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Is a Postdoc Worth it?
Jim_Austin writes "In a very funny column, Adam Ruben reviews the disadvantages and, well, the disadvantages of doing a postdoc, noting that 'The term "postdoc" refers both to the position and to the person who occupies it. (In this sense, it's much like the term "bar mitzvah.") So you can be a postdoc, but you can also do a postdoc.'"
If grad school has at best a questionable return, how could a postdoc - indentured servitude, slavery - be any better an idea?
The exceptional at anything will do fine, including academics. By definition, odds are you're not exceptional in a given talent pool, even one that's two or three deviations out.
Have a concrete plan to feed yourself. Or save the schooling for retirement, after you've saved up enough to live on. Digging yourself a hundred thousand dollar hole isn't a great idea right out of the gate.
Academics used to be the playground of the elite (and the exceptional, with a patron). That's been forgotten..
..don't panic
Unfortunately, for my field, a postdoc is required for just about everything outside of industry. Even teaching position at community colleges want postdoc. And since there is a flood of people with them already, they can be picky and get them.
To me, the increasing use of them is a sign of oversupply of interested people and not enough 'real' jobs for them. We are beginning to see very long postdoc times (during which the postdoc isn't actually rolling in money...)
if you know what I mean.
"Despite its masculine undertones, the term "postdoctoral fellow" is actually gender-neutral. This has led to much confusion when female doctoral students have told their friends or family, "I’m planning to become a fellow."
I did a postdoc. After several 3 month contracts I started looking a bit more broadly (was in bioinformatics/statistics). By chance I saw a job for a street light bulb changer. They got a 3 year contract, a couple of percent more pay and about 20 days per year more holiday. So I went into SEO for remortgage websites and tripled my salary.
My post-doc was the most grueling and difficult thing I've ever done. Two and a half years of crushingly long days, hard deadlines and uncertain future. I guess I got my faculty job out of it (and traded up to the same thing again for another 5 years before tenure review)... so I guess it's worth it?
Now I'm left wondering if tenure is even worth the struggle at the end. Bear in mind, tenure in Australia is not a "secure job for life" as people in the US seem to think it is. We're actually having a lot of difficulty convincing newly minted grads to come and do PhDs when they see all the junior faculty are deeply bitter, cynical and exhausted. But hey, I build robots for a living, so I tell myself when I see those same grads getting jobs that pay more than mine does with zero years experience..
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
When I graduated with my CS PhD back in the early 2000's, I couldn't find a single job due to some combination of the dot-com bust and my being not ready for industry. I was lucky enough to get a postdoc position with IBM Research. The salary was average (only $95K/year) compared to software engineers, but the experience was great. My manager hid all politics from me, and I wasn't subject to the rigors of performance reviews. Ten years later, I've had a relatively decent career, and having IBM Research on my resume sure does look good.
No.
(Brought to you by a postdoc.)
Phd in French Lit - worthless Phd in chemistry - worth it!!! You do the math!
Now I can understand wanting to be lesbian, to an extent, but gay? Why would you want that?
We're actually having a lot of difficulty convincing newly minted grads to come and do PhDs when they see all the junior faculty are deeply bitter, cynical and exhausted.
Well, the perk of banging undergrads now gets you fired.
WTF is the point in doing ANY uni level teaching anymore?
Life sucks! The richer get richer. The World economy is going to shit! And college professors can't bang co-eds anymore!
I'm going to write a Russian style novel now - a thousand pages - all handwritten!
And then die knowing some poor poor fucking high school or undergrad student will have to read the fucking thing and look for all the symbolism and BS. I'm gonna go out of my way make all the "symbolism" be based on some Aztecan God!
Ahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Postdocs aren't all bad. I'm convinced that the issue with academia is that everyone thinks they are outstanding. As a result, postdocs that have a rough time of it blame the postdoc, not themselves. In other words, I made a decent wage and had normal hours. YMMV.
The people going the post-doc route either hoped to become faculty at a University somewhere, or were foreign nationals who needed a green card, and the universities were the only ones willing to do the paperwork. Then again, sometimes the Universities would string the post-doc along and only put in a half-hearted effort on the green card.
He was a Ph.D, taught at University of Arkansas. Told me it definitely depended on the field, and that even a Doctorate in some fields (Business) was considered a bit questionable. But he said the number of people who get postdoc's is based on the number of people who A=(can't figure out what they want to do) + B=(can't find a job), more than C=(fields that need post-doctorates). So I looked at my dad, and quit at a Masters.
