Why I left my tenured academic job
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There are really no built-in checks and balances, unless commercial interests care for it to do a 'check', that benefit that commercial interest.
Adding to that, a now well known, built-in corruption of student acceptance and grading, it is impressive that we get any forward movement at all in applied sciences.
>".. . Now, in general, negative results may have value, and it may be worth sharing them. You could write a negative result paper (I think they are valuable). But wait, most conferences don't like those! Shit. So what do you do? You could write a blog post — as detailed as you want, no page limits, etc. you are the boss! — and move on with life with something better? But wait, blog posts "don't count" (more on this later). And in many environments, "no paper" == "I completely lost my time from the eyes of the public"... "
Meanwhile I'm being paid obscene amounts of money to center divs and type @Autowired and @Component for projects that never end up launching anyway. It's all so badly badly flawed.
Umm, no.
The reality is that research type jobs are not that numerous for a reason.
That reason being we just don't need that many of them.
The reason why industry pays more is because that is what society needs.
Ok... And almost by definition, that means that industry (and therefore industry jobs) is more useful to society. Because it is generating more wealth.
I feel that this is a rather narrow view, since there are a lot of companies who generate wealth by being detrimental to society at large (usually those who are just rent-seeking instead of continuously creating value).
That's clearly false. Industry/capitalism/profit-seeking by definition makes it incredibly difficult to do things where there isn't a large expected monetary return. But profitability is a poor proxy for whether a thing is useful to do or not.
For example, there are quite a few diseases/conditions that affect a decent number of people, but we don't find cures because the return on that investment would be too low, or often negative.
Capitalism suggests that the only thing that matters is having more money; I believe what truly matters is having better lives for everyone.
I don't think that's unique to capitalism. The Soviets were building spacecraft and nuclear weapons while people went without food.
Curing an extremely rare disease is valuable, we all value human life. But say there are tens of thousands of uncured diseases and more coming every year. Then let's say there is a finite number of people capable of working on them, how do you decide which cure we're going to target. The tradeoffs are a consequence of limited resources, not the system.
Market based health care does make me uncomfortable though, mainly because the incentives aren't in curing but in perpetual treatment to generate an income stream.
I think this is incorrect.
I think economic (and political) behaviour suggests rather strongly that we don't much value most other human life, nor value curing most extremely rare diseases.
> Then let's say there is a finite number of people capable of working on them, how do you decide which cure we're going to target. The tradeoffs are a consequence of limited resources, not the system.
That comes next, after there's a collective commitment to resource that finite number of people to work on uncured diseases of some kind.
At the moment, I think we're showing that the collective commitment is not in that direction.
We're doing other things instead, that you can certainly argue are of value, but given the large proportion of "earned income" most people and businesses have to spend on somebody else's "unearned income", I have to wonder if money flow is a good indicator of value.
Most of the interesting things in our field can be done with passing json objects around a network and persisting them in whatever way is durable, a bit secure and easy to develop.
What we really need to see is the advancement of computer vision, robotics, and dynamic, goal-based software decision making capabilities. And I suppose battery technology and radio networking too, but that's more about electricity and physics than software.
When that comes, you will see many mundane human tasks go straight to the robots, and hopefully every family will be permitted to own one (politics is all about limiting people from doing things for sane prices, right?)
If a family's robot could till the land, grow food, cook it, synthesize medicines, build a home, serve as physical security and defence, play games for entertainment, transport the family from place to place, etc etc... then quickly the only world industry still in existence would be semiconductor manufacturers :)
It's win-win BS. That's why it keeps going. The reality of its economy comes in delay long enough (e.g. 5 years with no profit, keep funding) that every body is detached from economic principle. With printed money lately .. oh the collapse might not come at all, you can be alive in coma for a decade as long as oxygen keeps pumping into your dead body.
This is not a trivial field, contrary to what some are trying to claim.
This is a completely absurd comment and notion. There’s talented people all over the world who don’t need $200k salaries and also simply get things accomplished without whining about not being able to use whatever tech is popular on HN at the moment.
Why don't we have a library stack where I can define some datatypes and get database migrations, CRUD REST endpoints, and a basic editing web UI, in a maintainable language where I can understand where all that's coming from and incrementally start customizing? I'm pretty sure I've implemented all the pieces you'd need, scattered between the codebases of my last three or four employers: in a language with a decent record system it should be a one-liner to build a set of HTTP routes for a given datatype, not through invisible magic but through a function call that works by plain code.
But it's in no-one's interest to package that up to release it. A traditional business doesn't produce new systems often enough to make a general toolkit. A consultancy does new systems but has no need to make them maintainable (thus Rails, which does all the automatic spinning up but doesn't have the comprehensibility to be reliable). And there's no money in selling libraries to developers, partly because developers would rather do it themselves but mostly because a library you have to buy will never be popular enough to get talented developers using it. Occasionally a huge corporation decides it's worth making a framework for their in-house applications, and even more occasionally they find it worth publishing to the outside world, which is an astonishingly inefficient process for our whole industry to depend on.
This sounds like Django (models+migrations, views for CRUD/REST (maybe with another library for automatic generation from models), admin pages for editing, and in python).
And, one can annotate Python3 to make it typed, so things might improve.
This is why no-code solutions have never become popular.
The "no-code" environments from yesteryear were really, really good, and motivated "non-coders" accomplished amazing things with them. Hypercard, for example.
But even with Hypercard, at some point you needed to write code if you wanted to go beyond the happy path envisioned by the tool developer. And I imagine the new "no-code" tools will have similar limitations. And then when the "no-code coders" get bored of playing with those toys, will hand it off to the programmers to extend and maintain.
