I hate the helplessness of this. You have agency. You also have responsibility.
You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed.
I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had the moral stomach requires to convince highly educated broke 30 year olds to give me hundreds of thousands of dollars in free labor. But I don't.
So instead I turned down TT offers and went to industry where I spend a lot of time convincing people with the money to actually pay living wages with good benefits to people who can work on slightly different things. I don't have a lab with my name on it. I don't have an office. I will never have tenure. No on calls me Professor or even Doctor. But I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. My post-docs are paid $100k-$200k.
Stop relying on broke kids to fund your dreams. Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. Or stay in academia and don't hire people to help you unless you can pay them even close to what they're worth.
You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed.
I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had the moral stomach requires to convince highly educated broke 30 year olds to give me hundreds of thousands of dollars in free labor. But I don't.
So instead I turned down TT offers and went to industry where I spend a lot of time convincing people with the money to actually pay living wages with good benefits to people who can work on slightly different things. I don't have a lab with my name on it. I don't have an office. I will never have tenure. No on calls me Professor or even Doctor. But I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. My post-docs are paid $100k-$200k.
Stop relying on broke kids to fund your dreams. Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. Or stay in academia and don't hire people to help you unless you can pay them even close to what they're worth.