Tech Industry Really Needs Professors and Teaching Talent

Universities aren't trying to hire someone who can teach undergraduate CS courses. They're trying to hire someone who can build a lab capable of bringing in a steady stream of seven-figure grants. You need to have a PhD from a top-five (ish) school, with an excellent publication record, and an existing network of collaborators to be competitive for the vast majority of open positions.

  It takes five years to mint a Ph.D in computer science,
  and schools such as Stanford need more faculty now.

I guess they must have solved their faculty problems since the article was written!

The OP is based on this report: https://www.nap.edu/read/24926/chapter/1, which is starting/pushing the conversation. They write:

"RECOMMENDATION 2.1: Institutions experiencing a computer science enrollment surge should seriously consider an increase in resources to address the rising workload on faculty and staff in computer science and related departments, and the limitations arising from inadequate facilities."

"RECOMMENDATION 2.3: Institutional leadership should engage directly with computer science departments or programs to develop appropriate faculty hiring and faculty size targets, and develop strategies to improve faculty retention. Increasing the number and enhancing the role of academic-rank teaching faculty should be given serious consideration."

"RECOMMENDATION 2.4: Larger institutions—in particular, research universities—should reevaluate the organizational placement of the computer science department and other departmental units with a computational mission."

Basically, "Give CS a better deal"

Many or most of the individual contributing practitioners I've encountered in my varied career across companies big (Microsoft, Google) and small (startups early and mid-stage) consist of individual contributors who either fall up into management or otherwise happily and unwittingly peak out in their skill set.

The typical "high-quality" Senior Engineer is "smart and get things done" (Junior) plus a little bit of experiential knowledge peppered in with cold hard years on the resume.

But there's a craft and skill set to this work that takes (1) a very focussed (presently, self-) training effort and value system and (2) takes years to master, but where the payoff is enormous (i.e, where the 10x/Nx productivity gain is found.)

That last statement is theory only inasmuch as it challenged by those that don't want to believe that they're far from (the, or their) peak; I know it to be true.

As a hint to what that skill set is, it's fairly simple to talk about descriptively...the end result being building systems from composable, contract-based abstractions of course respecting and knowing the current available tools and how to wield them. The problem is able-to-describe and able-to-do are miles apart; it takes many, many years of conscious, directed effort to perfect the craft. The few people I encounter that have that ability had to care about it and muscle through it on their own. We need something closer to an organized pedagogy and training and measurement around this particular skillset to produce much more of it in the industry.

The problem is that any given business rightly has no interest in the kind of long-term investment required. And, at large, academia for many reasons doesn't have the practitioner context/focus/awareness to deliver the skill set, either.

There's a hole to fill here somewhere...

I guess if the above is adopted, there could be issues with part-time adjuncts getting higher hourly rate, by some measure, than tenure-track faculty. Thus, a market-based bonus which could fluctuate with market conditions of each field for tenured or tenure-track faculty members should be considered.

Added: By hard-to-fill, I meant hard-to-fill to the qualification threshold of research universities implicitly referred to in the article.

This is interesting. Depending on admissions standards for that program, I could see a ton of people from other disciplines jumping at it. The issue, of course, is that people would have to have a strong background to be competent to teach any kind of CS in a year. And the people with that background probably aren't the people looking for a career change.

Just thinking about myself for example---I'd probably be better qualified than most people with phds in another discipline for such a thing, since I'm moderately quantitative and semi-decent at coding, but I don't think I would be qualified to teach college-level CS on the basis of a year of transition education.

Would a good 4-year university accept an adjunct who holds a Master's degree from a top-10 CS program, but not a PhD, to teach an upper-level course (that does correspond to the person's area of specialty)?

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Added: Thank you for all the ideas and esp detailed explanation from tom_b. It sounds like more work than I can allocate time for in the near term. Perhaps in the future.

I thought up an alternative: Join/organize meetups and occasionally give talks or participate in panel discussions about recent/latest research sounds like more fun and less work than teaching in a formal setting. (Posted here in case someone would like to make use of the idea.)