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Comment by no_protocol | Hacker News Reader

This comment is probably on the rude side, but I've wanted to get this off my chest for years.

I had some exposure to several of the top listed faculty at one of the higher ranked schools. It seemed like at least a couple of them genuinely cared more about how many papers their name was on in DBLP than what the papers were about.

I mainly have a hard time believing someone who is a co-author on over 40 submissions per year has time to comprehend and fully understand them all. I was also unconvinced that many of the papers were even moderately significant. It seemed like they knew exactly what to do to get a paper accepted and optimized for that.

The end result was I decided to steer away from the academic track because it did not seem like an environment I would be comfortable in.

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Based on the number of insignificant papers I have had to crawl through in various ACM publications, I am inclined to agree. Having said that, I don't think the rankings are that out of line.

I do wish that CS (and science, in general) would stop requiring publication for tenure (and Ph.D candidates). Wading through 500 abstracts to find the one useful genuine innovation gets tiresome. At least the ACM has recognized they have a problem and are starting to provide curated lists in their monthly "Communications".

I was a grad-student at one of the top-5 schools. It should be realized that academia is as much a popularity game as the rest of life. It's better not fall into the trap of the sage-like pursuit of truth image. Much of what you publish will be tiny tweaks to established stuff - ignoring incremental (even if banal) stuff for the other is very disastrous and lonesome.

For this reason, I feel it is better bet to start with newly-joined faculty, since they have more skin in the game. The established ones likely won't have time/or care about your outcomes (and it's too easy to be stuck in that position).

As someone who went to a top-4 CS uni, there is nothing wrong with this. The professors who are co-authors on over 40 papers head their own labs. They have multiple groups of grad students / postdocs working under them, mostly independently. These professors are typically more hands-on in directing the research of the early PhD students.

This is actually the ideal situation for a late-stage grad student / postdoc. They are somewhat free to pursue their interests while the professor deals with getting funding and resources. They are also better prepared for independent research if they want a future postdoc or faculty role.

This is also ideal for professors: they are incentivized to train PhD students to eventually become independent researchers, because they get their name at the end.

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