I’m a teacher. I’ve never seen any evidence teachers are undervalued. Teachers don’t get paid more when they leave teaching for other jobs. Difficulties in hiring can be fully explained by having the same pay scale for those teaching subjects in demand in the outside world like Computer Science or Mathematics and those with either less demand or greater supply like Physical Education or English. Paying primary school teachers and secondary school teachers on the same scale is distortionary in the same manner.
Teachers in the government sector get very, very good job security and benefits for doing a hard job but plenty of people do hard jobs for much poorer compensation. And teachers aren’t magic. They come in a very distant third in their effects on student achievement behind student characteristics and family characteristics.
> By almost all objective measures, teachers don’t actually seem to be underpaid in the traditional sense. “Nationwide, the average teacher salary was $60,477 during the 2017–18 school year.” And teachers work around 2 hours less a week than the average profession (“ 40.6 hours during the work week, compared to 42.4 hours for private-sector professionals”). BLS Occupational Information Network studies found that teaching isn’t a particularly stressful job relative to other professions, and teachers typically have pretty solid relative job security. In addition to all of this, teachers don’t make a lot when they leave teaching and education majors have the lowest standardized test scores of any major. Although teachers have extraordinarily high social prestige, it looks like we are paid close to what we are worth on the actual job market.
https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-e...
I think this depends highly on the subject of the teacher and private v. public schools. My SO was a public school teacher in a STEM discipline and at the very top of the district payscale. My SO now makes three times as much in industry. And we have much better healthcare.
I'm asking because based on my country, I think there literally is no solution and we just have to live with the fact that CS education cannot be good (it might also happen to some other fields over time).
Paying CS teachers more than PE or English teachers is not politically viable as teachers and their unions wouldn't accept it, and paying all teachers a salary based on the market value of the most in-demand field is too expensive, bound to be unacceptable to taxpayers (who are already jealous of the incredible benefits and job security teachers have), and creates unacceptable incentives in education choices (ie even more people will try to become English teachers because the demand is the same, but the salaries are increased, so the oversupply of labor in those fields would increase even further, and the labor supply in in-demand fields would actually go down, because even though they also now get paid more for teaching positions, their relative attractiveness actually went down).
So is it even possible to solve this problem?
It looks like you have already identified your problem. You could give CS teachers double appointments with the IT department if you have absolutely no wiggling space on money/conditions. Or maybe you could gather some programmers who are eager to reach out to kids and let them work part-time as teachers after they obtain the necessary qualifications.
This is untrue for teachers who left teaching job I know. They all get paid more.
In all seriousness, if teaching is such a great job, why does average teacher leave so quickly instead of staying for long years?
* Administration overload (government compliance type stuff)
* Developing brains aren't always fun to be around
* Parents expect to outsource child rearing to the school and want to be catered to in their unique sensibilities while the teacher wants to focus on what's best for the kid and the class
* Even here in Europe, an increasingly litigious attitude, where any school decision you disagree with is escalated and finally prosecuted. This increases the box-ticking, cover-your-ass sort of administration
This has some of the classic ingredients for cooking up a burnout:
* Investing emotionally in your work
* Feeling like you're letting people down constantly
* Being expected to do things that go against your personal ethics
* Spending a lot of time on things you consider are wasting your time
But maybe this is not what scientific advancement takes. All you might need is randomly choose someone passionate about it, and just give them free reign without condition, no time limits, no stress, to just express their passion.
After reading that I'm wondering, what is the reward?
Think of it like getting a Nature or Science paper, or something in Phys Rev, or Cell. It's about prestige.
The real issue is conferences taking the place of academic journals. In most fields conferences are laid back places to share your WIP. In CS, conferences require full papers which means many ML researchers (for example) structure their whole year around meeting the NeurIPS and ICML/ICLR deadlines. It's a bit broken because those conferences have limited capacity and it can be a lottery if you get in. Journals don't have the same restriction and don't have deadlines unless you're going for a special issue, so you can actually take the time to polish before submitting.
This is true, but I think for many researchers the main motivation is self-esteem. It's the way they are ranked among their peers. In other circles, it may be your bonus, or how fast you run a marathon. It may be seem silly but this is what drives many researchers.
What should it be based on? Should academics be judged on performance? If so, how?
Essentially, I would break apart the monolithic idea of academia. There's too many inefficiencies, we waste away the talent of very smart people working on incomprehensible details that only a handful of people care about, and they write papers no one will read, only to then go to finance or tech where they'll wonder what was the point of grad school since a small percentage of their skills/specialized knowledge is necessary to make a living. We're creating all these PhDs and we don't know what to do with them. We need to foster a more entrepreneurial path in these people, they're stuck thinking that they only have two choices: academia or industry.
For the humanities, yeah I have no idea. I didn't specify but I meant the science and engineering parts of academia. I think math doesn't have a reproducibility crisis since it should be all logical proofs that don't require infrastructure, so I guess math is fine as it is.
Math does have a problem because proofs are very complex to actually check and few people have the time to do so. Subtle errors can creep in very easily.
Thank for the question. It is, indeed, easier to criticize rather than offer constructive suggestions.
Here are my thoughts on the reward system:
- I would like to see published conclusions challenged (if conclusions are based on data observations or empirical evidence). And if the challenge is clean and results are fair, then:
(1) The challenger gets a credit (regardless if the paper they challenged withstood the challenge or not)
(2) The original authors of the paper get credit if the paper withstood the challenge(s).
In other words, I would much prefer that our academic discoveries are encouraged to build consumable implementations (unlike US Patent law that does not require an implementation of an invention).
-if an published paper or a conference presentation was incorporated by the same team into a patent, I would remove any academic credits received by the team's researches. In other words, I would prevent double-dipping, if I may call it that. If the given paper is incorporated into a utility patent by completely different people (and it withstood the USPTO scrutiny), then that's ok.
