I find myself in a tricky situation, wrestling with pride, fighting inner demons, and so on. It’s all motivated by this singular opportunity: when I finish my Ph.D. doors will open that were previously very hard to open: moving abroad is now far easier. And being honest, one of the many reasons I started a Ph.D. was for the chance to explore the world, even live overseas somewhere for a while.

Considering academia, first

But the opportunity cost is also quite high. I’m worried for my future if I stay in academia, almost anywhere I choose to go.

If I stay in the US: funding will be tight, my students will be terrorized, and our country might be a much more difficult place to live in by the time I choose to retire (if I ever get to, of course). Plus, just due to the overall cruelty of our social systems, I won’t have health insurance unless I work, which means that if something were to happen to me, both my wife and I would become absolutely devastated.

If I move abroad: unfortunately, many places expect Ph.D. students to do a post-doc first, which is often 3+ years spent in a temporary position that pays less than a professor position. On top of that, because the position is temporary, I will eventually have to move again, and my wife and I are getting a bit tired of moving around. And lastly, professor positions tend to pay less than their US counterparts. So a lower position for 3 years, less pay even after promotion, and a high likelyhood that I can’t settle down yet. Not ideal!

So if I want to stay in academia, I’ll either have to grit through it here in the States or suck it up and just take a pay (and lifestyle) hit overseas. Is it even worth it?

Considering non-academia versus academia

But then there is a whole different dimension to think about: what if I just went back into industry and gave up on academia?

If I stay in academia and start as a postdoc: Salaries are rough. Postdocs (overseas or domestic) that are considered “well-paid” get 50-55k/year or so. And places that are nice to live (say, Denmark), the tax rate might be 30% or so. After taxes, that’s 36k or so. And in Denmark, you might have a total cost of living at around $3k for 2 people, which comes out to a neat 36k/year. That has 0 margin for error in lifestyle choices. Sure, there is socialized healthcare and pension, but if I have to come in as a postdoc, then I won’t receive the benefits of a given country’s pension system if I have to move away because I didn’t land a professor position. Lack of pension or retirement security is a big risk and already part of the massive opportunity cost of entering academia (especially since I was previously in industry). Plus, the hardest part about a postdoc is that I might just not get a professor position, even after 3 years. I’m not a heavy-swinging academic superstar and I am terrible at “gaming” the h-index system (pumping out papers and being invited on a bunch as a co-author). It’ll be quite a hustle for a tiny payoff if I take the postdoc route.

If I stay in academia and start as a professor: Good news is that my only “hustle” will be about eventually getting tenure. That is much more managable (and less terrifying than the postdoc situation). But salaries as a professor now become widely varied. Domestic assistant professor salaries apparently can be as low as $70k/year or as high as $130k/year (the latter at some top place like MIT or the like). In a domestic situation, I’d be paying healthcare and putting money into retirement, so my total comp (if I start on the low end) would be hardly better than a postdoc overseas but with a much worse living situation than being abroad.

However, if I am a professor overseas, the pay tends to be much less varied but better than a postdoc. If I get lucky and land a spot in Canada, it’s essentially going to be a best-case scenario: relatively high pay with socialized healthcare.

That being said, despite the narrow margins of supporting my wife as a postdoc overseas, I can probably expect to live comfortably (and have a good future) if I can land a job as a professor in virtually all English-speaking countries (or places where it is the lingua franca), as long as we aren’t on the lower end of salary here in the US.

If I go back into industry: I could imagine landing a job where I make 150-200k/year base salary here in the states (this is on the conservative end of the spectrum, since this is what I used to make as a Staff-level software engineer). After retirement and bonuses, I would be sitting at probably 200-300k/year in total comp (depending on the employer). Now, the downsides are pretty hefty: my healthcare is tied to employment, I have to choose how much to put into retirement, and I don’t have intellectual freedom (I don’t get to pick my projects, how I work on them, or how I share my work). Plus, the biggest downside to industry work is simply that I could be fired/laid off at any point for any reason. Being a good employee doesn’t save you if the company can’t stay alive. And the chances of staying at one job for the rest of my career is impossibly low, so I should expect to move around at least 2 to 5 more times by the time I retire.

The final downside to industry is that I would not be incentivized to take risks and innovate (unless I was very lucky about the job I could land), which means that I am actually more susceptible to getting “replaced” or losing my job. Being in an environment where I can take risks actually keeps my skills sharp! But if I have to complete incremental objectives every sprint, the only innovations and significant skill acquisitions I’ll be making would be related to workplace efficiency and task completion, not big-picture things like “how can we re-imagine work?” “what are new types of interactions we could do here?” and “how might we imagine entirely new futures?” That stuff is largely too high-risk for any single company to question (unless you’re Apple, Google, or Microsoft and even then it is marginal compared to academia).

Perhaps this is a point for its own blog post someday, but high-risk questions that really matter are precisely why socially-funded research matters: socializing risk enables us to dream more openly, without fear of any one company going under because a single researcher spent 3 years of their time on something radical that didn’t pan out. We need to socialize risk because if we don’t all we end up doing is innovating in different methods of conservative thought: de-risking, predicting, and reinforcing models that have already demonstrated they work. Divergence becomes too expensive, even though radical mutation from the “norm” is why humanity exists in the first place. Fundamentally, on a genetic level, we need to take risks at a scale that isn’t just individual. Human and ecological flourishing depends on it.

