Hacker News Reader

> The "cream" rising to the top is often less genius and more politically savvy with the right connections on the PC.

I'm generally nauseated when I interact with American CS academics. Every time I attend a conference, PC, or NSF panel, I am so glad I chose industry. It's like IRL twitter.

(Europe seems to be better for some reason.)

> If you're smart enough to rise, you'll get an offer from the private sector you simply cannot refuse. It doesn't matter if your passion is Academia, they can and will buy you out and own whatever you're working on.

IME it's less about "offer you can't refuse" on the industry side and more about "offer you can't take" on the academic side.

After 6 years of deferred income I simply could not take a job that paid $80K-$100K in an HCoL area or $65K-$80K in an LCoL area. I had loans to pay back, no 401K, and not enough savings for a down payment.

If you want good people to stay in CS academia, I think a few things need to change:

1. First, and most importantly, the faculty culture. I don't really know how to describe the problem, but "the old folks are checked out and the young folks are Twitter personalities" is probably close. What's the point of being in academia if you have to be surrounded by the intellectual equivalent of used car salesmen, especially when you can go to industry and do interesting work without the BS?

2. Double the income of PhD students so that they aren't financially ruined by choosing the academic path. This isn't a super unreasonable request -- they'd still be paid less than their peers in industry while doing what's effectively a full time job.

3. Pay faculty more. Not a lot more... just, like, "at least what my undergrad students make at their first job after graduating".

I think if you solve items 2 and 3, then item 1 will take care of itself.

Should faculty be paid more? Absolutely. Should Ph.D. students be paid more? Absolutely!! But the blanket statement you make in (1) is wrong and strikes me as awfully close to the extreme left-wing and right-wing mindsets of "the system is fucked up beyond repair, all that remains to be done is to tear it down". The reality is more nuanced than this, and the picture you paint of industry is hardly that rosy, even at silver-spoon companies that invest heavily in R&D.

I've spent a lot of time with working for or closely interfacing with a half dozen academic institutions. I left academia by choice -- with multiple TT offers in hand -- so this isn't sour grapes.

I am highly confident in my assessment that the personalities found on the typical R1 tenure track are exactly the sort of personalities I avoid hiring or working with at all costs. There are exceptions, but they prove the rule (and I can often poach them anyways).

I don't think I said anything about industry other than that it pays 3x-5x better than the TT, and I'm pretty darn confident that's true. I am clear-eyed about the issues in industry, but the personalities are much better.

I really do believe that the massive pay disparity between CS industry and CS academia is, in part, a "toxic personality that can't play well with others" tax. And I really do believe that you'd get more mentally/emotionally healthy people on the TT if it paid better.

Anyways, we can agree to disagree, because we agree on the solution in any case.

> I am highly confident in my assessment that the personalities found on the typical R1 tenure track are exactly the sort of personalities I avoid hiring or working with at all costs.

And what is that exactly out of curiosity?

My experience working with a former academic that was awful to work with: Self-absorbed, self-promoting, accomplished next to nothing but talked a big game, shit on everything everyone else did, even though their code ran the business

The pay is not the biggest problem though. Obviously it is a big one, but there's a huge issue with the work culture.

I agree it's a rosy picture of industry, but IME most of the supposed "intellectual freedom" of academia is just a marketing pitch these days. You don't get there until you somehow make tenure, and even then if you're in a high cost field you need to be very high profile if you don't want to be forced to focus on the topics that award grant money. You're interested in narcolepsy? Too bad.

So I consider it a red flag when a PI immediately jumps to say that "yes salaries should be higher but" and then goes on to defend everything else about their current situation.

Like it is ridiculous the amount of self promotion one feels pressured to do on Twitter. Do you not see the problem with authors pushing their work on social media during a supposed double blind review period?

I don't disagree that there is often a lot of bitching without actionable suggestions. But I don't think the characterization in (1) was especially extreme and I don't see the suggestion to burn the whole system to the ground. Personally I think we need more diversity in how academic institutions operate, that doesn't mean that old institutions will disappear.

I'm curious where all the money goes, since student loans are incredibly high but teacher pay is so low. I'm guessing the answer is 'random nonsense that shouldn't matter'.

In my university teaching experience, I found that everyone up the administrative chain to the top gets a cut, with the teaching faculty themselves receiving 1-2% of the annual tuition...

IDK, I think tenure contributes a lot to 1. I understand and agree with a lot of the rationale (academic freedom, etc.) but when you select for people that prioritize, “if I work really hard for 6 years and get lucky, I can never be fired,” you get a lot of dysfunctional individuals and encourage some of their worst impulses.

Many similar problems exist in most fields of academia. Biology has an even worse academic environment IMO, but unless you are highly computational it's not as easy to sell out to industry. Yeah there's pharma, but the straight out of PhD salaries aren't that exciting and the work environment is generally not as good as tech.

Not disagreeing with you at all on the CS front though obviously. I am interested to see how things go in the next few decades in the respective fields, as the ease of exit does affect who stays as you mention. But it also affects who joins in the first place, the pressure felt to get results, and hopefully down the road systemic incentive to fix the problems.

