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Particle Physicists Facing Insane Competition For Work
Jim_Austin writes "Teams of hundreds of young scientists — including many grad students and postdocs — staffed the Large Hadron Collider and helped make one of the most important scientific discoveries in recent decades. Now they must compete for just a handful of jobs. Quoting: 'The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) The two largest particle detectors fed by the LHC, the A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS)—which both independently spotted the Higgs—boast teams of 3000 and 2700 physicists. By themselves, the CMS and ATLAS teams minted at least 174 Ph.D.s last year. That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900. In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for. The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America.'"
they are always looking for quants from what i hear
With that kind of brainpower, there should be some startling developments in the next couple of decades.
What this says is that every rich person in this country is lying through their teeth about needing immigrants. We have highly trained scientists and engineers. The percentages of people who have the right attitude and mental attributes to succeed in this line of work has remained constant for as far back as we've had standardized testing results. There has been no shift of the basic personality types from one to another; Each generation has had the same proportions as the previous.
What it means is that nobody wants to invest. And scientific progress is an investment. It doesn't give you the immediate payoff of, say, a sequel to the Fast and the Furious (what are they up to now, seven of those infernal movies?). Science isn't formulaic. There's no spreadsheet that says "And after you spend $100 million developing a drug for cancer, you'll get this as a reward. Spend $200 million, and you'll get a free t-shirt too." Science growth mirrors our own; We grow in spurts, with long periods where nothing seems to be happening, periods where change is slow, and occasional paradigm shifts.
This isn't very amiable to the current "get rich quick" culture the Boomers are espousing as they approach their retirement. They're sucking every corner of society dry looking for a quick way to monetize, any incremental way to earn a profit without much risk. And science... well, it's too risky for them. They don't care about future generations, or a cure for cancer, or putting men on the moon again. They want botox and comfortable retirements.
This is society reaching back and giving people who love science the middle finger. It's saying "We don't need you, because your contributions aren't immediate. You live in the future and we're trying to recapture our past." So unless science comes up with a cure for aging, or a time machine, it's not getting funding. And that's really all there is to this story. It's about greed, pure and simple. Nobody gives a damn about tomorrow, because for the people holding all the cash... their tomorrows are running out.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I have a PhD in physics and mathematics. I did my research at Fermilab in the late 80's. I have been unemployed for a year. I have been underemployed for more than ten years. My math and analytical skills have been mostly unused by my employers. I gave up hoping for a job in research long ago.
Doing what you love rarely puts bread on the table and a car in the garage. Just ask a musician.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
When the resonance cascade occurs, we'll be able to just zerg-rush the bastards with PhD-and-crowbar equipped theoretical physicists. Aliens won't stand a chance.
Two comments on this:
1) The LHC was to a large extent built to find the Higgs. Given that the Higgs has been found and there are basically no hints of physics beyond the standard model, it's rather reasonable that the amount of funding would decrease as the future work to be done is mostly measuring quantities to higher precision and looking for really cool but pretty pie-in-the-sky new physics.
2) It's not really accurate to say that PhDs are training for a post doc. The way it's always been throughout academia is that a fairly small fraction of PhDs actually stay in academia. While some of these move to industry or what have you because of the difficulty of ultimately getting a tenure track position, probably a majority have gotten what they wanted out of academia and want a more normal job.
You want fries with that?
This should be no surprise, since these positions are for pure scientific research with no way to calculate the ROI for the money spent. Countries have debt problems caused by borrowing and their budgets are already stretched to pay benefits for retirees and other non-workers. Add a long recession, a weak recovery, and very little prospect for robust future economic growth, and ultimately you don't end up with the sort of fiscal environment that can support lots of pure research.
Wealthy societies have discretionary funds for things like pure scientific research. Poor societies have to struggle just to get by. If you want more pure research, you need more people in your society to be employed productively. And you need them to generate lots of wealth -- far beyond "the amount they need" or "their fair share" -- so there will be a lot extra left over for things like pure research.
The sad part is that many of these brilliant people will wind up on Wall Street creating obscure financial instruments greatly enriching their employers while gradually destroying the economic base of America.
They were unable to calculate their future job prospects. Whoops.
Put them to work on the polywell fusion reactor concept. Actually get the damn thing proven already.
When times are good, pretty much all you hear is "follow your passion!" - it doesn't help when in the business press you hear and see the "succesful" people who say that. Or the employers who demand that only people "passionate" in their work need apply!
So, folks did that: they went to school for music, art, history, literature, etc ... and maybe even found a job.
Now when times are bad (and student debt burden being in the news), folks are quick to say, "WTF didn't you study something marketable?!"
