6 ms·

Tech Industry Really Needs Professors and Teaching Talent

72 points by dpflan 8y ago

deong 8y ago
As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading. The reason only one in five is filled is not because there's a shortage of qualified teachers. It's because the thousand faculty searches going on at any one time are only interested in competing for the same hundred people. Universities aren't trying to hire someone who can teach undergraduate CS courses. They're trying to hire someone who can build a lab capable of bringing in a steady stream of seven-figure grants. You need to have a PhD from a top-five (ish) school, with an excellent publication record, and an existing network of collaborators to be competitive for the vast majority of open positions.
- neilparikh 8y ago
  They should also publish the statistics for number of PhDs looking for a job per faculty position open. That would tell the full story.
  - deong 8y ago
    I haven't been on a search committee in years, but in the mid 2000s, I think 3-500 was about the norm for a mid-range state school. Not all those people were qualified, but I think you can assume you'll have somewhere on the order of 2-300 qualified applicants for most jobs.
- obelix_ 8y ago
  Which is why it just makes more sense to hire Indian CS students. American univs are never going to match the volumes the Indian system already produces.
  - jjoonathan 8y ago
    They don't want good teachers, they want teachers who are famous and popular in the US academic community. That was GP's whole point.
    - obelix_ 8y ago
      And that's not going to change is my point.
- kd0amg 8y ago
  As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading. Also, still trying to dig up the last article I read about this, but didn't that figure lump pretty much all faculty positions together? I could definitely believe there are lots of contingent faculty positions going unfilled, but the numbers probably look quite different for someone who's not interested in part-time positions, teaching-only positions, soft-money positions, etc.
- aoki 8y ago
  anecdata from the current hiring season is that CS hiring at less prestigious institutions has become qualitatively different from that in other fields. one faculty described receiving a total of four applications from actual CS PhDs (not just top five) [0]. even at stanford, perhaps. i was astonished to see that a stanford junior is the listed instructor for EE 364A (a PhD level course in convex optimization, aka CS 334). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16482866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16482866
nopinsight 8y ago
Tenure-track faculty positions are hard to fill in this tech market no doubt. However, with multi-billion endowment at top schools, couldn't they pay competitively at least for part-time lecturers with PhD and some teaching experience, who might be working in the industry, to fill in requisite teaching needs? I guess if the above is adopted, there could be issues with part-time adjuncts getting higher hourly rate, by some measure, than tenure-track faculty. Thus, a market-based bonus which could fluctuate with market conditions of each field for tenured or tenure-track faculty members should be considered. Added: By hard-to-fill, I meant hard-to-fill to the qualification threshold of research universities implicitly referred to in the article.
- magduf 8y ago
  >However, with multi-billion endowment at top schools, couldn't they pay competitively at least for part-time lecturers with PhD and some teaching experience, who might be working in the industry, to fill in requisite teaching needs? No. That could result in CS people (esp. non-tenured ones) making more money than beginning business professors, and that simply cannot be tolerated. Instead, they need to just keep salaries for CS people low, and then whine to the press about how they can't fill all their CS positions. A lot of corporations do the same thing.
- deong 8y ago
  Tenure track positions are not at all hard to fill. There are 500 people applying for every one of them, and probably 350-400 of those people are completely qualified to do the job. But only ten of them are desirable, and a hundred other universities have those same ten people on the list. Paying market rate won't help, because they're not leaving positions unfilled because they can't make an attractive offer. They're leaving positions unfilled because they're unwilling to live in a world where not every team gets Lebron James. It's better to do without than to not get your first choice, so that's what they do. If they were willing to pay $800k to fill a seat with whoever they picked as that "market rate" lecturer, they could have just hired the same guy for $120k -- he applied for the job and you rejected him.
NPMaxwell 8y ago