- if a specific field of study is theoretical in nature (eg mathematics, may be theoretical physics). I would specifically reward joint publications, discoveries where the theoretical subject matter is incorporated into applied field.
- I would include into the reward system books, blogs and article posts that further public understanding of complex science topics (I would apply it for STEM subjects only). Such that online video lectures, and other forms of free/unpaid public education are specifically encouraged. I am not sure how exactly to measure effectiveness of this, but I am sure minds, brighter than mine, could come up with a fair, automatically-correcting model.
Another problem is that academics is full of dead ends, and it has to be if it's being done right. But no one likes that either. So rather than working on changing expectations, we do the opposite and bean count.
Yet another problem is the classic fan fiction / fan community issue: if you get into enough expertise, the experts have to become the audience, because no one else understands it, but then that leads to increasingly narrow fields of view because of increasingly narrow interests. You could broaden the audience, which is increasingly a demand, but that has downsides too, because often what's really the way forward is incomprehensible and boring to the average person. People love their iphones; not so much all the incremental computer science, physics, and engineering that went into every little part.
Something I think this essay maybe misses is that there are a lot of senior academics who would say publishing doesn't matter, that a paper is a dime a dozen, and what does matter are grants, and lots of them. This is how this dynamic has shifted in a lot of places, from the science -> publishing -> money. You might argue that this is better but it has its own set of incentive problems.
There have been quite obviously individually remarkable people that stand head and shoulders above everyone else, and don't think that's changed.
Nikola Tesla, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Isaac Newton, and many more.
Feats of greatness may come from collaborating but there are often great leaders and minds at the centre of it.
Sadly, after a few honeymoon years he will discover almost the exact same problems with industry. Sure, it will not be about papers, but about useless client projects, spinng bad tech choices because of commitments, making your boss/company save face when things fail, spending massive amounts of time on proposals andreporting that will never be read by anyone. Insane administration practices. Pointless HR 'events' in evenings and weekends that chip away team morale...
Thruth: we tend to run from one pigsty to the next, because the grass looks greener, only to realize it was towards the same shit we left behind until we tire of running.
I would advise in hindsight not running, but grabbing a shovel and cleaning a small corner of the barn.
I also left academia to work for a company. I agree it's not all black and white. But one important thing to take into account is salary. I earn now twice as much. I'm not materialistic but it makes a big difference. It's something I didn't care about when I chose to work in academia but I'm increasingly worried about future pensions, health system and social safety net in my country. It seems to go downward and my salary as a professor wasn't enough for me to plan adequately.
Plus, in industry, if you're good, you can always go higher, earn more, move to other industries, and earn even more. In academia, you can pretty much just choose the (almost) same job in a different institution, which probably pays nearly the same salary (especially in europe... even if you change countries, in the developed ones, pay (adjusted to cost of living) is nearly the same everywhere).
I worked as a research engineer for 2 years at an uni but since I was not full time employee for real I left. They would have needed way more full time engineers than zero. You can't run serious labs with grad students or short term engineers. The churn is way to big when you work on a per project basis.
The advantage state officials usually have is a safe paycheck with worse pay but unis offer the same numbers on it without the safety ...
Sorry, it's in French: starting salary for an assistant professor 1727.49 euros. It's similar for a CNRS/INRIA researcher. In practice it's a little higher. After about 15 years, you'll get 3000 euros. Many people get stuck there but it's possible to get a full professor / director of research position.
You recommend not running, but if you're not in a position to change some of these core practices, moving to a better situation may be the best option. I think one huge quality-of-life factor is working on a team with strong technical leadership. That could be a tech-led company, or it could be an in-house engineering team at any company where the team's director has clout outside the engineering team, generally based on a history of delivering value to the broader org.
You then said, “the grass looks greener, only to realize it was towards the same shit we left behind.” My whole point was that the grass is greener than you described in different parts of the industry than bespoke software.
In other words, it sounds like we’re mostly in agreement, but I chose to get out of bespoke work. You seem to be advising to suck it up and sweep the barn floor.
Pretty much what I was thinking. I am in demand just now, but my job hasn't been inspiring for years, its just keeping other peoples crappy code running rather than anything creative any more.
My theory with industry is that if a company has been around long enough to be making money, chances are their codebase will be a mess.
Especially the parts about publishing - there are so many people who are so obsessed by publishing, and most honestly don't have anything useful to say at all. I swear most of these papers aren't even read, even if they are cited. There are whole layers of publication politics that force people to cite work that is almost completely unrelated, if not unrelated and saying so, just to inflate citation counts. It's basically a follow-for-follow system. Same for author lists.
Also totally agree that the papers are written for these referees, instead of the people reading them (which many times I think is not any). Many of these papers are also written in order to give presentations or talks at conferences where papers are expected, since it is publishing and not speaking that gives you a line on your CV.
Also how tenure doesn't save you, I feel this is the same as in tech, where they won't fire you but they will try to manage you out or make life so unpalatable that you will just leave.
https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo...
Of course papers are written with the reviewer in mind. What is your suggestion? Abolish peer review? It's up to the AE to find referees who are qualified to review your paper.
> For instance, the Annalen der Physik, in which Einstein published his four famous papers in 1905, did not subject those papers to the same review process. The journal had a remarkably high acceptance rate (of about 90-95%). The identifiable editors were making the final decisions about what to publish. It is the storied editor Max Planck who described his editorial philosophy as:
> To shun much more the reproach of having suppressed strange opinions than that of having been too gentle in evaluating them.
However, and this is mostly for the sake of others reading this, be aware that the security industry has its own versions of the problems mentioned affecting the academic environment, and these versions are in most cases way worst than in academia. With the exclusion of some enlighten cases (which most often coincide with a good financial situation that allows for teams that do cool stuff without too-pressing metrics on the immediate business), in private companies literally everything is driven by money and to that one must add up that the incentives that the people part of the companies have (to this: in private companies the turnover is way higher than in academia). Some examples:
- Papers that don't deserve to be written? wait for that endless stream of tasks that does not deserve to be done that way (but need to be done that way the same, because <reason-you-cannot-argue-against>).
