way).
About once a decade, some yahoo at a major research organization moans ever so loudly about the lack of scientists. They claim the sky is falling. The economy, our way of life, every thing is at risk because we do not have enough scientists to meet future demand.
... the Soviet Union collapses, and all the poor schmucks over there want to come over here.
... that is 10 years at $60k/year difference.
In a word: Bullshit.
We have seen this before, and gullible young kids in college the last time (Erich Bloch's big freaking lie in 1986) went on to spend 10 years in graduate school to get a Ph.D. in Physics.
So I ask, in case (ha ha ha) any policy makers actually are reading this: Where the fuck are the jobs?
Most folks hop from postdoc to postdoc and finally quit. Tenure tracks are not opening up (and this is a good thing in disguise), because you cannot force old professors to retire. This means that, using physics as the example, there are approximately 100 new jobs (permanent or tenure track) every year, for in excess of 1500 graduates every year.
Well, this sucks, especially if you are, like me, one of those gullible kids from 1986. You can actually model this mathematically, and it absolutely sucks no matter how you tweak the model.
The folks who benefit from the vast oversupply of PhD's in the US are the universities, and the corporate world. You see, the universities get to pay physics postdocs wages that, if they had say a wife and two kids (not uncommon), they would be under the damned poverty line.
So, you study your ass off for 10+ years, because you are told by universities and companies that there will be many jobs waiting. You get there and
The supply side of market is flooded. The demand side is not good. They pay you $20k/year as a freshly minted PhD. 25k$ if you have experience.
Then you watch the little engineering weenies come out with bachelors and start at 70k$.
Ok, sure, we are getting a better education.
Now, the simple economic situation takes hold (always does). The opportunity cost of those 10 years (past BS) is at least the salary difference during that time, not to mention any career issues. At 70k$/year vs $10k/year as a TA
The opportunity cost is above one half million dollars.
Now start working out the future value of the retirement savings, the cost of living, and other things.
Is it worth the sacrifice?
Folks, I will be honest. Being called Dr. is really very little consolation when I am not working in the field that I trained in, or anything even close to it, nor is it consolation for the lost opportunity.
I am now the CEO of my own business, which I could have been without the degree.
I have met many PhD's who are not very smart. It seems that some of the "better" universities (ahem) turn out some really poor thinkers. Sadly, these are the jokers who get the tenure tracks. It is all about pedigree, not quality.
I would personally hire a bright BS or MS over a "name brand" PhD because of this issue, but I digress.
Competition is fierce. Ferocious. You do not get a job handed to you. You will get stabbed in the back by folks who work with you. You have to learn to hold your best stuff for when you are on your own.
Are you really sure you want to do this?
If I were to do it over again, I would not do physics. I would do an engineering degree, and do it fast. If an advisor wants to plan to keep you for more than 4 years, you should find another.
No one, and I repeat, no one should be in graduate school for a decade. Take it from someone who beat that by a year, and a decade is average for physics.
Also, don't consider academe. Really, it is not worth your headache.
Is it any better to be enslaved to the market and your customers than to be enslaved to your boss?
Unless they get lucky, and hit it big, most entrepenuers seems to have a lot less freedom than those those that work for "the man".
It's even worse if your passion is not business. Working for a company means letting someone else deal with that crap. Working for "yourself" means you deal with it and have little time for your own passion.
Oh, you dont want to pay me that much? Ok. Let someone else perform that arterial bypass then."
Oh, let me tell you, the shortage of doctors is a government creation - simply so much licences are available each year, And enrolment in med schools have no increased in the past 25 years and it was very low to begin with, even back then. Similar for lawers. So, my friend the government decides who takes how much and when. It's all politics, you don't want to know...
If a scientist can't fund his own research, he can't do it. If he wants someone else to pay for it, he has to prove that his work is more valuable to that "investor" than anything else that investor could do with his money.
That investor could be a person, a corporation, a non-profit, a government, whatever. It doesn't matter. Any of the above have more things they could do with their money than they have money.
So with this in mind, consider your advice: "Mass disregard for IP laws is the duty of a scientist." There are plenty of countries that exhibit a mass disregard for IP laws. How does their scientific productivity compare to countries with strong IP protection? How much funding do their scientists attract?
People are not usually inspired to invest their own money in scientists who consider it their "duty" to rip off the investor.
(This does not mean that I think that the stronger the IP laws, the better. I think productivity falls off at either extreme, and the US is less productive than it could be because IP laws have gotten ridiculously constraining. The solution is not to disregard the laws and rejoin the third world, though. The solution is to fix the laws.)
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
MBAs don't hire PhDs. They are "overqualified." MBAs don't give a fuck about degrees. All that matters is how much short-term profit an employee "brings to the table."
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
It's interesting that you say that the American Chemical Society testifies that there is a shortage, just to make sure wages are kept low, and PhD's are easily available. I've heard lots of people complaining about how it is "unfair" that scientists make so little compared to an MBA (which, I might add, I know an MBA not making much -- but that might be his own issue).