Part of the story is new assistant professors in Business are paid an average of about $110K, while new assistant professors in CS are paid and average of under $90K. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/28/study-finds-continued-large-gaps-faculty-salaries-based-discipline https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/28/study-finds-c... The OP is based on this report: https://www.nap.edu/read/24926/chapter/1 https://www.nap.edu/read/24926/chapter/1, which is starting/pushing the conversation. They write: "RECOMMENDATION 2.1: Institutions experiencing a computer science enrollment surge should seriously consider an increase in resources to address the rising workload on faculty and staff in computer science and related departments, and the limitations arising from inadequate facilities." "RECOMMENDATION 2.3: Institutional leadership should engage directly with computer science departments or programs to develop appropriate faculty hiring and faculty size targets, and develop strategies to improve faculty retention. Increasing the number and enhancing the role of academic-rank teaching faculty should be given serious consideration." "RECOMMENDATION 2.4: Larger institutions—in particular, research universities—should reevaluate the organizational placement of the computer science department and other departmental units with a computational mission." Basically, "Give CS a better deal"
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  It's hard to fire someone or lower their salary when economic conditions change, so it makes sense for academia to be a bit conservative here. What happens if interest rates rise, VC funding goes down, and there are lots fewer tech jobs in the future? You're stuck with a bunch of high paid professors and low CS enrollment. There could be a structural change that from here on we'll need a larger number of CS professors, but I can see why the universities are being conservative.
  - walshemj 8y ago
    I don't think "assistant professors" have tenure do they
    - mercutio2 8y ago
      True, but raising assistant professor’s salaries puts pressure on associate professor salaries, and they are tenured. Not to say the whole lot of them shouldn’t get raises; one thing missed in this discussion is that CS programs are counter-cyclical, when there’s a downturn in the tech industry and it’s hard to find a job, more candidates opt for getting a masters in CS instead of going into industry/finding a new job after a layoff.
michaelt 8y ago
It takes five years to mint a Ph.D in computer science, and schools such as Stanford need more faculty now. Looking at https://cs.stanford.edu/jobs https://cs.stanford.edu/jobs I see two job ads - both saying applications are no longer being accepted. I guess they must have solved their faculty problems since the article was written!
volkk 8y ago
is it possible for something like this to happen: a huge shortage continues, and the demand for CS goes up, so the salaries for CS professors goes up thus making this position enticing once more?
- kd0amg 8y ago
  That's basically how the market works, but how much that happens depends on the extent to which universities are actually willing to pay more for things they think/say they don't have enough of.
paultopia 8y ago
Possible solutions include a program that takes Ph.Ds in other disciplines and runs them through a yearlong course in computer science, which gives them a Master’s degree. That qualifies them to teach CS courses, Roberts explained, and sets them up in a department where the prospect for tenure is greater. “We need more of those,” he added. “Universities are in a bind. Market forces will not solve this problem.” This is interesting. Depending on admissions standards for that program, I could see a ton of people from other disciplines jumping at it. The issue, of course, is that people would have to have a strong background to be competent to teach any kind of CS in a year. And the people with that background probably aren't the people looking for a career change. Just thinking about myself for example---I'd probably be better qualified than most people with phds in another discipline for such a thing, since I'm moderately quantitative and semi-decent at coding, but I don't think I would be qualified to teach college-level CS on the basis of a year of transition education.
wellpast 8y ago
I would also say that the tech industry desperately needs a better understanding of what constitutes the professional practitioner skill set, and how to teach and measure it. Many or most of the individual contributing practitioners I've encountered in my varied career across companies big (Microsoft, Google) and small (startups early and mid-stage) consist of individual contributors who either fall up into management or otherwise happily and unwittingly peak out in their skill set. The typical "high-quality" Senior Engineer is "smart and get things done" (Junior) plus a little bit of experiential knowledge peppered in with cold hard years on the resume. But there's a craft and skill set to this work that takes (1) a very focussed (presently, self-) training effort and value system and (2) takes years to master, but where the payoff is