- Optimizing for the wrong things? wait for words like "cost-effective" to pop up.
- Move away from very cool stuff? yeah, that does not happen because the cool stuff are not even on the table, unless they can bring in money fast.
- Non peer-review things dismissed? wait for not-approved-by-manager-X or not-in-the-agenda-of-key-person-Y or subject-to-approval-of-Z-who-cannot-possibly-even-understand-the-value-of-that.
- No time for tech stuff? sorry, that doesn't change much unless your job is highly operational (which you won't enjoy much because it will have to be "cost-effective", thus most likely repetitive and metrics-based).
I'm not saying that every private company is a circle of hell in the security industry, but unfortunately most have far harder-to-deal-with problems than those listed for people looking for things like the author. Afaik, the common big difference is you get paid more and you see real-world cases as they happen.
(edit: formatting)
Related, discussed on HN a while ago: https://blog.dshr.org/2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-researc... Previous discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200764 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246672
To the second point, it's true that the research focuses shift over time but if your research area fizzles out you can either shift to a more applied position or move back to academia.
I think the general summary of what you're pointing out is that in industry it's easy to do things that the company wants to do (make money, make your boss look good, make life easier for the execs), and hard to do things that you want to do (cool stuff, disseminate ideas, and explore).
When you start at a company, you're optimistic and campaign to do a balance of both, but over time it wears you out so almost every defaults to doing the company work and fades out of public view. And yes, MSR is generally the exception but even then notice how many researchers there now do something related to "optimizing productivity".
Based on my experience, I agree with the first half of this sentence but I'd argue with the second bit. Sometimes the interests align. The one thing that has made my PhD worthwhile has been that it gives me the credibility to work on cool stuff that's going to make the company money. That's not to say that I would necessarily be working on exactly the same things if I had been free to choose, but that's largely because I'm solving problems I didn't know existed before I took this job!
I think I’ll end up in a similar place - hyper-focusing as a graduate student and then transitioning out of academia after. One understated part of academia is that for a lot of fields (Such as the bio-adjacent fields I’m interested in), academia is one of the few places willing to take on trainee risk. I hope we can keep academia as a place where we’re willing to take risks to educate, which I think starts with reforming the processes informed by the critiques this post levies.
One thing I would advocate for is forcing pre-registration of experiments. Publishing a design for experiments with an intent, a hypothesis, and a afterwards a quick summary of the results. That process for FDA trials has naturally led to a large buildup of both positive and negative results, while also inhibiting post-hoc statistical baboonery.
My experience in research is that there is very little pre-commitment on this level of granularity. Grant applications should be at the level of "We hope to study X because it is known to be correlated with Y and are hoping to elucidate a mechanistic relationship between these two". The experiments which go into proving such should more closely resemble mathematical proofs, is a viewpoint I currently hold.
One of the areas I helped write a paper for as an undergraduate was later proven to have a completely different mechanistic understanding than we proposed. I think having this more detailed set of observations would have helped both us and any people citing our paper come to this conclusion earlier. Physics is great at this [1] - seeing "dark matter" or something unexplainable is an opportunity, but many fields treat presenting something as 'unexplainable' as a weakness.
[0] I don't have experience in particle physics or anything of that nature where you're working on constructing something like the LHC
[1] Once again, outside observer bias
After 8 years of back-and-forth, I settled on both. I think this should be the norm. Professors should take a break from paper writing to work on a startup and/or be in industrial board meetings to know what to research next.
I have so many friends that kept a foot in both industry and academia. I find the model very valuable.
As I understand it, law and medicine are run this way.
In CS, "that year in industry" counts as a big whole in your publication list.
If you do stay involved in research, you spend more time hassling over a grant proposal that's a 1-in-10 shot than you would actually doing the technical work if you won the grant.
I’m leaving academia (3 months ago | 70 comments) https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/i-quit-be062295f638 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23642795)
Why I Quit Academia (4 months ago | 15 comments) https://aardvark-lily-k2lz.squarespace.com/transcripts/archi... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23560528)
I think the point is, if you want to be successful in academia, you need to be producing something theoretical or practical that others can consume and find useful. The medium need not be papers. It could be:
-- standards
-- methodologies
-- prototypes
-- libraries of code, manuals of protocols
even more practical things:
-- convening people on a topic with authority
-- writing popular works to publicize the field
-- building a scientific facility
-- even TV shows or blog posts
You will find professors at universities who do a whole variety of these kinds of things, not just publish research papers. (and as they get more senior, they often find more interesting outlets for their work, if they're innovative)
But you have to make something that others (in the scientific or industrial or popular community) can consume. All the paper counts in the world will not help, or make you satisfied, if they're just churned out for the goal of increasing your H-index but don't actually contain something wanted by others. It usually doesn't work as an approach.
If you can't do any of these, then you are probably better off taking a normal job. The incentives of academia will not align with your talents.
Personally, for example, I found that the things I was good at publishing or sharing with others wasn't groundbreaking novel research. So I went where that was valued, and have been happier since.
A: "Because the stakes are so low."
My dad was a professor and researcher (in ecology) in the 60s and 70s. He had a cartoon on his office wall, later relocated to his office at home, which depicted two priests having a conversation beneath the image of a very famous prophet being tortured (honestly, it doesn't matter which prophet).
One priest is saying to the other, "He was a great teacher, but he didn't publish."
My dad had a stress-related heart attack at 50, which he survived, and he semi-retired to a part-time professorship at a different university so that he could continue to work with grad students, which he loved doing.
