IEEE President's Note: Why Students Should Stay with IEEE | Hacker News Reader

IEEE President's Note: Why Students Should Stay with IEEE

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46 pointselashri53 comments

You have to work hard and come up with new ideas better than anyone else in the world, and demonstrate that. Then IEEE asks A review the work of B and B review the work of A for free. If the work is good, IEEE will ask you to transfer your rights to your intellectual property to IEEE, and sometimes pay on top of that too. Of course, you have to pay exorbitant fees to present it. Lastly, you can’t download your own paper from IEEE and must pay IEEE through a subscription or per article. So, IEEE takes your work and sells it back to you. Meanwhile, the access is not open in 2024, and there is a lot of unpaid volunteer activity, typically by local students and academics.

Why? We give you a professional home!

The cost of the online dissemination is minimal, and the events and societies are run mostly by the communities.

Academia always seemed to be a fraud in some ways.

Each scientific kingdom has the same. Chemistry has ACS for example, that even has secret agreements with university libraries (at the request of ACS not the librarians but they have no choice but to sign if they want the services).

> Academia always seemed to be a fraud in some ways.

In the western world at least, it's the last surviving guild-like institution. The industrial revolution and liberalization (free markets) obviated other such institutions.

I hope we see more open and transparent alternatives take over these legacy systems. There's no reason to keep paying these useless middlemen so much money.

> Then IEEE asks A review the work of B and B review the work of A for free. If the work is good, IEEE will ask you to transfer your rights to your intellectual property to IEEE, and sometimes pay on top of that too.

The article is talking about maintaining an IEEE membership. Is all this what's required to be a member of IEEE? From what I can tell, all that's required is paying the $229 annual membership fee. The IEEE president wants you to pay that fee - that's all it's about.

The ACM is the same way - I was a member as a student, but when I saw the fee to remain a member and what you got for it, I couldn't believe anyone would pay. These organizations must make their money from people whose employees pay the dues because having an acm.org email and maybe getting to go to some networking events just isn't worth it.

> For more than 40 years, IEEE has been a great place to build my personal brand and to create a valuable professional network. I know it can do the same for the next generation of engineers.

If they have to make this case, it suggests some combination of 1) the organization doesn't actually provide these opportunities to most people, or 2) people don't actually care about this anyway. For me, this language is business-speak. When the business people in my company start talking like this, I stop listening. It's not interesting. Hard problems are what's interesting to me. That's why I'm in this field, not to "network" or hone a "personal brand".

For me, IEEE student membership was worth it for the significant registration discounts at IEEE conferences. After graduating, since I'm no longer in academia, the one and only benefit ceased, so I immediately canceled my membership.

I don’t know about IEEE in particular, but -

> 2. People don’t actually care about this anyway

Is substantially different from “this doesn’t generate value”, “the people who do not care would were they to engage with it” (ie: the justification for marketing anywhere), and “people, especially young people, know how to evaluate this kind of thing.”

In particular, there’s a generation gap around networking, professional organizations, etc, and indeed that may be because those organizations aren’t valuable, or it could be some combination of “the older generation didn’t explain this to the younger” and “the younger generation is convinced it knows everything it needs to”, and I suspect if you’re old enough at least some part of that will ring true to you.

I'm truly interested in your thoughts... where would you discover truly hard problems? What do you feel would make you qualified to work on them, over, say someone else? enough to prove it to someone that could authorize such a salary and expenditure of time? Unless you were self-funded, of course. I've always wondered where and how would you discover what the edge of the knowledge and science actually is, and stay ahead of it? That is, to prevent reinventing the wheel and not to waste time? Just wondering as I've understood it by a lot of people over my career lifetime. Thank You.

You read papers and learn where the edge of the science is.

Of course you do; and thats where a lot of the papers are locked up, behind IEEE/ACM/Science/Nature, other journals. I guess that's a huge reason to stay involved, if nothing more to access the different subgroups, both for journals and papers. There is often no other place, in my experience, to access that level of information and knowledge. And especially if you wish to publish, on the edge, yourself.

In academia this is typically accomplished through staying up-to-date with top tier journals and conferences. I would say this is one of the benefits of IEEE--they have quite a few high-quality venues. However, there are also plenty of top-tier venues that are not associated with IEEE.