Our society is really fucked up and I have to blame corporate America - mostly. They are forcing all of us in the States into a narrower and narrower path for making a living.
Back in the old days, one was able to go to school for History or Literature come out and apply for a training program - say in Data Processing. You took an aptitude test and if you passed, they'd put you a training program (COBOL, CICS) and if you passed, you got a job - paid shit for a couple of years, but never the less a decent job. And he company NEVER - EVER - bitched about shortages of talent. They made it.
Now, you need to study EXACTLY what they need otherwise you are not qualified and not good enough - so off to India or wherever.
So, you either study something marketable - AND do well - or it's making coffee, 100% commission shit or dipshit retail.
This isn't new. It's been that way in high-energy physics since A-bombs stopped being cool. After WWII, there was a huge interest in getting into physics, and large numbers of PhD physicists were produced. The U.S. Government hired a lot of them. Nuclear weapon design became excessively fancy, much to the annoyance of today's workers who have to maintain the old bombs.
Then, after the US had produced enough bombs for the next few world wars, the nuclear establishment wound down. Los Alamos got into all sorts of strange non-nuclear stuff like chaos theory. Lawrence Livermore became a senior activity center for aging physicists. The average age of the membership in the American Physical Society went up by six months each year. That was back in the 1990s. It hasn't gotten better.
When the USSR wound down, there was a US effort to find jobs for old Soviet nuclear experts. The worry was that they'd go to work for somebody who still wanted to build a bomb or two. Some came to the US.
The same can be said for all basic science.
Also, much of the math that is integral to today's search engines, routing, and the Internet in general was discovered many many years ago and was filed away as just an academic curiousity.
And that Historian studying Neanderthals - they've been discovering things that is answering some questions the geneticists had and subsequently helping medical research.
That lowly stupid historian is probably indirectly saving lives.
As opposed to designing some shiny electrical gadget for people to waste their money on.
I mean we have such a shortage of scientists and tech workers, this must be a lie, right?
And this is why we need more graduates in science and math, to meet the need of all those jobs that are going unfilled!
Physics PhD's are wonderful (I have one myself), but the idea that we aren't producing enough for the available jobs is ludicrous.
-JS
"Same as you, Arthur. I hitched a ride. After all, with a degree in maths and another in astrophysics it was either that or back to the dole queue on Monday."
Young people should not go into physics expecting to become tenured professors. It might happen, but it's unlikely. And besides, why would you want to? Because your professor thinks you should aspire to it? It's actually not that great a job.
However. physics is still a great field of study because you can take it so many places. You can do engineering that engineers can't do because while they know the shortcuts while you know the fundamentals. I know a number of physicists who work in medical imaging, for example. The best RF engineer I know has a physics degree. A physicist needs great math skills, and unlike mathematicians, needs to be able to apply them in the real world. A smart physics student will take some classes outside of physics, and make mental connections between fields. If you're at a university, you should exploit the situation (and avoid being exploited).
I know how to fix the economy.
Simply automatize the consumer aspect of business and implement robotic customer machines to replace the needy whiney and low wage poor human consumer.
No need to thank me.
Getting a PhD is nothing like it used to be. The whole process has become industrialised since I was young, and - while it's excellent that there *is* so much support - it doesn't represent the independent intellectual achievement that it once did.
So, while I'm very happy that there are so many people training at this level, they shouldn't think they're that great.
NASA should hire all of them. We need something far far better than rockets.
The labor markets are saturated, and wealth is concentrating on the top. There just isn't a market for lots of labor anymore, manufacturing is increasingly automated, services like retail is becoming more automated (thanks Amazon!), so why not soak the rich and use the money to support more research instead of letting all that capital idle at the top?
Because that's EXACTLY what is happening now. All that capital is idling at the top, the middle/lower classes are underpaid and underemployed and not generating demand.
How about we fund a "research class" instead of a "leisure class"?
--PM
I'd be interested to see how these figures compare to other sciences. I am a mid-career biologist (did eight years as a post-doc and have had a permanent research position for the last seven years). I've always felt that we lose about half of PhD graduates to other areas, partly because they don't want and to partly because there aren't enough jobs, and then about half of post-docs don't continue in science for the same reasons. Doesn't seem that different. I do remember that, when I was a post-doc, an eminent prof (multiple Nature papers) in my field once said to me that he didn't know anyone who was 'really' determined to continue in science who didn't make it as a career. I'd say that is still true. It is a tough career that doesn't pay that well (compared to other professions with equivalent training), but a rewarding one.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
So, the short version is particle physics is exactly like every other profession in today economy?
