The Least Stressful Job for 2013? A Real Look at Being a Professor in the US

http://factsandotherfairytales.com/2013/01/04/the-least-stressful-job-for-2013-a-real-look-at-being-a-professor-in-the-us/

by jvdh • 14 years ago

48 53 14 years ago

factsandotherfairytales.com

eli_gottlieb7• 14 years ago

My adviser is rather lucky: he commutes to Technion via carpool, which puts a strong limit on the amount of time he can spend in the physical office everyday. Of course, he works plenty from home, but physical office-time limits things like committee drag and teaching load. And we get TA's here.

patio11• 14 years ago

I'm related to a few professors, and they largely carry massive chips on their shoulder about this. For example:

And for those of us whose research directly translates to the real world (e.g., in my case — persuasion, crisis communication, strategic communication), the so-called professionals look down their overpriced noses at us. That means that even if we did want to move back to the ‘real world’ — we have to basically apologize for our PhD, our time spent training them (Where do they think new professionals come from? Are they hatched?), and kiss their asses for handouts. So, basically until we write our book and ‘become’ a pundit or consultant later in our careers we’re stuck because Americans are scared of smart people.

is a great example of the genre. There's huge amounts of rank jealousy directed at classmates who took a look at the (readily available) evidence of what a PhD's career track looked like and decided against it.

(Amazingly, despite hearing terrible complaining about the stresses of tenure-track professors every time I meet my family, they always ask "So when are you going to grad school?")

tellarin• 14 years ago

That doesn't mean what she describes is not painfully true.

kulkarnic• 14 years ago

Yes, they may complain about society/"industry" not caring enough, and that's mostly because it is true.

Let me offer an analogy: when veterans are badly treated, everyone's angry because society isn't valuing their contribution enough. If scientists and professors contribute at least as much (and think of how far we've come in just the last 50-odd years), I think it's fair they're miffed if you trivialize their jobs as "least stressful" when they're not.

bthomas• 14 years ago

Agree directionally, but comparing professors to veterans is tough. People get mad that veterans can't get any jobs, or end up homeless with PTSD.

jibjaba2• 14 years ago

I'm sorry but this is a very ignorant assessment. I spent 5 years doing research in academia and none of the professors on our team had as easy of a work life as 99% of the software developers I have worked with do. I am in no way criticizing developers, being a professor is just damn hard and very stressful in comparison.

The demands of the sink or swim nature of academia, the need to be constantly seeking grants, teaching classes, participating in running the department and being an active member of their research area (organizing conferences, editing journals, etc.) are enormous. A good academic is expected to do all these things and do them well.

I grad school I was mostly a night person and so would frequently be at school around midnight. So would several professors on our team, except they would also be there at 8:30 in the morning every day, and work at home on the weekends. In the 7 years I have been a developer I have never seen a workplace that puts as much demands on it's employees. Not even close.

carbocation• 14 years ago

Your comment doesn't strike me as being in tension with patio11's. Rather, it seems to underscore his point.

eli_gottlieb7• 14 years ago

There's huge amounts of rank jealousy directed at classmates who took a look at the (readily available) evidence of what a PhD's career track looked like and decided against it.

The problem being that in most of the natural or social sciences, there are few job-options for researchers, or even for applied scientists, outside of the Academic-Governmental scientific complex.

Yes, yes, yes, everyone is about to point out their favorite example of a profitable industrial firm doing Real Science. Very nice for you at Microsoft Research or your chosen pharmaceutical company.

Problem is, those companies can only afford to do a small piece of the total research load every year, and only in subjects where research can translate into profits in the next 10 years or so.

So it becomes a decision of society's values: should scientific research be done without a prospect of profits in the next 10 years? And at the moment, most people hate being so much as confronted with a question like that, let alone actually paying taxes and engaging in the political-budgeting process to make sure allocations to science happen so that scientists can do their/our jobs.

_dps4• 14 years ago

The article, without being wrong exactly, is responding to a non-point while missing what I consider to be a deeper problem (disclosure: was very briefly a professor, now founding a startup, which is much more stressful for me ;-).

CNBC: "Being a professor is the least stressful job."

Article: "The first 7 years until tenure are hard."

Overlooked Fact: For the remaining 30+ years of your career, you have unbeatable job security, summers without any externally imposed obligations, sabbaticals, and the option to "take a slow year with your research" should you decide to have children, or have a family/personal emergency, or just want to, you know, live life and see the world.

Additional Speculation: The majority of people have a very tenuous understanding tenure to begin with, and CNBC may have elided "tenured" in their article for simplicity; it was, after all, a fluff piece designed to generate ten page views to deliver ten paragraphs of text :-).

