Why I Chose Academia | Hacker News Reader

Why I Chose Academia

blog.ketyov.com

53 pointsohblahitsme32 comments

the author needs to chime in a few years later when he fully understands how big science actually works:

- most work is done by untrained and inexperienced graduate students, good luck understanding/reproducing the process

- most faculty are little more than grant submitting machines trying to land a grant at all costs regardless of what actually interests them

- most research reviews processes are incredibly biased with countless people doing terrible jobs (the reviled "reviewer number 3") a single negative can sink a grant/paper acceptance

- most institutions are grossly monolithic and the rules and regulations are such that incompetent individuals can never be removed from any given position.

- most institutions are run as medieval lordships, with many smaller decision makers like deans, head of departments that have incredible influence on someone's career. It is great when the dictator is benevolent and unbearable if not.

Note how instead of paying a good salary the University choses to give out handouts (lower childcare fees, lower rentals) - because those in turn are paid via taxpayer grants. It hides the fact that they pay so little the people would qualify for foodstamps.

...And all industry jobs are mindless rote work.

I'm not arguing that the things you describe never exist in academia, but they're the worst examples of when things go wrong. They're not the norm.

From my vantage point in academia they're definitely the norm. I'd say the only one that's mostly false is #2, but that could be the norm outside of my particular field (computer science).

I've seen fantastic research sunk and forced through resubmission time and again because of reviewers that either don't understand the work (and why would they? they have zero incentive) or have pre-existing biases based on their own work (and are called in as expert reviewers, effectively functioning as gatekeepers in a subfield).

Bad deans/department chairs can make life suck pretty hard. This is usually not the case because they (in my experience) don't have that much power, but over some things like hiring they can definitely be as capricious as they want. The real killer are the people outside the department, on IRBs, grant review boards, etc.. In a good research-focused school they can be great; in worse schools they can be tinpot despots.

Reproducibility in particular is insane. In computer science virtually no systems are released at the time of a paper submission, so papers describe things that may or may not exist. I'd say this is less due to untrained/inexperienced grad students and more due to a combination of constantly rushing to publish, unclear institutional regulations regarding releasing artifacts such as source, and inability to focus on cleaning things up for a release.

Academia has serious problems at its core, and in a lot of places, it's obvious that startups and industry is outpacing it. I think this comes down to an incentive problem -- when there's no incentive to build things that work, you tend to build broken things.

>Academia has serious problems at its core, and in a lot of places, it's obvious that startups and industry is outpacing it.

Let's be realistic here. How many startups actually do any sort of research at all? By my estimates, the number is very close to zero.

How many places in industry? You can cite the big labs, but the majority of science is still done by universities. While academia has serious problems, lets not fool ourselves into thinking that industry is any kind of substitute.

I'd agree that startups aren't doing much research in general, but larger companies (Microsoft, Google) have pretty impressive research organizations and do a lot of good work.

Apple does too, but unfortunately they lean towards keeping everything a trade secret rather than publishing (excluding their patents I suppose)

To some degree it depends what you consider research. I agree startups and "the industry" are 1) not necessarily publishing, and 2) not doing work in a way that matches the procedural standards of traditional research, but a lot of new ideas are being experimented.

Does git count as important research? Does CoffeeScript?

Git: Yes; CoffeeScript: No;

Sadly with 15 years in the academia spent in three different fields of science (at multiple universities in roles that support dozens of researchers) - I found it to be the norm. Time and again I am surprised just how bad it is and that with time it is getting worse, more people are writing more and more research papers that are worse than ever before.

It is a race with very strange incentives this is the world where a Nature paper makes your career but publishing nonsense has no negative effect (in fact there is a positive one, you now have more publications padding your resume). You have to go out of your way like manufacture data and get caught to experience any negative consequence. Doing sloppy work is the norm.

I wish it weren't true and it could be that the problem is my perception.

As for the comparison with the industry: you can always go and try to work for a different company that does things your way, but guess what, science is all the same. You'll get the same reviewers, same grant application process, same publication process, same ranking methods no matter where you work etc. You are stuck with the system and you can't reform it.

On the latter point, I haven't found that to be the case in CS. Sub-fields of CS work completely differently. Some are entirely based around journals, some conferences, some a hybrid. Some are very large, some small. Some are based mainly on theoretical work, others mainly empirical. The empirical ones differ completely on what empirical work looks like: does it mean systems and data, does it mean field work, does it mean psych-style user studies, does it mean longitudinal case studies? Some subfields value big budgets, big systems, and big data, others value mathematics, algorithms, and proofs. European, Asian, Australian, and US institutions also differ considerably inside each of those subfields.

> I'm not arguing that the things you describe never exist in academia, but they're the worst examples of when things go wrong. They're not the norm.

Unfortunately, they are the norm. There are places when this doesn't happen, or where you have the privilege of working with an extraordinary professor who manages to shield you from this.

That's rare, though. #3 isn't constant and #2 is not an entirely accurate description (or at least not that widespread), but by and large, the portrait is very accurate.

I miss the intellectual challenge of academia. I'm in a pretty high-end job and it's nothing compared to what I used to do. But the working conditions and the colleagues? Not in a million years. I'd seriously consider selling hamburgers than returning there, and I have worked on minimum wage before, I'm not talking out of my ass on that.

