2. Pass all the exam;

3. Publish good papers;

4. Learn how to handle with “dog fighting”;

5. Join in top 1 group during pos-doc period;

6. Go to second level universities for assistant professor position;

7. Raise up;

8. Stanford, Harvard will use money to buy you back;

9. Grab best graduate students;

”””””

Meanwhile elsewhere it done left and right. Google does it (asks to solve nontrivial problems) - a pretty well to do company. So do any financial market company while competing for the best of disillusioned former string theorists. Even good old INS admission officers do it. Recall what Einstein was asked when he crossed the border of the land of the free?
Application process should be a well deserved prize for well spend research work years not the idiocy of what it is now.

That’s a load of B.S. It’s also unsupported by the evidence. Scientists care about the supporting-evidence business, or should. Lord only knows what purpose IQ tests (!) and entrance exams would serve. By the way, the problem in most searches appears to be choosing among too many qualified candidates, not weeding out undeserving ones.

Applying for these jobs is a pain in the butt, irritating, and at times degrading. However, if you let the difficulty of it overtake and own you to the point where you blame all problems on some putative undeserving “blind lesbian,” you’re ruining your own life with bitterness. That’s okay, but don’t inflict it on others.

- abandoning affirmative action
- establishing IQ thresholds and entrance exams for faculty candidates
(exams should not be based on multiple choice problems, but be open ended
problems including some with unknown solutions).
- finding out how many papers the applicant has actually written (applies
mostly to experimentalists)
- abandoning tenure. Just hire professors on term contracts with possible
extensions based on certain performance markers.

Nowadays you either need to be a blind lesbian or be lucky to be mentored by well connected professor, or be married by one.

Very important — I probably would have gotten at least a few more bites had I taken the time to individualize my cover letters in my first round of applications. As it was, I used the same technique I used for my postdoc letters, which was a stock letter with name and address merged in.

You need somebody like an advisor, collaborator or mentor who will help, writing good letters, promoting your work, and caring about your fate (a little).

Completely agreed! The one of the pieces of advice I would have added to Sean’s piece on being a grad student: “Pick an advisor who you like and who has a track record of going to bat for their students, even if the research is not your first choice scientifically.” I’ve seen too many pairings where it’s clear that the student and the advisor essentially lothe each other, which isn’t likely to result in a gushing letter or tons of support after graduation.

FWIW, don’t forget that in a lot of fields (maybe not string theory) there are non-professor science jobs. Too many people act like the only choices are tenure-track and hedge funds.

When, say, pre-tenure, is it affordable to give a bad talk?

When you’ve given enough good talks that they assume you just happened to have a bad day, rather than assuming based on a small sample size that you’re never going to have anything interesting to tell them.

This is a long list of what it takes to apply to a job. But there’s a substantial amount of work involved in complying with all of this. If you are applying for 50 positions, and trying to publish and go to conferences, and put together a smoking job talk, etc., it’s going to take a colossal amount of time. And you might put in this colossal amount of time and get bupkus. Happens all the time.

It’s true that the effort to reward ratio is high, and I understand being demoralized about it, but if no effort is spent, you’re much less likely to be successful. In that giant stack of applications are people who clearly have their act together, and if you look half-assed, you don’t look as good. I agree with Doug’s advice to call people you know in the department first, to see if it’s even worth your time. However, I’d add that you should call more than one person, because not everyone’s read on the political situation will be the same.

The flip side is that you really can’t afford to give a bad talk at this stage of your career.

When, say, pre-tenure, is it affordable to give a bad talk?

As a corollary to this post, it’s important to remember something else. Most people fail in this process. Most of your peers in graduate school, even if you went to a top ten research university, are not going to get faculty jobs. It’s also much easier for experimentalists to get jobs.

This is a long list of what it takes to apply to a job. But there’s a substantial amount of work involved in complying with all of this. If you are applying for 50 positions, and trying to publish and go to conferences, and put together a smoking job talk, etc., it’s going to take a colossal amount of time. And you might put in this colossal amount of time and get bupkus. Happens all the time.

If your advisers (grad school and postdoc) aren’t willing to call their friends and put in a good word for you - it’s going to be a lot tougher. That’s something it is important to know about your grad adviser before you sign on. Many advisers are perfectly willing to let their students dangle in the mistaken belief that the system is a pure meritocracy and that brilliance will naturally rise to the top. It’s not true, and you want to use every possible connection you have to rise above the masses. That’s really how people get jobs.

going on the postdoc market is bad enough

How common is age discrimination?

I haven’t noticed any examples of it. There’s definitely “stage discrimination” (i.e. for or against more senior faculty trying to switch jobs), but I’ve never seen anyone single out an applicant for being 45 rather than 35. It might start to be an issue if an applicant started to approach an age where they might retire at the same time they got tenure. The older (40-50 yr old) grad students I’ve known have largely self-selected out of the research faculty pool in anticipation of this. They have, however, applied to more teaching oriented faculty positions.