In any case, the much bigger problem faced by aspiring professors is not the tenure process itself; it's that normal labor market mechanisms are strained-to-broken for several structural reasons:

1) Regional oligopolies of reputable schools almost everywhere outside of Boston (and Boston, while having several reputable schools, is still much more full of, say, reputable law firms). This means that it's hard to have a lot of negotiating power if you're not willing to uproot your life and move to another city.

2) Another large switching cost arises from having your research program embedded at a particular school (students, lab equipment, grants, participation in "centers", that are all hard to move).

3) Universities don't directly capture value from professors' work, with the important exception of collecting grant overhead. This exacerbates 1, because as a candidate your argument is "I'm great" and not "You will benefit"

4) Because of 3, hiring is bottlenecked by "slots" in a department, rather than by being able to find people who have net-positive ROI.

5) Because of 3 and 4, it's quite possible that highly qualified candidates will float around the labor market as post-docs until a "slot" opens up at a suitable school. I have directly seen colleagues choose to delay their Ph.D. defense for a year because they knew that there were a lot of highly impressive post-docs already competing for the few slots in their field that year, and they wanted to wait for a more opportune time.

6) Again because of 3 and 4, the already existing time-scale imbalance between institutions and individuals is exaggerated. "Not quite sure if a candidate is a good fit? Just wait another year. No big loss. We only have the one slot after all."

7) Highly discontinuous payoff curves: the present value of switching from untenured to tenured is hard to estimate, but I'd put it at upwards of $1M (see my calculation [1] in case this sounds implausible). There's no obvious way to hand out fractional tenure, and once you have it most of the university's negotiating power is gone, so universities have (rationally) evolved mechanisms to maximize the value they extract until then.

[1] My calculation:

1) assume your market consulting rate is $150/hr

2) model tenure as the option to "slack" by only teaching ~10hrs/week for full salary and doing no other work

3) assume $100k/yr salary

4) so tenure allows you to work 10 hrs/week for $100k, rather than the $75k you'd make consulting

5) ergo, tenure can be made to simulate a risk-free $25k/year income stream

6) it's hard to get $25k/year risk-free without investing something like $1M, but obviously this depends on interest rates

rmk25• 14 years ago

> Overlooked Fact: For the remaining 30+ years of your career, you have unbeatable job security, summers without any externally imposed obligations, sabbaticals, and the option to "take a slow year with your research" should you decide to have children, or have a family/personal emergency, or just want to, you know, live life and see the world.

In many (US) universities though, perish or die is still a very valid concern, even when tenured. You get yearly reviews, and if you score a "0" (zero), you can be fired, even from tenure. Futhermore, universities thus value a number of small articles more than a book, because you are supposed to publish continuously all over the place. While you write a book, chances are you don't have time to deal with additional articles (on top of your other obligations).

Add on top of that all the administrative tasks in the department, faculty, university etc. and even a tenured professor doesn't exactly live the easy life.

_dps4• 14 years ago

> You get yearly reviews, and if you score a "0" (zero), you can be fired, even from tenure.

I am not aware of such a thing, and if it were offered to me I would say "That's not really tenure.", but I believe you that some schools do it. Similarly, real [1] tenure does not usually include administrative requirements because those requirements are, in my experience, not mandated by your employment contract. They are mandated by social pressure to be a good university citizen.

> even a tenured professor doesn't exactly live the easy life.

I agree that the typical tenured professor is a hard working busy professional; I just mean to say that in principle tenure could be used to merely teach (holding up the formal obligations of your contract), and I have certainly known people who have chosen that path at one point or another in their lives.

[1] I realize it may seem I am defining-away your point, but I take the definition of tenure to be "You cannot be fired as long as you continue to fulfill the formal requirements of your employment contract, and those formal requirements cannot meaningfully restrict your personal research agenda (academic freedom)."

zimbu6682• 14 years ago

I don't get the big deal about publish or perish. Isn't that a core part of the job?

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2495

mayneack• 14 years ago

Assume 100k/year? I wouldn't

wisty• 14 years ago

Wow, it sounds like being an airplane pilot. Work for $16,000 a year, and pull crazy hours. End up with a 9-5 job, for $300,000 a year.

The thing is, unions don't represent workers. They represent the kind of workers who run the unions - senior workers.

glenra2• 14 years ago

Shorter point: Being a tenured professor is nice but getting to be a tenured professor is essentially a lottery process - lots of work and luck is required to get there.

Similarly, being "a movie star" is a pretty sweet gig, but that doesn't mean being "an actor" is all that great as a career option.

idm• 14 years ago

Doubtless this poll is capturing the essence of something interesting, but when I look at that list of professions, a host of statistical moderators come to mind. I claim this list isn't measuring what they think it is measuring.

I think the reason "professor" ranks first is that the compensation seems to be proportional to the responsibility, whereas most other jobs appear to under-compensate. People are sensitive to this, but they misattribute it as "lower stress."