Unfortunately, they also have plenty of low-quality venues that dilute the discoverability of the high-quality ones. Some orgs (Usenix for instance) hold to at least a decent standard across nearly all their research conferences, so I can better gauge the quality of a paper in a field I'm less familiar with based on whether it was accepted to a conference in that org. When it comes to IEEE, it seems like they'll let any low-quality journal or conference spring up with their brand as long as it brings in the cash.

Exactly; if you wish I replied below. That is exactly the point of staying in such organizations, especially if you wish to be on the edge, and especially if you wish to publish, yourself.

> where would you discover truly hard problems?

You take simple problems and solve them in truly hard ways ;)

I also once in a while have IEEE membership because of some conference discount (even if it is not such a nobrainer as with student membership). Other than that I am just seeing a very intransparent huge org that does not provide much benefit. Some field are dominated by US researchers, some by Chinese. IEEE does not show much interest in breaking non-inclusive networks. Unlike ACM (which is far from perfect), I don't even recognize small bits a tranformative spirit. I had colleagues that had their IEEE status in their footer and used their IEEE, but most of those have been retired by now.

> For more than 40 years, IEEE has been a great place to build my personal brand

When I hear the phrase "personal brand," I normally throw up. Today was a normal day.

I stayed past that for a bit but eventually cancelled as well, even though work offered to pay for membership. Same as above, once the conference discount wasn't necessary I gained absolutely nothing from the membership.

I couldn't read what he had to say because his site opened an interrupting dialog element asking me to subscribe or join or something.

If I see that, I immediately stop reading and close the window.

There is no better way to show me you are not actually talking to me than interrupting yourself and me with distracting bullshit UI elements.

I have mixed feelings about this. I joined IEEE as a student for purposes of publications and getting discounts on conference rates. I have continued my membership mainly because it's common among my professional peers. There are some benefits.

However, I have received more spam and unwanted mail (both electronic and physical) from IEEE than any other organization I've been a part of. I find it ironic that I am essentially paying to be marketed to.

All-in-all I'm at about a 50% satisfaction rate with IEEE. The benefits are good enough to prevent me from leaving, but there are enough drawbacks that I wouldn't miss it at all if I did.

What kind of benefits do you find valuable?

They occasionally have good insurance offerings, occasionally.

I'm still in academia, and IEEE runs quite a few high-quality / top-tier journals and conferences in my research area (TAC, TRO, RA-L, LCSS, ACC, CDC, etc.) I'm a part of the control systems society, and their Controls Systems Magazine is a good read. On the perhaps more trivial side an Overleaf professional subscription was included with my membership.

So again, there are benefits. But I am frustrated that I'm being advertised to and having my data sold to third-party companies after paying over $200 per year for a membership. I also have issues with journal paywalls, but this is slowly changing as open access journals become more common.

> So again, there are benefits. But I am frustrated that I'm being advertised to and having my data sold to third-party companies after paying over $200 per year for a membership.

Isn't your library covering IEEE access?

Yes, my University library covers access to many (but not all) IEEE articles, but the ability to download and read IEEE articles from a library is completely separate from being an IEEE member.

IEEE membership costs ~$229 for 2025 in the U.S. for Professionals [1]. This fee typically is not covered by universities in my experience.

If you're asking why I don't simply access articles through my library and forget about the membership, members typically are given fairly significant discounts and enhanced options for publishing in conferences and open access journals.

[1]: https://www.ieee.org/membership/join/dues.html

maybe if IEEE wanted to keep students, they could support them, unlike during the 2019 ISCA peer review fraud incident where an IEEE fellow was caught in peer review fraud that lead to a student's death, and essentially it took years of intense pressure for them to stop allowing a cover up, do a minimal investigation, and in the end most of the people involved got a secret punishment that was likely a minimal slap-on-the-wrist at best

https://pbzcnepu.net/ieee/index.html

A point of contention for me is the IEEE Code of Conduct [1] whose point 5.e. can be summarized as "I will not infringe the intellectual property of others". If you are critical of copyright itself (something not unusual among hackers) then the IEEE may not be the association for you.

[10 https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/code-of-cond...

Intellectual property, more like imaginary property.

That seems to be a small minority in software. 2% of Github repos are Unlicense licensed, 16% are something else I don't know and for everything else, the authors have chosen to use copyright to restrict how others can use it in some way, even if it's just keeping their name on it.

[1] https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on...

