This is my rant working as a postdoc, and it’s a terrible life at the moment with few opportunities to improve one’s life. To begin with, I finished my PhD after a long drawn struggle with my supervisors who made my life miserable because I am from a minority in my country, so it took an extra year and a half without pay before I finally defended my thesis. I managed to convince a professor in the same institution from a different field to take me on as a postdoc then covid struck. After two years there, I moved to a different country for another postdoc, because despite being considered in several places, in almost every place, they demanded recommendations from my phd supervisors, which of course I can’t get. Now I’m stuck in this new position, which is okay but precarious, and can’t move to a better position because of the same recommendation letter from phd supervisor. If I stay here another year, then it’s much harder to move to another institution as I will have to apply for a professorial position which requires even more and stronger recommendations. This whole system is exploitative and corrupt. Why can’t recruitment be based on papers published, interviews and anything else more objective than recommendations from people with a vested interest who wield it as a weapon. I know an obvious suggestion is to move out of academia and I’ve been working on it but it’s not easy at all.