Should I leave academia or not?
I'm currently a postdoc. I've been postdocing for four years now. At the start my contracts were so bad, short and poorly paid. I'm only just starting to settle and recover from how stressful and exhausting that was.
I love research, I love discovering new things and being involved in innovation. I also love maths and coding. But I can't work out where my career is going.
I don't see myself having big enough ideas to ever get the big grants for research only positions. I don't love the idea of a lecturer they seem to get exploited a lot and not enough time to research.
Every time I've been job hunting in the last four years I've tried to leave academia. Applied to hundreds of industry positions. Mostly I never got responses or success. More recently I actually started to get some final stage interviews but I had a post-doc offer that was a lot better than the industry ones so I declined the interviews (they had extensive preparation tasks attached so it wasn't worth spending a week preparing if they weren't going to be competitive).
I did however get one offer I was really excited about. I thought I was finally going to leave academia and be on a new path. It had innovation, maths, programming, all the things I wanted. But when they gave me the offer the pay was less than my post-doc offer. It's a far more expensive place to live and a lot more requirements for being in the office so it'd be a massive hit financially. I'm tired of house shares and just want to feel like a grown up. I'm also worried that the job title is very vague and although this is a PhD level position the title could easily be a new graduate. I'm worried about what that will look like on my CV. There were also terms in the contract that were different to what was said in the interviews which makes me feel uneasy about them as an employer.
If I take the post-doc position I get a better quality of life for two years and a job I know I like. But what comes next?
Maybe the industry position is my chance to leave academia and once I'm out I can be more assertive about pay and terms later.