8 ms·

CMU’s computer science dean on its poaching problem

83 points by doppp 11y ago

jaryd 11y ago
Just curious: How many out there are yinzers? I knew there was a nice technology scene here but am surprised to see Pitt/CMU on HN several times over the past couple weeks.
- dgacmu 11y ago
  CMU professor here. Currently on leave at Google for the 2015-16 academic year, returning in August. (Not, in my case, for the money - I actually left a startup I co-founded a few months before it was acquired because I decided that I'd probably learn more at Google. Ask me in a few years if I regret leaving that money on the table -- but thus far, I'm exceptionally glad about the decision. Having a total blast. Sabbaticals/leaves are one of the under-advertised benefits of being a faculty member. Which is useful, since the salary delta to industry sucks. :)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - doppp 11y ago
    Hi, dga! I took 15-440 under you! Wasn't a very good student, though. Just wanted to say hi and all the best in your sabbatical!
    - dgacmu 11y ago
      Hi and thanks! Hope post-440 life is going well. :)
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
Well, I'm glad to hear CMU is hiring 17 new faculty and that the fields of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning are all booming so rapidly (though let's hope it's not a bubble)! But as to the concept of "poaching", well, to quote the economist Homer Simpson, "Money can be exchanged for goods and services."
- ericjang 11y ago
  The quote in context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgct3Jn8pFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgct3Jn8pFA
electriclove 11y ago
Professors at CMU make incredibly great salaries.. they are not 'poor'
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  No one, here or in the article, claimed they were 'poor'. But most are not as wealthy as similarly-qualified peers in industry. That's all. CMU's CS and AI profs are among the best in the world and companies are keen for these skills.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  And what about all the researchers who don't become professors at the world's top computer-science department? http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144
kriro 11y ago
CMU has dropped significantly in my personal ranking of universities. None of that was related to faculty being hired away. All of it is related to activities like attacking the Tor network or accidentally admitting 800 students. Maybe they have a PR problem but my overal view of them is pretty meh even though they are one of the more elite CS schools (and I think Pittsburgh is a fairly nice city, never been there though).
- argonaut 11y ago
  I did research in machine learning in college (not at CMU). CMU remains the top overall university in the world for machine learning and robotics (depending on specific subfields of ML/robotics the rankings will switch, but at that fine granularity the difference is just 1-3 professors).
- mafuyu 11y ago
  While the research was unfortunately performed under the CMU name, the SEI was more or less founded by the government to do this type of research and is not related to the rest of the school. I wrote to the ethics board about it when the story broke, but I doubt anything will be done, as it's more or less a separate institution.
- computervision 11y ago
  Your metric for ranking universities is in no way based on how productive the university is in research or the quality of the graduating students. Even if you consider the things you mentioned as proxies for the quality of the university, they are extremely weak ones and there are better metrics available to judge the quality of a university. Am I wrong in viewing this comment as a flawed attempt to attack the university? Open to any counterarguments.
  - tikhonj 11y ago
    Presumably OP's ranking cares about things besides just research quality in CS or graduating students? Those other things aren't proxies for the quality of the university, they're components of it.
sgt101 11y ago
Does anyone have any links to the emotion recognition work he talks about?
- burkaman 11y ago
  I think he was referring to this guy's work: http://www.pitt.edu/~jeffcohn/ http://www.pitt.edu/~jeffcohn/
chrisbennet 11y ago
As an aside, the use of the term "poaching" always bugged me. It implies that an employee is owned by a company like some deer in the King's forest.
- elcct 11y ago
  This term was created by companies paying low salaries and being puzzled that employees are going to companies that pay more.
  - mizchief2 11y ago
    I had a manager that would get red-faced mad when talking about people the company would pay to go get some certification, and couldn't understand that "loyalty" wasn't enough to prevent that person from taking a higher paying job that the certification earned.
- eitally 11y ago
  Not really. It originated to describe high level employees who take a job and then exploit their personal network to hire away friends. This is super-common and expected, and is also the reason non-competes became popular. It wasn't until later, the tech boom, that "poaching" was repurposed to be more generalized luring of high potential employees from wherever using whatever ($, perks) means available.
  - chrisbennet 11y ago
    An that use of the term "poaching" [high level employee hiring away friends] originated with the earlier/original meaning of the term i.e. "hunting animals illegally". The deer (for example) were the property of the King - Robin Hood was a poacher.
  - TheCowboy 11y ago
    The idea that they need non-competes to retain talent should still set off some alarms that maybe companies aren't paying market rate salaries. Most people don't leave a company for less money and no other benefits, and there's nothing wrong with employees being lured away for more pay. That's how it's supposed to work.
imgabe 11y ago
Academia in general is screwing itself. The main reason for anyone to go into it is to work on interesting problems in a self-directed fashion with amazing job security. You probably wouldn't get rich, but you'll have a nice upper-middle class salary and almost no way of getting fired. Now the available tenure-track positions are declining every year in favor of adjunct quasi-slave labor. Even if you do win the lottery and get a tenure-track position, from what I understand you'll spend most of your time writing grant proposals to chase funding, and at least 5-7 years trying to please the tenure committee. So, why exactly would anyone spend 10-15 years making a fraction of what they could in industry for a vanishingly small chance of the eventual payoff of tenure? If you're going to slave away for 10-15 years anyway before you get to do what you want, you may as well do it in industry where you could put away enough money to be financially independent in that time. The only remaining obstacle is that you still kind of need an institutional affiliation to be taken seriously as a researcher and publish, but that might be slowly changing as the Internet makes it easier to publish.
- argonaut 11y ago
  In computer science, your criticisms are very very valid for graduate students: they make ~30k/year when they could be making ~200k/year at, say, Google, and they usually have less autonomy than a professor. But they don't really apply to tenure-track faculty. If grad school is already a sunk cost for you, (or it was valuable to you in other non-monetary areas), a tenure-track position can actually be quite a lucrative choice. Firstly, CS professors make a decent salary. A professor at Berkeley (all salaries are publicly available for California state schools) make ~160k/year. Someone like Michael I. Jordan makes ~300k/year. And if you work in a field directly applicable to industry, such as machine learning, this figure does not include the substantial consulting/advising revenue that is available to you. Furthermore, tenured faculty can go do a startup and then come back at any time for their old job. Granted, a professor in CS could probably be making millions per year in finance or something, but my point is in absolute terms you can make a lot of money.
  - TheCowboy 11y ago
    Is it really that easy to enter finance at that level (or at all), or even get a job at Google for $200k/year? I don't think it's that automatic unless your background is one that includes the "correct" college, an affluent background, and more. Many people end up pursuing an advanced degree in this field because they want to break into a new industry, make themselves more appealing to employers and make more money. If you can do a master's while working, you don't end up with 2+ years of lost salary as well. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I don't have a computer science degree and I currently find myself considering a master's for those reasons. It would be nice to avoid having to go that route.
mizchief2 11y ago
We aren't your slaves. We can't be "poached" If you want our services, offer us a better value than your competitors.