The aim of Physics should not be to become an tenured professor, endless publishing in a very dodgy field, but doing it because its easy papers. What a waste. As much as a waste as working on wall st (telling people how to move money) or Google (getting people to click ads).
The aim of Physics is to teach the other primates to *THINK* and inspire. Some do that by building machines, some do that by tv shows some just grab people in the street and try to make them understand. Its not to get the nobel prize, or a tenured job or any shit like that.
Albert said his backup career was to teach high school science. Personally I think it should be the backup career of every physicist to teach high school physics. I think every physicist should do it like compulsory military service. Say 3 years during the early part of your career. As a professor, most uni's have teaching loads so learn how to teach damit.
Physics is dying. Less than 10% of the people teaching physics have any 3rd year physics units. Even less are Physics graduated. Its taught by PE teachers, librarians or anyone who there is currently excess supply of. People think that physics isn't important, or real or something they should know about.
We should be pumping physicists out into our societies. They are adaptable. Tesla was a labourer, Fermi could fix cars, Newton ran the mint and made one hell of an investigator. Everywhere physicists go they revolutionise or advance other fields. Because those fields are so childishly simplistic and usually not based on logic or reason. Physicists make great managers. Look at the LHC or the Manhattan project, can you imagine a team of 10,000 history/management/business/accounting professors managing and working together? Do you think they would get together and make something that changes the world socially, politically, economically? Its in our nature to collaborate, to link up to cross over into other fields. Physicists win prizes outside their field (chem, bio, economics) like its nothing.
Damit, the problem is no one is seeing the real problem, which is pumping physicists into the general population. I have a team of ~10 physicists (degree level) working under me. Its great. They are prolific about their work, they work hard, they collaborate, they rarely make mistakes, they pioneer or develop new technologies into the workplace and share everything they know with anyone who is interested. All highly capable mathematicians, communicators and problem solvers, particularly outside of their field.
If we're going to open our doors to foreign technology workers, it shouldn't be because some technology or pharma executive wrote an editorial in the WSJ.
Well, said... As someone moving to SF on an H1B next month, I'm usually pro the H1B program :) :)
:)
But I do want to point out that not everybody abuses the H1B program.
I'm not relocation from a third world country, or to work at a third world salary, in fact could get similar wage here... actually I could just do job remotely.
Or get a well paying job at a company here... but the job wouldn't be as fun
I think mobility is important for many reasons, in my considerations are things such as SF having a lot of tech companies, startups and etc...
I don't know if I'll apply for a permanent visa at some point, but if I move back the contacts I'll be making will be invaluable, on both ends.
At the end of the day, if you don't let tech workers from around the world in, tech workers from around the globe will cluster in another valley.
Note. with all the NSA scandals, lack of welfare, poor security, crime, human rights violations, war crimes, etc. that the US has got going, I'm starting to wonder why I'm relocation.
On the other hand, I did all the paper pushing... So I might as well try it out
Anyways, feel free to tell me why the US is so awesome, I kinda need it...
Why not use changes in technology to help support research?
Use crowdfunding to get started maybe?
Document and publish via youtube etc. for advertising revenue. The cooler the videos, the more revenue.
Use the GPL so that everyone has access to the research, rather than having it restricted to traditional avenues.
Think about how awesome the videos could be for things like plasma physics...what kinds of useful tech could be done in a way that looks cool and has important applications? Shields to protect spaceships from cosmic radiation perhaps? Demonstrations of thrusters like VASIMR?
Maybe companies like SpaceX would want to invest in useful tech like that too?
How could communications be changed by quantum physics?
Figuring out what distances the observer effect is useful over might revolutionise communication. If the double slit experiment could be refined to the point where observation(or lack of) is used to transmit data, there might perhaps be a way around the limits imposed by the speed of light.
Just demonstrating the double slit experiment and spooky action could make for cool youtube clips.
Multiple entangled pairs of particles can be used to find the polarity of a photon before the particles have been entangled.
If weak measurement could be used to find the polarity of a particle and strong measurement used to send that as data, could there be a way of sending data back in time?
Don't you think people would be interested in crowdfunding projects to see what's possible?
Twenty years ago it was pretty clear that very few physics graduates would have a career in the field so little has changed in this regard.
You study it because it is fascinating stuff, not necessarily because you'd expect to make a living of it. Other work is financially much more rewarding, and it is fairly easy to branch out with a physics degree under your belt.
Instead of spending billions on Wall Street, the government should be supporting the sciences, by providing patronage for things like physics Phds and the like.
Much higher return methinks.
“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it. ” Richard P. Feynman
The rest of society benefits when government and society puts money into the sciences instead of financial hustles.