Gently reply
There was an interesting editorial in Nature back in 2005 commenting on how postdocs earn barely more than a janitor at Harvard.
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v37/n7/full/ng0705-653.html
With the economy having gone south and the inevitable funding cuts that has brought about, the situation is even worse now.
I moved halfway around the world for my postdoc (from Australia to the US), for a job that pays approximately half what I'd get in Australia. (Postdocs in the US are paid far less than Postdocs in Australia. Maybe that's why there are so many Postdocs in the US. They can hire more of them for the same amount of money.)
Sometimes, I do wonder what I'm doing here. And then I remember how I have a job that I absolutely love. That I can go home every evening looking forward to going to work the next day. And when I am reminded of that, I think how incredibly lucky I am to be doing what I'm doing. And if I have to accept lower pay and the lack of job stability as a trade-off, I am perfectly willing to do so.
This doesn't mean that I think Postdocs are getting a great deal, of course. We know we aren't. But we never got into this profession for the money anyway.
Knowing all that I know now, would I still have gone through all those years of grad school and gotten my PhD and moved halfway around the planet for a postdoc? Was it all worth it? I believe I'd say yes.
Think of it as a year-long or two-year-long work contract. That's it. It's a way to get some experience, put food on the table, and figure out what the hell you are going to do when it ends. In my case it was 4 years of employment in a series of contracts before getting a "real job" elsewhere with some permanence to it. I enjoyed my time as a postdoc, but when other opportunities came up, I gave them my notice and left.
The article is sarcastic and funny mainly because some people put in all those years of effort and mistakenly think a PhD or postdoc magically "graduates" into a real professor position eventually. Nope. You're entirely on your own to figure out how to make that happen, if ever. But after ~10 years of post-secondary education you better be able to take on a career challenge like that or you are guaranteeing you will be one of those 6/7ths that don't go on to be a professor. It's a tough path. It does work sometimes, but you have to focus on making your CV stand out from the others. A postdoc gives you time to do that if you are well-motivated and organized. The worst is if you are so intensely devoted to the short-term tasks of your degree and postdoc that you don't think about the longer-term goal and how to build towards it. You should be thinking about employment all the way through, otherwise you're in for a big shock at the end.
I'm doing a postdoc right now, and while I don't mind the 60 hour weeks, the uncertainty is what gets at me. After a long education one basically becomes a vagabond, drifting from university to university, never knowing where one will be working in 3 years' time. And the last year of each postdoc is spent writing applications for other places. In my home country, there are 1-2 available permanent positions every decade or so in my field, each of which typically has more than 100 applicants from all over the world. Getting one of those is pretty unlikely, to put it mildly. So I'll have to choose between permanently moving far away from friends and family, or leave my field of research. Unless I'm better than all the 100+ other applicants.
The postdoc situation is a symptom of there beeing too little resources invested in science compared to the number of people who want to do science. Instead, society is investing resources in things like moving imagniary money around really fast (yes, high frequency trading and other finance is a big employer of drop-outs from my field - they can emply more people, and pay much higher salaries, despite their detrimental effect on society). Yes, I am a bit bitter.
When I was younger, I wanted to go into academia. The idea of devoting a lifetime to pushing back the boundaries of science, even if only in some small way, appealed to me.
Looking back on it, and hearing the stories, I wonder why I ever thought it was a good idea. (Ignoring the fact that I'm far too stupid to qualify anyway.) Why do people do this to themselves?
If you are asking /. you might not be convinced, or worse, not passionate about it.
What other thing you desire or better yet, you really need, can be attained with the same amount of money, time and sacrifice that you'd pour in a postdoc?
Most people do not realize there's better ways to invest in time, money and sacrifice.
Some need to pay for the education and be chased with deadlines to learn and/or get something done.
If you must go for formal education, I personally find more benefit in studying something new I don't have a remote clue about.
Unfortunately you can rately "do a postdoc" as they tend to be too preoccupied with their research to engage in fornication.
Long article to say: postdoc is a lot of work for low pay and iffy career prospects.
Well duh.
On the flip side, if you are doing it, chances are "a lot of work" is a plus not a minus. As Aldous Huxley said: "An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex." Yes, the pay is low but you get to use someone else's money to fund your research. If you want to worry about science and not administrative issues then postdoc days are the golden days.
If you like crippling debt and no better chances at employment. If you are going into the education field and hope to become a tenured professor, then you need to do it. Otherwise it's just pissing away your money and time.