It really comes down to basic economics. It is not at all unfair that scientists (PhDs) are paid less, as this poster said, there are a surplus supply of them. If more people respond to the lack of economic incentive (the low pay), then there will be less PhDs, and eventually the salary MUST go up. That is of course, if they do their research properly and realize that they may be recipients of a disinformation program such as this poster discussed.
The thing I have noticed, is that most PhDs I know do what they do because they love it, and they don't really consider the financial incentive much at all. Which means the benefit they get from the job exceeds that which the money supplies... money is not the only benefit available.
This is really a very basic economic model, and there is nothing "unfair" IMHO about scientists getting paid less if there is a surplus supply of them, and they simply aren't needed in such supply. It might be unfair if they were purposefully mislead, which is really a very horrible thing, BUT, if they were not and are complaining because they think there work is more important, well, that's a different matter. Lots of people do important things and are underpaid, but that's the nature of the economic beast.
I've learned one rule over the years... "No bucks, no Buck Rogers." Funding makes the technology happen. While the salaries of the scientists and technicians are significant, equipment, space, supplies, overhead all cost significant money and that investment won't pay off for years, if at all, so the cost of the financing and the risk premiums are also large. A couple of fields are supported by government largesse or charity, but most technology is developed for commercial benefit, so at some level money is THE reason for doing the work.
I did 2 bachelors and my masters at MIT in 4 years and luckily enough, took some time working in the world before going any further. I discovered that if you really wanted to change something, the decision to do it was going to be made at a management level, not just because the technology said we could. [For the results of something that contains all the technologically possible without doing management trade-offs, c.f. Microsoft Office]
I worked at a biotech startup, employee #55, as the computer department (my degree was biochemical engineering). I saw enough silly decisions from a technical standpoint (CEO at the time was a former Pepsi Marketing manager!), that I determined that learning how to integrate a real technical evaluation with the financial decisions was the only way to get the right things done.
I went on and did the MBA , and it's been a great ride helping bring a scientific perspective to the decision making around technology.
Progress is being made in getting the decision process improved, but we still have a long way to go.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
also, those "masters" you want to study were NOT successful because they studied masters themselves. they succeeded because they had creativity and drive, not because they read "the 10 habits of highly effective people."
I don't have to suck up to my boss because my industry is a meritocracy. I enjoy the freedom that comes from being able to switch jobs anytime because good people are always in demand.
So, what color is the sky outside?
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I know this wasn't your point, but really:
"How is life truly 'better' today then it was 100 or 1000 years ago? You have more toys and convenience and more luxury but you still have to work like a dog and it still costs you (in work) the same amount of time taken away from life."
Work-wise? I can choose the job field I want to work in. If I don't like it I can switch. I do not have to be what my father was, and what his father was.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
The US despite its lousy elementary/high school education, has one of the highest numbers in post-grad education, compared to, say China (which has much better science/math pre-college education).
The point is not what makes it fun, the point is do you have enough people who wants to do this for a living. I am about to get my PhD, and I'd tell ya, I've seen enough of idealistic incoming grad students who burnt out/got bored and went off to make kabillions dollars outside w/o (or after) getting their PhDs.
And why is the pay so low for scientists? It's because there are more people are wants to do this than there are jobs available. Taking away the furriners would not solve the problem : you just lower the quality of people who actually get the jobs.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Hey all. I consider the Slashdot crowd to be in the above average intelligence category (okay, most of you). The tone and presumption of the post is total crap.
/.), and graduated from a first tier school (yes, a little tooting of my horn). When the company I did research for started to go under, I was let go. I got a job a a pharmaceutical rep right away, and now play in the business world. I make almost triple what I did as a researcher, company car, flexible ours, hell, even free broadband. Guess what I'm doing right now? Taking a break from studying for the GRE so I can go back for a PhD and get the hell out of the business world.
I have dual undergrad science degrees, several years of research experience (including a project highlighted several times on
I think it's healthy for people to realize on their own that money is really worthless, and that if you're creative, there'll always be ways to just make money. Just don't make it yo9ur life's pursuit. Let the MBAs have their money. Chances are,they need it to justify their worthless existence anyway. Seriously, where do you think the whole stereotype of the false smiling MBA comes from? Probably forgot how to make a real one.
Is it any better to be enslaved to the market and your customers than to be enslaved to your boss?
Unless they get lucky, and hit it big, most entrepenuers seems to have a lot less freedom than those those that work for "the man".
It's even worse if your passion is not business. Working for a company means letting someone else deal with that crap. Working for "yourself" means you deal with it and have little time for your own passion.
Welcome to freedom.
Freedom of will means that people are free to choose their own masters, or to choose to forego masters altogether.
But if you choose to let someone else do your worrying for you, then don't turn around and bitch and moan that you had to sign away your intellectual property rights.
If you wanna keep your intellectual property rights, THEN DON'T GIVE THEM AWAY IN EXCHANGE FOR A BOWL OF HOT GRITS AND A PLATE OF CHITLUNS!!!