Well, the job itself (professor) is really hard, but the lifestyle (everything outside work) is really great. It's a great damn job. That's different from being "stressful."

Where does the stress come from? Well, I bet the HN community knows professors better than most, but between publication and grant writing, there's a ton of professional evaluation that directly impacts your quality of life. Your personal and private lives will blend much more than in other professions, and being rejected professionally (i.e. being denied a major grant) will mess with your personal life as well.

There's no free lunch here.

edtechdev• 14 years ago

Pre-tenure, it all boils down to just being above average on 3 numbers:

* how many journal articles have you published

* how much grant money are you bringing in

* what is the average rating you get from students

Interestingly, there does not appear to be much validity behind those numbers. Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with student learning: http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf http://listserv.aera.net/scripts/wa.exe?A2=AERA-L;6767f510.1...

And the 'impact' of journal articles has been criticized more ways than I can count: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Criticisms I've seen blog posts with more impact than average journal articles.

Lastly research grant money - I don't know the research on the impact of grant money - but in many fields, when you have an original, new idea, you usually get a smaller grant, maybe even just a seed grant at first (just like how little money startups usually get), or you do it on your own in grad school. The large grants are for large scale collaborations and scaling up of well-trodden ideas. 55% of the grant money doesn't even go to the research project - it goes to the university's administrative overhead.

eli_gottlieb7• 14 years ago

Higher student ratings, for example, actually negatively correlate with student learning:

Well... duh? Obviously students are going to give higher ratings to professors whose courses seem easier.

drblast• 14 years ago

Plus you have to add the 8-10 hours a week of complaining about all the sacrifices you're making to be a professor. That can really add up.

jibjaba2• 14 years ago

HN needs down votes for crap like this.

glenra2• 14 years ago

HN has downvotes (and the post you refer to did get downvoted) but you don't get access to that feature until you have a certain level of karma.

DanielBMarkham• 14 years ago

A slightly tangential observation: I've had the good fortune to meet and work with people in all walks of life. Oddly, I've found the amount of stress they feel at work is hugely related to the type of personality they have.

I'm not discounting external factors: surely those bomb disposal guys have it tough. But some folks just seem naturally sunny and light-spirited, while others seem to be on the verge of a monstrous breakdown. I've seen people who were stressed who were moved from a stressful situation to a much less stressful situation stay just as stressed as before. Perhaps, like weight, there is a "set point" for the amount of discomfort you feel in your job, and over time you can train yourself to become more and more stressed, regardless of the externalities?

Beats me. Interesting subject, though. Definitely falls in the nature versus nurture arena.

matwood• 14 years ago

Good point. I tend to operate under a certain level of self imposed stress plus whatever actual stress there is with the job. Not monstrous breakdown type stress, but definitely a heightened sense of urgency most of the time. Personally, my self imposed stress comes from my desire to make things perfect and my fear of failure regardless of the job at hand. I attributed most of my personal stress to nurture, and the lack of a family to fall back on should I fail.

dfc• 14 years ago

"loads of us finish our Ph.D.’s (which is what you have to have to be a ‘regular’ professor) with between $75,000 and $160,000 in debt"

The link/citation for this statement never mentions 75,000 or 160,000. In fact it says:

"According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), individuals earning research doctorates in academic year 2009-10 did so owing over $20,400 on average in education-related debt, of which about $14,100 on average was graduate debt and about $6,400 on average was undergraduate debt"

Granted this NSF data is limited to research doctorates but it certainly does not support the statement that "loads of us" have 75k to 160k of debt. Moreover the NSF data says that 52% of the research doctorate population graduated with no debt.

mitchi4• 14 years ago

I just woke up from an all-nighter of correcting exam papers for my professor here. I'm being paid $15 an hour to grade all the homework assignments and the exams. I'm a regular teaching assistant at my university, I can usually handle the load of correcting assignments in time but correcting exams is actually the worst thing in the world. Depending on how the exam is made of course. If you care about being fair to everyone, you will usually have to backtrack through your first copies (when you were more severe) to add points. Any professors who grade their exams here? Do you use any heuristics (if you know what I mean) to correct faster? That being said, as you can see, professors in Canada can "offshore" the job of correcting to students. After that, you are left with the best part of the job. Preparing the course material, preparing the presentations and giving it every week. It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary.

I'm in Canada though, I don't know how professors are treated in the US. I know that for students it's shit! Graduating with mountains of debt, I don't know if I could celebrate that.

anonymouz3• 14 years ago

> It's a high paying public sector job with 3 months of vacation and you can take a year off every 3 years with 80% salary.

Nobody in Canada does research then? No classes does not mean vacation.

mitchi4• 14 years ago

yea, I never said that. I was just describing what the vacations are. If you think that they don't do research you are partially right because of a lot them don't do it after their permanent status.

ibrahima• 14 years ago

I've had much the same problem as a TA as well. It's really painful having to go back to correct a few scores and sometimes I think I probably still missed something.

