Software Engineers Should Read Academic Papers to Enhance Their Knowledge/Skills

* Reading academic work will help you decrease the gap between the industry and the academic field and will make you realize how ignorant you were *

Advice for the author: don’t criticize other people’s communication style while you insult your audience.

While we’re at it, it’s academia’s job to be considered relevant by doing meaningful research and communicating it effectively, not the industry’s. And for as much great research there is, there is so much more irrelevant, blown out of proportion, theoretical, unnecessary and untested garbage. Therefore reading papers and finding something worthwhile is actually a significant time sink.

I really appreciate the people who distill these highly technical academic papers into more approachable and digestible formats because I really don’t have time or energy to dive into academic papers most of the time. It’s just not practical to spend the time needed to digest a really dense and dry analysis of a concept. It’s great that they exist, but I’m not the target audience.

I recently needed to visually represent a graph and came across a YouTube video detailing the Sugiyama framework. The academic papers around this are super math-heavy, which didn’t really help me. The YouTube series gave me exactly what I needed, succinct explanations of how to solve my problem without lecturing about theory.

EDIT: Shoutout to Phillip Kindermann, who made the video I was talking about, and to all who take their expertise and make it more accessible. Those are the people doing some of the most important work with regards to knowledge sharing

Just a warning: academic writing style is not going to serve you well in a corporate environment. It requires far too much attention and commitment from readers, and particularly when writing for senior management or the C-suite, you'll all but guarantee that you'll be ignored.

You're far better off to adopt inverted pyramid in a corporate setting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

What I always find funny about academic writing is that nobody actually reads it from the front to the back. You read abstract, conclusion, future work, methodology and only then do you read the actual content.

Academics should write readable papers

I am about to have an academic paper published about an algorithm I invented. I can explain this algorithm roughly to non technical people fairly easily.

The paper itself is quite math heavy and some bits hardly make sense even to me, but that is what is expected in that world.

So yes, reading academic papers can be helpful, but they are not written to be comprehensible, they are written to show off that you are part of the clever club.

I often look for presentations or other explanations to make sense of the academic papers I have to read.

I believe that this will only happen (if at all) once the cheap money has disappeared, the industry starts to realise how much money it's burning on failed projects, and regulators impose substantial fines onto any companies that had security breaches demonstrably due to negligence.

Then maybe we will start taking this profession a bit more seriously and not demand 200k+ salaries while refusing to read anything that isn't just a glorified sales pitch.

In this article the author (me) discussing how reading academic papers would be beneficial for software engineers to enhance their knowledge and skills.

https://medium.com/@KhaledElAnsari/software-engineers-should...

Well... duhh... (sorry, couldn't resist)

Engineering is essentially applied science.

One of the first things you should have learned is how to find and read papers and keep up with the science you base your discipline on.

All that logic, and math and physics where there for a reason.

So what are some good academic papers to read?

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