My girlfriend right now is trying to figure out her postdoc in neuroscience.
While I fully support her passion, the industry of academia seems completely irrational from almost every sense and full of traps. While the end goal of a tenured professor is exceedingly stable, getting there requires heroic acts of risk, going with the flow and instability that even when compared with the world of startups seems insane.
After 4-7 years on a PhD (which is fraught with the possibility of your PI losing funding, vets shutting you down for weeks on end, the university messing up shipping of things that need to stay frozen, strange policies of academic journals, endless bureaucracy, the university threatening to cancel health insurance or not pay you for a few months despite them wanting you to work) you exit with the ability to make less money at a Postdoc than you had with just your undergraduate degree, and certainly less than you'd make if you had just stayed as a lab tech for that term.
In admission to a Postdoc program, you've gotta deal with PIs who seem to check their email in more archaic ways than RMS and seem to play games with you with their intermittent responsiveness. The chances of you getting into a place doing the research you'd like in a geographic region that has any semblance of culture or livability. Of course, all the pitfalls of your PhD are still present, as funding is constantly on the brink and your PI might die or retire without notice- which essentially ends your academic career.
Then maybe after a postdoc (or two), you find a tenure track position (again, where this is... you seem to have little control over), which also seems to pay crap considering the amount of knowledge and experience you have.
All of these funnels seem to have a 20:1 (or worse) completion rate. Something always seems to screw up. Fortunately, my girlfriend is almost done with the PhD part, and the Postdoc part is looking more promising than it is for most.
Whatever relationships, life, family or culture you'd like to maintain through this seem nearly impossible. Now, I'm aware that 'softer' subjects are a little more flexible on parts of this. You don't need a lab with a half million a year funding to write the next great american novel or study the culture of people on 4Chan.
In comparison, startups seem much more certain. Move to SF|Boston|NYC, program awesome things, get funding, etc... no one's going to ask you suddenly to move to Alabama to work with the one startup in the US that does Haskell programming, but in science academia that's entirely possible. Worst case scenario, you go work for Google or similar. And after working for 10 years, they aren't going to pay you barely livable wages.
Unless you're running a center (which probably less than 0.1% of people entering into a PhD program ever will), the monetary reward almost never catches up. The risk of failure is high, and the alternatives for leaving are grim. Whereas if you leave your CS PhD, you can get a job at a startup... there are few places that are dying to hire PhD dropouts.
This is not a criticism of you; I understand you're trying to do your best for someone you care about, which is laudable in itself; but there is something I think needs to be pointed out.
You did not say "I fully support her rational and well-informed career choice". Probably you would love to be able to say that but, well, it wouldn't be true.
There is a meme floating around at the moment that passion should be the deciding factor in career choice. Every society has its characteristic errors, and this seems to be one of the more harmful ones of 21st-century Western society. In reality, emotion should be an input, yes, but not the only or necessarily decisive one; our emotions evolved in a very different environment, after all, and they don't actually know very much about what's going on today so it's hardly surprising that they often make bad decisions.
Another common wording of this meme is "do what you love". Put that way, it's easier to see why it's bad advice for most people. If you love doing something, probably lots of other people do too, and they'll bid down income and working conditions in that field until your life degenerates into miserable slog.
The obvious reply is that if you end up in a job you hate, your life will also degenerate into miserable slog, which is true. You don't want to end up in a job you hate if you can avoid it.
The best career choice is usually somewhere in the middle: try for something you don't mind doing that will pay a decent wage for no more than forty hours a week without unreasonable demands. If your passion doesn't offer a realistic prospect of that, then it's probably time for reason to overrule passion.
She's well informed about it, and honestly better than the majority of people in the field, but it still doesn't make the field in general a rational decision. In the end her goal isn't to make money or have tenure, but to do science that changes the world; which I admire greatly.
I could say the same about my friend pursuing music professionally (I myself went to school for music, but I'm now in software and far happier)- I went to school with people who probably haven't made $500 in the past year on music, and also with people who won Grammies recently and are at the top of Pitchfork and Billboard's charts. By no means does it make it rational; its a broken system that hasn't caught up to the 21st century, but overall there are still people in it who will do well no matter how hard it is.
On average, you're right however that the best choices are often somewhere in the middle for most of us.
While I fully support her passion, the industry of academia seems completely irrational from almost every sense and full of traps. While the end goal of a tenured professor is exceedingly stable, getting there requires heroic acts of risk, going with the flow and instability that even when compared with the world of startups seems insane.
After 4-7 years on a PhD (which is fraught with the possibility of your PI losing funding, vets shutting you down for weeks on end, the university messing up shipping of things that need to stay frozen, strange policies of academic journals, endless bureaucracy, the university threatening to cancel health insurance or not pay you for a few months despite them wanting you to work) you exit with the ability to make less money at a Postdoc than you had with just your undergraduate degree, and certainly less than you'd make if you had just stayed as a lab tech for that term.
In admission to a Postdoc program, you've gotta deal with PIs who seem to check their email in more archaic ways than RMS and seem to play games with you with their intermittent responsiveness. The chances of you getting into a place doing the research you'd like in a geographic region that has any semblance of culture or livability. Of course, all the pitfalls of your PhD are still present, as funding is constantly on the brink and your PI might die or retire without notice- which essentially ends your academic career.
Then maybe after a postdoc (or two), you find a tenure track position (again, where this is... you seem to have little control over), which also seems to pay crap considering the amount of knowledge and experience you have.
All of these funnels seem to have a 20:1 (or worse) completion rate. Something always seems to screw up. Fortunately, my girlfriend is almost done with the PhD part, and the Postdoc part is looking more promising than it is for most.
Whatever relationships, life, family or culture you'd like to maintain through this seem nearly impossible. Now, I'm aware that 'softer' subjects are a little more flexible on parts of this. You don't need a lab with a half million a year funding to write the next great american novel or study the culture of people on 4Chan.
In comparison, startups seem much more certain. Move to SF|Boston|NYC, program awesome things, get funding, etc... no one's going to ask you suddenly to move to Alabama to work with the one startup in the US that does Haskell programming, but in science academia that's entirely possible. Worst case scenario, you go work for Google or similar. And after working for 10 years, they aren't going to pay you barely livable wages.
Unless you're running a center (which probably less than 0.1% of people entering into a PhD program ever will), the monetary reward almost never catches up. The risk of failure is high, and the alternatives for leaving are grim. Whereas if you leave your CS PhD, you can get a job at a startup... there are few places that are dying to hire PhD dropouts.