Even to become one of NASA's top scientists you dont need it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I had a cousin who was a genius, at least in chemistry. After he got his BS in chemistry, he went into the army where he was assigned to the chemical weapons area. He was so knowledgeable in chemistry (started with a chemistry set during grade school) that everywhere he went, he had to have two marines carrying 45s protecting him. After his 4 years, he went back the college to get a masters and doctorate in chemistry. He was then recruited by Stanford University to teach chemistry. He then got a post doctorate, then a post post doctorate, and I think a post post post doctorate in chemistry. He knew so much more than all of his professors that he continuously encountered jealously and hatred from them. They stuck him into a room running some kind of machine. He was said to be rather upset at this because is was monotonous and boring work. He was supposed to get a professorship several times, but the jealously of the other professors prevented this from ever happening. I was surprised to discover on the web that he had died at the age of 50. He had apparently been on SSI disability, so I am guessing that his work in the army chemical weapons area caused him to get cancer or some other deadly disease.
All his education was basically for nothing, except for his own need and personal satisfaction.
he term "postdoc" refers both to the position and to the person who occupies it. (In this sense, it's much like the term "bar mitzvah.")
I've been Jewish for a long time -- since before I was born -- and I've never heard of the Bar Mitzvah (or Bat Mitzvah) celebrant called a "Bar Mitzvah". Usually we say "Bar Mitzvah boy" or "Bat Mitzvah girl", or something similar.
I'm not strictly observant, but I think I would have heard that usage by now ...
I recently finished a book where the author analyzes the entire process of getting a PhD in physics. For various reasons, it's not at all worthwhile. You will never be in a position to realize your dream of doing interesting research or becoming a professor. I'll let others describe the various problems, but they're fairly self-evident.
So let's think out of the box. Is there a way to do interesting research without the PhD?
It turns out there's a ton of interesting things being done by home experimentation nowadays. Actually, this used to be common - a gentleman scientist was someone with an independent income who tinkered with home research. Many had quite elaborate laboratories and discovered useful things.
If you want to be a researcher, you could approach the problem intellectually. Establish a steady income from which you can support yourself and family, allocate some time and money to setting up a lab, and do your own research.
Ben Krasnow built an electron microscope (!), and is experimenting with vapor-phase deposition of conductive traces. Robert Murray Smith makes graphene and conductive ink, Brad Graham built a rock disaggregator (which is, incidentally, totally frightening), Lindsay Wilson built an untrasonic drill, Timothy Ferriss is scientifically studying of nutrition, I am trying to detect dark matter (no link - sorry)
Lots of people are doing interesting research at home with a modest budget. If you can give up the big questions (Higgs Boson, Penicillin replacement, Egyptian archaeology), there's a wide swath of interesting areas just waiting to be explored.
Use your own judgement. If she's your wife, then 100% yes!
Graduate students in STEM fields typically do not accumulate student loan debt from grad school. In fact, many STEM U.S. grad students work and get paid as TAs or as RAs (research assistants). From talking to dozens of other CS PhDs, the pay is about 23K/year (which is about what I got). That amount is enough to get by when you're a PhD student.
I don't know or understand all the negativity regarding doing a postdoc or a PhD - I personally am having a blast doing my PhD! I do research in materials science, and while the money is not spectacular, I enjoy myself immensely. And you know, at the end of the day that's really what matters. Maybe the ones who complain are doing postdocs in economics, political or social sciences, humanities... or some other subject that to me does indeed sound boring... I don't know. I can only say that for me it has been rewarding and I would be more than happy to recommend it to anyone with a passion for what they study. I must mention that I have no study debt - in Finland higher education is free for all, so we don't worry about paying back tuition fees and such. Life is good :)
Most of the ones I've known (from when I was in grad school and then from when I worked at a major biotech) do postdocs in order to build their research portfolio. If you want to a faculty research (not teaching) position in science, you need publications. These require research. Research requires time and money and in this day and age, the time typically spent in grad school is not enough to do a lot of top-quality research. And, grad school time is often spent teach undergrads, doing coursework, etc - whereas postdocs can usually afford to spend all their working hours on research.
So yes, postdocs aren't paid well, but most of that is because the position itself typically funds work that the postdoc needs and *wants* to do. It's a symbiotic relationship between PI and postdoc.
There are always, of course, the stars who are good enough to get research positions straight out of grad school. I've known a few.
Post-Doc?
Hell does even a Doc worth it? Even there is a Master even worth the years of experience lost?
I guess it depend of the career.
