Some good advice, but how well does it work?

In the comments section of a recent reader submission, "Advice for search committees", Anon writes,

All you can control is your work. So focus on your work. Throughout your career you will face many absurd interpersonal distractions and people who are enamored of the most trivial markers of status. Learning to ignore such people and their misaligned value system is crucial to leading a meaningful life as an academic. Even if there is a star system and gatekeepers, etc. people still do manage to publish good work. The only thing one can do if one does not want to buy into that is to try to do good work.

This was the attitude I tried to keep during my many years on the market, and in general it seems to me very good advice. In fact, I think it may be the single best piece of practical wisdom I ever received--and I should really give my father a shout-out on it, as it's one of the few lessons I remember him teaching me as a little boy, one that has always stuck with me [his words: "You cannot control what other people do. All you can do is control what you do."].

That being said, there is of course the question of how well the advice actually works in any given context. One of the most common things one hears about the philosophy job-market is that it is a "lottery", based more on chance than merit. Which raises some questions: namely, how much of a lottery is it? And, does hard work/improving one's work pay off? I was thinking it might be good if readers shared their experiences. Did hard work--and improving your work--pay off for you on the market, or not? How? What is/was your evidence? Did you get more interviews, on-campus visits, and/or offers after improving your work [e.g. publishing more, improving your teaching reviews]? Or, did you experience the opposite [i.e. no improvement in your performance on the market, no matter how much you publish, where you publish, etc.]?

I do hope readers are willing to share their experiences, as it might give others some clearer [albeit still anecdotal] evidence of whether, and if so how, hard work and improvement pay off. There have, after all, been questions raised on this blog about how long one should stay on the job market, when one should give up, etc. Perhaps different people sharing their experiences will give some further insight. All I ask is that commenters be honest! My own experience is that hard work and improvement can indeed pay off on the market--but that is only my experience. What's yours been?

Comments

[recent grad]

I have reached the point of no longer working hard. I worked hard enough to put myself in a decent position for a job--Ph.D., publications, presentations, strong teaching portfolio for someone at my stage, etc. But it's November of my final year on the market, I don't feel that hard work will have much more effect at this point. So my work ethic has disappeared. I'll pick it back up if I get something, but I'm done rolling the rock up the hill.

[Henry Lara]

Having come to philosophy late, after years of industry experience, I find it hard to fathom why there is this expectation that all you need to get a job (ANY job, academia or otherwise) and succeed at it is to be good at it. Yes, of course, academic pedigree, publishing record, etc., all matter. But if there is one position and a hundred or more or less equally qualified candidates, then surely who gets the position is decided by extra-academic factors, like who did better at their interviews, references and networking, and of course, luck. I think that most people won't dispute that. But equally important is that all these non-academic factors come into play with who gets to keep those jobs; i.e., who will pass tenure-track reviews and so forth. Yet sometimes when discussing this here and in other blogs, many people seem shocked and even angry about it. I suspect that part of it comes from the fact that many of the faculty advising and training future philosophers have been academics all their life, so they are partly or completely blind (or even in denial) as to how much their success is due to how they handled the non-academic factors in their careers. I have a long way to go in my philosophical career, and it may well be, for many reasons, that I'll never make it beyond the Master's program I am currently in. But it seems to me that a vital part of a future academic's training is lacking. More job market prep, and other career advice (including non-academic options) always helps, but no graduate student should leave a program without fully understanding how an academic department is run, from new assistant professor appointments, graduate student admissions, to tenure reviews.

[anon]

Same sentiment as 'recent grad' here. One can only work hard for so many years without tangible results before giving up.