I graduated in '91 studying molecular beams. There was so little work in the field then, that I went into peptide chemistry. Nothing has changed, and I doubt anything will in the future. More people want to study high energy physics than can be supported in the field. Nothing new. Nothing to see here, move along......
The labor markets are saturated, and wealth is concentrating on the top. There just isn't a market for lots of labor anymore, manufacturing is increasingly automated, services like retail is becoming more automated (thanks Amazon!), so why not soak the rich and use the money to support more research instead of letting all that capital idle at the top?
This is in danger of going off topic now, but if labor markets are saturated, it's because companies can't make a higher profit by hiring more employees. If we could find a way to increase the profitability of these companies and/or to reduce the cost of hiring more employees, then the companies would hire more people. Labor markets would become saturated at a higher level of employment. More profits would be earned, and, all other things being equal, the society would be wealthier and be more able to fund pure scientific research.
Labor costs could be reduced without any wage or salary changes by cutting the costs of liability and regulatory compliance. Beyond that, various taxes could also be cut. Profitability could be increased through similar changes -- especially by cutting the US corporate tax rates from the world's highest to a rate more in line with international norms. If we want (the benefits of) a wealthier society, we should think about these and other ways our society can be wealthier.
"Soak the rich" produces the opposite of higher profitability. Profits -- or the benefits of profits -- are enjoyed after taxes. If a rich person can't enjoy the benefits of higher profits, he won't bother to produce anything beyond some minimum level and he certainly won't burden himself with unprofitable employees. When he cuts his investments in response to being "soaked", you'll have a poorer society with fewer people employed. That society might be able to spend a few extra dollars on pure research for a few years, but then the money will be gone and there will be none to replace it.
How about we fund a "research class" instead of a "leisure class"?
Do you include all the people who are retired but still physically able to work in your "leisure class"? They certainly enjoy their leisure. Do you think we should cut subsidies for this leisure and use some of the money to fund more research?
That we have: rich owners of robotized factories. The benefits of this robotization should fall on all the members of society, not only the few that possess the factories.
What the hell did you ever do to think that you deserve any of the "benefits"? You priced your labor (through the unions) to an unsustainable level; you threatened profitability with work slowdowns and strikes; you supported the lazy assholes who did just enough to get by and never tried to push for more productivity - any wonder that management went to the expense (and it is LARGE) and trouble of implementing "robotized factories"? And for doing nothing (and worse) you now feel that you should be entitled to the benefits?
You do and have done nothing to increase value for the shareholders (you know, the people that own the company) , but you want more - typical union mentality.
Just remember: if it is poorly made of inferior materials. outrageously overpriced, and fails to fulfill its designed function - it's union made in America!
Most retirees worked for their benefits. They may be non-workers now, but while they worked they paid taxes into a retirement system and often accumulated their own capital in addition.
The fact that the government frittered away their contribution is not their fault.
The capital they accumulated should be and even sometimes is an important source of accumulated wealth that is invested into the economy. When it isn't, it's another government screw-up.
I don't see why I should cry for these guys any more than I should cry for the millions of athletically gifted sacks who discover that they won't be playing professional sports for a living. The worldwide number of professional athletes and professional particle physicists seem comparable and the physicists don't have the jocks' excuse of being bad at math.
Labor costs could be reduced without any wage or salary changes by cutting the costs of liability and regulatory compliance. Beyond that, various taxes could also be cut. Profitability could be increased through similar changes -- especially by cutting the US corporate tax rates from the world's highest to a rate more in line with international norms. If we want (the benefits of) a wealthier society, we should think about these and other ways our society can be wealthier.
Umm not. Labor costs are not particularly affected by regulation and liability. Nor are they affected by taxation. It is only corporate profitability that is affected. Which is already at an all time high. Corporations don't need to be more profitable to hire people. Corporate cash accounts are at all time highs.
The reason we have a labor glut? Demand is down and worker productivity is extremely high. So we have record low labor force participation. Unemployed people consume lots less than employed people.
Do you know who else consumes relatively little (as a proportion of their income)? Very rich people.
What do we have in the US right now? A real crappy distribution of income. A shrinking and lower income middle class. Until the consumer class starts growing again demand will stay low and along with it labor force participation.
This should be no surprise, since these positions are for pure scientific research with no way to calculate the ROI for the money spent. Countries have debt problems caused by borrowing and their budgets are already stretched to pay benefits for retirees and other non-workers. Add a long recession, a weak recovery, and very little prospect for robust future economic growth, and ultimately you don't end up with the sort of fiscal environment that can support lots of pure research.
