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When the bullet dodges you
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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This is the worst advice I have seen in a while. Academia is the absolute worst for salary, with an eternity actuelly not earning anything (or if in the US, having to pay yourself!) plus the stress of constant chasing of funding, politics that make big corporations pale and whims of reviewers that have no idea about your niche. I didn't even consider a post-doc, went straight to industry. Best decision ever.
Only go to academia if it's truly your passion and you don't care about money for some reason.
I am comparing academia to working as an initial employee in a startup though, not to working as an employer in industry in an established firm.
In this case salary is likely better, you still build stuff from scratch on topics that interest you, you don't work so that some guy can achieve his/her dreams, you have a higher chance of getting credit for the stuff you do (though wouldn't say %100 because yea fucking humans...). It even comes with the same levels of future uncertainty that a startup does lol. That being said as with anything luck is the major determinant here too. If you end up with a group of immature people and a bad PI you may live hell on earth (as you would anywhere). But I believe your chances of ending up with a fun gang of intelligent people is quite high, including the PI.
I respectfully disagree. The potential reward in a startup is orders of magnitude higher than academia. The percentage of time dedicated to useful work is higher in a startup (funding proposals suuuuck). The time you start earning money is years earlier in a startup (no need for masters or PhD). I agree about credit (which unless it's Nobel level is almost worthless, and usually the department chair gets the most credit anyway) and luck.
While I don't regret my years in academia, it's only because it helped me land my first industry job which would be super difficult without that background. Academia itself as a career path was a big no for me after my first two published papers.
My experience in startups is quite limited, it is some 5-6 friends who applied early on worked and got disappointed. It seems to me that if you are not a founding member, even if the startup makes it through (against quite bad odds), you don't get rewarded enough for working quite a lot for a low salary. Even in one case a friend of mine who came up with quite a good idea that was useful to the company got sacked later on without a second thought or a thank you, let alone a share or a bonus (because of bad financial situation). Also the politics drama (that is abundant in academia yes) also exists for startups on a higher level. Where there are rich shareholders and funders, you are always at the whim of politics between people. Many startups go under because of political decisions by shareholders to stop supporting a certain sector (or even a shareholder being assassinated during some sort of gun fight, in Canada, yea this is a real experience). So that is not special to academia, politics unfortunately exists in any place humans do. It is surprising that it is also so entrenched in academia but yes it is.
Proposals, oh man, nowadays that is the same level of bullshitting involved in AI determined industry interviews, I completely agree. However, if your group is of medium+ size and your PI has some sanity, then odds are you have some project administrator that writes the proposals mostly but I do realize that is not the generality in research groups.
Mostly agree, I guess it's subjective. The startup has the advantage that you could negotiate or go to a different startup or big corporation, academia is basically just the one path.