Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

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Two separate points:

1. I'm surprised that Welsh argues that tenured CS profs still have to follow what publication venues want to see. Why not just say, "Fuck it?", publish on blogs / arvix.com/, and let the field catch up to them? Certainly that's not a route to immediate promotions or status within the field, but there may be strong long-term returns to individuals who go this way and are vindicated over time.

(This obviously doesn't apply to non-tenured faculty or grad students. I'll also note that this point is a related observation, not a criticism of his argument.)

2. This stands out to me:

The final (and arguably most important) aspect of being successful as a faculty member is being able to solve new problems better than anyone else in your area. It is not usually enough to simply do a better job solving the same problem as someone else -- you need to have a new idea, a new spin, a new approach -- or work on a different problem.

Genuinely new ideas are actually quite rare. Sometimes the difference between a "new" idea and someone else's discovery or implementation of that idea can be just a couple months difference! (See Steven Berlin Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From for one popular description of this.) Yet one person or group gets 99% of the credit / tenure / etc.

I'm surprised that Welsh argues that tenured CS profs still have to follow what publication venues want to see. Why not just say, "Fuck it?", publish on blogs / arvix.com/, and let the field catch up to them?

Because funding agencies don't like it. They'll look back at previous funding you've been given, and rightly or wrongly, look at the peer-reviewed articles that came out of it. If you're pushing everything to arXiv, then it looks like something went badly wrong and you can't be trusted with future money.

As the OP says, the problem is not just ideas, but how those ideas are disseminated and what that means to your funding stream. Saying "fuck it" is a really good way of screwing up your funding stream for years.

Thanks for the comments; I replied on the blog post itself. TL;DR: Even tenured profs care about helping their students get good jobs, which means publishing in top venues.

It depends on the kind of research you do, but one viable approach in some areas (which I've seen work in practice) is just to not have as many students. Plenty of tenured theory profs out there have one, maybe two PhD students at a time. They do still need to work with that student to send the student's papers to top venues so he/she can eventually get a job, but it's a lot less of a constraint than if it's a systems-style lab full of 5 or 10 PhD students who all need to be pumping out top-tier publications, and leaves considerable time to work on one's own projects with fewer constraints.

For 1, I can think of one compelling reason not to do that: It's harder to convince your funding agencies that your work is having real impact if you don't/can't convince the best venues in your field to publish your work. This is problematic because in your funding agency's eyes, it's impossible to distinguish between "I choose not to publish in the best journals" and "I'm just covering for my failures by claiming to only publish in arxiv."

A professor without any funding is a professor without a hope of getting tenure.

ad 1: Please also do keep in mind that there are career steps after obtaining tenure. If you say "Fuck it" right after getting tenure, you are almost certain to never make it thus far.

I also do agree with the other comment regarding funding agencies. Another problematic way that NSF does business (inviting professors for peer review that is) is that this virtually guarantees that some of your peers know exactly what you're doing, which reduces effectiveness of double-blind submissions substantially (to the point where it is hard to believe it works at all; didn't it ever occur strange to anyone that the same people from the same top schools are consistently successful? [with grants and publications in the top venues])

On the first part, that's true, but you don't have to actually care about those further career steps. Tenure you have to care about, because you're out of a job if you don't get it. But a tenured professor in CS has a permanent position with a good salary, regardless of whether they ever get another promotion or not. Some people do really care about the Full Professor title, but it's not mandatory that you take those further career steps particularly seriously.

A bigger issue post-tenure is the money side of things. Do you need significant funding to carry out the kind of research you want to do, e.g. because it needs reasonably expensive equipment or employee/minion labor? If yes, you do have to care what people with money think, whether it's funding agencies or corporate donors, and that constrains the research you can do. If no, e.g. because you work on your own projects and don't particularly need equipment or a large lab of minions (common in areas like theory and logic), then you don't really have to care about the funding agencies, either.

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