Comment by eatbitseveryday | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eatbitseveryday | Hacker News Reader

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eatbitseveryday

This is a reason I gave up doing systems research. It’s full of cliques and negativity. It became a process whereby we were even trained to accept this rejection frequency as normal and to expect retrying for years. You keep submitting a paper and revising it for months even while working on the next idea (can’t just sit around fixing a paper, PhD work must always continue).

Rejections also directly impact a student’s graduation. No accepted papers at decent conferences? Delay graduation. It’s grating and unnecessarily stressful.

After graduation I was unmotivated to continue to bother publishing because I don’t care for this culture. I’m saddened by it.

There are positions in industry like at Sandia National Labs which require regular publication to remain employed. Again, given good work is done, rejections affect your livelihood. Too much stress.

I lost my “spark” thinking the field of CS systems research was one of exploration and community. It exists, but not as a whole.

/rant

I left my PhD in computational geometry for similar reasons. I was told flat out by my advisor that the chances of me getting a paper accepted in even a middling journal were low. Not normally low (as in tough review), but so low because the entire field is dominated by a handful of very high profile researchers and mathematicians that essentially gate keep knowledge on it.

It was also necessary to publish some papers to even get my PhD.

Academia is dead. My biggest most important realization about learning in the last decade is that my concept of the academic was backwards. They aren't free thinking at all. It's drama all the way down.

I now havent touched really anything in CS research because this experience completely killed my love for the field, and advanced learning in general.

I agree with this sentiment. Although I didn't make it to even applying to grad programs because the professors at my uni were very much "what are you going to do for me" in Thomas Edison invention factory way, when even inquiring about undergrad research.

> I now havent touched really anything in CS research because this experience completely killed my love for the field, and advanced learning in general.

I wager you'll come around, out of genuine interest, and when you want to work on interesting things, you'll run into novel problems, a lot. But this is sad to me because every few years I'll come up with something novel, and discover someone already did a ph.d thesis on it. I feel like I'd be much further along if I had access to people who really cared about teaching and pushing the boundaries.

One slight saving grace (after having graduated) is to feel fine writing documents like papers and just putting them up on https://arxiv.org/ under my own terms.

One additional technique I learned from others is to use submissions to conferences as a way to get feedback on your work without any expectation that it gets accepted. You do that early knowing there are flaws, but do it to get early warnings from reviewers about rejection points.

Now you could do the same being outside academia, as a way to get feedback on something and then just call it “done” on some paper on your terms.

>> One additional technique I learned from others is to use submissions to conferences as a way to get feedback on your work without any expectation that it gets accepted. You do that early knowing there are flaws, but do it to get early warnings from reviewers about rejection points.

This is, of course, one if the problems with current research as it wastes everyone's (yours, reviewers, ACs, etc) time. In particular, because you're not guaranteed practicable or actionable feedback and because you're increasing the time reviewers must review work (i.e., more papers to review as submissions are higher and quality lower).

I won’t deny that.

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