One can be against something and still make use of it. Don’t be ”Mister Gotcha”: <https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/>

Usually that only makes sense if other people's use of it makes it harder for you not to. For example, you can want a 4-day working week but still work 5 days because you'll lose your job to a 5-dayer if you don't. But if it was forced on everyone, you'd be happy.

Violating other people's copyrights while still exploiting your own probably means you just want to pirate stuff for your own selfish reasons. If you were against copyright protections in general, you wouldn't be choosing MIT or GPL for your open source code.

> If you were against copyright protections in general, you wouldn't be choosing MIT or GPL for your open source code.

This is demonstrably false. IIRC, the creators of the GPL explicitly argue that the GPL is a tool to survive in a world with copyright.

I cancelled my IEEE membership years ago. I enjoyed their magazines and journals, but remember being frustrated at the time with their pricing. After I cancelled, they became aggressively spammy, and they are now on my shitlist. This President's Note seems to be more of the same.

The same here. Being a member for ca. 9 years. After they made IEEE Spectrum digital only and even badges digital only, I completly lost my interest due to high expenses and limited overall value. Those two little physical things were a real bond to IEEE.

Maybe it works for specialists in the narrow fields, but as I shifted from electronics to IT, I could not find real benefits for myself there, even in the "Computer" section.

Yeah their offerings are not good on CS and IT. They have couple of good conference and journals in electronics. The member discounted rates are not that attractive though, and if your institution/company is paying, who cares? The real benefit is access to specific publications of a society. If I would be working for a big company with a unlimited access (for which they charge up hundreds of k$ per year) I wouldn't have been a member. I guess ot used to be important to be a senior member or fellow back in the day, but now nobody cares.

In the past I wouldn't go to IEEE for IT and CS, except maybe, possibly for the physical level; that's the ACMs bailiwick. I had the distinct fortunate/unfortunate to be an absolute crossover, but could afford neither exsxcept when in pharma where they staffed their own libraries (from necessity), and paid for access.

In summary, "Give us your money. I promise we provide some benefit". As engineers, they should at least provide some data with this claim. A chart would be nice.

"some benefit" meaning, you can hang out with other people who also paid to be there.

It is a special clubhouse for engineers with a positive bias towards academicians. But hey people networking is the true human currency, and if you want international exposition and collaboration it's probably hands down the best clubhouse for engineers at the moment.

I like to think that students are well advised to spend their money elsewhere. Namely to pay back any student loans. To save up for home loan deposit. Etcetera.

There are other (cheaper) ways to build a professional network. Local meetups, hackathons and whatnot. The best advice I could give graduates is to focus all of their energy on getting ahead in their career, ie. in their job at their employer. This will pay off way better than any IEEE membership could.

I've found the ACM more interesting than IEEE for some time now.

True, but it does depend on your field. I was fortunate/unfortunate to have my feet in both over the years, and could not afford either early on, when I truly needed access.

CACM is also a nice magazine subscription to have.

IEEE Spectrum used to be good. I don't know whether it still is. Does anyone know?

It still is pretty good. That and the ACM CACM are my only subscriptions. I independently purchase the Spectrum only because I don't want to be associated with IEEE anymore.

My reasons of cancellation are less fiduciary and more of a policy. In 2022, IEEE published an interview of two Russian researchers and effect of the intellectual & economic blockade in Russian academia after Ukraine invasion started. It sought pleas for donation & help. Many people pointed out it was tone deaf since the ones really suffering were the Ukrainian academics who were dislocated or persecuted in their own land. IEEE never commented or retracted those interviews & several people canceled their membership in disgust.

I subscribe to Spectrum for about $50 through Omeda rather than continue giving IEEE additional membership fee. I know some part will be shared with IEEE, but I am minimizing this by conscious choice.

> several people canceled their membership in disgust

Looks like nothing of value was lost.

Ukraine already gets 99.99% of airtime. Two Russian researchers -- not army generals or politicians, mind you -- were given a chance to describe the problems the conflict has created for their side, and we're supposed to pretend that those problems do not exist and their struggle doesn't matter because somebody else has it worse.

There's this thing called "journalism" where you're supposed to be given raw facts from all sides with as little interpretation (i.e. propaganda) as possible, and think for yourself. It used to be more common back in the day, though maybe not much. Now we only want to hear things that closely follow our own narrative, and ignore everything else. It's easier to live this way, I understand.