The failings of the US public education system is a big part of the "cultural problem", but otherwise you have it correct. Even if you're stuck with a mediocre public school, there's a lot you can do to improve your situation.
It's just morally wrong to claim exclusive ownership over something nonrivalrous.
So Wiles shouldn't claim ownership over semi-stable Taniyama-Shimura?
And Hilbert shouldn't claim ownership over the Nullstellensatz?
And Gauss shouldn't claim ownership over Theorema Egregium or Theorema Aureum?
And neither Newton nor Leibniz should claim ownership over the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus?
And Galileo shouldn't claim ownership over Conservation of Momentum?
And Scotus shouldn't claim ownership over the concept of infinity?
And Archimedes shouldn't claim ownership over the volume of solids?
And Hippasus shouldn't claim ownership over the irrationals?
After all, how many CEOs in corporate America have engineering and/or scientific degress?
I apologize that I don't have the source, but I've often heard it quoted that 50% of Fortune 500 CEOs have engineering degrees. Many of them probably have MBAs as well, but engineering is a solid start.
In several technical fields I know off: Biology, Medicinal Chemistry and Medicine (MD inplace of PhD). What you need is to graduate from a good school and join a good company. For example, it is not difficult to skip a post.doc. and start working for a pharma company and make a 6-figure salary in few years. Myself, I do not have a Ph.D. - just M.S. in chemistry - and my salary is $92000 at the age of 35.
US spends more generously on research in natural sciences than any other country I know of. This wealth of government money helps to create companies and jobs. When they closed our company few yars ago, I got interviews with couple of companies located just across the parking lot. Last time I checked, there were approx 25 biotech companies just in Bay Area alone.
(Physicians have to spend 3 year in a residency program after Med. School - so they do have an equivalent of a post.doc. required for being able to practice. But after 3 years of residency and board exams - when they join a good private practice group - their income is often 6-figure right from the beginning.)
It may be hard to find a well-paying job with degree in high energy Physics, Botany or Acheology but it is not true that Ph.D. prospects in US are uniformly bleak. In fact, I am convinced that on average they are best in the world. Right now, programmers have hard time with outsourcing to Asia. (Sys-admin jobs however are stil reasonably easy to get.) But as long as US continues to have the best grad. schools in Biology and Chemistry and continue with current level of research funding, the outsourcing will probably not happen very soon in these fields.
What is bad in US is primary and high-school education. The salaries of primary and high school teachers in US are shitty so these teachers often tend to be low-qualified and low-spirited. The amount of red tape in elementary and high school is incredible, the discipline of students is appaling. High school often serve as reservoirs for kids that should be learning some useful skills in trade schools instead. It is hard to get good technical education with teachers and classmates like these. The highschool curriculum in science, math and history is on the level of the sixth-to eight grade in Eastern Europe. Colleges even sometimes canot make up the difference. When I did my GRE (an standard entry exam for grad school application) the hardest math problems in general section were about triangles and and equations with one x.
So it is logical that grad schools are looking for students from abroad and that industry loves to employ forigners. (I am Czech, my colleague is Swiss, our boss Chinese).
I belive the problem is that good universal elementary and high school education would be too expensive. With elementar and high-school quality tied to local taxes, forigners in technical fields are the outcome.
Rockefeller Foundation, Director of Charity, Frederick Gates, 1913
I can understand why many people post as AC in topics such as this one which cover careers and money.
:)
Just for pointing out the obvious I've been modded twice as flamebait and made two foes.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
This article should have been written long ago. It was true then and it's true now. There has never been a shortage of engineers or scientists. There certainly have been shortages of engineering jobs. As the article pointed out, these shortage claims were made by those interested in increasing the supply of workers for the purpose of holding down their wages. What they mean is theres a shortage of engineers at the nice price. By a similar line of reasoning, I conclude theres a shortage of gasoline at the price of $1 per gallon.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
. . . and get ready either to retire early or to find a vocation outside of "knowledge-work".
"Or would I rather be an M.B.A. and making $150,000?"
A mirage. The offshore-ing which has happened in other fields, can just as easily happen to MBAs, PhDs, etc. The ONLY safe vocations are those which have an INESCAPABLY strong requirement for a FULL-TIME physical presence.
Even health-care isn't safe: look at the proportion of routine dental care which migrated from dentists to dental hygienists, and then ask yourself how difficult would it be for the same thing to happen with routine medical care?
The only knowledge-jobs which won't emigrate to the least-cost locations -- or have their onshore salaries collapsed by a flood of immigrants, as is happening with nursing -- are jobs which are restricted for reasons like national security (e.g. the most secretive defense-industry jobs),
and the thinnest topmost layer of leading-edge R&D jobs.
Academia? No jobs, eventually no demand for the relevant degrees, and then no way for the university to pay for the relevant professors. Not to mention the disruption which will eventually be caused by trans-national distance-based learning.
Even attorneys -- many of whom spend little or no time in court -- are currently protected only by the inertia of tradition and historical practices. There's no fundamental technological reason that court appearances couldn't be done by video-conference. And where will the money to pay onshore attorneys come from, when hordes of white-collar jobs have been lost?
