Recent content by HepMan

Depends on the country - Dragoon mentioned the UK and Canada. In the UK it is certainly becoming very common, especially in HEP, for "post-docs" to work in those jobs for 10,20 or even 30 years - partly because, in my opinion, if you become an academic the university is on the hook for your...

The OP did not specify a country, and anyway given researchers are highly mobile and often move to a different continent (let alone country) there is no one size fits all answer - all the options are relevant.

The research scientist changes to a different project - there is nothing difficult about this, their skills are not unique to a specific project. Many groups use pooled researchers in this way nowadays (in the UK). In general its worth everyone noting the system is really quite different in...

Interesting difference - in the UK I don't think the equivalent bodies see themselves as providing money to train new scientists, but to fund science research. Doing that means you can have fresh newly minted PhDs and more experienced people at the same time employed from research grants...

I don't really think this analogy works, because the job structure and bottle necks in promotion are very different to industry. A better analogy I have heard is imagine if teachers in high schools were all told either they have to become a manager within 5 years or they will be thrown out...

Your options narrow because you are officially excluded from applying for many things, and informally some academics won't consider older postdocs. That does not mean its impossible to get a postdoc as you get older, just it will get harder.

nearly all UK postdoc fellowship schemes have an explicit requirement against experienced postdocs. I believe DOE labs in the US also have such a requirement. Informally many academics state they won't employ experienced postdocs (citing reasons such as "we want someone young and dynamic" or...

I think it would be a deterrent, especially if there are better options out there (even if not your first choice). The pay is already low enough and job security bad for many, that instead of a postdoc they get better terms and pay in industry. If you make the pay even lower, you will only...

Depends where you go - in the UK its not unusual to hire very experienced postdocs (at least in particle physics) and postdocs often become long term positions. So you can be a perpetual postdoc. I think this has happened because Universities don't want to hire more academic staff, yet at the...

Yep you will also have to mentor/train PhD students in a research only job at universities.

Those are all really different languages, used for very different applications...depends what you want to do really. e.g. html is used to make webpages which is really different to writing databases (mysql) or developing scientific software, games software etc (often C++). I think you...

I don't think so - if you did no courses, but can prove you used in your job to write good software that others used it could be enough (or if not your job, some kind of open source project - e.g. a friend of mine wrote a hike planning sw for a very large local hiking group that was used for...

It depends where you want to do research - I can tell you in the UK in particle physics it is possible to have a career with minimal or no teaching at a UNiversity. However usually research only jobs at Universities are funded from external (to the University) research grants and if you don't...

One of the students in my research group recently got an engineering position completely unrelated to his research and he definitely knows zero about engineering or the physics it involves - this suggests to me they were not able to find a qualified engineer. 2 of my engineering friends...