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All University IT departments I have interacted with were terrible too. Universities simply cannot pay market-level salaries for IT staff because it would turn

by i000 10y ago

All University IT departments I have interacted with were terrible too. Universities simply cannot pay market-level salaries for IT staff because it would turn the whole pay-pyramid upside-down. The ones who stay, spend most of their time making sure their work is neither cheap nor good: You cannot use the cloud! but you can have this VMWare virtual from 2009. You need to store 500TB? we don't have it but don't you dare to use S3. To get stuff done you have to essentially run a shadow IT group. Let's see how the UCSF experiment turns out.

ptaipale 10y ago
But then the same limitations are passed on to the outsourced services, and it's even less flexible because it's not just a "because I say so", it's also a contract...
curiouscats 10y ago
They could pay what is justified if they wanted. University pay is usually topped by sports coaches (and not just head coaches, at many universities numerous assistant coaches make more than any executives at the school and all academic staff). There is no reason IT staff couldn't be paid at market rates. Poor management of IT is due to poor management not because "Universities simply cannot pay market-level salaries for IT staff."
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  Right. There are nonsense "administrators" who make similar salaries to junior devs, but they can't afford market rates. I'm sure whoever is in charge of this bound-to-fail offshoring makes at least that much as well.
- anonsssis 10y ago
  Paying market salaries for IT would mean that the people who generate the income for the university/medical system (football coaches through merchandise, doctors through billable services, faculty through grants and teaching) would often be paid less then the personnel they hire. No board of regents will approve this.
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    Which of course tells about the thinking of boards of regents. Myself, I've often personally hired people who I have to pay more than I get paid.
- justinv 10y ago
  "University pay is usually topped by sports coaches (and not just head coaches, at many universities numerous assistant coaches make more than any executives at the school and all academic staff)." Coaches & sports staff at the high level you are referring to, are NOT funded by the university budget. They're funded by specific athletic funds that is from sports revenue & that boosters pay into. This is not an equivalent scenario - you're basically saying that a University should go set up an IT Booster Fund and have interested parties pay into it in order to pay these market rates - which they wouldn't (would you? I sure wouldn't). "The other problem with the salary comparison is that Alabama taxpayers aren't paying Mr. Saban, and so his salary doesn't take any money away from professors. One of the benefits to come out of the rampant commercialism of college athletics is that media conglomerates and sneaker companies are willing to pay huge sums for the broadcast and apparel rights. Thus, Mr. Saban will be paid out of Alabama's $70 million athletic budget, with little or no impact on academic departments."[0] [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20160325043141/http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122853304793584959 http://web.archive.org/web/20160325043141/http://www.wsj.com...
  - emj 10y ago
    But who pays for the infrastructure of the sports, from what I've seen of stadium and amenities investments it's almost always the public that pays for that, and in that case the state does pay a lot to the athletics funds. One have to be real careful when thinking that the abstract budgets are not related.
- greeneggs 10y ago
  UCSF doesn't even have any sports teams...
analog31 10y ago
A sincere question: Why have IT involved in those things? Just flood the place with wi-fi, put an RJ45 in every room, and good luck. That's how it is in my house, both personal and business use, and it works just fine. Most of the staff are buying their own computers anyway, because academic employers don't pay for computers. My spouse won't let IT touch her computer because they screw it up. Her lab still uses thumb drives to move data between computers. At the worst, IT creates hurdles like you describe. At best, a university does need some services, such as to let students sign up for courses, and maintain their records. But even those services could be outsourced. My daytime employer doesn't maintain those services at every work site, but either outsources them or manages them at a centralized location. In a certain sense, a university in SF is like a person who wants to live in SF but isn't in a lucrative enough field to afford it. Such a person (e.g., a teacher or a baker) would simply leave town, but the university wants to maintain its presence.
- robk 10y ago
  Likely for security among other reasons. As soon as someone uses something like Dropbox with a weak password and it's hacked, then the university's data is out there or at a minimum it is perceived as the university leaking. Or a thumb drive with personal information of staff/students is lost and then leaked by the finder.
- munin 10y ago
  > Why have IT involved in those things? It depends on the context of their use. For example, a neuro-imaging lab wants storage space and processing power. They need to store somewhere between 500GB and 50TB of data they'll gather over the course of a multi year experiment. They'll need a few powerful computers to run a data analysis pipeline on the data. None of the people involved are computer janitors, the best they can do is maybe set up their home wi-fi and write programs in Matlab and R. As the lab PI, you have a few choices but also a few constraints. For one, the IRB told you that all of the data you generate has to stay "secured." You asked them what they meant by that and they told you that it had to be locked up in your lab. Does this mean the cloud is out? The IRB doesn't know what the cloud is, but "stored on some server in Ireland" sure doesn't sound like "locked up in your lab." How do you solve the rest of your problems? Do you just go down to Best Buy and buy a bunch of hard drives? They don't sell a 50TB hard drive. How do I even make such a thing? Absent an IT staff, you now have a PhD-MD and their grad students sitting around googling about RAID and Linux. They'll try to create some system on their own to hold scans of peoples brains and other kinds of PII and they'll try and make it all work in house because all IT does is flood the place with wi-fi and run the RJ45 in the room. Or maybe the PI could hire his own IT company? Then they notice that the six other PIs in his building also hire their own IT companies and they start talking about pooling the costs...
mbreese 10y ago
Not all University IT is horrible, especially in areas with less tech overall. I've been at a few places on the West coast and in the Midwest. While it can be pretty hit or miss, overall, I'd say the Midwest schools have better IT. And it's pretty much why you'd expect - academia can't pay market level salaries in Silicon Valley. If you're good at running a data center, you're not going to do it for a university in California. If you're in the middle of Indiana though and want to play with high performance computing, there are only a few places to go. For example, Indiana University has always had top notch IT. They value that as a core strength of the University and it shows... their president is even an old head of IT.

