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Comment by BooneJS | Hacker News Reader

How does “publish or perish” relate to “my job at a public company evaluates my performance every 6 to 12 months?”

Original research is much riskier than a job at your typical public company. Or, it should be. "Publish or perish" encourages breaking research into "minimal publishable units" which produces gobs of churn for everybody involved.

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.

That makes sense. I suppose it’s easier to blend in on a team then the lead name with a team of students behind you.

> Original research is much riskier than a job at your typical public company.

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.

The expectation for a performance review is that, well, there's some attempt to look at the actual performance and evaluate it. For example, imagine that the job at the public company would "evaluate" the performance every 12 months by solely counting the number of projects launched. So if you're doing great in a 18-month project, your score is 0 (since it's not launched yet), and if you've been part of launching 3 small projects, then your score is 3, no matter how irrelevant or poor quality the projects were.

The stack ranking is turned upside-down in academia. Only a small sliver at the top will make it to a secure position.

"How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang"

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/ho...

Both require evaluation against some standard of good performance. I guess the difference is the definition of "good performance." If it's a function of # of papers published, and you don't care about publishing papers for the sake of publishing papers, I can see see why someone would want to jump ship.

It’s not just top-down pressure but bottom-up too. Your students, undergrads, grads, postdocs are also incentivized to publish as much as possible for their own careers. So you are supporting them.

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