Physics is a contemplative and meticulous profession. Most physicist I know simply want to concentrate on the problems that interest them and ignore everything peripheral to their research (administration, funding, career planning, etc.) as much as possible. This was certainly the attitude I had early in my career. Unfortunately, I discovered that most practicing physicists cannot focus on their science work as exclusively as they used to.
Once, there were good odds of the typical physicist getting on with a large company, university, or national lab that offered “permanent employment” and meant it. Believe it or not, in 1990 IBM employed nearly 400,000 people worldwide, most with life-time employment guarantees (which ended not long after). Landing such a position was the package deal for a stable middle to upper-middle class lifestyle complete with dependable paychecks, regular vacations, and a nice pension all included. I thought I was on the path to that sort of job when I showed up for my postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2005. As I quickly discovered, however, the nature of “permanent employment” was changing fast even at this flagship national lab. My time at LLNL corresponded to the years right before the “management change” in which the administration of the lab was taken away from the University of California, which had run it for decades on a non-profit basis, and contracted to a for-profit consortium through competitive bidding. I quickly learned that two big elements of the management change were busting the pension system and reorganizing the lab. Livermore employees were eligible for the gold standard CalPERS defined benefit pension system when the UC managed the lab. Employees who did not vest into CalPERs before the management change (e.g. me) would be excluded. Instead, the newer hires received much less generous defined benefit 401k plans. As is so often the case, “reorganization” is a euphemism for lay-offs and LLNL did in fact reduce the size of its workforce by about 40% since I left in 2007 (~9,600 then vs. ~5,800 now according to Wikipedia). So much for the old “permanent employment” deal.
My experience is hardly unique. People at most of the US national laboratories and major companies have similar stories to tell. Take, for example, a fellow PhD physicist I know who enjoyed his work at Solyndra up until day they suddenly went bankrupt and he found himself out of work. Solyndra was a 1000 person, 100 million dollar company that turned out to be a lot more impermanent than it looked. Job security is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in academia as well, just ask the legions of adjunct faculty. Consequently, I argue that even if you manage to land one of the few “permanent” jobs that are still around, it is unlikely to stay permanent in the decades to come.
What does all this mean for the average physicist? Fundamentally, it means that managing your career is clearly your responsibility and no one else’s. This was also true in the past, but having a permanent job provided the option of abdicating your personal responsibility and letting your boss or institution define your career trajectory for you via set career paths, seniority based raises and promotions, etc. To effectively manage your career in a world without that option, you will need a strategy unique to your talents and goals. That will be the topic of my next post.