enormous (i.e, where the 10x/Nx productivity gain is found.) That last statement is theory only inasmuch as it challenged by those that don't want to believe that they're far from (the, or their) peak; I know it to be true. As a hint to what that skill set is, it's fairly simple to talk about descriptively...the end result being building systems from composable, contract-based abstractions of course respecting and knowing the current available tools and how to wield them. The problem is able-to-describe and able-to-do are miles apart; it takes many, many years of conscious, directed effort to perfect the craft. The few people I encounter that have that ability had to care about it and muscle through it on their own. We need something closer to an organized pedagogy and training and measurement around this particular skillset to produce much more of it in the industry. The problem is that any given business rightly has no interest in the kind of long-term investment required. And, at large, academia for many reasons doesn't have the practitioner context/focus/awareness to deliver the skill set, either. There's a hole to fill here somewhere...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nopinsight 8y ago
As someone who could be interested in teaching part-time, how much is the workload (in hours per week) one needs to spend when teaching an undergrad/grad course? Would a good 4-year university accept an adjunct who holds a Master's degree from a top-10 CS program, but not a PhD, to teach an upper-level course (that does correspond to the person's area of specialty)? --- Added: Thank you for all the ideas and esp detailed explanation from tom_b. It sounds like more work than I can allocate time for in the near term. Perhaps in the future. I thought up an alternative: Join/organize meetups and occasionally give talks or participate in panel discussions about recent/latest research sounds like more fun and less work than teaching in a formal setting. (Posted here in case someone would like to make use of the idea.)
- BeetleB 8y ago
  >Would a good 4-year university accept an adjunct who holds a Master's degree from a top-10 CS program, but not a PhD, to teach an upper-level course (that does correspond to their area of specialty)? They may, but adjuncts are poorly paid, and often have fewer benefits, than faculty members. Many adjuncts often have no real guarantee they'll have a job the following semester/year. They are the first to get axed when there are budget problems. And frankly, having spent time in academia, they do have a significant ego problem. Adjuncts will be treated poorly by professors. Many lower level courses will have a "director" who is a professor, and he will usually treat the adjunct poorly. Rarely do adjuncts have freedom in what homework is assigned and what the syllabus will be.
  - hiram112 8y ago
    > Many adjuncts often have no real guarantee they'll have a job the following semester/year. They are the first to get axed when there are budget problems. So pretty much like every job I've ever had in the private sector.
    - BeetleB 8y ago
      >So pretty much like every job I've ever had in the private sector. Yes, but with a lot higher pay, and often with better insurance, etc. And your work experience in industry has more weight. I don't know how employable a person is if their only experience is teaching. Just looked up two of them in a nearby university. 12 month salary is $75-80K. No stocks, bonuses, etc. Both have MS degrees. It is a decent salary if the job is not stressful, and you are in a dual income family. But job security is likely poorer than in industry.
RightMillennial 8y ago
So like the supposed STEM shortage? Is there really a lack of qualified candidates? Or is there simply a lack of applicants because the pay is too low or the requirements are too stringent?
- QML 8y ago
  I would place my bets on low-pay. For example, working at a Big Four would probably net you more than working as a professor at Berkeley [1]. [1] http://projects.dailycal.org/paychecker/departments/computer-science/ http://projects.dailycal.org/paychecker/departments/computer...
- shoguning 8y ago
  So much to unpack here. The STEM label itself is extremely misleading. There are opportunities in TE (technology and engineering) but not in SM (science and math -- well unless you get a PhD, but even then maybe not). So people hear STEM shortage and go major in chemistry or biology and then find out there are few and poorly paid jobs so they have to accept that or get an advanced degree. Some simplification here, and individual exceptions exist of course.
  - RightMillennial 8y ago
    That's a fair point. I've always heard it in the context of "STEM", but I think it was more referring to the technology area (primarily programmers, etc.). And even then I want to say it was about companies wanting cheap developers or specialists. So there's only a shortage if you're unwilling to pay the common rates.
zerostar07 8y ago
I thought they were building AI for that