83 points by doppp 11y ago

jaryd 11y ago

Just curious: How many out there are yinzers? I knew there was a nice technology scene here but am surprised to see Pitt/CMU on HN several times over the past couple weeks.

dgacmu 11y ago
CMU professor here. Currently on leave at Google for the 2015-16 academic year, returning in August. (Not, in my case, for the money - I actually left a startup I co-founded a few months before it was acquired because I decided that I'd probably learn more at Google. Ask me in a few years if I regret leaving that money on the table -- but thus far, I'm exceptionally glad about the decision. Having a total blast. Sabbaticals/leaves are one of the under-advertised benefits of being a faculty member. Which is useful, since the salary delta to industry sucks. :)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- doppp 11y ago
  Hi, dga! I took 15-440 under you! Wasn't a very good student, though. Just wanted to say hi and all the best in your sabbatical!
  - dgacmu 11y ago
    Hi and thanks! Hope post-440 life is going well. :)

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

Well, I'm glad to hear CMU is hiring 17 new faculty and that the fields of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning are all booming so rapidly (though let's hope it's not a bubble)! But as to the concept of "poaching", well, to quote the economist Homer Simpson, "Money can be exchanged for goods and services."

ericjang 11y ago
The quote in context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgct3Jn8pFA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgct3Jn8pFA

electriclove 11y ago

Professors at CMU make incredibly great salaries.. they are not 'poor'

robotresearcher 11y ago
No one, here or in the article, claimed they were 'poor'. But most are not as wealthy as similarly-qualified peers in industry. That's all. CMU's CS and AI profs are among the best in the world and companies are keen for these skills.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
And what about all the researchers who don't become professors at the world's top computer-science department? http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144

kriro 11y ago

CMU has dropped significantly in my personal ranking of universities. None of that was related to faculty being hired away. All of it is related to activities like attacking the Tor network or accidentally admitting 800 students. Maybe they have a PR problem but my overal view of them is pretty meh even though they are one of the more elite CS schools (and I think Pittsburgh is a fairly nice city, never been there though).

