I recently did a brief job search. I will have to repeat this process every 3 months or so over the next year until I actually start somewhere. My PhD finishes around October next year, and with it goes my scholarship payments. I have been a bit stunned by how brutal the market is, particularly the extent to which business has abrogated any search and match effort on its part and outsourced this to grad programs that churn and burn through new hires to identify the good ones. More generally, I've been stunned to discover how hard it is to find jobs that match my criteria, which I wouldn't have thought were all that difficult.
I'm mostly looking for academic jobs. In what now feels like antiquity, academic jobs presented a trade off. In exchange for a pathetic salary, you got three things:
1. Flexible hours
2. The ability to pursue your own research interests
3. The company of thoughtful colleagues
All three of these things are disappearing from the academic rapidly, and salaries aren't rising to keep up (though I care fuck all about salary so even if they were skyrocketing it wouldn't help). Let me explain briefly.
1. Academics nowadays work 60 hours a week if they are lucky, so while your hours may well be flexible, you're basically just working all the time. The kicker is that most of the extra work isn't coming from research and teaching obligations, but from administration that an administrator should be doing, like providing administration with the names and ID numbers of all the students in your class. Why don't the administrators administering your courses do this? Hell, why isn't it automated!?
2. These days you can't do your own research because you have to do research that gets funded, even if your research, like that of most philosophers, doesn't actually require any funding beyond your salary. You consequently find yourself spending more time writing grant applications than researching and teaching (another source of long work hours). You're also trying to figure out how to fit your research into someone else's KPI framework.
3. Academic faculties are increasingly made up of empirical workhorses and ultra-specialists rather than deep thinkers. Both of these things are important, but they've gotten out of control because of the incentives academics face. Empirical results are much easier to publish that theoretical work (though hopefully the cascading replication crisis will have some effect on this). They are also mostly a function of how much work you do rather than how smart you are. These two things combined means that faculties are increasingly hiring people doing research that is, how shall I put this, boring AF. An example I came across recently was a paper analysing the impact of the Nazis sacking all the Jews from German math faculties. It was negative. Duh. Like was it ever going to be anything else? The author notes in the introduction that nobody has studied this topic before. That's because it's boring and useless mate.
Now boring workhorses, what some friends and I like to call "strivers" (they're like the evolved version of a try-hard), are a dime a dozen, so the number of people applying for academic positions is sky high. The other day I saw an advertisement for a one-year economics postdoc with a teaching requirement in a middling German university in a small town offering $40 000 p.a. in salary. This is basically the worst job ever when you consider that applicants need to have a PhD in one of the most employable disciplines on the planet. But nobody applied right? Wrong. 450 applicants.
The academy, especially at the early career researcher level, is also really keen on specialists even as it sings the praises of interdisciplinary work. As I'm genuinely interdisciplinary, I am fucked. If I do manage to get an ECR position in a year's time it will be because I have so many publications that even though only half of them will be in philosophy I'll still be competitive among the philosophy grads, who seem to struggle to get even a single paper out before completing. In the meantime, I've decided that the academy is for beggars and I'm going to look for something else.
This brings me to the rest of the job market, which is also fucked. I have 3 fairly simple criteria for a job. They are:
1. Analytical work. I don't care what it is, but it can't be bullshit. A lot of consulting work, for example, is not analytical, it is fraudulent. Consultants like to say things in jest like "the findings of your model are endogenous to client wants". That's funny. It should also be criminal, especially when the client is the government. I will not be putting my $100 000, 10-year education to work conjuring up "independent expert" justifications for bastards to sell patsies a turn.
2. Competent management. Working for a decade in an Australian University has made me allergic to bad management. One example: Australian universities rely heavily on student fees to fund research, capital works and administrative salaries but don't systematically audit teaching. That's why you've still got tutors saying "question 6 is easy so I'll just leave it to" even though it's now a meme. You have to apply yourself for a teaching award! Can you imagine a business where people self-reported their productivity? These awards, for a paltry $1000, are the only bonuses paid to teaching. They are pretty much the only incentive you have to improve your pedagogy. All other promotion is based on research output, even though teaching quality factors into the decision of most students to attend ANU, and certainly into what they tell their peers about ANU. So what I want from a job is a management that is competent and no-bullshit. That shouldn't be so hard to find. Yet it is often the case that management is both incompetent and full of shit, or at least that the more competent management becomes the more full of shit it gets because feeding you shit is a great way to get more unpaid hours out of many people.
3. Skin in the game. I want to work for someone who makes money depending on whether they did a good job. Investment is at the extreme. If you did a good job you made the bank money and get a bonus. If you did a bad job the bank gets burned for millions. But this principle can apply across a range of fields. Consulting isn't one of them. You do a shit job and the company goes bust, you can just say that it was going bust anyway (indeed, you were probably pulled in to say that so the CEO could still collect his bonus).
I tell you what people, these jobs are incredibly hard to find. Every company is dealing in bullshit. You've got to say that you're passionate about banking, buy into Bain's claim that they "care about the happiness and wellbeing of their staff" (despite working them 70 hours a week), submit to key performance indicators that have nothing to do with your actual job (this is how teaching is "improved" at ANU), produce economic models that are invalidated by missing data but it doesn't matter because all the client wants is some regression output, mechanically write market reports on daily flows, etc. etc.
The few jobs that I do come across that seem solid are invariably not for grads and say that 2 years consulting experience would be ideal. As far as I can tell, you have to be quite masochistic or a bit of a fuckwit to do 2 years of consulting, so what do these company's think they are achieving by using this filter? What do they even have HR departments for if the strategy is simply to see who survived working for a company like McKinsey, who just released a short film on reinvention because they are so "passionate" about it?
RIP me.
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