Comment by raverbashing
9 years ago
While academia is a place of good ideas and discussions, the power-distance and the use of students as very cheap labour with the promise of a higher place of importance someday is a dark side of it
Low skilled workers are treated better and more fairly than Graduate Students in a lot of occasions
Academia is stuck in the past in that sense. And it is already hurting them in quite a few disciplines where 'being published' is great but trumped by 'being able to afford a normal life'. So it filters out people that are willing to put their lives on hold in order to have their names at the top of a couple of papers. Some of them find that the lives they put on hold can not be put together again after a decade.
Graduate students are as a rule underpaid, overworked and if they're unlucky harassed to boot and all that for the privilege of having someone else then finally take most or even all of the credit for all the hard work.
Academia is similar to many other fields in that you roughly get what you pay for. That doesn't mean you can't save some money here or there or that money is not wasted here or there, but as a rule of thumb this generally holds.
My biggest quirk about the universities and institutes I've worked for so far is not the way they deal with grad students or postdocs, it's about seemingly 'unimportant' issues. Things like large, noisy, shared offices, lack of whiteboards, unnecessary bureaucracy, and lack of paid linguistic editing. At universities money tends to be saved at the wrong end, private businesses are much better at creating productive environments. Especially the constant lack of office space is hampering productivity. The priorities tend to be wrong (outside of a few centers of excellence), focused on getting as many researchers as possible. Instead they should spend a bit less on human resources and a bit more on a good work environment.
At least that's my personal experience and opinion.
Moving from a top research group to a fortune 500 company just last year, I couldn't agree with you more.
I had great resources in some places (access to the finest minds in my field, for example) and was completely hamstrung in others (a hard salary cap as an assistant researcher, extreme difficulty getting a new whiteboard installed in my office, etc)
Industry isn't perfect either but seems to be better at recognizing that researchers are best used in the role they were trained for and not doing ancillary work.
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Already hurting them, and has been hurting them for almost a decade, even more at this point.
I was thinking about continuing my education to do research in distributed computing, but I learned midway through my undergraduate, majoring in computer science with the "Software Engineering" track, that our field was already playing catchup with industry. I learned this because I worked for a startup my senior year. Their pace, learning, and new innovation was nothing our dusty class with out of touch professors were able to keep up with. Even the ones that were trying to be "cool" by teaching stuff like Ruby on Rails (mind you, this was in 2008 so it was the hip thing at the time) instead of Java Server Faces, it was just bad. You could tell the professors had no idea what it took to build software. After being in the industry about 10 years now, probably the biggest joke of a course I took and arguably a complete waste of money was CS 3100 -- Software Engineering. It was an entire class on Object Oriented programming with Java, and using UML diagrams to model everything, and CRC cards and all this object oriented cruft. Everything was an object nail to drill with your object hammer. It was at this point I was becoming more familiar with LISPs and dynamic/functional programming languages, and I started to care more about behavior rather than creating a tangled web of leaky abstractions.
Anyways, why go get my masters in distributed computing when I know it will be hilariously out of date and all the best innovation in distributed computing is coming from large, internet-scale companies such as Twitter, Google, Netflix, Facebook et all? But unless I could get into Stanford, which is essentially the big tech firm's R&D arm, I don't see the point. I was thinking of the Georgia Tech OMSCS, but I think I am too jaded at this point.
I have a similar story for a college course also titled "Software Engineering". Essentially, it was a course on how to properly execute the waterfall model of design.
We were assigned teams of four, wrote hundreds of pages of requirement papers, design papers, everything papers. Then we wrote the code in PHP in one night.
For the final section of the class, 3 teams of 4 were merged into teams of 12. It's obvious that no college students have the desire or ability to manage a team of 12, as it's a huge task even for an experienced manager. The overhead of having 12 people involved was incredible. Fortunately, more than half the students in the group were happy to be "fired": we didn't talk to them at all, did the work in a smaller, more nimble group, and everyone got a good grade.
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My embedded professor waged a little guerilla warfare against the Object Orientated Everything doctrine. Subtle little sentences like- fired mid lecture: "Yes, it helps us programmers, but the compiler has to rip it all out again, to not ruin the cache performance-"
which got us to question other lectures, and find out that the exact truth - depends on the circumstances.
PS: If you strip university down to its basics- its basically society accepted basic income for three/four years - to do whatever you want- if one does not use that, because s/he is chasing some gamified credits in exchange for real credit - is it really fair to blame that on the professors of that institution?
They must teach something, in a field, where half the innovations are basically secret and the other half is outdated the moment you write exams.
So what can you expect from a university?
We learned C/C++/Java.
Object Orientation is still a valid crutch for most programmers, who would otherwise fall back into procedural decay.
Functional programming languages are great, but hard on the novice mind.
Software engineering was one of those courses that are not usefull until you are out in the trenches. Still the Prof had valuable and valid war stories of theire own time in companys and lots of stuff you can find here on HN as advice including:
"He who writes down everything, is the last man standing."
Nobody claimed to have a silver bullet.
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I've been interviewing the products of many of those types of classes lately and discovering that none of them seem particularly interested in computers outside a classroom.
If you haven't even booted up a VM on a cloud provider to try stuff out, why do you expect to have a career in it?
True in most cases I'd say. In this case, even for $200/month and working hours of 60-80h/week I'd still argue most people would be proud to have this position. The learning, the networking effects, the constant intellectual challenge. I think this is also value, and in some regards a lot more rare than money.
Eh, I think my pride and job satisfaction would drop off quickly if my boss was constantly mad at me for not completing the work I was supposed to complete; and my loved ones were constantly mad at me for not making time for them.
Even learning and networking are not guaranteed. Your life is basically dependent on your relationship with your advisor. He/she can make or break you as a PhD student...
In my case, it's a bit different, but it has been disappointing enough that I'm trying to ditch the program with my MSc in hand.