Elok
When the economy gets hot, and you ditch mesh generation altogether and jump to computational electromagnetics. While doing the jump be careful not to collide with the Computational electromagnetics PhD jumping to mesh generation ;-)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I did 4 years of Postdoc (in Japan). It was fun, in Japan the payment for Postdocs is ok, and i worked in a field i liked to work in since i was 16years old. I contributed to some publications (10 Impact points per year) and did some really nice experiments. To me it felt like playing with the most expensive lego bricks which i ever was allowed to play with. I had the priviledge to see parts of the world which i would not have dramt about when before my masters thesis. I met some interesting, peculiar, and exceptional people (coauthors from ~12 nationalities).
OTOH, it was hard work (>80h per week average, in critical times >400h/month), strange habits, uncertainity, and a lack of decent positions after it.
I got out of it, to a technical consulting company. I earn less than the people who started 10 years younger, but somehow doing a phd/postdoc kept me young and agile. I am now more or less resistant to stress (did not feel it since i started the job), am used to pick up new things at a high pace.
I can only say: i did it, it was fun and broadened my view. My PhD and postdoc thought me that persistence in following something you want to do leads to success. I managed to get rid of my attenton span problems. I quit as postdoc when it stopped being fun and when i did not see decent positions around, i left science. I dont regret having done my postdoc, i did not regret for a single day leaving it.There was a time when a very different path in my life would have been very possible. I proably also would not have regret it.
Remarks: you have to have a compatible partner or risk a series of relationships. IMHO the only point where i really seen from behind could have spent some attention on. I also saw people not being able to handle the pressure. I saw people doing postdocs until they where older than 40 because they became too anxious or to incompetent in other things to leave. I saw people fuckign up their lifes for good. People not good enough to get any decend publicaitons, but valuable in the lab, hoping that the professor who kept them forever in a dependent relationship would give them the life-long position as assitant. I habe seen people growing old faster than they should and people breaking down. I have heard of people becoming so fristrated that they sabbotaged the co-workers experiments.
So my advice is: do it als long as you do it for fun. Dont get addicted.
Do a search on STEM postdoc job ads - $50k is considered very generous. No, you won't starve, some people get by on less (though usually in low cost-of-living places rather than the high CoL areas where the better universities typically are). $50k/yr is about $24/hr assuming 40 hr weeks, but that's a ridiculous assumption.
I'll agree with you that 50k is not much for someone with a STEM education. However, most people get by on less, as 50k is in the 56th percentile for incomes in America.
Lots of people are doing interesting research at home with a modest budget. If you can give up the big questions (Higgs Boson, Penicillin replacement, Egyptian archaeology), there's a wide swath of interesting areas just waiting to be explored.
But maybe not a good idea for the fields of Chemistry or Microbiology, as you may end up with a SWAT team knocking at your door.
Seriously, you need to shit or get off the pot. I know people in their 40's who are still students. Get the fuck out there into the workforce where you belong. Stop hiding from it behind an ever-increasing pile of paper.
__END__
=head1 Postdoc
Embedding Perl's Plain Old Documentation in your source as a particularly perverse take on self documenting code.
=cut
Anecdotal, but the STEM postdocs I know regret it. They went into industry, not academics. Sure they make $200k/yr plus, but they also spent ~10 years burning themselves out. Some of them are still expected to work 50-60/hrs a week. One is developing anxiety problems. One bailed on her gig (physics) and took a office job sucking up to high rollers. The other two are happy with their situation in general, but don't feel the extra pay makes up for the work they put in.
Shit, I didn't even graduate high school. Have taken some college classes here and there, not much over the 200 level. Mostly math and programming.
Including salary and some old side projects that still generate a couple grand each year (subscription based web services), I'm projecting to clear $90k this year. Now that I have my first kid though, I've been considering some offers I've had recently to bump that up over $100k/yr.
The down side is it would mean actually working most days.
If you're driven enough to reach a point where a postdoc is even an option, you can do fine without it. Unless you just HAVE to know more about nano carbon structures or whatever you study, then sure. Enjoy. If you're just planning to get a job and be a grunt, skip it.
I suppose it depends partly on your definition of science.
Take for example this post: a method for electroless copper plating which is easily in the realm of the home experimenter.
The video was not published in a journal, didn't have a write-up, and wasn't an accredited researcher - just some kid who thought things through, tried it, and it worked. I admire the presentation format - the video gives complete details of the process without a standard writeup (abstract/background/procedure/results/discussion). I think that's pretty neat. And there's no paywall. It doesn't need peer review, either.
