text:
Trouble finding job after disappointing PhD in India
Started PhD in 2014.
Mistakes that I have committed:

I did my PhD in a topic that was not the area of expertise of my PhD supervisor.

I was doing computational work, while the past graduates on the topic were all experimentalists. So, I did not know the career prospects.

I did not take relevant courses. My committee did not tell me to take them. I am technically unsound now.

I published very late, in 2017 and that too a bad paper (just 3 citation till date) in a decent journal.

Finally graduated in 2019. Tried everything to get a postdoc or industry positions. Did not get anything. I have just 4 papers from my PhD.

Currently unemployed. Looking for positions since. I am an Indian national. Doing part-time job in call center to make ends meet.

My PhD advisor has offered me 2 years postdoc position. Topic will be little bit different and more collaborative with other research groups. Should I accept? I don't know my career prospects after that? Can I still get into academia or research industry after that?

I apply to both industry and academia. No responses. I want to be in a research field either in industry or academia.
Is every career redeemable?

Your emotional response may be at odds with the reality of the situation. Times are hard in general for academics right now and don't reflect your skills and knowledge. Perhaps you should talk to a personal counsellor to get over your sense of (probably) burnout. And take that post-doc. Call center work isn't going to help a bright person cope with life.

Agree with @Buffy . That postdoc is much better than a call center job. You might want to use some of the time in your postdoc to audit courses in fields in which you think you are weak.

And don't judge yourself too harshly.

What does "Is every career redeemable mean?"

@AzorAhai-him- I assume they mean "salvagable" not "redeemable".

Speaking as someone who has been both an employee and employer.. if you want to get a job in industry, what are your skills? You mention doing computational work - that alone lends itself to software development jobs. How many programming languages do you know? How many are you comfortable with? Got any personal projects on github?

The only thing that sounds bad is 3.) Work on it during that Postdoc.

There are many reasons why someone might struggle to get a job. I would suggest getting a career adviser (hire one or ask a friend) to look through every part of a few job applications. Doing lots of research online can serve the same purpose (although it can help immensely to get an outside perspective from someone experienced). This includes your resume / CV, your cover letters, what your general career prospects are, which jobs and how many you're applying to (as a rough estimate, expect 1 interview for every 10 to 100 jobs that you're well-suited to) and interview prep.

Covid=work from home: You must register your details with Freelancer and Fiverr and Guru.com They are all websites where programmers and computer scientists can earn 200, 5000, 20,000 for a computing project. People will probably propose topics especially related to your PHD or your other strong talents, and you can take any work until your reputation reaches 5 stars and then you can command high work rates. A lot of round the world businesses complete contracts through those websites with Indian computer science professionals. Only do EASY projects, so you can do them awesomely.

You could go from working in a call center to working in a university? I have no idea what the issue is. Take the job immediately.

Having 3 citations means that you are statistically already in the upper part of the citation-distribution!

I think your phd experience is quite similar to mine (also began in 2014 und submitted in 2019 under bad/none supervision) but it wasn't difficult for me to get a position afterwards. My plus, and still, is that I'm very familiar with programming and as you conducted a computational work, you should be as well?

It is really tough to get government employment in these days in India even after having PhD degree. I am also a PhD student in India. I am also worried about next career after PhD. This is because our government is not creating enough opportunity to the talents.

You did a PhD in 5 years, published 4 papers and got an offer for a 2-year postdoc position in times where research funding decreases. Keep going, looks fine.
Take some courses or workshops on topics where you think you aren't skilled enough, but given that you could publish, I suspect that you underestimate yourself here.

"Can I still get into academia or research industry after that?"

With a postdoc position, you are in academia.

"With a postdoc position, you are in academia." Yeah, with an offer of a postdoc position, he's already doing better than 90% of the PhD graduates at my university.

To answer the explicit question, no, not every career can be salvaged. But yours doesn't seem to fall into that category.
You are experiencing a natural emotional letdown, but it is based, I suspect, much more on the state of the academic economy than on any failings on your part. But, since such feelings can be debilitating, it would be good to deal with them explicitly, say by visiting a personal counselor. Most universities have an office open to students for such things, and they might be available to recent graduates and to employees.
I suggest that you take the postdoc that is being offered and use the time to advance your prospects. This involves productive research, of course, but it also involves building a circle of potential collaborators and advocates that can aid in your career moves. Your advisor probably already has such a circle and you can, perhaps, get entry to it. But, through conferences and other meetings you can also make productive contacts.
I also suggest that you ignore your age as a factor and take heart from the fact that your advisor believes in you.

I, too, graduated into a terrible academic marketplace and had to do some rather drastic things to stay in academia, though I was highly thought of by my peers and the faculty. This included both changing fields (math to CS) and a multi-year job search. But, forty some years later, my goals were largely met.

Interpreted a certain way, it sounds like your job search lasted 40 years. heh

@DKNguyen, not quite that bad, but I had some bad experiences.

I graduated in the recession of 2008 with a bachelors. I couldn't find a job for 3 years. Of course, I was younger not having spent as much time in school because no post-grad degree. The job I did end up getting was in my field, but not my specialty by a long shot and did not use my knowledge base or skills at all.
I am on my second job after graduation now and although it is relevant, I never know if that experience will ever help me easily get a new job due to how specific it is. Graduating in recessions hits your sense of security hard like that. When your experience has told you that finding a job takes 3 years, that's the benchmark you use when thinking about future job searches, and it would take a lot of much shorter, easier job searches to unlearn that, but I digress.
Your mindset is definitely skewing things. I could be misreading between the lines, but were all those industry positions you applied research positions? If so, why are you neglecting the enormous, well-traveled alternative of non-research industry positions?
It is absolutely baffling to me why you would ever consider not taking the post-doc when nothing else is on the table, especially with your concerns of future career prospects. Who cares if the topic is a little bit different? There are people working in entirely different departments in industry. It is as if you think your call-center job is even remotely as relevant as the postdoc position. The post-doc topic could be in English literature and still help you more than that call-center job would.
One thing I've observed: People who aren't worried about finding new jobs and seemingly seemingly quit jobs on a whim are like that because they always find new jobs easily, and they seem to be able to do that because they know enough of the right people to help them. On that basis alone, any post-doc topic would help you more than that call-center job. I still lack such a network due to my skills and particular job. But with the post-doc you have an clear-cut way to get your foot in the door. Not only that you say this post-doc position has more collaboration with other research groups which is even better for networking. If this hasn't occurred to you, your emotions are getting the better of you. I wish I had such clear cut networking opportunity where I get paid fall into my lap.

The post-doc topic could be in English literature ... --- This also baffled me. After earning my Masters degree, along with a couple of additional years towards Ph.D. (but at that time not completed and left school), some of the jobs I worked were: part-time evening data entry (this was late 1980s), substitute school teacher, adjunct at a community college, and fast food restaurant ("flipping hamburgers"). I would rank ALL of these higher than a call-center job, even the restaurant work (of which I've actually done a lot, and not just fast food) since it's more applicable as these things go.

The academic path is harder than many people think.  You're doing fine.  Some people do better and some don't, but it's not a personal failing, there's a large degree of luck involved too.
Do what makes sense to you.  If you feel you are missing skills, while being a post-doc take a few extra classes to fill the gaps.  If you don't have enough publications, work to release more papers.  If you feel you don't have enough citations, change the topic to a hot-ticket item.
The world does not have a "correct path" or a "path so bad it can't be redeemed"  In fact, most of the world isn't keeping score on you at all; they too are too busy keeping score on themselves (also regretting their failures, also ignoring their successes).
In short, set a goal and achieve it, then repeat.  Don't look at all the goals you considered but didn't set for yourself, as you'll always fall short of that benchmark (as considered goals are not worked towards, only set ones are).

And if you ever drop out of academia (typically it takes 2 post-doc positions before you get offered an assistant professorship, so you are on the academic path), take a job fitting your educational level.  Just because you don't have training in something you deem a practical skill, that doesn't mean you have failed.  You're smart enough to get where you are, so take a job that needs smart people and is willing to pay them.  There are plenty of people not working in their field; one of my best software developers was a physicist.

First some good news, with many things shut down due to the coronavirus, there is no need to feel ashamed or like a failure to the people back in India, nothing to brag about, but no shame either.
Explain to them that things are very bad here in the job market.
Tell them (probably lie) that all your co-workers in the call center have college degrees.
Mention that even after the vaccine gets dispensed to enough people, in May-June 2021, there will be 2 years worth of graduates for 1 year's worth of jobs.
Also, don't tell your folks in India about those mistakes you mentioned.
All that should lower the expectations that your folks have for you.
Now, for your career.
First of all, you ARE employed at the call center, so you said.
Second, you have gone so far down the acedemic rabbit hole that you might as well accept the postdoc position that was offered to you.
Third, as far as industry, are you talented in a mechanical sort of way?
Can you twirl a wrench and twist a screwdriver in a way that gives beneficial results?
Do you understand the mechanical workings of a car and appliances?
Do you dream up mechanical devices to accomplish some sort of task?
If the answer is yes to these questions, you have a good shot at industry.
If the answer is no to those questions, either you need to stick to academia (those who can't do - teach) or you could go in a different direction.
You mentioned how you pursued computations rather than experiments, perhaps you could narrow your focus to doing stress analysis equations or change to calculating risk and cost factors for an insurance company, or computationally heavy accounting work.
I hope this gives you some direction.

