The author of this article is a friend and former colleague (I had the office next door to hers at Harvard, when I was on the faculty there). Many of the reasons she cites for being "miserable" as a faculty member reflect why I left a tenured faculty job for industry. Nearly all junior faculty I know describe it as a survival process. Given this I fail to understand why being a professor remains such an attractive career path.
What's scary is that this represents a fairly luxurious set of pain-points relative to the ones I've seen junior faculty members in the biological sciences exposed to at Harvard.
The conveniences and cultural differences of the CS community are a stark contrast to academic biology. Considering the author's observations:
First, the opt-out options are often fewer and further between; making the jump between basic science work and industrial biotech/pharma can be very difficult depending on your area of interest.
Then, as a biologist, it can be incredibly difficult to restrict your working hours, as experimental (e.g. cell culture) work can operate with delays or intervals. Stepping out at the wrong time means your cells die.
Beyond the unpredictable timing, there's more uncertainty around whether experiments will physically work, and it can be nigh impossible engineer your way out of certain failures.
Further, the benchmarks for "contribution to the field" in biology can be extremely unforgiving; publishing papers in journals outside of Nature, Science, or Cell fails to paint a compelling picture.
These things are added on to the things pointed out in the piece. Extra hurdles.
That's not to say that biological science fields are evil or that faculty paths are never worth considering. But having worked in the lab of a junior faculty member, you can see the pressure and challenges.
>Then, as a biologist, it can be incredibly difficult to restrict your working hours, as experimental (e.g. cell culture) work can operate with delays or intervals. Stepping out at the wrong time means your cells die.
That's where personnel management comes in. I've got an undergrad intern at the moment, who has only a modest amount of lab research experience. In a month and a half, I've taught him molecular biology from scratch (beginning with the fundamentals of PCR) and from what i taught him, I gave him a list of 48 mutations. He designed primers to make those mutations, does the molecular biology, checks the sequences, then does the biochemical experiment on the enzyme that's being mutated. He's finished about half of the mutants. We are able to get this done because the experiments were planned out to be paralellizable and scaleable, and if something is finishing up when it needs to be picked up at the end of the day (like a transformation recovery), I do it, because he comes in early and I stay in late. I also drop in on the weekends to start cultures- but usually only briefly -, to make the most efficient use of his and my time. He is in usually around 9:00-9:15 and I make sure he leaves at 5:00 and I really get angry if he's around past 5:15 except in exigent conditions.
Bottom line: Even in Biology, you can restrict your working hours if you're a team player if you have good management skills.
If you're overworking. Since science entails failure that you cannot engineer your way out of - you will wind up burning out, since the working hard followed by failure is exactly an optimal way of conditioning laziness.
You're absolutely right, it is possible and even important to structure your experiments in such a way that they don't dominate your life. It's something that I've learned to do pretty effectively (and my chosen discipline makes it easier).
I think there are certainly organizational things that can be done to facilitate more reasonable working hours, and I've seen this done well in industrial settings. From pipelined experiments to working with automation, technicians, and teammates.
With all that said, it's not easy, especially as a junior faculty member with limited resources. Building a sane lab environment is 100% worth it IMO, but it is challenging and comes with a few perceived compromises.
Biology could also be a very competitive field that seems to have devolved into basically a rat race. How do you compete with your equally capable peer when they work 80 hours a week and you work 40? Yes, its not sustainable, but maybe that's where we are right now (disclaimer, I don't work in Biology, but have friends that do).
You are just sounding like the prototypical PhD / Post Doc that tries to convince everybody that their work is the hardest and if they don't put in the 80h/week humanity will fail.
Every science has it's own merits and problems and we CS people do not only sit on the couch and drink coffee before we hit back on some brogramming and getting the next 10^9$ from Facebook.
What you write has a side effect that you get much better high school biology teachers than those who teach other STEM subjects as there are fewer options for them. I can't remember a biology teacher who hadn't done serious research on something.
Given this I fail to understand why being a professor remains such an attractive career path.
I wouldn't say that many people see it as attractive relative to high-degree-of-freedom research positions in industry, but there just aren't that many such positions in industry. And, you often have to build up a reputation in academia first (as you did) before you can jump to an industry position that is senior enough to give you research & publication freedom. Even then there are only a handful of options; MSR and parts of Google are two of them in CS, and the numbers dwindle considerably if you look outside of CS. If MSR hired many more people straight out of grad school, and in a broader range of fields, I'm sure many grad students would consider that option rather than pursuing a tenure-track faculty position. Back in the Bell Labs days, it was a popular top choice out of grad school, with faculty job being a second choice.
If you relax the requirement that the job has to let you regularly talk about and publish the results of your research, there are more industry positions available, like R&D positions at petrochemical and aerospace firms. They have large R&D arms, but the average employee in them will publish little to none, except whatever ends up being published via patent filings. That can be a good choice (I have some acquaintances who work in R&D at BP and like their job), but a research career where you can't publish is a quite different choice of career.
As a more minor working-conditions point, I personally like the flexibility. I typically spend 3 days a week in my office and 2 days working off-campus, which most companies won't let you do. And if I want to take a 3-day weekend trip somewhere, I can just do it, as long as it doesn't interfere with a day on which I have classes; no need to ask for permission in advance or worry about how many vacation days I have.
I liked Radhika, and I was sad I couldn't take any of her classes.
> Given this I fail to understand why being a professor remains such an attractive career path.
I know a lot of students who made the very concrete decision between immediate grad school, a job followed by grad school, only a job, self-employment, self-teaching, vacation, etc. Guys and girls.
