"ok, picture the most conscientious people on earth, getting a paycheck one fourth of your starting salary in tech fifteen years ago, working on chill things like 'curing cancer for all of humanity' or 'the fundamental mechanisms that explain alzheimers', being the de facto fulltime people manager for what's essentially a startup team, with the boss being someone who got security of employment 20 years ago and only had to learn one twentieth of what you now have to know"
I am a rare case of a person who has done both while marginalized in both places & I promise startups ARE actually a much closer comparison to being a postdoc than anyone outside of academia generally thinks.
("academia isn't the real world!" is a fair thing to say, and the thing is, startups aren't the real world either. They're each their own very isolated and extremely rule-bound insular worlds)
@grimalkina I prefer to think that there's probably a real world but that none of us are in it, so that makes the concept irrelevant to most conversations.
@grimalkina I remember a senior historian years ago talking about how we were entering the “golden age of the humanities postdoc” as if that was in any way, shape, or form a good thing. It was almost a bolt from the blue, a perfect piece of evidence showing that the gatekeepers of the field have no idea how things actually or how dysfunctional they are. Indeed, they don’t even really understand the field at all.
@Zeb_Larson reminds me of the feeling I get when I see research faculty applauded at length about how magnificently important they are for engaging in (1) training about being a better teacher while they have tenured teaching professor colleagues around them who never get a single moment's recognition for years of evaluation, publishing, iteration and improvement of teaching and who literally transform the entire trajectory of the undergrad majors in some cases
@grimalkina truly bonkers sounds absolutely right! when I was looking into why postdoc positions exist, I had learnt that this position was created primarily because there were far too many PhDs graduating than there were Assistant Professor positions available for them to continue in the traditional academic career trajectory. So an intermediate temporary position was created. What's worse is that present-day postdocs are called trainees whereas in the past they were considered already well-trained during their PhD to go on to become Assistant Professors.
I also vaguely remember that Assistant Professors in the past were supposed to actually assist a senior Professor whose lab they were a member of. I could be wrong but I believe this is still true in places like Japan.
@manisha There is a lot of complexity to it, like the increasing need for more specialized skill learning, and imo as someone who works a lot on learning and achievement pathways it is a failure across the entire "individual lab" and "1:1 mentor" model of science -- we're in an era where the actual science work DOES need far longer skill training and has escalating complexity but imo that means we need to build new supportive models that benefit all (including faculty who tbh also suffer)
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