Telling lies to everyone? -1 for that. I'd give a few more -1's for "china virus" and "trump vaccine" btw

How is understanding mechanical workings necessarily relevant to the OP's situation? They don't seem to have specified what field they are in.

@GoodDeeds They did. At the very end, but it seems they edited it out.

Many aspects of this post (like the advice to lie) are very troubling. Further, some of the assertions here (i.e., that industry necessarily involves twirling a wrench and that academia only attracts "those who can't") are unsupported and seem improbable. I urge OP (or those who agree with him) to edit the post and better justify these assertions. For now, I am adding the "needs citation" post notice.


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How is cheating viewed in Western universities and why is it seen as such a big deal?
Summary: Coming from Russian university student, cheating at exams seems normal and encouraged. Why is it so much more frowned upon at the North American/western universities?

Ok, I assume that most people viewing this question are from the US, or at least from the West. This question is something that got me kicked off Reddit for "promoting cheating". I spend a lot of my time in the American infosphere and one thing that always baffled me is the apparent attitude towards cheating, plagiarism etc. It seems that everyone (including the students) see it as immoral or the like. Here in Russia cheating is a normal part of student life. It is seen as a way of bolstering your grade/passing a class and is only bad in the sense that you might get caught. And you are not a thief until you are caught...
I don't remember a single serious exam I didn't prepare some cheat sheets for at least as plan B. Not doing so would have simply been callous on my side. Helping each other cheat is expected of friends, and no fellow student would ever see it as immoral. Students cheating and professors trying (or at least pretending to try) to catch them is a normal and expected game of cat and mouse. It isn't something you necessarily do out of desperation or laziness but something you do if you can get away with it.
My question is why it seems to be such a big deal in the West (and in America in particular)? I have seen movies where students buying course papers from each other is a major plot point and is presented as something horrible and not as something totally mundane. Would people in the US be comfortable telling stories about how they managed to cheat on exams to their bosses during small talk?
Edit: Just to clarify, I don't see cheating as something that should be ignored by professors. I just don't see a moral dimension to the issue: if you can get away with it, it is not your problem. Nor is it such a big deal to try.
Edit 2: Another accidental observation. Just reading the questions that pop up in the "related" section makes me cringe:
"Is it cheating if you guess on multiple choice questions?"
"Is it cheating if you know the solution in advance?"
It simply wouldn't have occurred to me to ask these questions. "If you can't get caught, then there isn't anything to worry about" is the way I see it. The fact that people even consider these questions points to a profound difference in our mentality.
Edit 3. I understand that "Western" is a vague term, but I chose to use it because I am also interested in perspectives from other "Western" countries - not necessarily just the USA.

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Voted to close because this question seems not asked in good faith. OP is engaging in argument with every answer posted. The Reddit ban for "promoting cheating" is not off the mark (and/or trolling the site).

Who encouraged you to cheat? Your peers or your professors?

Just curious about one thing.   If cheating (without getting caught?) is almost encouraged, what is the point of grades or tests?   Just to see how good of a cheater you are?   Why aren't all classes just pass/fail?

@JasonGoemaat It is not encouraged in any way. Just not viewed as morally wrong to try. You may still get caught and, depending on the subject/professor you may have your grade lowered or have to redo the exam. The point of grading is the same as anywhere: to assess your level. Oftentimes the exams are constructed such that cheating alone is not enough to pass. Oral exams are common, and even if it is a maths exam you may be asked to explain your reasoning.

This seems to be a troll question written to defame Russia. It would be useful if you actually give Russian references where they mention cheating as a normal and encouraged attitude. If it is so common, you should be able to find some, don't you?

@Amelian I was under the impression it was the opposite: when you look at their questions' history, it looks like they keep asking about the why's of the education system in the United States.

I graduated from a Russian university and later taught for years at an Australian university, so I understand your question very well. In my opinion, the reason for the phenomenon you're asking about is multifold, and I will now make a few points to explain my view.
I have to start with an important caveat though. The West isn't uniform, and my answer is specifically about Australia. For a German point of view, read another answer.
1. While students at Russian universities are generally graded against well-defined standards, students at Australian universities are often graded on a curve, that is, against their peers. This means that if you cheat at a Russian university, your cheating won't affect the grades of other students, and that is why your cheating is simply none of their business. And that's often not the case at Australian universities.
In response to comments below, I want to clarify that grading on a curve is often implicit rather than explicit. When I taught at an Australian university, we first gave each student a score according to our assessment criteria, like in Russia, and then, when all scores were known, we decided how to convert these scores to grades on the scale of 100 - and the latter grades were written in transcripts. The conversion rule was chosen each time on the ad-hoc basis and had to be such that outstanding students (say, top 5-10%) got a grade above 90 (but never 100), while average students got something like 75. So, it was, in effect, a curve, but we didn't really explain this to students, so I guess that some of them were not fully aware of the competitive character of the grading process. Still, I believe that many students realized, at least on some level, that they were compared to others in the grading process and that this could affect the grades.
In contrast, it is quite normal in Russia to give every student in the class the highest possible grade, отлично - or, for example, to give most students the lowest passing grade, удовлетворительно. The point is that there are no expectations whatsoever from Russian teachers regarding the mean value and spread of the grades. Russian teachers are expected to clearly define standards before the exam and then blindly grade against them.
One more clarification: A comment below says that grading on a curve is likely to increase cheating, not the other way around, and that well may be true (provided that all other factors are the same), but OP is asking about how your cheating is viewed by others. And my point is that if grading is on a curve and you cheat, you basically push the grades of your peers down. So, I think it's understandable how they feel about cheaters - and they woudn't feel that way if grading wasn't on a curve. Also, teachers who grade on a curve have an additional motivation to ensure that no cheating takes place, to avoid fair students getting "robbed" by cheaters.
2. Australian universities care much more about their reputation than Russian universities do, because a good reputation helps attract students who are prepared to pay a high tuition fee. In Australia, students pay a lot of money for their education. Getting a BS degree in Australia can easily cost you A$100,000 (which is about US$70,000). Tuition fees are a considerable part of a university's income. And each university is free to set its own tuition fee. So, if a university gets notorious for letting its students cheat, its reputation gets destroyed, and so does its ability to attract well-paying students. After all, students want a diploma of a reputable university. And in order to remain reputable, Australian universities strive to eradicate cheating.
In contrast, education at Russian universities has been free for decades. Now many Russian universities have started introducing tuition fees, but they are not as large as in Australia, and many Russian students still pay nothing for their university education. In Russia, if you get good scores for your school-leaving exams (ЕГЭ), you will be able to choose between many universities that will grant you a tuition waiver. And if you don't get good scores, you probably don't need a university education in the first place. At any rate, Russian universities are largely state-funded, and their income doesn't depend on their reputation as strongly as for Australian universities.
So, when you cheat at a Russian university, you harm neither your fellow students, who are graded independently of your grade, nor the university itself, which gets funded by the state according to some formal criteria that your cheating has nothing to do with. So, if you don't make any obvious harm to the university or your peers, why would anyone at your university be really bothered by your cheating? No harm, no foul.
3. Academic staff at Russian universities are notoriously underpaid, with the typical salary being US$500 per month or so. They barely make ends meet, at least unless they have a second source of income such as a second job or private tutoring. As a result, they don't really value their university teaching jobs. So, they don't really care when they teach. And, consequently, they don't really care about cheating. Furthermore, if you are a Russian university teacher and let your students cheat, you'll be able to give them good grades, and that will be a good cover-up of your poor teaching - and you have to cover it up because your teaching is as good as your salary check is.
In contrast, academic staff at Australian universities are relatively well-paid. Professors in Australia make about A$200,000 per year (which is US$130,000). So, they value their jobs. They really care. And no professor wants to get notorious for letting students cheat, for no university will tolerate this - see my second point above.
4. Students in Australia tend to have a more responsible approach towards their studies as compared to their Russian counterparts, in my experience. After all, Australian students pay a lot for their education, so they naturally want to get real knowledge. And this makes them less inclined to cheat.
5. Finally, cultural differences play a role, too. Australians tend to be much less tolerant towards cheating in general (e.g., cheating on taxes) than Russians are, in my experience.
At any rate, there's no simple answer to your question. It's a very complex picture involving many factors, and I'm unsure whether I've listed all of them.
And I'm sorry if my answer seems too critical of Russian universities. I hope they are improving now, although the recent geopolitical developments don't add optimism, to be honest.

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You should note that "Professor" in Australia means "full Professor" in the US. It is not true that every tenured academic earns $200k! People might get an inflated expectation of academic salaries here.