Because sci-hub is no longer adding new articles.

I have to caution students that the discount isn't for as long as you're a student, it's 8 years total, so if you do a BS, MS, and then PhD, you probably won't get the discount the whole time (and that's $200 extra a year). I had to pare my membership down from societies and magazines to just the membership, as punishment for having been an excited high schooler.

This is sickening to the core. IEEE charges people who submit their work FOR FREE, ann entire $2,000 to let people access their work!

Want to help your career? Publish in a venue that doesn’t charge a ransom to get your name out there. That will actually help your career.

What a fraud.

https://open.ieee.org/for-authors/article-processing-charges...

I keep mine because overall it saves me $50 on conference fees per year, I'd have cancelled it otherwise.

Counterpoint: what has IEEE done for me lately?

I joined IEEE when I was at Google and despite cancelling my subscription long ago, the amount of physical spam mail I get from them is truly infuriating — life insurance offers, 2+ copies of various publications, and a lot more. It’s truly madness and it has put such a negative taste in my mouth with respect to IEEE.

Years ago I tried to point out some inconsistencies in an IEEE standard. I failed to reach anyone who cared and eventually gave up, disgusted at the absolute pay to play nature of the entire thing. I certainly won’t join or review for this unnecessary, unhelpful organization.

Ok, let's see why Mr. President believe people should be members. I'll try to extract the arguments as to why that is beneficial for 1. Humanity. 2. Engineering/Technology 3. Me personally.

> IEEE is ... an international community

How is it a community, as opposed to part of a community? Are engineers who aren't IEEE members "not in the community"? It's not like there are secret weekly sessions with masks in the basement which only IEEE members know about.

> that can help students build and sustain successful careers as technical professionals

That's a conclusion you want me to reach. You need to tell us _how_ IEEE helps us do that.

> For more than 40 years, IEEE has been a great place to build my personal brand

Ugh. Why can't you say something like "recognition for having supported the collective and collaborative activity in my field"?

> and to create a valuable professional network. I know it can do the same for the next generation of engineers.

How does IEEE membership help me "create a valuable professional network"? Is the idea that luminaries in their field tend to answer IEEE members and engage with them more than non-IEEE members? Maybe, I don't know, but you haven't actually said that.

> access to more resources—both professional and personal—that can help them advance within their field

1. Like, what resources?

2. If you mean the journals you're preventing the public from accessing, then really, shame on you. Scientific and technological information should be freely accessible by all.

> and discover new interests.

How would membership be useful for me in discovering new interests?

> They will also have the opportunity to build soft skills,

What opportunity?

> raise their visibility,

1. You already said that.

2. Will they really? I don't think I notice people more because they are IEEE members. But, convince me, maybe I'm missing something (or maybe it's true in fields other than my own).

> and make friendships that last a lifetime.

How would IEEE membership make me friends? Not very convincing.

> The organization provides professional contacts

Again, how does it provide contacts other than those non-members have?

> and a community that offers support, advice, and mentoring, independent of where they work.

Does it really? Again, if that's actually true, then maybe it is worth it to be a member. But how does it do so? How community-like is the IEEE membership?

> Within the organization, there are young people ... also... active engineers ... in industry, government, and academia, as well as retired professionals ...

That is also true for the telephone directory. What do these people actually _do_ in the IEEE?

> Through its technical societies, IEEE also has a tremendous reach

Say what they do!

> Whatever your focus is, there is a community within IEEE that will meet your needs.

But what does it do?

> It can lead to meaningful collaborative research opportunities that jump-start and advance one’s career

How?

> and it can provide professional-development pathways that refine skills through leadership opportunities.

How?

> Many of the key benefits of volunteering

This is the first sentence in this whole f'ing spiel which is starting to make sense. Instead of "IEEE will help you", it's an "IEEE is vehicle for helping others, volunteering, promoting the profession / the field etc."

Ok, then why did you waste our time with the verbiage before, instead of telling us what we can do _for_ others via the IEEE, plus what the IEEE does for everyone with the dues we pay it or with our volunteering efforts?

> provide opportunities to help guide the evolution of numerous fields,

Which opportunities, man? Come on!

> Serving as a volunteer can also help empower members to champion their ideas and hone their communication and presentation skills, as well as management experience, which are important for professional development.

How? Through what mechanisms?

... (sigh) I give up.

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