The same technologies which enable distance learning, will enable remote fulfillment of ANY knowledge-work, including management. And what will justify the cost of onshore managers, when most of their workers are offshore?
The vast majority of university degrees are acquired in six years or less. How long from today do you think it will require, for expanding pools of Asian-born graduates to be ready to fill the bulk of the need for knowledge-workers, just as is happening now with info-tech jobs?
Beat the rush and learn a trade, or buy a fast-food franchise, etc.
This is rascist nonsense. You say the foreign students are working harder than the Americans. Good for them. Grad school is hard work, and many of these students are working in a second or third language. Quite an achievement. How well would you do in grad school in China? Now it's true that hard work is not equal to good results, but it sure as hell helps a lot more than moaning about the "superfluous" foreigners.
You say "the papers these people crank out are often full of nonsense". Here are some foreigners for you: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Bohr, Lorenz, Voltaire. If you'd prefer some modern day foreigners, how about Rodney Brooks or Stephen Hawking? Both work (part of the year in Hawking's case) in US universities. I'm glad that Brooks worked hard as a student thousands of miles from his home.
No doubt you have some less than stellar students around you. But Americans do not have a monopoly on brains as your silly comment demonstrates.
I'm an English-born scientist who did a postdoc in California, where I worked with very bright, very productive people born inside and outside the US. My grad students come from all over the world. I expect them all to work hard and treat each other with respect.
How is life truly 'better' today then it was 100 or 1000 years ago? You have more toys and convenience and more luxury but you still have to work like a dog and it still costs you (in work) the same amount of time taken away from life.
Today, you can survive, if not thrive, on a part-time job of 20-30 hours a week. A thousand years ago, the vast majority of the population had to work from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week, from when they were old enough to walk until they were too crippled to do any useful work just in order to survive. Most people working full-time jobs in the US get half of their waking hours off, don't work weekends, and get vacation time; that's far less work than before.
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Today, you can survive, if not thrive, on a part-time job of 20-30 hours a week
WHAT?
Pass me whatever it is you found...
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
What I found is math. I'll pass it to you here:
Let's say you can find a decent part-time job paying $8/hour. This might be high, but increase your hours per week to compensate for lower wages; I'll assume a straight 20 hours a week to make up for it.
$8/hour for 20 hours a week is $160 a week, or about $700 a month. Around here (bumfuck, Wisconsin), a cramped one-person apartment will probably run you $200-300/month. Add on another $100/month for utilities, if you really go crazy. If you're frugal you can easily get away with $200/month for food. If you're good, it's probably a lot less, but we'll be generous. So that's a worst-case total of $600/month in expenses.
That's a pretty crappy situation, but you can survive that way. Note, in case you misunderstood, that I specifically said that you can not thrive on such a job.
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Note, in case you misunderstood, that I specifically said that you can not thrive on such a job.
Props to Leinie's, bud. I'm from Rhinelander. I know the Wisconsin dialect. You said "...can survive, if not thrive, on..." meaning that you thought it was entirely possible to thrive.
So how is this better than a thousand years ago? From what I've read the Native Americans around LaCrosse, Eau Claire, or even in the northwoods averaged about 20 hours/week for any real hunting or gathering work. The rest of the time was spent singing, walking around, chasing the girls, smoking good northwoods herb, etc.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Lazyness and Money. They want to make money fast and easy, with as little work required. Theres the American Dream for you.
http://www.macinhack.com
Well, part of the problem is that these PH.d's are 35, and have no actual experience.
Every cross-section of the population has its bottom 10%. You can't judge them all by this small sample.
My personal experience, and most of my friends was, I think, more typical - 4 yrs. for the BS and 4 more for the PhD. Graduate at 26 and get a job at one of the largest corps in the world - Exxon. ALL of my co-graduate student friends had similar experiences. At 36 I have 10 years of SOLID experience at both "fortune 3" and startup companies in a wide variety of areas and am now self-employed and working part-time on academic projects. I make far less than I used to, but I'm having the best time yet.
That said - If you're getting your first real-world job at 35 you either fucked-off and took way too long to get your degrees, you do not interview well and ended up working for buddies of your advisor for several 2 year stints at various back-water universities, or you just didn't get into a good institution for your PhD which can probably be related to the first reason mentioned. Nothing was out of this hypothetical PhDs control - they got what they earned in the end, and are a relatively small pool to judge PhDs from.
Are you by chance a engineer at GE? This was a typical attitude taken by engineers at my large former employer. It resulted in several extremely talented individuals finding more rewarding jobs in other companies. PhDs were usually considered lab monkeys with no interest in anything outside their ivory cage, and were treated as such. This lead to resentment and other negative feelings for people that wanted to progress up the company ladder. Luckily they have started letting PhDs into the good-old-boy's club which seems to be working out well for everyone. Hopefully the trend will continue. I say if you want to be a lab monkey and the company wants you there - great - but let the guys out that have mutated into something else.