There is a profound cultural and factual difference in understanding the society between the rule-of-law democratic countries ("the West" in the Russian parlance) on one side and the ex-USSR space on the other side.
In "the West" law, order and various rules are seen to be:

beneficial for the society as a whole
beneficial for the society members (people breaking the rules may see short term advantage, but long term resistance as well)
subject to change, should a general consensus of changing them is established
livable in the first place
generally enforced
usually take precedence over what the boss says

Another important fact is that the education certificate (diploma) is good, but is in no way a replacement for the actual abilities and competence when we talk about earning money.
"In Soviet Russia" everything is the other way round.

Rules are from the above. Even if they change, the average Ivan has no business thereof.
It is generally hard to follow the rules. They are hardly ever evaluated for efficiency or acceptability (no feedback so no one cares).
Rules are enforced sporadically and selectively.
The best-known social elevator is breaking the rules in one way or another (corruption, stealing, etc...). People doing this precisely are seen as successful and see approval instead of resistance.
The society well-being is a ruler's business, not everyone's.

Back in the USSR times, diploma determined your work position and your actual competence had little to do with your income. It is not exactly like this anymore, but the diploma fetish is pretty much entrenched.
So here we go.
The authority or rules of any kind and form are seen as an obstacle and people learn from early age that the ability to evade them is a must.
If two or more people are in a position to share the need of a particular rule evasion, they unite against the rules ad-hoc, no conspiracy needed.
Cheating on exams is how the school prepares children for their adult life.

The only really forbidding road sign is a big, heavy concrete beam blocking the whole width of the road. Everything else is a mere recommendation.

In regard to the integrity and "keeping your word":

In "the West", keeping your word is keeping your word. There is no profound difference between cheating your wife, cheating on exam, cheating in your tax form or stealing an item from the neighbor.
On the other side of the iron curtain, cheating "the system" (be it your boss, the government or the grocery store) is really, really morally different from doing the same to people equal to you (friends, family, direct contractual partners or even an unknown person on the street). The former is acceptable and sometimes approved, the latter is not.

p.s. I am not going to say that neither of these things is unknown at the other side, but the general mechanisms of life, the universe and everything else are exactly as stated above.
This is a first-hand experience. I spent a half of my life on both sides.
p.p.s Contrary to the popular western belief, there is such a thing as "the West" from the Russian viewpoint. Russians are so much culturally different that the "subtle" differences between Greece, Norway, France, USA or Japan look unimportant to them. Yes, Japan and S. Korea are part of "the West". It is easier to count the places that are not "the West", but the list is rather dynamic these days.

This is the best answer. I subscribe to every point. Especially to the one on "keeping the word".

A valuable perspective, thanks for writing this.

Very interesting; based on that description I would say that the prevailing viewpoint in Italy is more like your "soviet Russia" than your "the West".

@FedericoPoloni believe me, I know what I am talking about. Italy is an outlier when compared to e.g the averaged EU. Compared to Russia, it goes firmly into "the West" cluster.

"There is no profound difference between cheating your wife, cheating on exam, cheating in your tax form or stealing an item from the neighbor." I can assure you that many people in, e.g., Germany will consider several (or all) of those things to be really profoundly different.

Much I could say, but as others have asked, would you want the person doing brain surgery on you to have obtained his degree not because he himself passed Med school, but because the girl up the hall did all his exams?
Are you okay with him cutting into your head? If not, why not? If not, ask why he should be allowed to be a brain surgeon at all. If he lacks the knowledge of the brain to be one and doesn't have the requisite experience to know what he needs to do for his job, by himself, then why should he be in that position to begin with?

Brain surgeon is an extreme example. My point is: if a student sees an opportunity to cheat, why not take it?

@IamCleaver Some people don't cheat because they see it as wrong. Others don't want to face the consequences like expulsion.

@IamCleaver It applies for every skilled profession in a trust-based society. Do you want the service of a poorly trained accountant? Do you want a cheating engineer designing a bridge you will drive over? Do you want the person running your city's water treatment plant to understand its systems? The more complex and interconnected our society, the more that we have to rely on other people, and the more that it matters that those people are actually well-trained to do their work.

@IamCleaver what makes it extreme? Do you want someone that doesn't know about engineering and physics and structures to build your house? What if his wife took all his exams and wrote the papers he needed to write? Are you okay with him building your house? And don't tell me it's extreme, I'm genuinely asking you.

As someone who studied in a "western" country where grades are not compared to other students, this is the first thing that came to my mind.

@jakebeal Do you want a cheating officer in charge of maintenance of military vehicles?

@jakebeal I don't want a cheating officer leading my platoon, either.  (I am actually safe from that at 76 years old, but it was certainly true when I was 20-something and the war in Vietnam was going on.) Essentially, I don't want to depend on cheaters in any way.

Brain surgery is a bad example because you have an high mortality among your patients even though you do your job properly with deserved degrees. Nevertheless, I get your point.

What about cheating subjects completely unrelated to one's (future) occupation?

@BryanKrause: I see what you did there.
That's almost worthy of a full answer.

@IamCleaver If you're not ok with everyone cheating their way through school (including brain surgeons), it's hard to argue that it's ok for anyone without engaging in obvious special pleading.

@HolyBlackCat in many of these examples, it's not just a question of having the required knowledge. If an engineer was willing to cheat on even unrelated exams, then I wouldn't trust them to bother doing safety calculations properly even though they might be actually competent to do so (especially if they may be under some economic pressure to be quick rather than careful).

@EspeciallyLime I see what you mean. While I don't condone OP's attitude, this argument assumes at least minimally sound teaching process. Having studied at Moscow (albeit not in a top university), I've had things such as: a lecturer being uncapable of speaking loud enough, so you couldn't hear them even from the front row; a professor demanding ~100 hours worth of homework to allow one to take the final exam (which is against university regulations, but is ignored because of their seniority). All of those on subjects unrelated to students' future occupation.

It's almost as if the way some subjects are taught is designed with the assumption that the students will cheat (such as making the requirements high enough so that even cheaters would have to study hard to pass).

First of all:

Here in Russia cheating is a normal part of student life. It is seen as a way of bolstering your grade/passing a class and is only bad in the sense that you might get caught.

I am going to assume for the purposes of this question that this is indeed the prevalent thinking among Russian students. (As opposed to an issue localized to your university / your group of friends, or motivated reasoning of the "thiefs think everyone steal" variety.)
I do agree with the comments that it is part of a larger societal trend, which I will try my best to illuminate. However, please keep in mind that I am not a political scientist, and I have not spent any meaningful amount of time in non-Western countries to have first-hand experience of the conditions there.

While "the West" is a rather large and inhomogeneous group of countries, the belief in the rule of law is a common cultural feature in those countries (or at least the intelligentsia of those countries, which includes both students and professors at universities).
The concept (simplified for the purposes of this answer) is that there should be open and clear rules, it is legitimate for established authorities to enforce those rules, and there should be mechanisms to ensure the enforcement is fair. ("Rules" here is not restricted to written laws and regulations - cutting in line at the grocery store would be a rule violation, which would be seen negatively both by by people in the queue with a direct interest in your actions, but also by the shop clerk and non-queuing clients in the store.)
The key part is that the rule of law binds the authority as well as the citizens. This is what makes the citizens voluntarily agree in principle to follow the rules; they are not a top-down decree enforced by raw force, but a two-way give-and-take contract. Some examples of this thinking as applied to exams, viewed as part of a grand teaching bargain ("I promise to test you under such and such conditions, and in exchange you promise to work hard and not cheat")

Any recourse for testing on material not mentioned in the class syllabus? : thinking (incorrectly) that the professor's syllabus is part of a moral contract with the students, and binds the professor’s future actions
If a professor refuses to elaborate on the contents of the cheat sheet, what becomes fair game? : complaining that a professor refuses to give enough clarity as to what material is allowed in the exam room

Now, that lofty ideal has obviously some faults. For instance, individuals and companies with money and connections can more effectively manipulate the system to create rules that favor them. Sometimes, the rules are vague enough that enforcement is arbitrary; or the rules that bind the authority are lax enough that it can get away with anything. But that is generally seen as a bad thing, a defect in the system, rather than an unescapable fact of life. People try vigorously to change the rules in a way that suits them. If you believe the authority will do anything that suits them regardless of the rules, you don’t bother doing that - either you try to break the rules and not get caught, or you try overthrowing the authority.

My understanding is that Russian society does not view administrative rules the same way. (Religious/cultural rules might be a different thing.) They are seen at best as non-binding statements of intention from the authority ("here are your orders, if you follow them you won’t get in trouble, until further notice") or at worst as mere theater ("we are a totally legit country with solid institutions, well-functioning courts etc."), such as in that example (in Chechnya, but I don’t think a similar thing would be unthinkable in Moscow). In that view, rule-breaking is normal and expected, because the rule has no legitimity to speak of, and the authority would be foolish to rely on compliance unless it can enforce it by raw force.
I would also note that in Asian countries, in particular China, there is a strong deference to rules. Those rules might not be of the same nature as in the West: for instance, guanxi (i.e. reliance of your network to obtain favors from the authority that others would not have access to) is generally considered proper, whereas in the West it would generally be shunned as nepotism or cronyism.

