It seems like only a blink of an eye ago that I was on the job market, scared silly about the future and hoping to establish the knowledge, skill set and track record (and have enough plain luck) to land a faculty position. For a young physicist, during one of possibly several postdocs, those are both exhilarating and terrifying times, during which one has precious little else to do apart from one’s research, but has absolutely no job security whatsoever.
For many people in this position (most of us, let’s be honest), part of their “free time” is spent trying to figure out who among their peers is being interviewed for which jobs, and, if it is a job for which they themselves have interviewed, whether the job has been offered to someone else yet.
Once, this might have been a lengthy task, involving surreptitious phone calls, sometimes through intermediaries, to glean whatever information one could from the organic “rumor mill”. However, by the time I started looking for jobs, the process had become much easier thanks, naturally, to the Internet.
The prime source for information about jobs in theoretical particle physics groups is the Theoretical Particle Physics Jobs Rumor Mill, which was the main site I would visit for gossip when I was on the market. I think it was somewhat later that the Astrophysics Jobs Rumor Mill came along, which was also occasionally relevant to me and certainly involved a lot of people I know. Since then, rumor sites have sprung up in Austria/Germany/Switzerland/Denmark, Greece, New Zealand and the U.K.. Other subfields have also followed suit, in Nuclear Physics and Condensed Matter/AMO Physics.
The rumor mill sites elicit mixed reactions in the community. Most people who are on the market seem to like them and find them to provide a desirable service. Among search committee members feelings are less homogeneous; some are unperturbed about their, and others’, shortlists being public, while some clearly feel they have a right to keep the information secret.
There are a couple of different worries that I have heard some candidates and more people on the other side express about the rumor mills. The first is merely that the deliberations of hiring committees and the resulting offers they make are the private business of the universities and the candidates and nobody else’s business. They understandably don’t like the idea that, for example, if they make an offer to their first choice candidate and are turned down, then when they make their next offer it will be to someone who knows they weren’t the first choice.
The second worry is that there is a fear of a herd mentality developing, in which once it becomes clear that a couple of universities have decided on the same number one choice, this may influence the decisions at other institutions. After all, several fine institutions can’t all be wrong about a particular person being the best choice, can they?
From my perspective, having been on both sides of the hiring process, there is some merit to each of these worries. There is often very little separating the exceptional people who make it to an ordered list of people to whom a position will be offered, and if one is, say, third on the list and is ultimately offered the job, it is seldom a reflection on your absolute talent. I think the rumor mills can make it harder to see past that, when the information is clearly out there for anyone to see.
A herd mentality can sometimes develop, it is true. Often its only effect is to slow down the process as one person garners multiple offers and then sits on them for a while negotiating with the various institutions. Sometimes, however, this can derail the hiring process at some places. On the other hand, if an institution does not follow the herd, the information provided by the rumor mill can be invaluable, enabling the hiring committee to make an attractive offer to someone else, and to snap them up while other institutions are tied up playing the waiting game.
However, my attitude to the rumor mills has always been that the various pros and cons I’ve identified above are, at the end of the day, irrelevant. If one thing is clear on the Internet, it is that information that is out there will be made public whether one likes it or not. All that technology does in this situation is to formalize, simplify and make very efficient, the dissemination of the kind of gossip that people have always shared in the community. Like it or not, one just has to live with it – what are you gonna do?
This week, I learned from my friends at Berkeley – cosmologists Martin White and Joanne Cohn – that rumor mill technology is taking another leap forward. Joanne and Martin have set up an Astrophysics Job Rumor Mill wiki which, rather than individuals emailing in their information to a moderator, as they do now, can be directly edited by all contributors. As Martin put it
The idea is to take some of the burden off of the person(s) running the Astrophysics Job Rumour Mill by letting lots of different people edit a Wiki. A successful Wiki could result in an accurate and up-to-date page with little work for any one person if the community embraces it.
If you’re interested in how our rumors get propagated, take a look; and if you’re in the field and use the rumor mills, I’m sure Martin and Joanne would be interested in any feedback you might have.
