BF2S Forums I hate my job/I need a job/I've got an interview MEGATHREAD

If you could make the same amount of money to do the Oxford thing, wouldn't you? Anyhow, in the U.S. it is really only the upper class students doing humanities post-grad stuff. If the U.K. is anything like us, I assume the job will be filled by someone incredibly motivated and has parents with money to support them too.

Job interview - done

Via webex, bizarrely the first online meeting I've had during the pandemic.

Only stuff-up was I asked what I thought was a pretty intelligent question about one of the points they wanted me to address in a multi-point question - then burbled away and completely failed to address that point.

Ah well, if an engineering company doesn't know engineers are autists I can't help them.

Anyway, the project lead - who has an awesome resume/linkedin profile which starts in the marines - was the classic person who didn't know how to set up a webcam - just the top of his head down to his eyes showing, which sort of put me off my stride a bit, I think that makes us even.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2022-02-11 00:12:55)

erm, you’re comparing a junior lectureship to a senior lectureship. well done, god brain.

senior tenured lecturers in the humanities make £50-100k too.

low pay for junior academics is systemic, not limited to humanities. do a research.

‘too many history graduates’ it’s literally one of the main saws of fretting and complaint in the TLS and education supplements that humanities, modern languages, etc, are in terminal decline. you really are a fucking idiot.

according to 2016/2017 stats, there were the same number of physics grads and computer science grads (~25-26k, respectively) as ‘historical and philosophical studies’ (25k). there were 35k engineering graduates.

amazing that your petty, bitter, sadsack proclivities even stretch to feeling smug about people being exploited/underpaid because ‘wahh me no like their subject! it offends moi!’

grow up mate, honestly. it’ll do you a world of good.

Last edited by uziq (2022-02-11 00:21:22)

it literally says ‘stipendiary lectureship’, dumbass.

you're comparing 'fixed-term' contract to 'permanent' contracts. it's right there in the posting. how dumb are you?

a ‘stipendiary’ is what you get given when you’re a lowly PhD graduate student. that they’re encroaching into actual full-time work, in lieu of, you know, permanent contracts with job security (to say nothing of tenure), is a blight in-itself.

stipendiary contracts are obviously for junior-most academics, which comprise the bulk of a department’s workforce thesedays.

amazing that you love to wank off over topics you know nothing about. time and time again you just reveal your fecund ignorance.

Last edited by uziq (2022-02-11 00:39:48)

brain drain is a big problem in technical sciences, too. industry is obviously much more lucrative than academe.

history or politics graduates can make a lot more money at london thinktanks. who woulda thunk it?

the real question is why institutions with vast endowments and sky-high, marketized tuition fees are underpaying their core staff so much.

i should have known as soon as i posted a *ree ree!* humanities post that you'd want to make it about how engineers get paid more. well done!

fyi graduate earnings between sciences and humanities are pretty much even in the middle-term in the UK market.

Why do you single out history majors? You know of all the liberals art majors, history students are the least uh liberal. History majors tend to have war video game addled brains and weird ideas regarding nationalism, fascism, etc.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Via webex, bizarrely the first online meeting I've had during the pandemic.

Online meetings via Zoom or Google Meets is the future. It is actually great being able to do a meeting with somebody on the other side of the country.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

Via webex, bizarrely the first online meeting I've had during the pandemic.

Online meetings via Zoom or Google Meets is the future. It is actually great being able to do a meeting with somebody on the other side of the country.

Web meetings were already the future. Business travel is back on the menu though

Older, much older, teachers have been asking me about what to do about kids with IEPs. I guess like the union president said I am "friendly and approachable". Really feels good when senior teachers ask me what the process/system is. I give good advice.

I've been to some advanced time-wasters in my day. Before-times immaculate grooming, the commute there, hanging around in the lobby, mind-games, insults, 1.5 hour lunches, the one person who monopolizes time while the exec twiddles their thumbs and stares at their lap, "oh we need to wrap this up there's another group who was scheduled for this room 15 minutes ago," without much getting done, and then the commute back, and finishing your day mentally exhausted. Physically if the drive was long.

Give me the remote meetings with all the annoyances of those, and at least I'll have my entire day back.

Exactly. Even the stuff which supposedly is supposed to have import, yet doesn't amount to much import. Sometimes the closing words are "we'll send an email," yeah ok, thanks.

uziq wrote:

Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology
Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Excellent

But its a very strange worldview you have - Someone did a PhD -> They should be given an above average salary to pursue whatever interests them for as long as they like.

Maybe I'd like to spend my time pondering how rivets work, what rivets have done through history, how much better rivets could have done but for anti-rivetism.
Where's my tenured funding.

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology
Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Excellent

But its a very strange worldview you have - Someone did a PhD -> They should be given an above average salary to pursue whatever interests them for as long as they like.

Maybe I'd like to spend my time pondering how rivets work, what rivets have done through history, how much better rivets could have done but for anti-rivetism.
Where's my tenured funding.

the view i have is that oxford is one of the richest institutions on the planet.

a single international student - of which oxford has a superfluity - pays some £30,000 per year for a course. at least £50,000 for a postgraduate degree.

and yet the 'bread and butter' of their academic workforce, the lectureships, are being paid sub-£20k a year.

the average salary in the UK is £25-32k, depending on median/mean. a highly qualified worker with 3x degrees and a very high responsibility role, who will surely be overworked, is being paid £19k at oxford. without a permanent contract. without any legal protections. without a union. the complaint is a bit more than 'why aren't PhD's given an above-average salary?' they're far, far below the average. a supermarket pays its workers better.

i don't think PhD's are a special elect who should be paid a lofty salary because they're society's philosopher-kings. i think workers should fight back against shameless exploitation. it's pretty simples.

as cybargs pointed out, this totally dysfunctional 'free internship' -> perpetual stipends culture is a wider symptom of a vastly unequal society in which social mobility has stalled. elite jobs in elite industries are populated entirely by posh kids who can take the job for its social prestige alone. meanwhile the institutions promoting this toxic workplace culture are making more money than ever. we really can't organize things better than this?

starbucks is busy union busting this year and raising prices, whilst refusing to raise employee salaries. it's the same thing. don't get so fucking distracted all the time by your 'hurr durr the humanities are evil and i base my entire personality around crusading against them'. you seem like a total fucking dork. an unemployed live-at-home guy who has evidently been exploited and miserable his whole working life in his sub-managerial role, if your constant whining on this forum is anything to go by ... taking pleasure in a vice chancellor/managerial class exploiting academic workers. great job dilbert! you the man!

as for the standard philistine 'i would like to research so-and-so, why should the taxpayer fund it?' boilerplate: the world's richest western economies can afford to fund academic freedom and intellectual research. most of the nobel prizes in history have come from 'disinterested' research, most of the greatest human strides forward, whether you want to think in material scientific-medical-technological terms or in less tangible terms of its literature and civic prizes. western nations can afford to spend trillions to astroturf dustbowls in the middle-east but, oh ho, we should suddenly be very thinlipped and meanspirited about an engineering or history researcher? do you have any idea how little it costs to 'fund' and cover the costs of a history PhD? lmao. it is literal pocket change.

also, let's be straight: we are talking about full-time lectureships. they're not being paid to pursue their own navelgazing. they are being vastly underpaid to teach undergraduates in lectures, seminars and tutorials. to mark essays. to set-up and structure course syllabi.

Last edited by uziq (2022-02-16 07:35:43)