I thought it was a good idea
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Stock brokers, advertising / marketing types, lawyers, and executives make a great deal of money. Scientists, Teachers, Police, Firemen, and the like probably contribute more to civilization then the types listed above, but they certaintly dont reap much of a benefit for it.
That's because private enterprise doesn't reward people who benefit society. It rewards people who increase its own profits.
I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing. The two benefits can coincide -- and in fact, good policies try to make them do so, or at the very least don't put them at odds with each other.
Tweet, tweet.
I find it sad that it's so much about money. What about 'the meaning'? What about having the knowledge to pass onto your children? What about applying the knowledge to make the world a better place? Money cannot buy this.
:(
No matter that that study says and what people here think, I know that whenever I look at PhD programs in the U.S. I always see a LOT of foreign names, lots of Chinese, lots of Indians, some Europeans, and very few American-sounding names.
However, U.S. has nothing to fear - they've always been on the lookout for exceptional individuals, and when they found them they usually made them an offer they could not refuse. Perhaps they didn't do a good job with Charlie Chaplin.
Simpy
Perhaps outside the research, and academic community PhDs are overrated.
Post Undergrad work is highly specialized. Once you get a Masters the rules for gaining employmen change. It becomes: "What can your highly specialized field of study bring to the company and how can it contribute directly to our research and development?".
Also there are limited numbers of academic and research positions available. Frequently they are required for a Government job where they already have a candidate in mind.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Sorry about the misunderstanding; I realize now that it's ambiguous, but I meant that it's probably not possible to thrive. Although I lived here for a while, I'm not a native, and I don't live here anymore (I'm just back for a visit). You may know the dialect, but I sure don't. (And wtf does "Props to Leinie's" mean? I'm all curious now.)
So how is it better than before? First, most people in the world a thousand years ago were not native Americans living in an area that was rich enough to support human life on 20 hours a week. Most people a thousand years ago had to do a lot more work to survive at all. Second, with your extra $100-$200/month left over money, you can do things those people never dreamed of, like take occasional vacations to faraway destinations, fly a plane, talk to people on the other side of the planet, etc. etc., and you can still spend the rest of your time singing, walking around, chasing the girls, or smoking some good stuff.
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"Outsourcing"
What's the point of spending years and years in school for a MsCS and hours and hours behind the monitor learning stuff when the only people willing to hire you haggle all the time over the phone asking if you can be flexible with a lousy $35/hr to make it $25/hr and even try to convince me that it's the right rate to take in order to avoid the contract from being sent overseas... Unemployment for electrics/electronics/systems eng and higher degrees on the same engineering areas is rampant and thing will just get worst as the greedy companies want more and more $.
The current situation makes me think I should have taken the advice of this teacher telling me I should better go for Business better than Engineering. Maybe drop all engineering and better go for art.
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Compared to the problems, there is a shortage of scientists. Genome Project was just the start, now to figure out what the genes do. 300 years, at least. Astronomy, no end. Nanotechnology, barely began. New diseases we didn't even know we had.
Only thing that's brought real new wealth is science. The lawyers and financiers only push around the wealth that already exists into different piles.
Don't give me this economic/Darwin spew about well, science must not be viable/economic if the system can't support it. Wrong wrong wrong. That just tells me the system is set up wrong. If the system doesn't support them, it's the system that's wrong. And in the long run, we'll all suffer the lack of what might have been.
The system is not immutable. And certainly shouldn't be the criterion of what should be.
Do I want to be a postdoc paid $35,000 or $40,000 at age 35, with extreme uncertainty working in somebody else's lab, and maybe getting credit for my work and maybe not getting full credit?
... we have the *time*, the *computers*, and the *freedom* to do so. Take that and smoke it in your pipe.
If you took most people aside from the pitch forks and torches and honestly asked them this question, I think you'd be very surprised. A lot of people don't want to have their own lab or manage income in the 6 digit range. We always whine about the measly pay, but, guess what
I went a different way, probably because I came (back) to academia later in life. Consider, especially if you're in CA, teaching at a community college. Some of the ways it differs: Need a Master's (though some fields - not the technical ones usually - are hiring PhDs who didn't get 4-year slots)...in some more practical fields, maybe not even that Usually no research, it's all about classroom teaching (so liking that helps). What is nice is though that I can pursue my own research. I was also asked to get in on a grant with my alma mater since a lot of grants offer incentives to work with 2-year schools. Faster, less dicey tenure. Yes it's not that high-falutin' but at my age a PhD just didn't make sense. The environment is different (wider range of student abilities, to be sure) but there are some excellent students. The trend here is to redirect some incoming UC/CSU students to the CCs with guaranteed admission after two years as a cost-saving measure, so the trend in numbers and especially quality looks good. I am noticing that we can always use some good people, especially in the technical areas. If you like people and can deal with them, and can live without the support system you get at a 4-year school, look into it. Not as much money, but solid money/benefits. Plenty of time off to pursue other things and a very flexible schedule.
If he's using someone else's money to live on, he owes that someone the patent/copyright.
