Month: August 2022

80% of Life Science PhDs end up completely unemployed or in low-paying postdoc training positions, which the government does not count as employment. (Life sciences includes all the pharma researchers etc) 60% of ALL PhDs end up unemployed or in low-paying postdoc positions. (this rate is actually only slightly lower for PhDs in tech, so Materials/engineering/physics/CS/Math are around 40-50% depending on institution). I am a PhD candidate in STEM with about 7 years of programming, software engineering, and research under my belt. I'm currently doing AI and Machine Learning stuff, have been for a year or two. I have roughly $60,000 in student loans, due to me losing my job a couple of times and now being in school for ~7 years (4 more to go, at least, hoorayyyy). I have been applying to jobs for a year now in SE/Tech/ML (I'm doing a PhD in ML and closely related…

Like seriously commercials and adds and stuff. Blast it to the people that don't know. Put it on the bus. Hang flyers.

After doing my old job for 11 years, they changed the requirements for the same job I had been doing for years and fired me. I've been working since I've been 17 for various companies but this was a gut punch. No warning, no “Improvement plan”, just gone in 10 mins with “we're going in another direction” and not even enough time to empty my desk. This is was supposed to be my retirement job. 11 years wasted. Graduations missed, birthdays missed, a million never to be repeated moments lost for a job that fired me in a 10 minute phone call. Never take a job over family. Never. Covering the entire company's footprint with just three people for months. Working 12-16 hour days. Dangling a “raise” over my head for years and never following up on it. Now I'm living on my 401k money until that runs out then…