I actually made a web application for grading exams which alleviates this somewhat. Basically you grade by creating a rubric, which is a list of items and how many points to deduct for each item (could be additive too, but the professor I wrote it for didn't want that so I never implemented it). When grading you just check the boxes for the items that apply to a specific submission. You can change the weights in place and have all the scores update. Also, since all the exams are scanned and each question is cropped out you can much more easily go between instances of one problem. It's not completely releaseable to the outside world unfortunately but maybe in a month or so it could be. A lot of other professors have asked to use it but unfortunately we had to turn them down for now since there are still a few steps that are somewhat manual, and my time is currently prioritized for research work so I can't really clean up that last 10% and make it releasable right now.

mitchi4• 14 years ago

That's not a bad system. However, I have to grade on the paper directly and I don't want a computer near me if possible when I correct. Too many distractions. I just grade each question then I add them all up if I predict the grade is gonna be bad or I subtract if the grade's gonna be good.

lisper• 14 years ago

I was never in academia, but I was a researcher (at NASA) so I played the publishing game. And if you look at my record, I was relatively good at it. Not only was my publications list fairly long, but my work was also pretty widely referenced. But since my career no longer depends on it, I am now free to say that I credit my success almost entirely to gaming the system. This is not to say that I didn't do good work (I think I did), but there was virtually no correlation between what I thought was quality work and what I actually got rewarded for. The vast majority of my publications were minor tweaks on previous work that were specifically engineered to get past the program committees of key conferences. My best work (by my own quality metric) either went unnoticed, or could not get accepted for publication at all. When it got to the point where I was faced with a very stark choice between continuing to produce bullshit and get rewarded for it, or to do what I thought was good work and eventually get fired, I quit.

Evbn3• 14 years ago

Industry isn't so different. My salary is determined by 2 days of interviews and negotiations, and only slightly perturbed by my performance over the next several years.

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

Academia's the biggest fucking scam there is. Look at the prize. Around age 35-40, if you work 80-hour weeks and don't make any mistakes, the prize is getting a job that you can't be fired from. Meanwhile, the same kind of exertion (and political luck) in finance or software will have you able to retire: not in luxury, but at a middle-class standard of living that could be described as "making your own tenure". Also, you get to live where you want, instead of rolling the dice on where in the country you will end up living.

It's billed as "the life of the mind", but the reality is that a lot of the work is mindnumbingly boring: writing grant applications, grading papers, attending committees. Every industry has some boring work and vicious politics, but most industries are honest about it. In software, having been fired once because of political bullshit is par for the course. Yep, that happens. In academia, getting shot down for tenure is this huge mark of shame.

Finally, the academic industry has a huge underclass of people who spend lots of time between adjunct gigs on teaching work that is viewed as a commodity and paid extremely poorly.

I'm sorry, but this industry has sold out a generation and a half, while tuitions have shot toward the moon, and that's fucking inexcusable. University leadership: stop building fucking ziggurats and colossuses and get fund some goddamn research and teaching. In other words, do your job.

eli_gottlieb7• 14 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with this bit:

Meanwhile, the same kind of exertion (and political luck) in finance or software will have you able to retire: not in luxury, but at a middle-class standard of living that could be described as "making your own tenure". Also, you get to live where you want, instead of rolling the dice on where in the country you will end up living.

In this realm, I really don't think software, finance and academia are all that different. You go where the work is, and on average, the best you can do is to nicely secure a comfortable, upper-middle class position for yourself with plenty of job security.

You're right that being lucky enough to get a tenured position, but "applying that luck" to software or finance, can make you a millionaire. Problem is, that kind of luck is not a known probability on which we can set rational expectations. If I go work 80 hours/week at a software start-up, I can't expect even a 3% chance of becoming a millionaire. It's just not a random process with a set probability distribution. So you can't "apply your luck" to software instead of academia, because we're talking about two different kinds of luck.

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

This is a good point. The types of people who thrive in one environment are not necessarily going to do well in another.

My issue with academia is that it has minimal job risk but high career risk. So, while it's rare that someone actually gets fired (I've seen 9th-year grad students lose funding; I guess that counts) the risk of ending up in a ruined career is high. On the other hand, in software and finance getting fired is practically a rite of passage-- happens to everyone, especially ambitious overperformers-- and it's painful but it doesn't end your career.

On the other hand, one thing academia has going for it is career coherency. In industry, you serve a boss and have to make it look like you value his political aspirations over your own career development. In academia, your job is to invest in yourself-- to publish and develop a reputation, to attend conferences, to improve your skills. So that's one thing that's nice about it.

The Least Stressful Job for 2013? A Real Look at Being a Professor in the US

Related Stories