I have bad news about the private sector, pal...
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/ho...
I've known a few professors that publish paper after paper with similar results and similar methods. I suspect each of having a much deeper theorem, either under their hat, or (more generously) at the tip of their tongue. If they'd take a bit of a break from the churn and focus on the deeper theorem, their actual impact on the field would be significantly more value. We'd all get to read, write, or review, a small handful of papers instead of dozens.
The typical job at the typical public company is also a lot less innovative than original research.
I have a feeling that the author will discover that the grass is always greener on the other side. The private sector has no shortage of authoritarian big-men[1], dumb vanity-driven projects, asinine performance review metrics, PHDs doing the equivalent of licking envelope stamps, and your work being thrown out in the dumpster (With no ability to share it with the outside world, because trade secrets), because someone in upper management lost a political battle, and your division has been canned, or re-purposed.
[1] Of either gender.
Since I’ve been remote due to COVID, my life has been remarkably better. I don’t work any less (perhaps more), but I am much happier. It is far more compatible with my lifestyle. I love being at home with my wife and my pets, I love being able to cook all my own food. Like the author, my physical and mental health have both improved; at the start of the pandemic, I could barely hang from a bar, and now I can do multiple pull-ups in a row. Same with squats, bench and everything else. I was never able to build a workout routine, but now I have. And I haven’t eaten any fast food or low quality food in this time, is all been homemade from scratch, and way more delicious and nutritious.
I feel the same about my company and my team, I really have made friends there and have built a great career, but they have made it very clear that remote work is not an option going forward. This is just not compatible with the way I want to live.
If you’re reading this and are in need of a technically skilled, motivated, hardworking individual with many years of experience, have an interesting project to work on, and support remote work, please reach out: https://lukep.dev for more info on me. I am experienced at building teams, delivering products, and leading others, and am looking for a management level role.
Again, thanks so much for the post. It’s difficult to articulate this feeling when things just change for you and there’s no going back, but I feel you and I know that you’re making the right move. Best of luck at CISCO!
Considering how many papers I read that still are easily misunderstood even by smart readers... I think "defensive writing" is better understood as "good writing".
Of course papers are expected to be "bulletproof." It's called a standard of excellence. Peer review is supposed to be meaningful, not a rubber stamp. But the sneaky secret is, the bar isn't even that high. I read so many papers where I wonder why an obvious alternative interpretation isn't even mentioned, or an opposing viewpoint isn't cited, or where the author subtly misrepresents another author.
("Capricious people" are a separate subject, but they certainly exist just as much in industry as in academia...)
The rest of the post aside, this particular bit of the "rant" just feels like a defense of lazy writing. An academic paper isn't just a blog post, and it shouldn't be.
And sometimes it's just having to add verbiage in anticipation of a lazy or uninformed reviewer, who is not necessarily the audience that you actually care about. The net result is that there is a lot of work and fluff that interested readers often have to put up with that exists solely to get the paper through review and serves little other purpose.
> The rest of the post aside, this particular bit of the "rant" just feels like a defense of lazy writing. An academic paper isn't just a blog post, and it shouldn't be.
If your point here is that blog posts are "lazy writing", then I assure you I have read many blog posts that are much more thorough, well-researched, and worked-over than academic papers. I do agree with you that the two are separate things, but blog posts have a number of desirable qualities that academic papers have difficulty optimizing for–either because they are not prioritized, or because they would actively hurt the chances of acceptance.
But see, that hits the nail on the head.
There's a reason papers are full of long intros, backrounds, and even mini-literature surveys.
Because the audience isn't just other tenured professors in the same subfield. It's the rest of the field, it's grad students, it's undergrads, it's researchers in other fields it might be valuable for.
It's also for people trying to figure out even which subfield the author is approaching it from, to contextualize the paper -- is this political science paper being written by a structuralist or a culturalist, even when they never explicitly say so, but it makes all the difference for judging it?
It's easy but short-sighted to assume you're writing solely for your peers. Thankfully, the "verbiage" and "fluff" you disdain is deeply appreciated by many, many other readers.
To reiterate: there are very good reasons for these standards. What's fluff to you, is extremely valuable to many others.
Not once.
Maybe it's a problem in other fields, or in very specific journals? I honestly don't even know what fluff looks like, which is why I'm so confused by this whole thread.
But again, your paper ought to be an advertisement, no? That makes it clear why it matters? That's why there's an abstract, an intro, a conclusion.
I have read a lot of writing where I wonder, "yes but what's the point? why does this matter? what's the actual impact here?" So to have that clearly stated is incredibly helpful for all readers -- not just what it does but how much it matters, why and for whom.
Writing for a public audience isn't a place for false modesty -- it confuses rather than helps.
There are also other things a researcher is incentivized to do to get past reviewers such as emphasizing only the good points of your algorithm, deemphasizing its downsides, comparing only against current so-so algorithms or baseline algorithms or algorithms a couple of years old instead of the latest state of the art so that your algorithm can look good. As in, even if you propose an algorithm that has new ideas in it that could bear fruit in the future with more refinements, you as a researcher would only hype it up to get past the reviewers.
I agree 100%.
One thing I HATE HATE HATE is when research articles use unnecessary synonyms. Ie, plasma membrane in one sentence and then phospholipid membrane in another and then cell membrane in another. For someone just trying to get a grasp on a topic, it is REALLY fucking confusing. And even if you're an expert on the topic, it's still annoying. Just pick one and stick with it.
OR uses stupidly complex words just to appear smart. Ie, ameliorates, a term I've ONLY ever seen in biology research articles and yet is a completely unscientific/unnecessary word. This isn't your creative writing class. Just fucking say that you found that your drug decreases lipid synthesis, NOT that it ameliorates it you big dunce.