CS also has the perk of being easier to rejoin - you don't need to make a huge initial investment in most researchers to give them a chance. So I'm optimistic for reform in CS academia down the road. But it's a long road, and if academic politics continue to prevail then I'm deeply concerned about the state of all of our research institutions.

Seriously, I was recently at reunions for a "top" university where many people go into graduate programs, and it became a running joke trying to find an alum from any PhD program that wasn't jaded as fuck. Even some of the people that I was most confident would be killing it weren't (or at least felt they weren't). The majority were actively exploring industry opportunities and considered themselves unlikely to do an academic postdoc.

> If you're smart enough to rise, you'll get an offer from the private sector you simply cannot refuse

The average graduation time for my comp sci undergrad in the mid 2000’s in Slovenia was 7.5 years. Because most people got jobs and forgot to graduate.

Personally I dropped out when schoolwork started getting in the way of freelancing for US companies. I remember a moment when my professor said “You know if you don’t get these grades up, you’ll have a hard time finding a job” and I thought “But I already have a job … sitting here talking to you is costing me billable hours”

Don’t get me wrong, I loved studying comp sci and learned a lot. Even use that knowledge regularly. Just didn’t get the paper.

> The economic realities of the field just make it too risky to allow an exceptionally gifted individual to remain out in the open publishing research that could potentially destroy your business model.

This seems a bit of a stretch, doesn’t it? It seems that you don’t have to suppress CS research to prevent it from having an impact, you can usually just politely ignore it after it has been published.

I am a week late. Real Life Happened. :-)

I probably phrased this really badly and applied it too broadly. Take the early days of Machine Learning. Everyone was working to crack it open and make money off of it. They still are, but now we’re almost to the maturity portion of it’s lifecycle.

But in the early days, if you were smart enough and showed promise, you could get hired before you even finished your doctorate. Everyone trying to crack open the ML egg was doing this, so not doing it gave execs FOMO about letting someone else employ a very smart ML scientist that developed something that made a lot of money.

So it’s less that it’s risky but for very specific and developing areas of CS it’s considered a worthwhile expense rolling the dice to own the patents on the next big breakthrough outright for the cost of a single salary.

I saw a list of acceptance rate here: https://github.com/lixin4ever/Conference-Acceptance-Rate.

Is 18% or so acceptance rate really low, though? Almost 2 in 10 submissions are accepted, and I thought "the top" meant something like 2% or less.

BTW, is there any resources that catalogs which ideas in papers may work well in industry? As someone outside of academia, I find there are simply too many papers, even from top conferences, for me to consume. It's hard for me to know which paper's ideas can help me or not, and this 18% acceptance rate is not a good enough filter any more.

There's also self selection: You're only going to submit to a top conference if you think there is a slight chance of your work being accepted. Thus, one could argue that papers submitted to top conferences are already better than average. This means that the acceptance rate is way lower in fact.

I have never pursued this type of publication, but why on earth does an "acceptance rate" even exist for these (journal or conference) publications?

Why not publish them all? Endorse those that are selected, add commentary to those with which there is disagreement, but is a batch inclusion of them all so technically difficult?

Because there is an implied stamp of approval for publications.

These days nothing is keeping people from publishing elsewhere if they want to.

If the organization is receiving public funds of any kind, then they should be required to (electronically) publish all submissions unless the authors withdraw.

There has been quite enough censorship and paywalling of research that my taxes fund.

The point of a journal is not for people to express their feelings, but to provide researchers with a collection of papers that are, at least, mostly, not garbage. Journals publish the work of others and farm out the review process to others, their only real functionality is that of a gatekeeper.

Since a good chunk of researchers are funded in part by the government, I guess most journals would end up having to follow this "publish everything" requirement (money is fungible and some of every grant goes to administrative overhead, so you could argue anything any most universities touch is funded in part by the government).

Most publishers publish multiple journals, though, so I guess they could follow your rule as long as they were allowed to open up the, for example, "IEEE Journal of Perpetual Motion Machines And Straightforward Proofs That P=NP."

The bullshit will wash over everything though - there are lots of people out there that are not acting in good faith (ie. Russians) and they will use your suggestion to claim status for all sorts of wickedness.

You are likely not aware of just how much crap gets submitted for any given conference/journal.

The purpose of a journal is to be read, the purpose of a conference is to be heard, and they should be optimized for the desires of the audience, not the desires of the authors.

A journal or conference that publishes everything is useless to its audience, which expects significant curation and filtering to pare down the incoming firehose to something that (a) fits a specific topic and (b) has a filter for quality and (c) pick the most interesting ones out of all the far-too-many decent papers that fit the first two criteria.

There's no problem to publish them all somewhere, that's being done on e.g. arXiv, pretty much every recent useful CS paper is there as well, often before being published in a "proper venue" - but a "publish everything" service is not enough, people do want to read more selective sources instead of trying to skim everything that's posted on arXiv.