"here are your orders, if you follow them you won’t get in trouble, until further notice" Isn't that how it is in all places where there is written law???

@IamCleaver fair enough, but my point was the capriciousness of the rules. In a rule of law society, changes are (supposed to) come with a lot of advance notice, with clear justification (especially if they reverse course compared to the previous rules), and the citizens can give input into what the new rules will be. (Of course that doesn’t happen this way because power corrupts etc. but that’s at least the ideal.)

"motivated reasoning of the "thiefs think everyone steal" variety" That is the thing: I don't care whether everyone is cheating. In fact, if nobody is cheating but me than I get an even greater advantage. It is their loss as far a I am personally concerned

Networking is explicitly encouraged by almost all career advisors and schools' career office in US. In China, networking is usually discouraged by professors. Moreover, networking between high officers/executives is forbidden by rule under current administration.

If I was asked for the underlying reason that cheating is viewed as bad in the west I would say there are two contributing factors: 1) normative ethical tools that have been developed and implemented in western cultures, and 2) the view that education is about improving society, not just a piece of paper.

Before discussing the first factor, I would not be surprised if your and your colleagues points of view are more in line with those from the west in the medieval time. That is basically because at that time societies had developed fewer tools to help two random people to trust each other. So in this sense it makes more sense to be out for yourself, cheat by making yourself look brilliant, pay less taxes, help to promote your family or those in your society at the expense of others.
The tools I'm talking about having been developed are norms, behaviours that society decide are worthwhile and so people will go a little bit out of their way to enforce, if you get enough people agreeing on a norm then it becomes very hard to break from that norm. If the norm improves trust, e.g. checks and balances in government, limitations on wealth/power concentration, agreement that you won't cheat on tests, then people begin to be able to re-orient from spending a bunch of effort on verifying every new person they meet and making sure they aren't being screwed over by others to more productive/pleasurable things. For these norms to hold consistently the view that violating them are immoral or unethical categorically, rather then only bad if you are discovered, is important.
These tools probably happen to leverage our biology to help make sure everyone agrees to the norms. Once something is viewed as moral or just, then we tend to feel bad when doing it and may go out of our way to punish someone for violating these norms (e.g. you might go out of your way to punish a person who tells the lecturer how everyone cheated). Look up experimental tests of the prisoner's dilemma and the ultimatum game to see that (I believe it is) the pleasure centers of our brains light up when we dispense justice, whatever we consider that to be.
So why do people agree to the norms and keep agreeing, I'm going to guess that its from a few thinkers who sat down and tried to work out what kinds of new behaviours would help society become better. Once they have their beliefs they then tried to convince others that this should be done and sometimes these beliefs spread far enough that they become entrenched. After entrenchment there will always be some people who think about why do we do what we do and come to similar conclusions, applying stronger pressure or convincing others that even if this norm harms us in the short term, it will help us and the people we care about in the long term.

The second factor is that education is viewed not as a door to something better, but something that makes you better yourself. Think of it like exercise (and we are going to ignore steroids here), if you put the effort into exercising properly then you'll end up strong no matter how you're tested. If you instead find a trick so that when you are tested, you are actually lifting less weight then you are suppose to for your test then you just appear to be strong. So if strength is necessary to get a job then cheating makes sense, if you want to be able to apply your strength in a variety of scenarios, then cheating doesn't make sense.
From this point of view those questions you mentioned (is guessing cheating, is it cheating if I know that answer) start to make sense if you view education and tests as about your intrinsic smartness rather then how smart you appear. In theory I could know nothing about a topic and get 100% on a multiple choice test, but that's just an illusion of my actual skill and when people find out that I somehow violated that norm then people will go out of their way to penalise me for creating that illusion. Similarly I may have only the flimsiest grasp of topic X but happened to work through the question that appeared on the exam last night, creating the illusion of competence and possibly also of cheating once people find out (and associated penalties). Note that this is not really how people think in the west, but I think it captures the basic ideas if you were not raised in this society and are trying to understand it.

In all these cases you have conflicts between the different norms you've learnt from different societies and your situation. You might be really struggling with a course and so try to cheat, or you want to signal your intelligence to your friend group by "outwitting" the lecturer. Or you might think of the course as not meaningful or worth your time and just a roadblock to something more worthwhile and so decide to cheat so you can put your time towards something more valuable/will be able to reach a position to help people sooner. In all these cases the norm of "cheating = bad" helps to apply pressure so the norm of "everyone cheats" is suppressed and prevents the negatives that come with that second norm (e.g. incompetence).

Here is the thing. You need a degree to get a job, and you need skills to get a job. While you are in class you are gaining skills. On the exam, you are working for the transcript. Why not use ALL the recourses available to make use of all resources available? If you are the only one cheating, then you are gaining an advantage, and if everyone is cheating, then you prevent yourself from falling behind. Even if you are at university primarily for self improvement, why not also get the best transcript you can through all reasonable means?

The "ethical tools" you describe sound more like blindness to an opportunity to improve ones grades do to stubborn convictions...

yes and no, in a sense they are tools that allow you to be blind to short term opportunities for long term payoffs, the inability to take this option also allows other people to trust you. Lets say no one cheats and your grade is a valid representation of your skill, then if you (one person) cheats you improve your apparent skill and your grade is now considered an almost certain valid representation of your skill. Then as more and more people cheat the chance your grade is a valid representation of your skill decreases until it's almost certainly wrong and your grade loses value.

At this point your grade becomes valued only as an upper bound to your skill rather than a lower bound or true skill level. Obviously the grade being perceived as an upper bound is worst than it being a representation. And your personal behaviour is not going to really change public perception, so if everyone cheats, so should you, otherwise people will know you might only be average at best rather than at least average in this skill, so you cheat so people know you are brilliant at best, so possibly above average and can get a job.

The group agreement that cheating is bad now becomes a tool to keep the value of your degree high, something which benefits you more in the future. You may want to look up prisoner's dilemma, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma , particularly multi-player games to understand how suffering in the short term can give you more gains in the longer term

"So why do people agree to the norms and keep agreeing, I'm going to guess that its from a few thinkers who sat down and tried to work out what kinds of new behaviours would help society become better." Uh, rather than guessing, you may want to look up the history of the Protestant Reformation and how that affected societal ethics in the West.

@NathanTuggy that's the kind of thing I was imagining, though since I can't say all these norms come about because of event X, Y, Z in general, I decided not to make the claim and just suggest the mechanism which you could probably give numerous examples of

I was about to bring in the prisoner's dilemma. I understand your point but as a "prisoner" (student) cheating is advantageous in either scenario (as long as I don't get caught) and so does helping others cheat/helping them avoid detection since it increases the pool of people who trust me and know I wouldn't betray them

@IamCleaver You should actually read the material about the prisoner's dilemma. When the relationship is ongoing (i.e., iterative games), cheating becomes disadvantageous.

@IamCleaver you're looking at the game in the wrong way, while you can say I always do better by cheating, you can also say I'll always do better if my opponent cooperates. Normally you can't control your opponents actions, but the idea of these things I'm calling ethical tools is to help you control your opponents actions (and help your opponent control your actions). If everybody cooperates then everybody gets more than if everybody cheats. You might be able to cheat once or twice if everyone cooperates, but if you aren't penalised then everyone starts cheating and you lose out long term.

Your example actually shows both cooperation and cheating in the prisoner's dilemma. You cooperated with your friends to enable cheating, none of them cheat on letting everyone get away for cheating (e.g. turn you in for extra credit) because you've solved the prisoner's dilemma because you're playing a repeated prisoner's dilemma (as Jakebeal mentioned). But you have a second game going that is played against all the students in Russia where everyone cheats (the actual cheating in exams), and therefore everyone loses (your degree is worth less). The ethical tools help solve the second game.

I'm not sure whether many students in the "Western" countries actually see cheating as that big a deal. I come from (Western) Germany, and when I was a student (pretty long ago), I knew many fellow students who would cheat and brag about not getting caught, and there was also this kind of moral code that would imply that it is good and nice to help your friends cheat, and you're rather the evil one if you don't. Not sure whether it's still like that or how widespread this phenomenon is, but in my perception for sure it does happen in "the West" as well.
Consequently, as a lecturer I don't think it's a moral issue in the first place. Cheating is bad for learning and has bad consequences, e.g., people not being up for later courses that they take or even for their jobs, also maybe discouraging or frustrating honest students who would be up for learning properly, but of course I also know that not every student later needs to properly know and understand everything I teach, so students may cheat and it may, at times, not do harm. As a lecturer it's my job to try to stop students from cheating, and there need to be severe penalties and measures to stop them cheating, so that students are properly discouraged from cheating. But if students get caught I don't try to make it a moral issue. They are penalised and that's it. I also don't like to use moral appeals to put students off cheating because I think that this implicitly communicates that penalties and measures against cheating are not strong enough, which may in turn actually encourage cheating.
I like open book exams allowing students to use all written material, so cheat sheets are no issue for me. I also try to make my exams so that they are hard to cheat on, but apart from "open book" (which surely helps against a certain way of cheating) I'm not sure how well this can ever work. I think also as university teachers in "the West" we need to accept it as a reality that the moral barrier against cheating is very low.
Also, in my view, capitalism encourages everybody to put their own advantage first (on which I'm not particularly keen), which means that I'd not be surprised about a rather lax attitude to cheating in countries with a long and strong capitalist history (I'm alluding to certain "Western" countries here). Cheating on tax returns is a big issue pretty much everywhere, isn't it?
I'm not an expert on Russian culture, however I am interested in what I can pick up. I fairly recently had a discussion with a Russian, who said that in Russia (and maybe in other countries with authoritarian governments or a strong history of such governments) "playing by the rules" isn't something that can be justified  ethically, but is rather only a strategy of survival, and often not in line with what people really think, rather there is general distrust in the justification of rules, and consequently, as long as people can get away with breaking them, there is no moral consideration that would stop them from doing so. This makes much sense to me, except that I don't think (as said above) that in "the West" things are that different.