I could be lucky, but I have the opposite view. Some of academia is bullshit, but I genuinely like at least half my colleagues, and find the discussions with them interesting. I like some of what Silicon Valley produces, but the lifestyle and colleagues? No thanks. You've got the 60-hour crunch lifestyle on the one hand, the pagerduty.com lifestyle on the other hand, and the "everyone eats dinner at work at 7pm" lifestyle on the third hand. Plus a really bro-tastic atmosphere, and rampant jerks who are always trying to Disrupt The Very Concept Of Transport while quoting Ayn Rand. Sure, a bit of a stereotype, but some mixture of this actually does seem to be the norm. And people really do say "disrupt" a million times a day with a straight face. Maybe industry not in the SF Bay Area (where I lived a few years) could be more tolerable, though.

Plus a really bro-tastic atmosphere, and rampant jerks who are always trying to Disrupt The Very Concept Of Transport while quoting Ayn Rand.

Isn't culture fit great? I mean, if you're a social psychologist you won't have that problem, they have less than 1% Republicans.

It's not so much that the random startup person would be a Republican (I'm not sure they even are?) as that many seem to be buzzword-slinging airheads who've never read anything but YA novels and self-help blogs. There are plenty of conservatives (in CS academia and elsewhere) who've read Hayek and the Chicago school and can make an intelligent and informed argument for that side of economics & politics. They might be wrong (they are), but they at least have an argument. The disrupt/Rand people remind me more of Christian fundamentalists, in that they just have some slogans and faith.

I'm sure I'd be a really bad fit in the Valley, too. Things aren't bro-tastic over here in Europe. More often than not, the pretentious idiots who are always trying to Disrupt The Very Concept Of Transport while quoting Ayn Rand are just given a Mac to play with and kept away from programming.

This blog post is a year old. The writer is now an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego.

http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/research/faculty/447/

Love of science and research does not pay the bills, nor does an academic level salary.

The "choice" that the author made wouldn't really crop up unless he had help paying the bills.

What? Academics may not make the same salary as industry... but an engineering professor generally makes >$100k / yr. For example, you can look up the salary of most public university professors (eg. from Georgia Tech/UGA): http://www.open.georgia.gov/

You might not get rich... but it can definitely be livable with a high quality of life.

The average salary for professors at UCSF used to be ~$160K.

UCSF is also one of the top ranking medical research centers in the world. I'm sure that most of the faculty at UCSF could go elsewhere an make even more money.

If you get a tenured position, it can be a $100k/year job. Tenured jobs are harder and harder to get, and adjuncts are compensated badly.

I think "associate professor" is the untenured position, regardless they seem to be all 100k +... even in Canadia:

https://uwaterloo.ca/about/what-we-stand/accountability/sala...

Associate Professors are usually tenured. Assistant Professors usually aren't.

The untenured position is really a sessional instructor, which I'm sure also goes by different names, but involves zero job security and extremely shitty pay. It's not a salaried position, it's a "per course you teach that semester" position.

This is true for some fields, at some schools. Median salary for an associate professor (the first rank with tenure) at my institution is 63k.

Yes. We are all going to live an infinite number of years. So any difference ($30-60K a year) in salary is justifiable even if you are doing mind numbing tasks making other people insanely rich. Even if you die, you will be taking all that extra money into your next life! So slave away my friends :D

I know a number of academics who will be surprised by this.

For that matter, having "paid the bills" through graduate school and a postdoc, the notion that you can't live on an academic salary is absurd.

My wife went the academic route, I went the industry route. For the first several years or so our salaries pretty much kept pace. Now while I admittedly earn a bit more than she does now, she earns plenty enough to to pay her own bills and have money left over.

You need to cut your bills then. I'm a 40 year old grad student who's been living on less than 20K for a decade. At this point making 40K would be living large.

I like Tanya Khovanova’s perspective:

"I started my life wanting to be a mathematician. At some point I had to quit academia in order to feed my children. And so I went to work in industry for ten years. Now that my children have grown, I am trying to get back to academia. So I am the right person to compare the experience of working in the two sectors."

http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=476

Khovanova's stuck in the adjunct trap, and mostly studies recreational mathematics. Because of this, her experiences don't really generalize well.

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900.

In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.

Let's not confuse students and fellows with missing staff. [...] Potential missing staff in some areas is a separate issue, and educational programmes are not designed to make up for it. On-the-job learning and training are not separated but dynamically linked together, benefiting to both parties. In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting.

http://ombuds.web.cern.ch/blog/2013/06/lets-not-confuse-stud...

An unsatisfactory contract policy

This will be difficult for LD staff to cope with. Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of pursuing a career

http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-...

Pensions which will be applicable to new recruits as of 1 January 2012; the Management and CERN Council adopted without any concertation and decided in June 2011 to adopt very unfavourable mesures for new recruits.

http://www.gac-epa.org/History/Bulletins/42-2012-04/Bulletin...

And a warning to non-western members:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264

"Why I Chose Academia"

I make enough money to pay my bills, I have as much free time as I want, I get to learn new things all the time and teach them to others.

However, it can be a little depressing to be a lousy researcher, I feel useless at times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com