Is it useful? I dunno. Even if this particular process is already discovered (it's not in Henley's, at least not my copy), it probably wasn't known by the kid doing it. Couple with inkjet deposition of conductive ink with poor conductivity, it might lead to a system for direct-deposit circuit boards.
Is it science? That depends on your definition.
Damn! I wish slashdot had a way to contact other users.
Drop me a note. If and when the experiment is finished (several months of data gathering) I'll let you know the results.
reolh at beddly dot com
(That's a temporary E-mail - I'll respond from a permanent address.)
and where is the benefit of even that? not much really unless you do it for yourself, that is because you like that sort of thing enough. generally i feel it rather limits the opportunities later to something really sad such a postdoc slaving for meager pay for years and years.. or go back to the industry competing with the 10+ years younger lot, what fun. course there is the odd chance to end up doing something really cool. but not too often i would say.. and btw many of them postdocs are not that hot as someone up there was thinking of 'doing' one.. :)
As a former government oversight scientist, I can also say that the minimum recommended salary for a scientist with a PhD is significantly higher than the average postdoc salary. The government has tried many methods to increase postdoc pay, but the established professors and academic administrators push the salary down. I used to work with a few guys to convince their universities to allow them (allow!) to pay the higher standard government rate for grad students and postdocs, but there is tremendous and extraordinarily depressing pressure from academia to keep those salaries low.
Many degrees, at least in the US, are no longer to benefit the students or society. The primary function of many degrees has become making a few people a whole lot of money, and those people are not the students.
College is better than K-12 mind you, but not much better. Dig into all of the various rackets involved in the systems. University of California has tons of administrative positions that pay extremely well, many of which have redundant job descriptions. A journalist did an article about a year ago in the SF area, and could not find out what most of these 200K/yr positions actually did. Book deals go to select peoples companies, not to what's best for students or for education. Granted, writing a text book is not easy. Not allowing e-books and making kids pay 200 bucks a book is simply asinine. College sports is another racket. Students may get free tuition for being an athlete but the University makes millions in Televised game deals, and receives free marketing to book.
I don't want to discount education mind you. I have read or studied something almost every day since I left college and think a well rounded education is essential. I don't have a PHD or even a Masters. Sometimes I consider going back and getting further degrees. Then I look at the costs and say "maybe after my kid gets done with College".
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Nothing's worth it. You're just gonna die eventually.
Post docs are holding positions until you get a faculty position. If you need/want to build a better research history because your PhD resulted in publication delays or issues (mine is facing issues with being able to publish when I'd like because it's a collaboration, so my publication list with the PhD is shorter than normal and a post doc would be a chance to publish the stuff from my PhD that was delayed and do some more).
But in many cases computer scientists don't need to do post docs, nor do engineers. You can get an entry level faculty position at a smaller school. If you're in physics though, you're not getting a faculty unless you've done a couple of years as a post doc because everyone else has done a post doc.
Where I am graduates about 15-20 PhD's a year, about 1-2 a year will do a post doc, the remainder end up splitting between industry-academia about 75%-25% ish, but that's comp sci. The physics programme (program, take your pick), is about 70/30 academia/industry basically all the academia ones have to do post docs.
An insightful comic: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php
I couldn't remember for the longest time, or I would have put it in the original post. It's just now come to me.
It was "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt. Reading it is 'kinda like slogging through wet cement - get it on audio tape instead.
Among the interesting bits is the story of Theodore Streleski, a mathematics grad-student who bludgeoned his faculty adviser to death with a hammer.
From the wikipedia article:
...claiming he [Streleski] felt the murder was justifiable homicide because de Leeuw had withheld departmental awards from him, demeaned Streleski in front of his peers, and refused his requests for financial support. Streleski was in his 16th year pursuing his doctorate in the mathematics department, alternating with low-paying jobs to support himself.
Sixteenth year pursuing a doctorate indeed...
Oh, most certainly you can do a postdoc. And you don't even have to be a postdoc for it :D
Anyway, on the serious side, postdoc jobs mean one thing: working for food. But, there are much worse places to do that than at some university's research lab, so at least you might be at a nice place to be exploited while you figure out a). where to go to actually make some money and then leave, or b). that you can't actually get a job where you could make money so you get stuck. Problem is when one gets to be a postdoc at 27-28 years of age - calculating with 5 years university and 3-5 years until the phd degree, which is pretty normal -, and realizing you're just starting to - eventually - earn some real money, with some friends having got to well-paying positions during those 3-5 years you've spent for that degree.
