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I know lots of brilliant, hard-working, creative people who failed to get that product-market fit as a postdoc and left academia. Some had kids, some didn't. Many of the ones with kids still worked nights and weekends. It's irrelevant to success.
The failure mode of academic science is that it actively punishes the careers of really smart people who fail to achieve product-market fit on the prescribed schedule (i.e. by end of first postdoc). Lots of great potential PIs wash out for this reason.
Could you define "product-market fit"?
I view scientific product-market fit as the act of producing a new tool or insight at a time when a critical number of other scientists are ready and willing to embrace that as a key component of their work.
I'd wager most people could point to the citation history of at least one of their papers and say "This was a great study and I'm glad I did it! But I guess not as many people cared about the result as I'd hoped." That's poor product-market fit.
Lots of great discoveries are made on the backs of niche papers that didn't gain traction at the time. Much like lots of successful companies are built on knowledge gained from their predecessors in a particular market.
All science is worth doing even if it only helps a small number of people. But the academic system is set up to award the greatest (possibly disproportionate?) professional benefits to people who achieve product-market fit early in their careers.
At that point they've typically had 8-10 years to achieve it, or about a quarter of an entire career. How much longer do you think they should typically have?
It's much less time than that if you exclude graduate training, when a person is still learning how to do science and has very little independence in most labs.
I find that incredibly uncompelling. If someone has 5 years to work on improving at something, they usually show substantial progress. If they don't, it's usually - not always - a sign that it's not going to work. It's often money coming out of taxpayer's pockets, too.
What if someone has made substantial progress of the sort that hasn't been valued? I didn't interpret lack of fit to mean lack of progress.
Yes, that happens. I'm criticising an earlier tweet, which seems to espouse the point of view that _generically_ 8-10 years isn't enough time for people to really get going & make an impact.
It's certainly possible to find and make exceptions; I've been a party to some (and, in some ways, a beneficiary). But I'm pretty unsympathetic to the idea of further extending the typical career path, in part because society spends enormous sums of money on it already.
I'd argue the aggregate scientific value for money is pretty high for government funded postdocs. My first year postdoc salary at NYU, with degrees from MIT and Princeton, was "NIH standard minimum" $39k. I worked happily on that scale for over 4 years, as do most people.
Academic postdocs as a labor category probably give the best ROI to the taxpayer, due to advanced training, high motivation to innovate, and generally low cost. I don't think it should be viewed as a negative for taxpayers if some people do multiple postdocs.
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