ALSO one more thing that annoys me - when people only use a term 3 or 4 times in a paper, but still INSIST on using the acronym. Ok, I get it - if it's something WAY more commonly referred to by its acronym like DNA or COPD, it's acceptable and probably preferable. But if it's central pontine myelinolysis, just fucking type it out instead of writing CPM so I don't have to waste mental energy trying to decipher what it means.
If anything, scientific writing should be dumbed down more.
PS. While I'm on my biomed-academia soapbox, I'd like to point out that the correct pronunciation of constitutive is just as it's written - similar to constitution. It's TUTIVE not TUITIVE.
I think it is less this and more just code-usage to facilitate showing that they're part of the in-group. If I use the appropriate words ("Elucidate", "Ameliorate", "in situ"), I'm showing that I have learned the subject from a similar heritage.
Partially an aside, but an interesting talk on academic writing, which I've enjoyed [0].
Elucidate is unnecessary but not terrible - at least it's used in everyday writing. If I had my druthers, I would ask for a less cumbersome word to be used. Still, I think most reasonably educated people would know what it means without missing a beat.
Words like ameliorate are just wrong. Just absolutely wrong.
[0] Like this word. I could have said "Because of their precise meaning", but I picked a word that encapsulates that directly.
Take this example:
> Chemical and/or biological therapeutic strategies to ameliorate protein misfolding diseases.
Why not just "to target protein misfolding diseases"?
In the case you mentioned there is a bit of redundancy which makes the word “ameliorate” easy to substitute. Terms like “therapeutic” and “misfolding” make it easy to derive that we’re going from a bad to good state.
“Activated protein X ameliorates biofilm formation” has more content than if we swapped to “target” in this case, because it has the added effect of indicating that the interaction was “good”.
As a continued aside, I think you’d enjoy the talk I originally posted. It dives into the difference between using writing to think vs persuade or educate, and how not recognizing that difference can cause poor scientific communication.
Thanks, I'll check it out!
`Target` sounds active and vigorous, but it is quite vague in that context. You can target a diseased brain region (for stimulation, surgical removal, etc) or a mutated gene for deletion, but it's not clear to me what "targeting" something abstract like a disease would mean.
`Ameliorate` means "to make something better". It has the added implication that the situation is quite bad, but the intervention won't totally restore things to normality. This is exactly what I meant: we don't think this intervention is a silver bullet that will reverse the disease, but it seems like it should help--and our proposal is cheap and easy, so...consider it.
This also keeps Reviewer #2 from busting your chops over how effective the proposed strategies might be, which you'd be inviting with a stronger word like "cure."
Here, you could also use `treat`, which feels like an intermediate-strength claim. "Manage" might work too though that comes with implications of its own too: to me, managing a disease suggests that it is temporarily being held at bay, or the negative consequences are averted without fixing the underlying problem.
I learned `ameliorate` in junior high--and was writing for people with PhDs--so I went for it.
Simply, most people writing scientific articles are bad at writing and generally are happy or is somewhat English. They don't obsess offer single word, because their focus is elsewhere and they have no clue about writing anyway.
There isn’t anything intrinsically evil about norms and signaling, I feel that assuming someone recognizing a structure means that structure is inherently evil is a bit presumptive. In-group jargon usage is common and useful for some, and a hurdle to overcome for entrants, that’s it, absent any moral judgement.
`Elucidate` is an basically a fancy weasel word: I read it as "I don't actually have a strong prediction about what will happen--but I expect something obviously cool will happen when I do this experiment."
I think that’s the original point, that a lot of the word-level complexity is just how the writing is taught and subsequent reinforcement by mentors and peers to use the appropriate language.
Yeah, elucidate is just a fancy word for “figure out” - but I think it is part of the dialect because of the connotation you mention (Even if a casual reader might not use it).
[0] Not because it is strictly wrong, but because it violates how the in-group expects converse. I think this holds even if we go outside of phrases (One could argue in-situ hybridization is one item), as if I discover something new I’ll likely use the term “in-situ” if it involves similar locality properties
Your "ameliorate" example is a good one. In catalan, "millorar" is an extremely common verb meaning "to improve". Hence, I can easily see myself using it at some point, as rare as it may sound to you.
I'm not saying it is better to do it this way, what I'm saying is that instead of being so annoyed at the author trying to seem smart, maybe you can shrug it off as a quirk of those who are writing in a foreign language.
Especially if you are not native speaker, the fancy word is equally new word then the supposedly common word. Because both are new to you and you learned both from other papers. So you just use the one you remember better and ameliorate sound like common French word. Or maybe it is from Latin, but if you deel with Latin often it sound common.
It is like using POJO in tech. You kind of forget the word is not normal after a while.
I think that this is generally frowned upon in any technical writing, including scientific. So it is not an expected convention in scientific writing.
The author's issue is not with defensive writing. It's with writing to defend against the wrong audience.
Perhaps you haven't been in academia, and haven't experienced it yourself, but the author's problem is very real. Your intended audience will understand a point, and want you to go further. But the referees are often not the intended audience.
Imagine trying to explain the value of a new type of N95 mask to an anti-masker. You'll be spending your time writing defensively to try to argue for the most basic aspects of wearing a mask, when you would really just like to go into details on what's cool about the new type of mask, for people who actually care about better masks.
I'm wondering about the nature of your shop. You said it's heavy on research, but it also doesn't sound like you're in academia.
I didn't as it it's obvious the reviewer didn't read the paper :)
How do you know this? Like both you and OP, I've had my writing misinterpreted by reviewers. These reviewers may not be experts in my precise niche, but reading research is part of their profession. If even they misinterpret it then it is likely I was not clear enough. I have no reason to believe that experts in my niche would not also misinterpret it, and there's no way to verify this once the work is published.