Especially since there are now companies who actually don't want to hire phd's based on some weird philosophies. Go figure.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Nobody wants a postdoc, but we all need one to further our career. You won't get hired without one.
The answer is easy
If you care about money, it is not worth it. But you probably should not have done a PhD either.
If you care about science, a postdoc is ABSOLUTELY GREAT! You will never in your scientific carreer have the opportunity to do so much work by yourself. As soon as you become a lecturer/professor/whatever equivalent your country has you will have to write grant proposals, go to conferences, teach, etc. all getting in the way of science. Given the choice (read: if I can afford it) I take a postdoc position any day above any other academic place.
When I was in grad school, I had teaching and research assistantships that covered my tuition and gave me a stipend. Unfortunately, it was only possible to pay for (choose one: health insurance (mandatory), textbooks/supplies)). Clearly you need both in order to be a grad student (at least in the early years), so the debt burden increased each year. And that doesn't include computing resources - only one of the three computers I needed as a grad student was covered by university funding, and none of the software was covered. It is entirely possible to have your tuition paid in full and receive a stipend and still leave grad school with significant debt.
My TA paid $440 a month - the union-mandated minimum. My big earning year was when I got a research assistantship and made a whole $16k!
I see a lot of comments here pointing out that uncertainty is the most demanding parameter when doing a postdoc. Well, I'm not in a position to comment on that, because despite being a few decades old, I haven't really started my acamedic career yet - allthough I'm inching my way into it, should nothing notably better come up. Mind you, this is Germany, where there's no tuition to pay and they accept you at university if you've got the grades and the track record to prove you really mean it.
However, there is one thing that I've been noticing ever since the last decade started with the first internet bubble:
Today uncertainty is everywhere, no matter what you do.
It's a simple fact, and I'm sure most of you would agree, that we are moving head on into a cyberpunk world the likes described in William Gibson and Neal Stephenson novels. Move to post-scarcity economy, peak capitalism, permantent environmental damage, constant economic and currency votality, work & travel throughout your career, constant precarious personal life, etc. It's happening all around. Regular lives of people falling apart left, right and center and those stuggling to maintain a modestly secure life feeling more and more miserable by the day in doing so, because they have to cut so many throats and compromise in to many places to even be able to. I've had 3 jobs this year, the current one with a web programming hovel with no versioning or deployment, a passive-agressive boss, 5 different main admins in 5 years and a higher turnover rate of programmers than McD's has with burger-flippers, accompanied by the according codebase. The last gig was 60+ hrs of unpaid overtime in 7 weeks, working on a project that consilidates Germanys online travel booking market by orders of magnitude and will put quite a few people out of work when the rush is over.
I'm certain we're moving into a world where acamedic rank will count less and less and even universities will be consolidated, because their cruel selection mechanisms don't guarantee a solid career anymore. And do we need them? I can get more education off Khan Academy today than I could of half of the universities in Germany 3 decades ago. For free, without moving anywhere. Those are the upsides of a cyberpunk society.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I just thought I'd share my post-doc story. Not at all bad.
Finished PhD in a STEM field. Applied for many jobs, ended up getting a visiting professorship at a military school in the US. Paid pretty decent for the time (early 2000's), probably since it was only open to US citizens. Friends were making in the $40k's, I was paid in the upper the $50k's (though it was year round teaching).
During that time, my wife and I started our family. I gradually realized during this job that research was not for me (long hours, questionable chances of good results, and...I hate to say, but in some fields it is indeed a bit of a "racket", publish or perish and all that). We wanted more than anything to move back to near our families so our children would grow up knowing their grandparents, which neither my wife nor I really did.
Maybe I was incredibly lucky, but from day one the people I worked with were very kind. They understood us post-docs were just getting our feet wet, and no one gave us negative pressure to get things done, and no one strung me along about possibilities of permanent jobs. The chair of my department was realistic that we'd be applying for other jobs all the time and (partly acknowleding the uncertainty of things at any federal institution) was amicable to helping in any way he could.
A few months before my contract was up, I was able to get a community college teaching job near my home town. Just so happens my current boss went to school at the institution I taught at (that couldn't have hurt, right?). Sure, it could pay more, but the wage is decent enough and I have a job that allows me to spend plenty of time with my family, get time off of work exactly when my kids are off school, and keep in good health. We're very happy, no regrets.
Post-post-post...
And soon we'll all be over educated unemployed idiots in debt up to our eyeballs and fighting cage matches for McJobs to buy white bread and cans of Chef-boy-ar-dee.