"Also, in my view, capitalism encourages everybody to put their own advantage first (on which I'm not particularly keen), which means that I'm not surprised about a rather lax attitude to cheating in countries with a long and strong capitalist history." You mean like the long history of communism in OPs Russia? Downvoted just for that alone.

I completely agree that cheating is at the end of the day bad for learning and I can easily see why you, as the lecturer, would want to curb it. I just don't see why the students would see it in that light. As a student, at the end of the day, the more top marks are in my transcript, the better. Why not use all reasonable means available to me to improve bit? I guess the German attetude is closer to Russian

@Oбжорoв That specific part wasn't meant to say anything about either Russia or communism. It rather was about certain "Western" capitalist countries. (Edited it to make that clearer.)

This answer again generalizes "the west" as if it was homogeneous, and does not actually give examples of what would be cheating. For example in Germany many politicians got Doctoral degrees through plagiarism and slowly they are losing them due to this, and the legal system agrees that degrees based on lies can be revoked. Also you should consider differences across fields as cheating is very different across them.

@IamCleaver Students are taught that cheating is bad, but in the end, improving your grades through cheating means the grades do not mean anything, they do not represent what you actually learned, which in the end also hurts students massively. See for example tech companies putting ridiculous entry/interview requirements to filter candidates, which are more prevalent in the US than in the EU, since a lot of the usual metrics can be cheated away.

@IamCleaver Having top marks in a University where it is known that grades are inflated by cheating means nothing. The net effect is that honest and probably better students at that university suffer direct harm from the cheating (and the tolerance to it. In my class, the only possible solution for cheating is to bail out of the course and repeat it next year — when I catch it, clearly. But you know, after the first two cases, people learn what they can or can't do.)

@Dr.Snoopy As far as I can see, I do not make generalising statements about "the West"; rather I state that I don't believe that certain statements generally hold, and I generally make sure that it is clear that I'm writing about my impression and experience rather than about how things generally are.

Not sure why this is at -1 points, so I upvoted.  I think this answer provides a valuable counterpoint to the OP's assumptions about "Western" cheating attitudes.  I remember I was proctoring a final for a postdoc from Germany.  At some point, I took out a take-home final to glance at it so I could ponder on it, and he asked what it was.  When I told him it was a take-home final, he chuckled in disbelief and asserted that if you did that in any university in Germany, "everyone" would cheat.  As an American, I was in disbelief that top PhD students would just cheat like that.

@Chan-HoSuh: I think your story about the take-home exam highlights a cultural difference between US and German academia quite well (not only regarding cheating, but also regarding the role of exams in general). The idea that something like a take-home exam could even exist had never crossed my (German) mind until I read about the concept on this site some years ago - and when I first read about it, my reaction was quite similar to that of your German postdoc colleague.

The moral side of cheating is easy enough to see: using illegal means to get an undeserved advantage on your fellow students (or citizens, when cheating on taxes; or friends, when cheating in games; or scientists, when cheating their results... you got it).
I don't think that cheating can ever be not harmful to anybody. Even after reading Sandra's answer, there is no cheating that has "no harm done". You are at least damaging people that will trust you to be prepared to do a job and not to be prepared to cheat through it. Do you ever think about how many exams were approved by cheating by the engineer that has designed the elevator you are using?
So cheating denotes a lack of social feeling; you can call it a lack of empathy for the people around you. You can do it by ignorance, by lack of self-esteem, or by sheer greed, but always you just avoid thinking you are damaging somebody. Higher education is thought to be a tool to prepare young people to be useful to society; they sign a social contract when starting it, and cheating means they are not able to be really useful. The instructors' task is to correct such behavior the best they can.
I do not really think that all people in Russia believe cheating is morally ok. I have acquaintances (among them a girl from Cuba that studied in the URSS in Vladivostock) that is one the fieriest defender of academic (and general) honesty.
And yes, I know real life is different; people cheat and sometimes even are proud of it. That does not mean that the ethical way is to try to teach that this behavior harms and that nice people don't do it.

Cheating doesn't harm anyone concrete, that is somebody I know personally. Saying that it harms abstract people who may or may not suffer as a result of actions that may or may not occur as the result of me using my smartphone during my chemical engineering exam is a weak argument. As an engineer I carry the responsibility for my actions no matter how much I cheated during exams. The real and immediate social responsibility to help my friends and not to snitch on my fellow classmates far outweighs any hypothetical damage that may or may not occur as a result of it.

@IamCleaver Your objection here contradicts your objection to the answer above: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/195041/22733 Please reflect and comment. If you don't see how your statements are contradictory, then you either beyond help or are a troll.

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Can a bad paper title hurt you? Can a good one help you?
I've written a paper draft and given it a provisional title which is slightly tongue-in-cheek (but not in any way offensive; cf. examples below).  This title makes my coauthor nervous, as he feels like it may cause the paper itself to be taken less seriously.  I'm of the opinion that a fun title simply makes the paper more inviting, but to be honest I don't know whether it makes it more or less likely for readers to engage with and appreciate the paper.  Hence the questions of the title: Can a bad paper title hurt you? Can a good one help you?
Some real examples of papers with fun titles:

"Attention is all you need"
"How dark matter came to matter"
This Mathoverflow post contains a whole list of examples.

I realize that it is probably not possible to answer this question in a uniform way for all situations.  E.g. the circumstances will certainly be different between law and epidemiology and computer science.  But I would appreciate any general guidelines that can be provided, as well as specific advice for physics and adjacent fields.

I still remember this one from 37 years ago: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.58.1038

Regardless of the actual question, you shouldn't do something a coauthor is uncomfortable with.

Do what you and your coauthors want to do. Funny or lighthearted titles don’t always hold up well, but that might not be a concern. For me it’s hard to beat the sheer intensity of the title H = W, but that’s me.

I know it's stupid but I can't help judging people for ungrammatical titles.

Perhaps the better question is, "Can you reliably predict which is which?"  Or is this selection bias on the titles that people remember?

An example of a different kind: On $O_n$ https://doi.org/10.2977/prims/1195186936

How about using the boring one as the title, and the clever one as the subtitle?

See also this question and answers https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9396/should-academic-papers-necessarily-carry-a-sober-tone which don't refer to titles specifically but discuss the general pros and cons of humour in scientific writing.

@anonymous in my case, "no" ;o) The best paper I have written (IMHO) has about 4 citations, and I think the reason is that I gave it a title that only had any resonance in my mind and nobody else's.  Note that humour is divisive - I had a paper rejected because it contained an example about muppet labs in the intro, because I didn't want to pillory any new-career researchers of students that had made the error I was discussing in print by using their work as the example.  Reviewers said humour was not appropriate in a scientific paper.

This is an opinion rather than an answer, but for me (physics researcher), a title has to unambigiously convey the core messagge of the article. Othervise I won't even look at it while searching references. If I'm looking for e.g. the most accurate Hubble parameter measured, a title "Highly accurate determination of the Hubble parameter using novel supernova interferometry" will catch my eyes 10x more than "Big bang determined to be bigger by banged stars", or you get the idea. The cited titles don't quite tell me what the article is about.

Note that humour does not always travel well, in time or space. Will your title be understood in the way you intend by readers from different cultures or language backgrounds? Will changing societal attitudes make it age like spilt milk?

Interesting question. To appeal to a popular audience, a catchy title is much better: "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking is a good example. On the other hand, this has been used in scientific articles for years, see "Caddis Worms Ate the Cabbage" by E. B. Hungerford,published in 1950.(This is a play on the old expression "how the cow ate the cabbage" meaning "that's just the way things happen".)

Personally I think "Attention is all you need" is a genius title, and then I find every "X is all you need" and similar title that alludes to it terrible. Genuinely original great titles are great, titles that obviously try to be catchy, quirky, whatever, or just try to allude to something that the in-crowd knows without being based on a good and original title idea are much worse than just being factual and boring. My two cents.

