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musicale01/23/20251 replyview on HN

It's not as if there is a surplus of academic job slots that are going unfilled. The pyramid where one professor trains multiple grad students quickly becomes unsustainable.


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analog3101/24/2025

Indeed, and in my field, it even had a name: The "Birth Control Problem." In fact, the problem extends to post-docs. Professors were even training multiple post-docs. I saw that quite clearly.

I was lucky to have role models: My parents were both industrial scientists, so the idea wasn't foreign to me. And I figured that I could always become a coder if things didn't work out. ;-)

Re-reading, I may have been unclear: I meant that some people take temporary post-docs with no intention of staying in academia.