Wealthy societies have discretionary funds for things like pure scientific research. Poor societies have to struggle just to get by. If you want more pure research, you need more people in your society to be employed productively. And you need them to generate lots of wealth -- far beyond "the amount they need" or "their fair share" -- so there will be a lot extra left over for things like pure research.
When you're doing basic research, you must figure on the ROI of your research being possibly zero. There's always a chance that what you're doing will pay off for society at some point in a big way, but the fact is most basic research doesn't. Most of it is exploring blind alleys and some of it has negative impacts so devastating that they may offset the value of a great deal of research. So yes, it's the province of wealthy countries who can afford to spend a good deal of effort on something that may not ever pay off.
High energy particle physics in particlar has no foreseeable prospect of ever paying off from this point forward.
I'm kind of at a loss - there is nothing new here. HEP has always been a case of large numbers of grad students and post docs working on the cheap at the accelerator labs. There might be a bit of surplus from a rush in the years leading up to the LHC startup after a lull while it was built - and certainly the more complex detectors require more staff. And the Tevatron is now closed, though that was wound down over a number of years. But I think if one could get the figures, the employment in HEP at both the labs and at universities (often times at both) has been more or less constant since the early 1980s. And many of the grad students only work in the HEP field for a small time, leaving for related disciplines or someting at a tangent, like Wall St.
Finally, any one at entry level in HEP with the thought of making it their eventual career who has not considered at least one or two alternatives to fall back upon really has done themself a great diservice and clearly has not really looked at the history of supply/demand in the field. Sorry, I just can't drum up sympathy for this group.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/182889/
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/04/05/1522215/getting-a-literature-phd-will-make-you-into-a-horrible-person
http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/bioforum/1997-December/025426.html
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I wish I knew where all of these out of work physicists are. I need one to design a klystron or gyrotron for me.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
My post wasn't about whose fault anything is. Saying "it's not my fault" doesn't make problems go away, nor does it make money appear. We have problems. Retirees are part of "we". Retirees should try to help solve the problems we have.
To bring the discussion back on topic: retirees should try to help make their society wealthier if they want their society to be able to fund pure research. Retirees might want to try producing more or using up less.
If you don't think labor costs are affected by taxation, you've never seen a paycheck.
Besides that, you have a lot of complaints. Do you have any ideas?
.. is that they can end up being successful, at which point they end.
In the decades leading up to the Napoleonic wars, Great Brittian had a continously growing navy, They built ships at a crazy rate, and were very successful capturing enemy ships and re-flagging them as Brittish war ships. They took in huge numbers of young educated gentlemen as midshipmen, (at age 12 or so) who later became lieutenants, and the leading edge of that Ponzi scheme made it to Commander and Captain. Once made captain, they were tenured and moved up to flag-rank on a purely seniority basis.
This was a great career as long as Napolean was around as a threat. But the day he was defeated, the whole Navy career Ponzi scheme came crashing down. The fleet shrank, so there were no posts. Admirals, competent or not, sane or not, hung onto their posts like grimm death. It about killed the navy. Many a bright lieutenant never saw blue water again, at least in a King's ship.
So, anyway, we've seen this movie before. Too many Captains, not enough ships, is the same problem as too many PhD's, not enough gigantanic, multi-national particle accelerators.
Wait, so you're saying that if I go into the rarified field of theoretical particle physics, it's going to be hard to find a job? Crazy! I'm going to change my degree to Historical Russian Literature, that's much more market-attractive in an everyday sense.
-Styopa
Oh come on. Labor costs have nothing to do with the taxes you see on a paycheck. Those are the taxes that the employee pays, not the employer.
As far as ideas, sure, here's a few.
How about fixing the minimum wage? The value of the minimum wage has not at all kept up with inflation. In countries like Australia it's at $15. Accounting for inflation the US min wage is half what it was when first introduced.
A really stupid American idea is tying health care to employment. It should be a single payer system. The US cost per cap cost for health care is essentially twice that of any other nation because of the wasteful processes we have. Get rid of that cost and there will be far greater funds available for good old consumption.
Another idea is to cut back on defense spending and use the money for infrastructure. Defense buys expensive toys that do little for employment or the economy while infrastructure would do a lot.
Another is to cut the BS with education. We have large swaths of the population basically uneducated. If you want to cut regulations THAT'S the place.
Congress seriously needs reform. They cater to much to entrenched interests. Term limits would be a huge step forward.