Yes to both - a good title can help and a bad title can hurt.
Humor is hard. Comedians, who make humor professionally, always try out their material before incorporating it into their main show, because it's so difficult to gauge what other people will actually find funny.
Your coauthor may be uncomfortable because they don't want to impact the seriousness of the work, but they also might be gently telling you that your joke isn't funny. Either way, best to heed their feedback on this one. Maybe the next paper will be a better fit for a clever title.

I actually did try out various titles on about 10 colleagues who are not coauthors.  The clever one was the overwhelming favorite.  If not for that data I would have fewer qualms about using a boring title, but now I worry that doing so would be a tremendous missed opportunity.

For more details,  Belcher talks a good deal about titles, with this same point I believe, in their writing on these types of decisions in "Writing your journal article in 12 weeks" - https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1079401118

Remember that the goal for your paper title is not "amuse colleagues who already know you" but something more like "convey the topic of the paper to someone not familiar with it". Your colleagues liking the clever title doesn't give you any information about how likely people are to read the paper

In my field my perception is that authors need to "earn" the right to publish articles with cheeky titles by being very well established/famous in the field. That is, your name or the work needs to already be so well known that those features will attract attention on their own. This then buys you a little extra freedom in having a cheeky title. If you're not so well-established in the field you may want to go with a more conventional title. Not a definitive answer by any means, but an additional point to consider.

A good title is one that will entice readers to read further (abstract or full text). I frequently scan through tables of contents for titles which are relevant or interesting to me in some way, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. So yes, a good title can help gain readers, and bad title might mean that your work gets less attention that you would like.
Based on my experience as a reader, the way to do this is to be sufficiently, but not excessively, specific. The title should be clear, contain important key words, but not so technical or long that the general reader will lose interest. Note that you should probably not be worrying about attracting those interested in precisely your field. They will surely find it and read it even with a clunky title. You are trying to tempt those in a linked or adjacent field, or just those with general interest, to take a look.
Your two examples:

Attention is all you need

I have no idea what that paper is about, or even what field it belongs to. If I'm not in a rush, I might click out of idle curiosity, but it's basically empty. (Note: comments have pointed out this title might be perfectly clear to someone in the field of deep learning. So if you are publishing in a specialist journal, this might be fine. In a more general journal, it might get lost.)

How dark matter came to matter

Much better example. A touch of humour, but most importantly, I can tell within six short words what this paper is about.
Note that humour is great provided a) it doesn't come at the cost of informativeness, and b) it appeals to most potential readers. Bryan Krause's answer discusses the riskiness of point b), and it's also discussed at length in this related question.
This paper (to which I have no affiliation) discusses some of these issues, provides some data on how titles and keywords affect citation rates, and has some tips.

A compromise to balance humour and informativeness that I've seen a reasonable amount is "Straightforward Informative Title: Witty Subclause After Colon"

"Attention is all you need" is a deep learning paper, putting forward the idea that attention (which is a technique already popular at the time) is incredibly powerful. For the right crowd, it is actually very informative.

@Davidmh totally, and in particular, that other popular features of neural nets at the time were not needed; that you could go far using only attention. The title "Attention is all you need" was so effective that it has spawned countless "X is all you need" imitators since, not always as appropriately titled.

@JohnMadden indeed, it has spawned a paper or two. Although "All you need is a good init" predates it (same sentiment, minus the Beatles).

@Davidmh thanks for pointing this out, I was showing my ignorance! I have edited the answer to note this point.

A bad thesis title hurt me financially.
Basically (and unwisely) I was dead set on my thesis title describing exactly what was in my thesis. In my case, this included various subscripts and superscripts, as well as a particular mathematical squiqqle. My university's policy was that I had to get three copies of the thesis printed and bound by a local printer. The squiggle which I wanted to print had to be embossed in gold on the front page. Being non-conventional, it doubled the cost of typesetting.

Out of topic, but the university should pay for the printing.

@Davidmh - certainly hasn't been that way at various US and Dutch universities that I know of.

Many good answers above. I want to point out that there's a study addressing this question, titled 'If this title is funny, will you cite me?'. The authors conclude that, after controlling for a few confounding factors, funny titles are in fact cited more. Some critiques of the study are posted here.

I definitely agree that a good title can make or break your paper! Like the abstract, people look at the title to see what is the main idea of your study. If it doesn't clearly communicate what your paper is about, the paper may lose its purpose in effectively communicating the content to its audience.
Plus as a student, the title is usually what people would look at when they're researching for papers to back their own research up. Personally, since I'm a business student, I have a bit more creative freedom with creating titles and incorporating humour, but ultimately, it comes down to a number of factors. Maybe it's your field of study, or your coauthors, or whatever.
Then again, if your coauthor is nervous about the title. What's the title of your paper, and how does it compare to your abstract? I would say hear out your coauthor about why they think they're nervous about the title and if both of your can come to solve this problem or compromise.

Let's be clear that none of these titles are actually funny.
The best you can hope for is to be quirky:

Nineteen dubious ways to compute the exponential of a matrix
How dark matter came to matter
Why the Brazil nuts are on top: Size segregation of particulate matter by shaking

Some titles are attempting to be quirky but are uninteresting:

Attention is all you need

And some are tiresome:

Some title containing the words "homotopy" and "symplectic", e.g. this one

As user2390246 says, most titles like these are OK as long as the quirkiness does not come at the expense of informativeness. It is best if the quirky part adds something to the serious meaning, as in the ones with "dubious" and "matter".
In answer to the questions, yes and yes. It depends how bad or good the titles are.

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Should we transition to making our conference online or postpone?
Last year we started organizing a conference in one of the European countries in September 2020. Everything was fixed and we had a number of registered people. As you all may know, due to the pandemic outbreak, many conferences in Europe were canceled. Since our conference was scheduled for September, we didn't declare it canceled and decided to wait a bit to see how the situation will be as we get close to the summer.
Now, recently we thought about having an online conference instead of a real one. But we don't want it to be a failure as we have no experience with it and we are not aware of the public opinion about an online conference.
Is it a good idea to change the conference to an online one or it is better to postpone the real conference until the end of this pandemic crisis?

Note that waiting until the end may be difficult as many countries have different difficulties with the pandemics and the day where all people may fly around as they wish may not be the same for all countries.

"Public opinion" is probably not the phrase you want to use, unless this is a conference that you want to know what the typical person you pass while walking on the sidewalk thinks about the conference, which I find hard to imagine (at least pre-COVID-19, that is, when you'd actually pass someone on a sidewalk). Maybe "academic opinion"? However, since most every (if not actually every) conference for the next couple of months or more will be online or canceled, I'm not sure that opinions based on events in the past have much relevance.

@DaveLRenfro I dunno, I hate them, so I'd prefer an every-three-years conference to delay a year than go online.

@AzorAhai Could you tell me what part of it is hateful for you?

@KratosMath Oh, I just can't focus, people are much less good at online presentations than in-person, all the networking is lost, and I don't get to explore a new city. For me, they aren't really worth the price tag.

My impression is that the lower price and lack of jet lag have made online conferences extremely popular in the last few weeks.

You might want to check with the people at https://venueless.org/ to get some info on best practices and the technical side of an online conference. (It's open source software, prices mentioned on that page are for hosting a conference on their server. I'm not affiliated with them, I just know some devs there.)

I am currently attending a virtual conference. The organizers used the platforms Zoho connect, zoom, and iPoster to put the conference together and pulled off the change from real conference to virtual in about 6 weeks - amazing. Not as good as the real thing, but will likely be the new normal for a long time, especially for events that typically attract a large, international audience.

hi OP, i changed the title to better reflect your question. feel free to roll back

Don't underestimate the organizational difficulties and planning involved in moving a large conference online. It's not something one should attempt at short notice and without a lot of testing.

I just attended AWS Summit online today. To me it's so boring. I attended the local AWS Summit last year, it was fun and I really enjoy it. But today, watched a guy talking through my bad speaker with a white background, it's not enjoyable at all. But I heard that ICLR online was a huge success though.

One nice thing about online conferences, seems to me, is that they're less sensitive to scale. If you set up a real-life conference for 5000 people and 237 show up, you have a massive fiasco on your hands. Depending on how soon you saw it coming, you may not save much on ballroom rental, speaker expenses/fees, gift bags, hotel deposits etc.  Online, you just overbought on licenses for whatever platform, and maybe you overpaid some speakers fees. Much lower stakes, no?

Isn't the first consideration how many people are expected to take part?
If it's a few dozen, go on line.
It it's a few thousand, postpone.
If it's hundreds, what other details matter?

Great question; however, I don't think there is any consensus opinion as to how good online conferences are.
You might, however, read this blog post by Daniel Litt. He was an organizer of the Western Algebraic Geometry Online conference, held via Zoom this April. It was quite large, with around a thousand participants, and in my opinion very successful.
In his blog post he discusses what went well, what went less well, and what the organizers tried to achieve. In summary, the organizers weren't able to replicate everything good about an in-person conference, but overall they succeeded in creating a very valuable experience for the participants.

