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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

> I know this sounds like a waste of time because you probably won't get a paper out of it

It's unfortunate that a "lessons learned" paper summarizing a sabbatical in industry doing customer-facing work would not be publishable. Surely it's far more useful to other academics than most papers. It'd definitely be more broadly relevant.

My wife is a professor in a practical field and I'm always sad to hear what counts as a "good" paper or a publishable article. The big journals in these fields drive the notion of what is and isn't legitimate research. That's the point where what constitutes career-advancing "academic output" has to be changed. But I'm not enough of an insider to have any idea of how to go about doing that.

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The issue is that when doing a sabbatical/internship at a company, it's often not possible to write a paper - either because there's not time, or the company may not want to publish the work (which could be confidential). I wouldn't go to a company expecting to be able to publish about the project.

Confidentiality is overrated, outside of narrow areas of core tech. A few years ago, Facebook hired a massive fleet of Google experts, and replicated a lot of the tech and open sourced it. But the reason they cause Google competitive trouble is because Google didn't understand the social product and have a culture to build it, not trade secret tech problems.

But if a company wanted to make sabbaticals or science-focused internships more interesting for people on the academic career tracks, it probably could ease their confidential policies and design such internships so that said academics can publish, right?

You have mentioned elsewhere that you are looking into how Google can help the academic world focus more on the right industrial questions, and you personally recommend such sabbaticals/internships -- so this seems like a natural step.

It's a good idea but fairly challenging in practice. The amount of information you need to reveal in a scientific publication may make many companies uncomfortable. My view is that academics should not just be focused on getting another paper on their CV -- there is value in having the industry experience even if no papers come out of it.

I'm not in academia per se, but (in Germany) just getting to do my (equivalent of a) Master's thesis at a company (still with a supervisor at university) was hard enough - because sometimes they just seem to search for people to do work based on their topic suggestions and if you want to do something that's a little off the tracks... Let's just say there were no real arguments, mostly just "we don't like companies that are not university spin-offs and oh shock that company might reuse that thesis to advertise their exploits instead of granting the kudos to the university.

But maybe that's not the general case, but as someone coming from the tech sector to get a degree (and not the other way round) this sounds all too similar :)

People often misunderstand what it means to get a paper published. Nobody publishes a paper to "disseminate their work." You can do that perfectly well by making a blog post or posting on arXiv. A published paper is a badge recognizing your contribution to the scientific community. If the lessons I learned from my summer exploits at FooCorp do not constitute a significant scientific discovery, then they're not publishable, and justly so.

I'm sad that journal reputation often trumps practicality of not exactly "breakthrough" articles that are nonetheless extremely interesting. One could argue that blog-reading should form an important part of being well-read in the literature, but again there's the concern over quality of research & insights that leads us to journals in the first place.

More and more researchers are also blogging. I think we're seeing a move in this direction.

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