Furthermore, vocabularies and terminology in a field can change. I find it very confusing when a paper from today and 15 years ago are using differing definitions for the same term.
As such I think defensive writing is a good practice, and I'm not sure why making your work more readable is ever a bad thing.
> when you would really just like to go into details on what's cool about the new type of mask, for people who actually care about better masks.
Defensive writing wouldn't stop you from doing this. It would ensure that a wider audience (across fields and into the future) can benefit from your proposals
I myself am a bit skeptical of how far this "defensive writing" is to be blamed for the unreadability of papers, and even if it's such a bad thing at all when done in measure. In maths, reading papers is about swearing and asking the author just as much as it is about actually reading; yet the reasons for the unreadability are often more natural than "we need to get this past the referees" (all else being equal, referees still reward readability). New ideas rarely are born easy to explain. Ugly ducklings need their time to grow. You can wait for 10 years hoping that by then your own work has taken the proper shape to explain to undergrads, or you can write it up half-baked in half a year and let others play with it. What is better for science? The answer is far from obvious, particularly because releasing your ideas into the wild will often get them properly explained faster than trying to do it yourself.
I would just like to point out that the variability across academic jobs is as large as variability across startups, or across corporate jobs.
So the important part is not so much whether you're in industry or academia (there are toxic environments in both), but that you find an environment where you work on problems you care about and with people that make you better. Those places are available in both academia and industry.
Although I admit the worst environment probably is found in academia because of the lack of checks and balances (being in the wrong lab can really be a nightmare), I would argue the best environment may also be in academia.
Isn’t this equivalent to saying that academia has the highest variability?
Essentially, I would break apart the monolithic idea of academia. There's too many inefficiencies, we waste away the talent of very smart people working on incomprehensible details that only a handful of people care about, and they write papers no one will read, only to then go to finance or tech where they'll wonder what was the point of grad school since a small percentage of their skills/specialized knowledge is necessary to make a living. We're creating all these PhDs and we don't know what to do with them. We need to foster a more entrepreneurial path in these people, they're stuck thinking that they only have two choices: academia or industry.
Market forces are not and can't be the start and end of how resources are allocated, especially in academia/research. You would be stiffling that which does not seem to yield immediate, visible results (profit). Except that's what research does. It's why it's called research.
My idea would be for the experimentalists, give them the opportunity to tinker and trial and error without the bs pressures of publish or perish, and/or crotchety advisors.
I just want the academic to be exposed a little bit to something from reality that can give them feedback, market forces is what came to mind because the introductions of so many papers talk about the potential applications of their niche research, but you never see anyone actually do the application. So how about they give that a shot? Let's put the models to the test and see if they can build something. That is in my opinion a much better approach at evaluating what can be reproduced. If they build something and did so without their academic models, well, then now we need theoreticians to figure out what's going on there. To me this seems a more organic approach, where the direction of research is being led by stochastic discoveries fueled by an acceptance of the risks of trial and error. The top-down, directed research approach we have is hard to stomach with inherently biased people at the top, and this type of system will only change its preferences on research directions one funeral at a time. That's a lot of time to waste for many many 20 - 30 year olds that have ideas but don't have a fighting chance to try.
You apply for tenure-track and tenure everywhere, because that is how academics do it. In the end, you get a tenure in France -- they have plenty of permanent jobs. Now you start learning French. You are motivated to learn the language. But having learned two foreign languages already, you see that it will take you 3-5 years to learn it. All public services in France require French beyond advanced, as you have to remind the officials about every single application ten times, before you get anything. Want to have fun? Try to rent an apartment and open a bank account in France, not being a French resident.
I am not the blog author, but I had a similar academic trajectory. Before judging people, try it yourself.
Regarding papers that shouldn't be papers because it's a waste of resources, I think it's unkind/elitist for someone who rose to a prof position via these resources to then propagate such a sentiment. Only experts and geniuses should attempt to publish? Only people from certain institutions? Why should an author self-censor their own work because one person who chose to be a PC member, to pad their CV (which OP also criticises), doesn't think it's worthy?
In general if people are making poor contributions, their careers in academia will be short-lived, and their individual draining of resources will be minimal. If they get published then it's likely on merit.
The PhD should be judged on their work rather than some semirandom publishing process.
Eg. like the normal thing should be one or zero papers published during a technical doctorial thesis and the effort is put into the thesis itself.
But you really have to love what you do, otherwise there's no point.
We are wasting the brightest minds of our generation with this nonsense.
The reason it's important is that both cases, at some level, one needs to justify the use their use of resources. Places without some real world feedback are usually not a great thing long term.
Same goes for publishing in glamour journals/conferences. In the end it's a competition for attention, and things often have to be judged by presentation and storytelling as well. Prioritizing your time on working on your best projects is likely a good thing. If you feel something strongly that no one else sees, you will likely have less resources to accomplish it. That's life everywhere.
There's an interesting clash of incentives -- the grant-funding agencies optimize for stuff that is low-risk, but they claim to want highly-novel work, which also what gets published in better journals. So often what you must do is dress up incremental progress as revolutionary progress. It's soul-sucking.
Post-publication (I'm counting arxiv here as publication) review is an improvement. My branch of science doesn't use arxiv to any real extent, unfortunately.
Edit: I left a word out.
The other thing that this publish-regularly mentality can prevent is very long-term forward-looking projects - for some problems it is not clear what an answer should even look like, let alone how to get there. The closest thing to compare it to might be starting a new company - perhaps it takes 6 to 12 months to work on a product enough to start selling it. This is time that people simply don’t have in some academic fields, where they will be seen as underperforming, so it discourages these long-term projects entirely.