Zoom is not a good idea. https://epic.org/privacy/ftc/zoom/

The Association for Computing Machinery (the US scholarly society for computing) has a presidential task force on the subject of virtual conferences, and they maintain a rather detailed guide. This can help understand your options and whether going online is a good idea for your event.
Here are some experience reports in the computer science field: ASPLOS, EDBT/ICDT, ICLR. The first two have satisfaction surveys. There are pointers to other such resources in the ACM guide.

Actually, public opinion is of little consequence. The times are chaotic and people need to do things differently as the old ways aren't viable (literally).
You have a couple of options:
You can just cancel the conference until some unknown future date (whether you express it that way or not) since the "end" of the current pandemic is over the horizon and not in sight.
You can do what you can do in the short term (probably online) to make the experience as good as you can make it, knowing that it may be a pale shadow of what might be possible otherwise. You can, to some extent, bring people together so that they can share ideas. That is the real essence.
My suggestion is that you plan now for the worst case scenario, whether you need to actually implement it or not. But if you don't have a plan in place then it will be more chaotic than it needs to be.
You can, in particular, give a tentative future date for a face to face meeting while warning people that the date is tenuous and an online meeting might be the only resort. A bigger problem, of course, is arranging the proper infrastructure, whether it is for a face to face meeting (reserving a venue) or an online meeting (bandwidth, video/sound equipment, etc). But make a plan now.
With more experience with online meetings we may learn more about the relative desirability of such things. If people learn to adapt then they will turn out to be fine. Otherwise there will be a lot of pressure to go back to more traditional meetings.

I think it is hard to give a general answer, what is best depends not only on what you consider best, but it may vary from conference to conference, and the audience.
But switching to an online conference is exactly what we did (The Perl & Raku conference). And although it's not an academic conference, many of the issues that were relevant to us, maybe relevant to you as well.
Our conference was scheduled for June, in Houston, Texas. We did both postpone and organize an online conference. Our conference is held yearly, in rotating cities in the USA (and sometimes Canada). We postponed the physical conference to 2021, to the same location. It did help that the hotel where the conference was being held was willing to work with us, and we could move the contract to the next year without much fuss. Groups who were working on bids for the 2021 conference were asked to work on a bid for 2022 instead.
We also decided to do an online conference. Partially because we had already accepted talks, and we wanted to give speakers an opportunity to present anyway, and partially because we felt that it takes way less resources to organize an online event than a physical event -- there is no venue to deal with, no catering, no travel arrangements for invited speakers, etc.
We did attract less submissions for the online conference than the physical one -- where we normally have 3 or 4 four parallel tracks during a 3 day conference, we now have 2 parallel tracks over 3 days. And that is even taking into account we got more submissions from European speakers than normally: were they are usually not willing to travel to the US, and go to our sister conference in Europe instead, there is no travel time for an online conference. Also, the European conference, scheduled for September, got cancelled as well, and will not do a separate online version. But there have been a number of speakers who signaled that they do not want to present online, and quite a number of people who submitted for the physical conference, did not do it for the online one.
A decision which needs to be taken is, what tool are you going to use to broadcast the presentations? Requirements for us were: the software should work on Linux, Mac, and Windows, with no costs for users; minimal costs for the organizers were acceptable. It should handle a large enough audience. It should be interactive, but moderated (that is, audience is normally muted, but can speak when allowed by the moderator). We decided to use Zoom, and stream on YouTube. Audience who wants to interact must use Zoom, no interaction will be possible on YouTube.
Another issue to deal with with an online conference is the schedule and time zones. With a physical conference, everyone is together and hence, in the same time zone. We will now dealing with people in the USA (from East to West), Europe, and an invited speaker located in Australia. Hence we start the conference at 11 AM Eastern Time, which is early, but, hopefully, not too early on the West Coast of the USA, with the last events ending at 5:30 PM Easter Time, which is past midnight for most of Europe. Hence, when I was scheduling the talks, I put European speakers in the morning as much as possible, and US and Canadian speakers later in the day. The Australian speaker is scheduled at the end of the day, which will be the next day for him. And unlike the physical events, we did not schedule any coffee/lunch/dinner breaks, audience members are scattered over too many time zones to make this work out.
Not everything can carry over. There will be no (obviously) no social events. And while we usually have a few days before/after the conference were (paid) classes are given, we have now restricted this to a single class. We have not worked out whether there will be any BOF (birds of a feather) meetings, and, if so, how we want to facilitate this.
For us, this is going to be an experiment. We do not know whether it's going to be a success, we can only decide that afterwards. And even if it's a success, that does not mean every other online event will be a success (and so it the opposite, if we fail, that does not imply other online conferences can't be a success).
This doesn't exactly answer your question ("Is it a good idea to change the conference to an online one or it is better to postpone the real conference until the end of this pandemic crisis?"), but I hope this answer will help you decide whether it's a good idea for you to change the conference to an online one or whether it's better to postpone your conference.

This was a comprehensive answer. Thanks!


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Is it considered unprofessional to submit a grant that you will most likely decline?
Summary: I want to apply for a grant with current group at university X. However, I will likely decline it if awarded because I actually want to work with different group at university Y (no hard offer yet though). Is it ethical to apply knowing I might decline the grant?

I am currently a post-doc and with my new PI we have discussed about me applying for a grant to get independent funding for another two years. I actually asked myself whether I can apply for a grant, since I prefer to be as independent as it gets, and also my mentors mentioned multiple times that it is rather important for an academic CV.
Now after being a while in the group, and after learning that two of my friends got PI positions in quite prestigious universities, I am thinking to spend only a year here, and then move on to work with one of them.
However I would still like to finalise the grant proposal I am prepairing and submit it, so that I can have an awarded grant on my CV, even though there are chances that I will not accept it if awarded.
Would that be considered questionable or unethical practice?

Do you have a job offer in hand? No? Apply for the grant..,

@DanielHatton, as a staff member who supports academics, I can assure you that I am a professional and expect professionalism from my faculty. It's disappointing how many faculty think they are not part of the professional working world and thus treat staff without the respect they deserve.  Like it or not, colleges and universities function like businesses, and being thoughtful to staff should be a basic consideration.

In an ideal world, maybe we could always be upfront about such things, e.g. by openly saying that to the rest of the grant writers. But the economic reality is that you do need to consider the risks and act in your own self interest. Presumably you'd stay with that team if it was your only economic prospect. If you plan to leave that team no matter what, then you should say so though because that is an unsure burden on them to waste resources including you.

As an example of what I mean -- research administrators often shift their personal lives around, including staying up until wee hours of the morning to get proposals done, but then the PI will decide not to submit.  I have a friend who last month worked on a proposal the night before she had surgery on her gallbladder.  After she came back, the PI decided not to do it after all.  If you look at the research of Jennifer Shambrook, you'll find the profession is associated with poor health outcomes.  Part of their own self-interest should be retaining their support staff by setting expectations.

Research administrator here (the type of person's time you would waste preparing this, haha).  The first problem you have is that as a postdoc, you are generally not entitled to apply for a grant by definition of your position.  You need to look into how PI rights work at your current institution.  At the R1 institution I work for, we would not allow you to apply without a ladder faculty member listed as Co-PI/Co-I.  There is a somewhat lengthy application to discourage postdocs from applying without the full support of their PI and a substantial plan of action in the event of an award.  As the grant is awarded to the institution and not the PI, should you leave, we would reserve the right to keep the grant and remove you from the research team.
Generally when academics transfer institutions, it is best practice to move the grant with the researcher, however it is the discretion of the institution to do this; not the PI.  If the Dean or Chair wished to keep the grant with your sponsoring PI, they could do so.  We always require a plan as to what happens when someone transfers out before allowing these types of individuals to apply for a sponsored award.  If they have a position in hand, we ask that they apply through their new institution.  They can usually do this as long as the proposed start date is after the appointment start date.
As for wasting time -- the truth is that a great deal of proposals are a waste of time -- many faculty do not spend the time required to do a good job (and it's evident even to administrators), and that includes senior faculty at R1 institutions.  You didn't mention scientific field or country, but in the US, NIH has K awards for what you describe.  Otherwise, postdocs sometimes help prepare applications with their PI and in the US at least, can be instead listed as senior personnel rather than Co-PI/Co-I.  This makes it easier to be included as "important" without requiring PI rights from the institution.  Should you leave the institution after an award, you should be able to get a subaward at no additional cost with most US federal sponsors.

"as a postdoc, you are generally not entitled to apply for a grant by definition of your position". Not true. The eligibility of a postdoc to apply for a grant depends on the specifics of the position and the grant, and, at least in Europe, there are examples of grants that post-docs can apply for, and that are generally supported by host institutions. If the PI encourages OP to apply, it's likely that it's possible in this case.

It will of course vary by location.  In the US, it is frequently prohibited except for postdoc fellowship type awards.  My advice still stands -- one should check to make sure they are even allowed to submit a grant before worrying about accepting it.
Here's an example of the policy for MIT: https://research.mit.edu/research-policies-and-procedures/proposal-preparation-and-review/principal-and-other-investigator-0  Here is Stanford:
https://doresearch.stanford.edu/policies/research-policy-handbook/principal-investigatorship/principal-investigator-eligibility-and-criteria-exceptions

@yourfriendlyresearchadmin In some countries you definitely can submit a grant proposal as a postdoc. It is like a fellowship, but it is bound to a specific lab. The PI of course and the host uni have to agree, but the grant belongs to you, and the evaluation is based on your own CV.