by i000 10y ago

ptaipale 10y ago

But then the same limitations are passed on to the outsourced services, and it's even less flexible because it's not just a "because I say so", it's also a contract...

curiouscats 10y ago

They could pay what is justified if they wanted. University pay is usually topped by sports coaches (and not just head coaches, at many universities numerous assistant coaches make more than any executives at the school and all academic staff). There is no reason IT staff couldn't be paid at market rates. Poor management of IT is due to poor management not because "Universities simply cannot pay market-level salaries for IT staff."

alphonsegaston 10y ago
Right. There are nonsense "administrators" who make similar salaries to junior devs, but they can't afford market rates. I'm sure whoever is in charge of this bound-to-fail offshoring makes at least that much as well.
anonsssis 10y ago
Paying market salaries for IT would mean that the people who generate the income for the university/medical system (football coaches through merchandise, doctors through billable services, faculty through grants and teaching) would often be paid less then the personnel they hire. No board of regents will approve this.
- ptaipale 10y ago
  Which of course tells about the thinking of boards of regents. Myself, I've often personally hired people who I have to pay more than I get paid.
justinv 10y ago
"University pay is usually topped by sports coaches (and not just head coaches, at many universities numerous assistant coaches make more than any executives at the school and all academic staff)." Coaches & sports staff at the high level you are referring to, are NOT funded by the university budget. They're funded by specific athletic funds that is from sports revenue & that boosters pay into. This is not an equivalent scenario - you're basically saying that a University should go set up an IT Booster Fund and have interested parties pay into it in order to pay these market rates - which they wouldn't (would you? I sure wouldn't). "The other problem with the salary comparison is that Alabama taxpayers aren't paying Mr. Saban, and so his salary doesn't take any money away from professors. One of the benefits to come out of the rampant commercialism of college athletics is that media conglomerates and sneaker companies are willing to pay huge sums for the broadcast and apparel rights. Thus, Mr. Saban will be paid out of Alabama's $70 million athletic budget, with little or no impact on academic departments."[0] [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20160325043141/http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122853304793584959 http://web.archive.org/web/20160325043141/http://www.wsj.com...
- emj 10y ago
  But who pays for the infrastructure of the sports, from what I've seen of stadium and amenities investments it's almost always the public that pays for that, and in that case the state does pay a lot to the athletics funds. One have to be real careful when thinking that the abstract budgets are not related.
greeneggs 10y ago
UCSF doesn't even have any sports teams...

analog31 10y ago

A sincere question: Why have IT involved in those things? Just flood the place with wi-fi, put an RJ45 in every room, and good luck. That's how it is in my house, both personal and business use, and it works just fine. Most of the staff are buying their own computers anyway, because academic employers don't pay for computers. My spouse won't let IT touch her computer because they screw it up. Her lab still uses thumb drives to move data between computers. At the worst, IT creates hurdles like you describe. At best, a university does need some services, such as to let students sign up for courses, and maintain their records. But even those services could be outsourced. My daytime employer doesn't maintain those services at every work site, but either outsources them or manages them at a centralized location. In a certain sense, a university in SF is like a person who wants to live in SF but isn't in a lucrative enough field to afford it. Such a person (e.g., a teacher or a baker) would simply leave town, but the university wants to maintain its presence.

robk 10y ago
Likely for security among other reasons. As soon as someone uses something like Dropbox with a weak password and it's hacked, then the university's data is out there or at a minimum it is perceived as the university leaking. Or a thumb drive with personal information of staff/students is lost and then leaked by the finder.
munin 10y ago
> Why have IT involved in those things? It depends on the context of their use. For example, a neuro-imaging lab wants storage space and processing power. They need to store somewhere between 500GB and 50TB of data they'll gather over the course of a multi year experiment. They'll need a few powerful computers to run a data analysis pipeline on the data. None of the people involved are computer janitors, the best they can do is maybe set up their home wi-fi and write programs in Matlab and R. As the lab PI, you have a few choices but also a few constraints. For one, the IRB told you that all of the data you generate has to stay "secured." You asked them what they meant by that and they told you that it had to be locked up in your lab. Does this mean the cloud is out? The IRB doesn't know what the cloud is, but "stored on some server in Ireland" sure doesn't sound like "locked up in your lab." How do you solve the rest of your problems? Do you just go down to Best Buy and buy a bunch of hard drives? They don't sell a 50TB hard drive. How do I even make such a thing? Absent an IT staff, you now have a PhD-MD and their grad students sitting around googling about RAID and Linux. They'll try to create some system on their own to hold scans of peoples brains and other kinds of PII and they'll try and make it all work in house because all IT does is flood the place with wi-fi and run the RJ45 in the room. Or maybe the PI could hire his own IT company? Then they notice that the six other PIs in his building also hire their own IT companies and they start talking about pooling the costs...

mbreese 10y ago

Not all University IT is horrible, especially in areas with less tech overall. I've been at a few places on the West coast and in the Midwest. While it can be pretty hit or miss, overall, I'd say the Midwest schools have better IT. And it's pretty much why you'd expect - academia can't pay market level salaries in Silicon Valley. If you're good at running a data center, you're not going to do it for a university in California. If you're in the middle of Indiana though and want to play with high performance computing, there are only a few places to go. For example, Indiana University has always had top notch IT. They value that as a core strength of the University and it shows... their president is even an old head of IT.