A person arrives on a 18 month funded postdoc (believe me, plenty exist). They have just completed a PhD which means they probably have a couple papers published and maybe another one or two in the pipeline. So as they spin up their time with you, they are also finishing these papers from their previous job. By six months in they are done with that and fully onboarded to the project. So they spend six months working. But now, they only have six months left of contract. You don't have money to keep them or perhaps your country will require you to offer a permanent contract if it is being renewed so you cannot offer them to extend their position with you. So they spend the final six months of their postdoc looking for a job. So, for 18 months of salary, you get six to eight months of work. It's unreasonable. Things need to change.
Or lets say you have a mission critical project that must be done by a postdoc. You offer them a 3 year contract that is grant funded. It is three years because most grant agencies work on three year cycles. The project requires a year commitment to building an apparatus (maybe its a lab experiment, maybe it's training some foundation model, whatever). After that year, the apparatus can be used for science. Your postdoc comes to you in year 2 month 3 and says, well I have been offered a faculty position at university X so I am leaving in the fall. So you get 18 months of work out of them and now cannot hire anyone else because you only have 18 months of funding left, but your country requires you to offer a minimum of 24 months contract. Things need to change.
It's important to note that academics often keep projects from their former positions going at their new ones. But as soon as someone leaves to industry, this falls apart. Because industrial positions expect the person to work on the project they specify, they rarely hire someone to work as an academic, pursuing their own research directions.
I think the solution here is as others have suggested, spend more money on hiring people for longer term and with higher salaries. But we shall see if anyone listens to that advice.
A person arrives on a 18 month funded postdoc (believe me, plenty exist). They have just completed a PhD which means they probably have a couple papers published and maybe another one or two in the pipeline. So as they spin up their time with you, they are also finishing these papers from their previous job. By six months in they are done with that and fully onboarded to the project. So they spend six months working. But now, they only have six months left of contract. You don't have money to keep them or perhaps your country will require you to offer a permanent contract if it is being renewed so you cannot offer them to extend their position with you. So they spend the final six months of their postdoc looking for a job. So, for 18 months of salary, you get six to eight months of work. It's unreasonable. Things need to change.
Or lets say you have a mission critical project that must be done by a postdoc. You offer them a 3 year contract that is grant funded. It is three years because most grant agencies work on three year cycles. The project requires a year commitment to building an apparatus (maybe its a lab experiment, maybe it's training some foundation model, whatever). After that year, the apparatus can be used for science. Your postdoc comes to you in year 2 month 3 and says, well I have been offered a faculty position at university X so I am leaving in the fall. So you get 18 months of work out of them and now cannot hire anyone else because you only have 18 months of funding left, but your country requires you to offer a minimum of 24 months contract. Things need to change.
It's important to note that academics often keep projects from their former positions going at their new ones. But as soon as someone leaves to industry, this falls apart. Because industrial positions expect the person to work on the project they specify, they rarely hire someone to work as an academic, pursuing their own research directions.
I think the solution here is as others have suggested, spend more money on hiring people for longer term and with higher salaries. But we shall see if anyone listens to that advice.