We had such a system for physical labor--it was called "feudalism", and we got rid of it because it is both unjust and inefficient.
The fact is that if I use someone else's resource to produce something, I owe them a fair return, based on their risk and their investment. If they manage to extract more than justified by their risk and their investment, then they have taken an unfair advantage, and that is something that is incompatible both with the law and with the efficient functioning of our economy.
Think about countries that are not wealthy, even here in Canada most places pay as little as possible (which means $7.15CDN/hr) if even finding a shitty place here is at least 600-700$ a month and after taxes, UI (unemloyment insurance) and what not has been taken off your check you're lucky to be left with anything after phone/utilities, etc. Up here you need a job and food stamps and thats on 35hrs/week because most places don't give you full hours so they can save $. I know lots of people who are on work and have to get foodstamps and they can't save hardly anything if they are a single parent and have a kid on top of that.
I also don't really agree with your comment about 1000 years ago thee were people in the ancient world that had a much slower pace of life and more amount of time circa 1000AD (after all it takes time to grow food and there were labour saving inventions and whatnot) I think you need to bone up on your history after all we are talking post roman and greek civilization here. I agree that their are benefits/perks to living in the modern world but no one picks the time and age in which they are born in, so that goes without saying.
I'm just saying with all the inventions and strides we've made in the efficiency of food production, housing, electricity and whatnot it's ironic lots of people are still barely able to make ends meet, and we shouldn't just say "tough titties" to those who lacking abilities or the potential to develop skills to an adequately competitive level (so they can find a job/be compensated) they were not born with.
The life as an engineer was (excuse me) pathetic. Why should I spend all my life chained to a desk, living in a cube farm, and putting up with the Boss from Hell who figured he owned me as so much chattel property? Life is much better now.
So tell me again why I would even talk any teenager into becoming an engineer? They would be fools to do so.
Now, here's where it gets interesting. I work as a software engineer. I create workflow management solutions for medium size (~200 staff) organizations, frequently with multiple job locations.
I love what I do! I work as Softare Architect, Programmer, salesman, and Business Workflow Analyst, all in one job. No day is like any other. I create works of smooth engineering that my clients rave about, and I get paid nicely to create them.
My kids are being trained to be engineers. They are taught that engineers create the wealth of society, and that Science is the process by which understanding occurs.
And, they'd better be in charge of determining where that wealth goes. This world need problem solvers - there are no shortage of problems. Solve the problems, and wealth is yours. Look for a "job" and you might as well resign and be a wage slave.
It's not about the PHD - it's about the problems you solve, and making sure you get paid for solving them.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Okay, why not... let's take away the rights of corporations to own "intellectual property" in the same way that, you seem to be saying, individuals should continue to be able to do. Of course, if they shouldn't be allowed to own _intellectual_ property, why should they be allowed to own _physical_ property either? We may as well be consistent in our granting of ownership rights to these legal entities, right?
:-)
Hmm... Well, as long as companies can't own property, we may as well toss the notion of them as legal entities out the window, wouldn't you say?
Grand! Now, I've just ignored a wet floor sign at the West Coast branch of your research firm, and broken your leg. Since corporations aren't legal entities anymore, I'll just sue and take your house. Enjoy the street.
I've also ignored the preview button, breaking your leg instead of mine. What luck.
And of course, the fact that the insurance companies have been dragged by customers (and accompanying lawyers) into a place where they cover things like routine checkups or surgery people wouldn't exactly have died without has nothing to do with it. Personally, I don't expect State Farm to cover oil changes... why should Blue Cross cover my physical? Am I the ONLY person who doesn't think of health insurance as some sort of health-care subscription?!?
Meanwhile, in mental-tangent land... As I recall, a large part of the pressure from the insurance industry, as you call it, comes in the form of stratospheric malpractice premiums. Thank "comsumer advocates" like Nader for this phenomenon. "You're hurt? Why, sue the big evil rich man/company/parakeet! They have a responsibilty to you. Even if they didn't actually do anything wrong."
> Meanwhile, I have $300K in my retirement account, a big house with a pool, an H2, and all the pussy I care to lick.
Do you happen to live in San Diego? Cuz you sure sound like you do.
This was a fascinating discussion.
Each of you has made (IMO) good points. While it is hard for a casual observer in the U.S. to credit that the average Indian has a better quality of life than the average American, or has better services (i.e. healthcare), I am forced to observe two things:
1) As an American who has been to a lot of the amusingly named "heartland," I find the degree of ignorance among many affluent urban Americans about the real living conditions of most of the country's population is simply staggering.
2) Neither myself nor the other American here have a real familiarity with life in India. Unless "several trips" had unusual duration.
Whatever our current state, the trend in the U.S. is a disappearing middle class, and a quickly growing underclass, while wealth is consolidating at the top. The trend in India, meanwhile, is going the other way. If both of these trends hold, sooner or later we will meet in the middle, by whatever measure of "quality of life" or "economic success" you choose.
If a child does not care about school, it is NOT always the home environment's fault.