I am 27 years into a high energy physics career and currently hold a research scientist position at a large state university that is a member of the ATLAS collaboration. My position is a a technical one involving detector simulation software for one of the ATLAS particle detectors and Grid computing. Along the way to where I am, I rented a house for half a year in De Soto Texas after accepting a position at the SSC which was promptly canceled the next month. I almost was forced out of the field at that point but my friends helped me greatly and it turned out that ATLAS was using the same kind of particle detectors that we had been developing for the SDC detector at SSC. I hung on. I have been paid more than enough to live a reasonable life style though far less than I would have been paid to be a quant or a commercial software developer. I had a lot of sleepless nights worrying about my support but in the end I was still there when the Higgs(-like) boson was discovered. Was all of the stress from being on a soft funded position worth it? To me you bet it was - I got to be part of one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history. I was not a leader or a key player but I was there. Would everyone come to the conclusion? Of course not! I deal with an enormous number of unbelievably talented under grads, grads, and post docs and all of them are sweating the issues that Jim Austin so well crystallizes in this post. However, I guess that nearly all of them are proud to be part of the team drawn from all over the world that did this thing. As has happened several times in my career, this year my support was greatly reduced and I am scrambling for support and still working hard to support the continuing operation of ATLAS. It sucks but still I happy to go to work every day knowing that when I come home, I spent my day doing something meaningful that supports scientific research that will be part of human history instead of some sort of mathematics to make a buck. I fully realize that not everyone would be willing to make this compromise to be there when the discovery was made but I am sure glad I did. I hope that as many as possible of those very talented young people stay in the field. The world does not need more quants but understanding the basic principles of the universe is a truly worthwhile pursuit.
This country wants cheap labor - not skilled scientists, the lies are told to keep grad-students (slaves) in the pipeline that work long hours for no wages. Then they graduate to a job at McDonald's. You are MUCH better off getting a BS and out - everything else is a waste of time, effort, and money.
I like how you said "labor costs are not particularly affected by regulation" and then, in your very next post, you mention the minimum wage and health care, both of which are highly regulated and impose costs on employers for each employee hired.
Oh come on. Labor costs have nothing to do with the taxes you see on a paycheck. Those are the taxes that the employee pays, not the employer.
In addition to all the taxes deducted from the gross pay on a paycheck, employers in the US pay 6.2% FICA tax, 1.45% Medicare tax, FUTA tax, ACA tax for each employee with a health plan, ACA fines for each employee without a health plan, worker's comp, unemployment tax, and other local and state taxes like the Employment Training Tax in California. Employers also have lots of expensive rules to follow. Cutting some of these taxes and eliminating some of these rules would make it less costly (and therefore more profitable) to hire someone, with no change in the employee's gross or net pay. If we want more people hired, we might want to seriously think about it.
Lots of the rest of your post is good.
I'm not sure why you want to deny everyone who can't (or doesn't want to) do $15 worth of work in a hour the opportunity to earn a paycheck though. You might want to consider that some more. Every high school student n the country shouldn't be deprived of a job just because one person has a sob story about "How am I supposed to support my 3 kids on $8.75/hour?"
(*fellow loser with graduate degree in physics*)
Shhhh! No tears! Only $oftware engineering, now! LOL!
Ka-chinggggg!!!!
I can't find a single post that suggests the apparent lack of career opportunities means anything fundamental is going on in particle physics. I disagree: I think there is a fundamental issue, and it's quite simple. Particle physics appears to be played out. Nobody has discovered anything of fundamental significance in decades. Read Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble with Physics." It's years old now, and nothing has changed. The book details deep and fundamental questions that had been posed and well-understood for very, very long periods of time and bemoans the lack of progress. This has only gotten worse in the intervening 10 years or so. It's expensive to do experimental particle physics. So if 30 years go by with no fundamentally interesting results, people are going to stop funding it and use the money to fund something else. We're not talking about a "show results by next quarter" kind of mentality - don't even go there. We're talking about multiple decades of relatively unproductive but highly expensive research. These folks did string theory for an entire human generation and it came to nothing. Jeez. Move along. Nothing to see here.
This is hardly news. It has been going on for at least 20 years now, in all fields of science, at least where I live.
Up until the 70s, early 80s, universities had ample funding and a growing number of students, and could uptake quite a few of their grads to fulfill the needed associate professorships. Now, funding is down, the student population is more or less stabilized, and university councils prefer to have one or two professors managing and planning, while PhDs and postdocs teach and do the bulk of the research. When a PhD or a postdoc fails to apply for Yet Another Grant, (s)he has to go. When a postdoc gets enough grants, projects, etc., (s)he might get onto a tenure track. It also helps when the postdoc's supervising professor has a certain status.
Universities are like Napoleon: they don't want any general, they want the lucky ones.