argonaut 11y ago
I did research in machine learning in college (not at CMU). CMU remains the top overall university in the world for machine learning and robotics (depending on specific subfields of ML/robotics the rankings will switch, but at that fine granularity the difference is just 1-3 professors).
mafuyu 11y ago
While the research was unfortunately performed under the CMU name, the SEI was more or less founded by the government to do this type of research and is not related to the rest of the school. I wrote to the ethics board about it when the story broke, but I doubt anything will be done, as it's more or less a separate institution.
computervision 11y ago
Your metric for ranking universities is in no way based on how productive the university is in research or the quality of the graduating students. Even if you consider the things you mentioned as proxies for the quality of the university, they are extremely weak ones and there are better metrics available to judge the quality of a university. Am I wrong in viewing this comment as a flawed attempt to attack the university? Open to any counterarguments.
- tikhonj 11y ago
  Presumably OP's ranking cares about things besides just research quality in CS or graduating students? Those other things aren't proxies for the quality of the university, they're components of it.

sgt101 11y ago

Does anyone have any links to the emotion recognition work he talks about?

burkaman 11y ago
I think he was referring to this guy's work: http://www.pitt.edu/~jeffcohn/ http://www.pitt.edu/~jeffcohn/

chrisbennet 11y ago

As an aside, the use of the term "poaching" always bugged me. It implies that an employee is owned by a company like some deer in the King's forest.

elcct 11y ago
This term was created by companies paying low salaries and being puzzled that employees are going to companies that pay more.
- mizchief2 11y ago
  I had a manager that would get red-faced mad when talking about people the company would pay to go get some certification, and couldn't understand that "loyalty" wasn't enough to prevent that person from taking a higher paying job that the certification earned.
eitally 11y ago
Not really. It originated to describe high level employees who take a job and then exploit their personal network to hire away friends. This is super-common and expected, and is also the reason non-competes became popular. It wasn't until later, the tech boom, that "poaching" was repurposed to be more generalized luring of high potential employees from wherever using whatever ($, perks) means available.
- chrisbennet 11y ago
  An that use of the term "poaching" [high level employee hiring away friends] originated with the earlier/original meaning of the term i.e. "hunting animals illegally". The deer (for example) were the property of the King - Robin Hood was a poacher.
- TheCowboy 11y ago
  The idea that they need non-competes to retain talent should still set off some alarms that maybe companies aren't paying market rate salaries. Most people don't leave a company for less money and no other benefits, and there's nothing wrong with employees being lured away for more pay. That's how it's supposed to work.

imgabe 11y ago

Academia in general is screwing itself. The main reason for anyone to go into it is to work on interesting problems in a self-directed fashion with amazing job security. You probably wouldn't get rich, but you'll have a nice upper-middle class salary and almost no way of getting fired. Now the available tenure-track positions are declining every year in favor of adjunct quasi-slave labor. Even if you do win the lottery and get a tenure-track position, from what I understand you'll spend most of your time writing grant proposals to chase funding, and at least 5-7 years trying to please the tenure committee. So, why exactly would anyone spend 10-15 years making a fraction of what they could in industry for a vanishingly small chance of the eventual payoff of tenure? If you're going to slave away for 10-15 years anyway before you get to do what you want, you may as well do it in industry where you could put away enough money to be financially independent in that time. The only remaining obstacle is that you still kind of need an institutional affiliation to be taken seriously as a researcher and publish, but that might be slowly changing as the Internet makes it easier to publish.

argonaut 11y ago
In computer science, your criticisms are very very valid for graduate students: they make ~30k/year when they could be making ~200k/year at, say, Google, and they usually have less autonomy than a professor. But they don't really apply to tenure-track faculty. If grad school is already a sunk cost for you, (or it was valuable to you in other non-monetary areas), a tenure-track position can actually be quite a lucrative choice. Firstly, CS professors make a decent salary. A professor at Berkeley (all salaries are publicly available for California state schools) make ~160k/year. Someone like Michael I. Jordan makes ~300k/year. And if you work in a field directly applicable to industry, such as machine learning, this figure does not include the substantial consulting/advising revenue that is available to you. Furthermore, tenured faculty can go do a startup and then come back at any time for their old job. Granted, a professor in CS could probably be making millions per year in finance or something, but my point is in absolute terms you can make a lot of money.
- TheCowboy 11y ago
  Is it really that easy to enter finance at that level (or at all), or even get a job at Google for $200k/year? I don't think it's that automatic unless your background is one that includes the "correct" college, an affluent background, and more. Many people end up pursuing an advanced degree in this field because they want to break into a new industry, make themselves more appealing to employers and make more money. If you can do a master's while working, you don't end up with 2+ years of lost salary as well. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I don't have a computer science degree and I currently find myself considering a master's for those reasons. It would be nice to avoid having to go that route.

mizchief2 11y ago

We aren't your slaves. We can't be "poached" If you want our services, offer us a better value than your competitors.