These are good arguments about phd's not going into academia. But a postdoc at a university is an underpaid training position for the most part. Not a worthwhile sacrifice if you want to work in the private sector in my field. Maybe it's more important for industry jobs in biology or something.

Personally I think it's a warped system that takes advantage of cheap labor from developing countries. And it feeds itself. The more temporary research staff professors can hire, the less permanent research staff universities need.

I left academia after my PhD, with no regrets.

As a grad student, for the duration of your thesis work, you're locked into a specialty at a specific institute that isn't necessarily first-tier, may need to work at a level of intensity that prevents you from attending to a proper job search, and may end up under a professor who doesn't adequately support your career (e.g., with reputation and favorable recommendations).

In short, many things can go wrong, but you're focused on finishing. Under those conditions, if you do go straight into an industry job, it may be a shitty job that's not much better than a post-doc.

A brief stint as a post-doc gives you an income while you repair your career. This may involve changing specialties, developing your own research idea, working in a more prestigious institute or under a famous professor, or searching for industry jobs. Whatever it is, my own advice would be to only consider doing a post doc if it serves a credible purpose, otherwise, getting paid to get older isn't worth it.

In my field (physics), it was customary for grad students to work for their PhD advisor as a post-doc if they didn't already have a job lined up. I know lots of people who did that. It may inflate the number of "postdocs who leave academia" if it's not really a new job and their intention was to leave academia all along.

You should absolutely only do a postdoc on the supposition that you will get a tenure track faculty position afterwards. It makes no sense financially or emotionally to do one if your goal is to go into industry.

I don't think I ever remember a time when the walls of the pyramid were shallow enough that the base could support all of the people at the top.

2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.

A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."

I think that all postdocs should stay in academia, why else would you do a postdoc? I assume (maybe wrong?) that most of the postdocs had intended to stay when starting the postdoc.

Right? I'm surprised 60% stay.

I theory the incentive is to 1) eventually become a professor and 2) have more say over what projects you get to work on.

Both of these aren't real incentives for the bottom 80% of postdocs.

Seconded. Ex post doc here. Any post docs reading this, I would say - academia is a sort of gravy train for the middle class (in the UK). If you want a comfortable life without doing much of worth, you’re not really driven in your work, stick with it. You’ll have to fight for your lectureship but once you’ve done that you can live an easy life with the only difficulties stupid bureaucracy, politics, and cynicism.

However, if you have a bit more energy in you than that, have some ambition, leave asap. Startups are a great alternative. Big co research labs are another. Or just get a day job that you love and do research in the evenings. You could even get paid to do real research via patron etc if you do well.

I think academia in the uk is part of the social structure designed to maintain the status quo. The academics get good pensions and don’t do much, and in return they don’t challenge the ruling classes. Part of the class system.

There are some exceptions to this rule, some good places doing good research, but they are a tiny minority.

> Being in academia is not the only way to do research,

No, but (and I'm not in this space, so totally ignorant), is it not the case that if you're not associated with a Uni in some form that _PUBLISHING_ your research is all but impossible?

Not to mention, many private companies actually offer better resources

Indeed. In other news, the overall pass rates for my (translated into US terms for the first three) middle school, high school, university and post-graduate degree were all approximately 50%. So this doesn't seem particularly bad.