What is being described here is merely the normal situation in almost all of academia. A dedicated and productive professor can churn out 1 or more PhD students per year, while certainly a PhD student per 3 years is easy to do. A professorship lasts on average, say, 30 years. that means there will be 10 to 30 PhDs per professor position. Every one of those PhDs is competing with his extremely qualified, smart and competent fellow PhDs, making for an impossible job market. The only way to have a reasonable job market in academia is during periods of growth, where new professor positions are added. During periods of decreasing funding, such as these days with the poor economy, things get even worse. It's got nothing to do with particle physics in particular.
This is all an inevitable consequence of the fact that each professor position can churn out a new person per year who wants a professorship too. The horrible academic job market then, also inevitably, lead to working conditions and salaries that are very poor compared to the level of qualifications needed. The people who luck out and become professors usually really want to do research, but they often find that their schedules have been packed with 40 hours of teaching and administrative duties - churning out those PhDs and other students take a lot of effort. So they worked very hard to do research and then, in effect, they only get to do that research in their free time. In this way, most professorship positions aren't really even research positions at all.
In short, if you are getting a PhD to have a successful research scientist career as a professor, your plans are not much more realistic than having a plan to be a successful movie star. You must have a plan B. If you plan things right, you'll have a fallback position in some part of industry where people like you are highly in demand, and then you'll have a very pleasant surprise when you transition from looking for academic jobs to looking for industry jobs. I certainly did. I tripled my salary as well.
Instead of spending trillions on pointless wars how about we divert some of that vast waste to employing these people to come up with improvements to society such as getting a working fusion reactor. I can't believe that the deaths of millions and the immense cost is never on the radar but scientists doing work that is unprofitable now catches hell from the commentators for "waste of taxpayer dollars/euros/pounds".
There is an idea that popularising particle physics and astronomy encourages young people to be interested in careers in science. What it actually does is encourage young people to be interested in careers in particle physics and astronomy. The result is a glut of specialists in those particular areas while other disciplines are starved of good people. Those offering posts in other areas of physics find it hard to get good candidates in their field and sometimes have to hire and re-train specialists from these popular areas (if they are prepared to take the job in the first place).
Some of these PHDs must have interesting transferable skills.
The huge amount of data pumped out of the LHC requires some pretty heavy duty data collection, storage and processing to get at it. And in the world of exadata some of those skills should be transferable.
Of course there is the instrument design aspects that have applications outside high energy physics.
And finally there is just the high level maths skills that will get you can apply in lots of jobs.
it is pure manipulative applied organisatinal psychology and management to minimise costs (young famililess people are without pension plans are far cheaper):
This policy, which leaves the staff member in the unknown for almost five years concerning the possibility of obtaining an IC, ensures too great a flexibility to the Organization and imposes too much precariousness and insecurity on the staff.
http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-contract-policy
But as others have pointed out, it is scamming the young from the beginning, has nothing to do with your scientific skills:
"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper
And no, these skills are not transferable: when you get your "new possibilitiy", you start from scratch, as a novice. You might as well invest your youth in the "other possibility" to begin with.
PHD Comics: Beware the Profzi Scheme: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144
Labor costs are not particularly affected by regulation and liability. Nor are they affected by taxation.
US workers are roughly 7% more expensive to employers because of Social Security taxes that the employers pay directly to Uncle Sam. As to the other usual income taxes, if those went down, the benefit would be shared between employer and employee because employment is a competitive market.
Labor costs are not particularly affected by regulation and liability.
Except that those things cost a lot especially for a small business. Even when regulation doesn't apply directly to labor, it can still cost money and hence, steal funds that a business could have used to employ people instead.
And there are a bunch of developed world government policies that deliberately constrict labor force participation. For example, in the US, we have subsidized student loans (encouraging people to go to school rather than get a job), prison (highest incarceration rates in the developed world), indefinite unemployment insurance payouts, disability, and Social Security payments (encouraging people to retire at a fixed age).
That results in lower supply of labor and higher costs for who does get hired. It also means yet another considerable incentive for US businesses to find ways to avoid employing people.
And all along you've been ignoring the elephant in the room, cheap global labor. Even with the relative decline in real wages of the developed world versus the developing world, it remains that a lot of jobs don't make sense to do in the developed world. If your labor is the sole source of your wealth and its value declines because there's so much more of it, then you will see a decline in your wealth.
Lots of people are employed. They just aren't getting employed in the developed world.
Unemployed people consume lots less than employed people.
[...]
Until the consumer class starts growing again demand will stay low and along with it labor force participation.
Wealth is not consumption. Short term economic activity need not lead to long term economic growth. We don't need a "consumer class", much less a growing one.
How about fixing the minimum wage? The value of the minimum wage has not at all kept up with inflation. In countries like Australia it's at $15. Accounting for inflation the US min wage is half what it was when first introduced.