A fellowship and a grant are not the same thing at all.  I'm not talking about any "sponsored funding".  A grant is a specific funding instrument.  Fellowships fund individuals; grants fund projects. Postdocs can submit for sponsored funding with restrictions, i.e., that they support their own research through a fellowship.  That's not at all the same thing as doing an R01 with NIH or submitting to a general call for a research proposal with NSF.  Can you give me a specific example where postdocs are treated equal to PIs and allowed to submit to all of the same programs?

@yourfriendlyresearchadmin Your mindset is a little bit constrained by thinking I am talking about the US system. I don't. In Europe there are GRANTS that are targeted to PostDocs. Not fellowships, does not require you to be a group leader. Personal grant for a specific project. Moreover I know that in large collaborative grants PostDocs can be co-PIs on projects

@can'tstopmenow I'm simply asking for you to show me one. I'm actually interested as a professional.

@yourfriendlyresearchadmin See https://dfg.de/en/research_funding/programmes/individual for the German Research Foundation. They have several Individual Grant Programmes, including the Research Fellowship (targeting early post-docs) and the Emmy Noether Programme (targeting postdocs and junior professors).

@lighthousekeeper Thank you for sharing.  So technically this is not the same thing that I am arguing. NSF and NIH are not the ones gatekeeping, it's the employer. The university is the one stopping postdocs in the US, not the sponsors (generally).  Do you have an example of a PI Rights/Eligibility page for a German research institution (e.g., a university) like the ones I have given above?

@yourfriendlyresearchadmin Well, the DFG grants are a counterexample to the idea that grants and fellowships are distinct, non-overlapping concepts, and that fellowships only fund individuals (e.g., the Individual Fellowship is awarded based on a project description). I'm not aware of any such pages like the ones you mention. In the countries and universities I've worked in, such policies are decided on the level of the department, often on a per-call basis, and there is no clear "default".

@lighthousekeeper, I appreciate the information about the lack of PI Eligibility info in countries like Germany.  I still maintain that page shows a similar distinction in fellowship and project.  It says "who have completed their academic training" for "Research Grants".  In the US at least, that would be after a postdoc.  I realize the requirement is only to have a PhD, so a postdoc is eligible.  In the US, our sponsors similarly would allow a postdoc to apply to a fund like that, but the employer generally finds there to be too much risk to allow that, as postdocs are temporary positions.

@yourfriendlyresearchadmin Well, the risk would mostly be on the side of the funder, right? Since an uncompleted research project due to a departing researcher generally does not harm the university. For the university, the incentive is that they can receive overheads, and can claim the money as part of their overall third-party funds attracted by the researchers. I suspect the real reason why it's made difficult for post-docs to apply has to do with power structures.

@lighthousekeeper -- oh, no way, the risk is with the awardee. We have to provide a facilities and other resources page to the sponsor for a reason -- we have to invest in this person. There is a reason universities in the US very frequently prohibit this. There is a lot of administrative burden to taking a grant, even more so for junior PIs. I don't know a research administrator who wants to oversee a postdoc as a PI. They need to be taught everything. What about the space they need for their work? Equipment? Do they know compliance? We don't think a postdoc can do this work unsupervised.

If you cannot envision a scenario in which you would accept the grant money, then you should not apply.  It is a waste of everybody's time (including your own—why waste your time applying for a grant you aren't going to accept when you could be spending your time doing something productive?).
On the other hand, if you can see a scenario (however unlikely) in which you would accept the grant, there is no reason not to apply.
It sounds to me like you are searching for a job.  You are hoping to get a good "PI position" at a prestigious university, so I assume that you are applying for those kinds of positions.  You also have the option of applying for grant funding which will allow you to continue in your current position for some period of time (with the added bonus that it will be a CV builder).
Also, note that, depending on how the grant is structured, you may be able to "take it with you" if-and-when you are offered a position somewhere else, or your current institution may be able to use the funding even if you are not there.  So the likelihood that you will accept the grant (assuming it is awarded, which is not a certainty) may be influenced by these kinds of factors.
Hence it seems like there is a scenario under which you would take the grant money, i.e. you are not offered any other position, and require independent funding for the next year or two.  As such, I see no problem with applying for the grant.

I am not currently searching for a job, I am just some months in my new position. But there is still some chance that if awarded I will take the money.

@can'tstopmenow Your current position is a postdoc position, right?  Then you are, almost by definition, looking for a job.  For most intents and purposes, the academic job market exists for about a month and a half every year.  You have two or three cycles during your postdoc.  If you aren't putting yourself out there every year, you are probably hurting yourself in the long term. :D

Touché............

From an R1, U.S. math perspective, you absolutely should apply for a grant at the post-doc stage, and accept it, so that you can (?!?) be a PI on a grant... whether or not you need money for anything. For some decades now, having National Science Foundation grants or other federal funding is really essential for getting tenure... because having the federal government pay you to do your work is apparently the highest praise? :)
And, very likely any grant is portable to some extent...
So, again, to be clear, it's not necessarily whether you need the money for equipment or summer salary or anything, but that getting a good grant funded is some sort of certification of the quality of your work.

In some universities, it may not be possible for post-docs to be PIs, at least not officially.

@Timmy Sure, but there are other kinds of grants which may provide funding for postdocs without those postdocs being the PI.  I don't know of any such grants off the top of my head, but I know that the NSF (for example) has grants for first and second year graduate students.

@Timmy Depends on the country and the founding agency you apply to. There are grants for postdocs, than need a hosting agreement from a PI, but they belong to the postdoc and not to the PI. However, they are bound to a specific uni/lab and cannot be moved like grants for PIs can sometimes move between universities.


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How to handle off-topic questions during an interview for a PhD/academic position?
While offering an answer to another question on this site (this one if you're interested), I was reminded of a particularly challenging experience that occurred during my interview process that might generalize to others.
I went to a decently well-known and respected undergraduate university, and while I was interviewing for a PhD position at various schools, at least one of my interviewers usually asked me how I could help his son/daughter/nephew, etc. get into my undergraduate university. This was not at the end of the interview when all other questions (both his and mine) were answered, but rather it was at the very beginning of the interview (e.g. "Oh, I see you went to university X. My [insert familial relationship] is applying there this year/next year. How can s/he get in?")
Not knowing if I was in a position to decline to comment, I gave some brief, generic suggestions and then tried to steer the interview back to my own application and admissions.
I can see this possibly happening in many scenarios, from graduate admissions (like my own experience) to possibly postdoc or faculty job interviews. Has anyone else faced this sort of situation before (off-topic questions that while not "illegal" are somewhat uncomfortable to answer), and any suggestions on how to diplomatically handle it?

Perhaps something along the lines of "I'll be more than happy to discuss this further with you if/when I am accepted/hired here. As I was saying, ...".

I would be put off, not only by the interviewer's bad manners, but also by his/her lack of understanding of how academia works. Surely he/she knows that undergraduates have no inside information, let alone influence, concerning admissions? If you do pursue a PhD here, please do not ask this person for any help navigating the academic job market.

That said, maybe the question was meant in jest? In any case, I think shrugging, smiling, and saying something like "I don't know. I wish him/her the best of luck!" is a good answer.

@Anonymous I really think your comment above is a good answer (not just a comment).

Such a question at the start of an interview sounds to me like a poor "warmup" question - meant to be an easy lowball, and failing miserably. As such I think a light answer is all that would be expected - they are not asking for help, but thinking this is one you could easily answer. Your reply should demonstrate you can think on your feet, without appearing to put the interviewer down and without really engaging in an answer. For example

I met such a variety of people there that I really can't tell you what they had in common - I guess you would have to ask the admissions office

That's probably quite truthful, while being completely evasive. And then you can move on.

I don't think the question was meant to be an easy lowball, just unprofessional.

Sure, definitely an improvement.

@Kimball Regardless of whether it was mean to be an easy lowball, treating it as one may be the best strategy.

Is it possible to reframe the question, a bit akin to ak001, make it about what got you into that university. "I don't know your [...]. When I applied, I ..." and then highlight the strengths (diplomatically and without bragging).
In any case, I wouldn't take that question too seriously. Could simply have been poor impulse-control (perhaps the person had had a stressful day so far) and s/he did not think too deeply about what s/he was saying.

I like this - turn it into an opportunity to talk about your strengths (which presumably contributed to your getting into X).

Well, if I am on that situation, I would first try to think positively instead of realizing that it's an off-topic question. Maybe they are asking that to know how competitive the university is and hence, how competitive I am. By having a positive mind, I think we can answer the question in a quite diplomatic manner, such as explaining approximately how many students get into the university each year (particularly in our class) and telling them how we could get into that university (for instance our high school grades or our SAT score, etc.).

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