If you’re upset or disappointed that someone stopped doing basic research, get mad at your elected officials the NIH, and the other people running the “research enterprise”, not the poor woman who making ~35k/year while living in San Francisco and working 50+ hours a week.

I love doing research but I can easily imagine scenarios where the low salary, long hours, and abysmal job security would make it infeasible for me to continue. Ironically, fixing these problems would probably improve the overall quality of research too....

Having put in their time at UCSF, this person has most likely already made a decent contribution to the field, at the very least enabling their PI to continue their work. And who knows what they will go on to do now that they have escaped the crushing grind of academia?

In the strangest way, I really welcome this comment.

There's not much anyone can say to me that comes close to the confusion, guilt, and pressure I felt making the decision to leave grad school. If I can provide some context: I'm a Chinese American whose parents and older sister are all tenured academic professors (in molecular biology, theoretical physics, and neuroscience). Becoming a professor was my dream, so I was also deeply saddened when I realized I couldn't devote my life to pursuing scientific truth and discovery.

But turns out, it just isn't for me.

I was miserable in academia, and that misery felt like a betrayal to everyone I knew, loved, and respected. To make things worse, I was also good at it (https://neurotree.org/neurotree/publications.php?pid=57690&s...). When it came down to it, I felt like I was living someone else's life, and I knew that my ability to make a positive impact on the world would be severely limited by how unhappy I was.

To this day, I feel obligated to be on the side of making things better rather than worse, and want to help people in whatever way I can. And while I'm no longer developing therapies for Parkinsonian patients, I do believe that I am still helping people. Key Values at its core is about helping people evaluate their personal values, find teams that will energize them, and feel genuine happiness from spending their waking hours doing work they love with people they love.

Now I feel inspired and excited, and I feel like the work I do is incredibly rewarding. I promise you I'll be able to do more for the world because I feel this way.

Listen, I get it. It's annoying that so many people today are so privileged, and here we are complaining about all of the amazing options we have. But this is our reality. If you don't love how you spend your waking hours, it is your responsibility to exercise your privilege and figure out what will. At the end of the day, the only person who has to live with every decision you make is you. So make sure you choose wisely.

Everyone wants to make a meaningful contribution to society, but that's just too vague of a desire. Maintenance and cleaning staff are some of the most overlooked and undervalued contributors, and thanks to Homejoy, I will forever go out of my way to express my gratitude to them.

Lastly, just for the record, I was not an engineer at Homejoy. I was both a city and regional manager, and I worked very closely with the cleaning professionals who serviced the Bay Area. I guarantee there are at least 100 people in the Bay who will tell you that I was the one who taught them how to clean a toilet. I scrubbed hundreds of toilets alongside them, and several of them continue to be friends of mine.

A couple links to maybe help get over your misery.

First, here is why academia decades ago was a nicer place to be and tenure was much easier to get -- meaning when parents tell you how great is was for them, times have changed: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

Second, academia is part of a larger process that stamps out most creativity and independence in order to produce professionals who toe the line ideologically: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/

Of course, that process starts much earlier than PhD programs: https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanE...

Good luck with your new directions. Wish I had know this decades ago myself.

BTW, on they joys of being a professional carpet cleaner: https://web.archive.org/web/20030807105050/http://www.unconv... "More than a few people agree the best career would be one which provides challenge, intellectual stimulation, and rewards for quality work. Many however, would be surprised to discover they can have all of those benefits and more in some of the unlikeliest of careers. Case in point: I'm a professional carpet cleaner. Some people think this is a second-rate career. I don't agree with them. Carpet cleaning gives me challenges, intellectual stimulation, and many other rewards. To prove this, permit me to walk you through one of my work days."

Man, I wish you sent me these about 6 years ago! It was hard to get out of my own way, and over my misery, but I was able to!

Thank you for sharing these :D

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, which was much better than my presumptuous comment deserved. I did my time in Academia as well, and the results were a PhD I don't use, and the skills to live cheaply on a TA/RA stipend. It's a hard road, and it's hard to fault someone for not taking it. Still, it's a shame to see so much talent going into parasitic tech jobs when they could instead be unironically "making the world a better place."

So what? Human beings aren't obligated to make "an actual contribution to human understanding." If you want neuroscience research done so much, go get your degree and make that contribution yourself.

I don't understand why you would want to shame someone for their career choices based on a short blurb on the internet.

If you are truly saddened by the loss of a potential neuroscience researcher you could start studying and apply.