So we "fix" labor issues by making it even more expensive to employ people? The problem with your proposal is that it fixes minimum wage in the wrong direction. Low labor force participation means we need to lower minimum wage not raise it.
"The World needs ditch diggers too"
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I've noted that here in Canada. In fact the engineers have managed to set up their own medieval guild structure so that, by law, you cannot have a physicist do certain jobs which they are more qualified to do than engineers e.g. teach physics! At one point they were even trying to get laws passed so that only engineers could work in any team designing ANY electronic circuit - fortunately that failed.
However if you get away from the pure engineering jobs and start to look at R&D or even in finance and you'll see lots of physicists. The data mining you do for particle physics coupled with the logical investigative/inference skills and a good understanding of large computer systems is extremely useful for mining financial data and making predictions. I know many colleagues who have left particle physics for the finance sector. Likewise R&D often requires that you know how things work which is where physicists often have the edge on engineers - although you'll undoubtedly be work with engineers to build things. This is a very similar model to physics research and again I've seen many colleagues take this route too. While the job crunch in particle physics is very severe at the moment if you look at the overall employment rate of physicists it is extremely high partly because a physics degree is so flexible.
First, take all the unemployed grads and divide them into two teams. Then, rent an Olympic track. Start the two teams running in opposite directions around the track, with one team taking the inside lanes and one team taking the outside ones. Half way through the race, you make them change from outside to inside and vice versa right at the start/finish line.
The results should produce interesting, previously-unknown kinds of employees, perhaps with unusual or exotic skills.
Just a thought...
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
It's not a surprise that there's little money, the problem is that the postdoc to potential permanent position ratio is dramatically large (also for Ph.D. to postdoc, but it's not clear what proportion of the Ph.D. students actually plan/want to stay in Physics; most postdocs probably do). The way the small amount of money is spent right now may actually be best for science (most manpower), but isn't a good deal for the postdocs. This should, at the very least, be made clearer to them. A better solution would be to close the door early, and have a saner ratio.
Full disclosure: not a bitter postdoc, I made it to a (assistant) Professorship, then decided to leave for industry.
If one pays any attention to demographics, then it is apparent that it is plain impossible that all PhD are employed in academics. Some have to go somewhere else.
Second, many new scientific discovery are made in such ultra advanced labs. For example Monte Carlo methods were invented for the H bomb. In order for those to diffuse in the rest of society, some of the students have to go somewhere else. Seminars or books are hardly sufficient. Of course, it is sad to see so many physicists going to Wall Street, but that merely reflects the priorities of our society.
The real problem (pointed out by the article) is the expectations of the student and what he was promised by his advisor. Employement in academia tends to evolve by waves and generations having good prospects tend to misunderstand completely newer generations. But that is not specific to academia.
Still think it was a good idea for Congress to cancel the Superconducting Supercollider?
Such a low wage would be unacceptable unless you supplement it with welfare, $1000 per month no string attached would be about decent if you want people to live in a society with no minimum wage, fire at will etc. ; don't forget the Medicare equivalent, too.
Are you the fucktard willing to work for peanuts, or the hypocrite suggesting everyone else should?
Such a low wage would be unacceptable unless you supplement it with welfare
While I'm willing to accept some degree of welfare, it's worth noting that what is unacceptable now will probably become acceptable in the next few decades unless something is done to reverse this ongoing decline.
Your $1000 per month welfare supplement, no strings attached over 310 million people (the population of the US) is roughly 3.8 trillion dollars of welfare a year - more than the US currently spends on everything including mandatory spending.
Who is paying for that? Even if we throw away everything else, we still need to come up with about 1.3-1.4 trillion US to make up that shortfall (on 2012 tax revenue of roughly 2.45 trillion). That's more than a 50% increase over current federal taxes, including every way they gather income. That's also almost a quarter of GDP. I don't think it's remotely sustainable.
And now you've redirected even more revenue away from the people who employ other people and given it to people who don't do those things.
Well, I'm not asking dishonest loaded questions. That's good enough for me.
The situation in particle physics is nothing new. When I finished my PhD in 1996, the situation was exactly the same, though I was lucky enough to land a post doctoral position at SLAC. The competition is, of course, much worse when you start looking at faculty jobs. I gave up and went to Silicon Valley.
The comments that people have made about companies not wanting to hire particle physicists are just wrong. Particle physicists bring many skills to the table, depending on the background of the individual. Analytical skills and error analysis are places where physicists are often much superior to engineers. In my case, I also had a strong background in embedded software, which helped me a great deal in finding jobs.