A friend of mine's kid is getting F's and a few D's in school - not because the kid is stupid, but because he has figured out that it just does not matter if he does the work. Due to this attitude, the kid has been grounded, his games confiscated, he didn't get anything for Christmas, etc. Both his parents and all their friends (myself included) have been beating on the kid (figuratively!) to aggregate his fecal matter in this matter.
His folks went to the school with a seemingly simple request - Hold Him Back A Grade! Let him repeat the eight grade. Let him watch his friends move on, while he doesn't. Let him suffer the jokes. Make not doing the work have a consequence.
The principal's response: "Oh, we don't hold kids his age back!"
So, when the school system itself makes it very clear that doing the work is optional, why should the kids care about it?
www.eFax.com are spammers
I don't know, but I'm certainly willing to conduct a number of double-blind studies to find out.
Any engineers out there recently sit for the P. E. examinations? Any engineers out there ever sit for the P. E. exams? Although not required, the P. E. exam is one of the mechanisms in place to make sure engineers know what engineering is about . . . of course a P. E. will command a top-dollar wage.
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And how many engineers upon graduation went to work for an Engineering firm apprenticed to an experienced Engineer with a P. E. for three to five years (depending on engineering discipline) prior to sitting for the P. E. examinations?
How many engineers out there are certified in their states of residence (USA - and no doubt many other places in the world) and keep those certifications - and their skill set - up to date?
I've worked with some excellent, gifted engineers that didn't sit for the P. E., some not even having a degree in their area of expertise, and I've worked with rabble called engineers because they were given the title "engineer." You know: "give 'em a title and no raise." Of course most of these guys tend to weed themselves out over time.
Engineering is a passion. Or should be. If an engineer is not vitally passionate about his work (not job) perhaps another endeavor would be wise.
Engineering is also about Details. Details in excruciating detail. But most of all, engineering is about FUN. In my opinion. .
Many professions have kept the experience element. A docyor or an architect needs formal study plus a number of years experience before they are considered fully qualified. Something similar applies for civil engineers.
You are right in that kids see that they have a degre and now say "So What?". Perhap if instead the experience and results of ongoing training could be formally recognised and that compensated.
See my journal, I write things there
May I add my voice to that call - and also suggest that companies be forced to rent patents for periods of no greater than 12 months.... and make patents truly determined by the lifetime of the creator, passing into the public domain afterwards.
Sneakabout is a mysterious figure, having done too much mathematics.
In every guy's life there has to be a summer of '42 eh? Baby. The rain must fall. Antie Emm, Antie Emm. Hey, I drove a ding dang truck for 3.5 CENTS A MILE, about $200 a week with the (Thank God for) breakdown time and layover pay. Did it for 3 years. What's so bad about $35,000.oo ? You just have to get 2 jobs is all ($70,000.oo), and with a PhD you oughtta be able to do that with yer hands tied behind yer back! Oh, is 80 hours a week too much fer ye? Gee, Chitty-Chitty Bah Bang. I was on the road 135 hours a week, little time to stop and less time to eat. And I did it with a cracked vertebrae. We've turned into a nation of CLOCK PUNCHERS SINGING GIMME GIMME GIMME TO TH CHURCH ON TIME. I baked Dunkin' Donuts for 2 years making $10 a nite, 5 years making $40 a nite, 80 hours a week and more standing on a hard floor and yep, the cracked vertebrae was right there too. No benefits. You guys don't have a clue. I was washing dishes in a seafood restaurant when I was 11YO for 10 cents an hour - 1966, under the table straight out of the cash drawer because I was UNDER AGE& AGAINST THE LAW. Oh, I'm sorry. I guess you thought only the blacks got discriminated against. Poof, there goes another strange illusion. And when our wonderful President Mr. Kennedy said we all had to run and take all those tests no one bothered to check us OR our shoes, so after the runs my feet would be cut from the ingrown toenails. Eventually getting infected from REAL LIFE 101 the doctor had to cut them out without novocaine because the infection wouldn't let the novocaine work. You guys need to hear a little real life once in a while. $35,000.oo working in a air-conditioned lab? Beats hell out of the life I got handed. And if you mark this off topic you're wrong. I'm dead on the topic. People have gotten soft. And you DON'T have to be black to get a whip across your back.
There's no need to be redundant.
Neither myself nor the other American here have a real familiarity with life in India. Unless "several trips" had unusual duration.
I lived in Asia for many years. I lived in three different Asian countries and traveled frequently (for business and fun) to most of the others.
While I don't experience India the way an Indian would, I have a pretty good feel for cross-country comparisons. I can assure you that anyone who claims that "the vast majority of Americans live in grinding poverty" and then proclaims life in India to be better is either mentally defective or is attempting to take advantage of other people's lack of confidence in their knowledge of "foreign countries" to deceive them for some reason. Perhaps he's one of the virulent strain of Hindu nationalists that have been growing in number over the last several years.
I don't know, but I DO know that his opinions are worthless.