So is academia worth it?

In a strange way, I have a lot of pride about not returning to industry. It makes sicko money but I left because I told myself I wanted more freedom. Returning to industry feels, quite literally, like I will have been bought out. And this isn’t to knock on folks who choose this path. It’s definitely smarter in most all ways than an academic path. Ironically, we talk about how Ph.D.-havers are smart people… but you have to be pretty foolish in the first place to pursue an academic career.

That being said, I think that the financial analysis only goes so far. I’m an idealist and someone who gets bored easily. I left industry because it was simply brain-melting to make products for Visa (no offense to those folks). I simply wasn’t stimulated enough. Is 150k more per year “worth” working in an understimulating environment? For some people, that choice is easy. But to me, the tech industry is torturous work and it is deeply un-social. I love freely sharing what I’m doing and what I’m working on with other people. And if the work is boring and I can’t even talk about it to anyone, then yeah, it probably is worth about 150k per year.

I think that at the end of my life I want a few things: I want to finish my tabletop game (and even build some fun digital tools for it). I want to write a fiction novel or two. I want my wonderful, lovely wife to be taken care of when we grow old. And I want to look back on the work that I did (that paid the bills) and feel a sense of accomplishment: whether it enabled not just me to live a good life, but others too.

I am a social creature. Virtually every major goal I have in my life is social. And I think that this is perhaps the reason why I simply cannot return to industry. It is a deeply unsocial way of living. Academia, especially in Europe, offers me the chance to take off my summers (which I could spend with my writing). And I’ll have the chance to share and learn from others constantly. How can I even put a price tag on these things?

Industry never asks you to slow down and think (unless you eventually outsmart your boss’s enemies). It doesn’t ask you to dream (unless you’re dreaming of making your boss more money, of course). Industry doesn’t ask you to improve lives (unless the improvements are profitable). And industry doesn’t actually want radical transformation (unless it comes at the destruction of everything in its way to a better quarterly report). And worst of all? With the transformation of knowledge work into management of artificial agents, my fundamental identity becomes reduced to my ability to get something or someone else to do work on my behalf. I don’t dream of managerial conquest. Industry is terrible.

I have to remind myself that the social dimension and fabric of academic life is ultimately why I still want to do it and why I believe in it deeply. If more work was outside of the scope of capitalism and privatization, then perhaps I’d be more open to it. But being socially supported to explore meaningful questions while simultaneously being free to share what I learn in a social way - that’s the sort of work that I want to do. The price tag on it really is awful. It’s hard to say that it is “worth it” or not until I finally grow older. But if I can find a way to live a life where my needs (and the needs of those around me) are met, then perhaps it will be.

Then… academia, but not here?

I think the conclusion to this little journaling exercise of mine is that I really should consider leaving the US, if I can. This is one of the easiest points in life when you can hop borders. I shouldn’t let that opportunity go, especially at a time like now when so much good is being cut here in the US.

And if I leave the US, that means that I virtually have to get into academia. There might be industry jobs overseas waiting for me, but the fragility of that arrangement doesn’t see worth it to me. Plus, I think that I really am more aligned with academic work anyway. I need to be annoying. I need to write. I need to wax philosophical. And most of all, I need to be able to share all the weird things I’m working on.

So now I just need to get lucky. I need to find a good city in a good country with a good academic position that has good funding. If I’m really lucky, I can skip a postdoc and go straight into work as a professor. But we will see.

For now, I think Plan A is an assistant professor position somewhere English-speaking (and I’m willing to pick up a language too, if needed), that pays well, has socialized healthcare, has pension, is in a cute/nice, walkable city with good food and transit, there is natural beauty nearby, and it is climate-ready and climate-resilient. Bonus points if they value visualization and/or accessibility work and/or I know some people there already and we’d like to collab.

Plan B is an assistant professor position somewhere here in the US, but it has to be at a place with a lot of existing support for accessibility (there are only a small handful of these).

Plan C might be a postdoc situation that allows me to stay here in our current house in Pittsburgh for a year or two (CMU again? Apple? Who knows!).

Plan D, I suppose, would be a postdoc overseas. I’d probably only consider one that had a very high or contractually certain chance of leading to a professorship after the postdoc ended. I don’t want to drag my family around while we try to get a job.

Plan E would be to wait a year (if I can squeeze another year out here) and then try the job market again for A - D.

Plan F is getting a job in tech that has some degree of intellectual freedom.

Plan G would be trying to go independent for a while as a consultant/contractor.

Plan H would be getting a job in tech that pays sicko money.

Plan I would be opening a cafe, I guess.

If I get lucky enough to compare multiple plan A situations together, I’ve made a spreadsheet that will help my wife and I get on the same page about the general vibes (in a pseudo-analytical way). It has different qualities of a city and job that we care about, each with weighted scores applied to a scale of 1 to 5 (as well as an aggregate “overall” score for that place). I made a copy of that spreadsheet here, if you, my reader, care to copy it for your own purposes.