In terms of 6-12 months, if you don't have that much time, it's likely your past bets haven't paid off and people aren't that willing to give you more resources. I definitely had lots of projects that still haven't paid off 7 years into them; but I get to keep playing on them because some of my other bets have. That's the way it works, but I don't think that is that bad. There are many professors with terrible ideas that they think are great and are indignant that no one will support them unconditionally.
Its possible that this part will not change.
The part about life being short and spending it on things we enjoy hit me hard because I feel the same way and can't hide it anymore. Yet, I can't really do that.
Being one of our founding engineers, I have several times identified a need and implemented a solution without "seeking permission" first. When I do want more formal company backing to pursue a project, a conversation with my manager or an email or a one-page Google Doc all sound easier than writing and submitting a grant proposal.
As our company has grown, I have seen my role change, and I have collaborated with my manager to determine a new direction and title for myself. Notably, I tried management for a while, and I ultimately decided to return to an individual contributor role (no direct reports). It didn't sound like Dr. Fratantonio had the option to stop mentoring other PhD candidates.
Freedom is not exclusive to founding engineers. Our company has a prioritized list of features available for development, and devs have a big role in choosing the next feature they work on, even when it's not a current area of expertise. Established engineers and new hires alike have a lot of latitude to pick technologies, architect a solution to a problem, implement a novel algorithm, etc. One relatively junior new hire is embarking on a project to rewrite much of our frontend code, with support from all of us.
Again, that's why I commented. Depending on what type of freedom you're seeking, industry may offer it and pay better and have better working conditions to boot.
I didn’t explain my opinion as strong as I could have. In academia, your biggest problem to do great research is "publish or perish", but in industry, as an employee, your biggest problem is your company's short goals. "They buy your freedom". You can't focus on a hard problem for ten years or do research on interesting theoretical problems in industry.
10 years of focus on the same problem is definitely possible in industry, and your salary will scale with your expertise. It sounds like you’re expected to produce results along the way even in academia, so there’s not a notable difference in that regard.
One other thing worth comparing is the administrative burden. Good engineering teams have a variety of support systems in place to keep high-value engineers as productive as possible (people managers, engineering coordinators, project managers, etc.). It sounds to me like profs end up personally doing a lot of legwork.
Sure you can. You simply spend a bit of time on farming out practical applications to other teams or filling patents or writing publications. Comes out to less overhead than in academia with grants, managing students, writing papers, etc. Sure, 99.99% of industry is applied however 0.01% of a massive thing is still very large so there's plenty of non-applied work being done.
Industry is massive and painting every little piece of it with the same brush is a very unjust way of looking at it. I'd recommend you actually learn about things and talk to people before making broad generalizations about them.
You will have managers in industry of course, where in academia you just have a dept chair and dean who only have a vague sense of what you're up to. On the other hand, in industry you can actually devote most of your time to doing the research yourself. Often they break the labor up into those that write grants and the team that does the work. Whereas in academia the incentives really drive you to spend all your time dealing with funding sources and students. When you do have free time, you then have a backlog of writing you want to get done.
Damn, that's the opposite from what I've seen around here.
Work/life balance is not necessarily better outside of academia. In fact, my observation it might generally be worse.
Athletes getting easy courses. People in power positions typically don’t deserve it but think they do. So, there are ridiculous projects, bias, and people getting paid in “non-standard” ways. Backroom deals with private industry and government. Things that would make no one want to go there.
Universities should work more with private industry like they used to many years ago, government money should be poured into research more openly, and tuition needs to rise, then they can hire the best from private industry that are also excellent teachers or researchers.
To do that, administrations and staff will need to be gutted.
A research prof’s concerns are about research, their scientific progeny (phd students and postdocs) and pressures to succeed in the related publish or perish/grant writing games. In this context the blog makes perfect sense and I agree with it. However, you write:
>Athletes getting easy courses
A prof doesn’t care about athletic admissions (those are undergrads anyways?).
>there are ridiculous projects, bias, and people getting paid in “non-standard” ways.
I am not sure what you mean about “ridiculous projects”? The university generally doesn’t control or fund a PI. Funding is nearly always external (in the US).
>Backroom deals with private industry and government.
I am not exactly sure whose research or publications this affects but I bet the number is tiny. This is not a concern I’ve actually ever seen play out in real life (again, I am sure you can find news where it happened, but it just doesn’t reflect the lived life of most PIs).
>Universities should work more with private industry like they used to many years ago, government money should be poured into research more openly,
I mean, I don’t think PIs are against working with industry, but industry usually wants IP, doesn’t want to publish, and wants RoI. The government funding process is already pretty open (at least NSF/NIH) but of course can be improved.
>tuition needs to rise, then they can hire the best from private industry that are also excellent teachers or researchers.
Most PIs are funded effectively from research grant overhead. Tuition is usually a smaller budget line. Increasing tuition will both not overall increase budget by much and add hardship to students. I do agree that more gov funding would be nice.
>To do that, administrations and staff will need to be gutted
I don’t think this follows from your previous statements but I do agree there is an explosion in administrative overhead that should be curtailed.
This gets into a tangential issue but I wouldn't be so dismissive of the consequences.
Where I went to undergrad the university had invested a lot of money in bringing their basketball team to NCAA Division I.
The program ended up doing a lot of shady stuff to recruit good basketball players, many of them which were discarded from other universities due to their inability to meet academic standards at their institutions.
Guess what happened?
Softball courses created for the athletes (someone has to teach them).
This was followed by rumoured intimidation of instructors by coaches who had the immediate backing of the university's president (who has the power to make your job/life miserable).
In practice, most of those who took the grunt were lecturers but this wasn't a household even name for sports, just some ego driven project for the president of a public university.
Having been a student during that team and paying attention to the reports that came out, I wouldn't discard the possibility of a professor being caught up in major politics as a result of the athletic admissions, so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as a downside.
For the record, and not that it even matters, I was an academic.