If you want a reasonable Asian comparison with the US in terms of living standards, you would be talking about Japan, Hong Kong, or Singapore, not India, China, Indonesia, etc.
And your comments about the trends in the US and India leading to a meeting in the middle are borderline nonsense because you clearly don't understand the enormous difference between and the enormous inertia of two such huge nations. While it's true that a small sliver of Indians are now solidly 1st world economically (as is true in China), I don't think you can imagine what it's like to have more than a billion fellow countrymen living as they did centuries ago, steeped in leftist "equality by confiscation" dogma, and viewing you with growing envy and hostility--as a pocket ripe for picking rather than as a role model to emulate.
I don't see India and the US "meeting in the middle" anytime in the next century, given the enormous inertia, though I can easily imagine tens of millions of Indians and Chinese (still just a sliver of the total in each country) living better than the *average* American before long.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
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I should know better, but I will bite anyway. On what do you base your argument that the system is wrong? I certainly agree that "the system" is not, and should not be, immutable, but you are making an assertion rather than an argument.
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Although a lot of the threads debate the merits of engineering and other disciplines over PhD programs, and one thread even asks what the use is of Science classes in K-12 education, I see the problem as a lack of good thinking skills: There are not enough people qualified to think through the potential of all the research available from the Scientists we have!
Back in the mid 80's a Physicist from Israel, Eli Goldratt, overwhelmed the manufacturing industries by applying scientific thought to manufacturing. There is tons of raw research out there, and the USA has some pretty good Scientists, so why aren't we seeing this type of thinking applied to other areas of the Economy and Environment? I believe it's because the HABIT of scientific thinking is acquired while we are young, and teaching these habits is mostly lacking in our educational system. I suspect that there would be plenty of demand for PhD's if there were enough thinkers to take advantage of their outputs.
An interesting note, though: I read an article in the IEEE magazine back in the 70's that said something to the effect that that the best balanced ratio between Engineers/Inventors and Pure Scientists was 7/1. If I remember the article correctly, "Pure Science" is the raw material of Engineering.
I wonder what 3M would have to say about this ratio?
Mike
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
... in a culture where ideology almost always trumps the truth?
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Not sure whether countries really have much economic inertia. Things can change pretty quickly once a change starts. Just ask the Argentinians.
Engineering is not all desk work... lemme expand. I had a really though time deciding my carreer and none other copared to engineering. Most engineering programs do involve desk work, well there are people who like desk work. But for those who dont I expect them to consider industrial engineering. Its quite different from all other areas and involves little desk work as you are the knowledgeable boss(not the big boss though, he WILL listen to you for its his job to) There is agro ing. but I dont like that. And Ind. is so related to bussiness you could be a great buisnessman with such ing degree. Actuall thats my plan so . Stop ranting and dont kill the hopes of them industrial engineers. Science to the world!
Bottom line, like it or not...industry and profits support most science. Companies follow the money - this is their reason to exist - and if they can't make money designing and making things in the USA, they'll let someone else create it and sell/market it here. You don't need that many PhD's to design logos and worry about shelf space at WalMart.
Industry in the USA has changed in such a way to discourage the future Fords and Edisons in this country.
Through entitlement and victim worship, the unions and courts have made industry in the USA a lake of molasses and mines.
This pressure has trended Corporate America's towards fixation on easy, low risk, short-term profits to stimulate Wall Street. Forget slow and steady, long term, high investment, high quality product lines (e.g. Toyota cars, Sony TVs). It's a heck of a lot easier to slap a pretty logo on some carefully engineered Chinese wine refrigerator than to do design and build it yourself.
So, want to see science thrive? Then re-create the environment in which it thrived in the past.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
Our public universities take tax dollars from my paycheck to educate foreign students who usually just take their degree and head back home to compete with my conpany and other US companies. Every week it seems I hear about a new tech company in China or India that was started by a couple of Berkley grads. How could anyone possibly believe that this is good for America?
No, he sounds like he lives in the Phoenix area, like Scottsdale (Snobsdale). I visit San Diego now and then (I was just there this weekend), and I actually see far fewer trucks and SUVs there than in most other parts of the country I've been in. It's probably because of the insane gas prices and tiny parking spaces. However, everyone seems to drive a BMW or Mercedes or other high-end car.
Here in the Phoenix area, in the wealthier parts at least, there's tons of SUVs (including lots of H2s), along with huge jacked-up pickups, jacked-up Suburbans, etc.
A big house with a pool is also a lot cheaper here than in San Diego. You can get a 4000 s.f. house with pool for maybe $350-400k, up to $800k in the expensive places. In San Diego, you're easily looking at well over a million for that.
..that a big obstacle to a lot of would-be graduate students (and indeed, university students) is cost. The US middle class is significantly smaller than most people think, and the working class much larger. It can be a real struggle to get a university education if you aren't brilliant enough to attract scholarships, even if you are willing to study hard. In addition, there isn't much incentive to get a $100,000 Ivy League education if you have to take on that much debt to get a job that pays $40k/year. Lots of factors at work here, these are only a few but worth mentioning.
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