72 points by dpflan 8y ago

As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading. The reason only one in five is filled is not because there's a shortage of qualified teachers. It's because the thousand faculty searches going on at any one time are only interested in competing for the same hundred people. Universities aren't trying to hire someone who can teach undergraduate CS courses. They're trying to hire someone who can build a lab capable of bringing in a steady stream of seven-figure grants. You need to have a PhD from a top-five (ish) school, with an excellent publication record, and an existing network of collaborators to be competitive for the vast majority of open positions.

neilparikh 8y ago
They should also publish the statistics for number of PhDs looking for a job per faculty position open. That would tell the full story.
- deong 8y ago
  I haven't been on a search committee in years, but in the mid 2000s, I think 3-500 was about the norm for a mid-range state school. Not all those people were qualified, but I think you can assume you'll have somewhere on the order of 2-300 qualified applicants for most jobs.
obelix_ 8y ago
Which is why it just makes more sense to hire Indian CS students. American univs are never going to match the volumes the Indian system already produces.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  They don't want good teachers, they want teachers who are famous and popular in the US academic community. That was GP's whole point.
  - obelix_ 8y ago
    And that's not going to change is my point.
kd0amg 8y ago
As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading. Also, still trying to dig up the last article I read about this, but didn't that figure lump pretty much all faculty positions together? I could definitely believe there are lots of contingent faculty positions going unfilled, but the numbers probably look quite different for someone who's not interested in part-time positions, teaching-only positions, soft-money positions, etc.
aoki 8y ago
anecdata from the current hiring season is that CS hiring at less prestigious institutions has become qualitatively different from that in other fields. one faculty described receiving a total of four applications from actual CS PhDs (not just top five) [0]. even at stanford, perhaps. i was astonished to see that a stanford junior is the listed instructor for EE 364A (a PhD level course in convex optimization, aka CS 334). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16482866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16482866

nopinsight 8y ago

Tenure-track faculty positions are hard to fill in this tech market no doubt. However, with multi-billion endowment at top schools, couldn't they pay competitively at least for part-time lecturers with PhD and some teaching experience, who might be working in the industry, to fill in requisite teaching needs? I guess if the above is adopted, there could be issues with part-time adjuncts getting higher hourly rate, by some measure, than tenure-track faculty. Thus, a market-based bonus which could fluctuate with market conditions of each field for tenured or tenure-track faculty members should be considered. Added: By hard-to-fill, I meant hard-to-fill to the qualification threshold of research universities implicitly referred to in the article.

magduf 8y ago
>However, with multi-billion endowment at top schools, couldn't they pay competitively at least for part-time lecturers with PhD and some teaching experience, who might be working in the industry, to fill in requisite teaching needs? No. That could result in CS people (esp. non-tenured ones) making more money than beginning business professors, and that simply cannot be tolerated. Instead, they need to just keep salaries for CS people low, and then whine to the press about how they can't fill all their CS positions. A lot of corporations do the same thing.
deong 8y ago
Tenure track positions are not at all hard to fill. There are 500 people applying for every one of them, and probably 350-400 of those people are completely qualified to do the job. But only ten of them are desirable, and a hundred other universities have those same ten people on the list. Paying market rate won't help, because they're not leaving positions unfilled because they can't make an attractive offer. They're leaving positions unfilled because they're unwilling to live in a world where not every team gets Lebron James. It's better to do without than to not get your first choice, so that's what they do. If they were willing to pay $800k to fill a seat with whoever they picked as that "market rate" lecturer, they could have just hired the same guy for $120k -- he applied for the job and you rejected him.

NPMaxwell 8y ago

Part of the story is new assistant professors in Business are paid an average of about $110K, while new assistant professors in CS are paid and average of under $90K. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/28/study-finds-continued-large-gaps-faculty-salaries-based-discipline https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/28/study-finds-c... The OP is based on this report: https://www.nap.edu/read/24926/chapter/1 https://www.nap.edu/read/24926/chapter/1, which is starting/pushing the conversation. They write: "RECOMMENDATION 2.1: Institutions experiencing a computer science enrollment surge should seriously consider an increase in resources to address the rising workload on faculty and staff in computer science and related departments, and the limitations arising from inadequate facilities." "RECOMMENDATION 2.3: Institutional leadership should engage directly with computer science departments or programs to develop appropriate faculty hiring and faculty size targets, and develop strategies to improve faculty retention. Increasing the number and enhancing the role of academic-rank teaching faculty should be given serious consideration." "RECOMMENDATION 2.4: Larger institutions—in particular, research universities—should reevaluate the organizational placement of the computer science department and other departmental units with a computational mission." Basically, "Give CS a better deal"

jeffreyrogers 8y ago
It's hard to fire someone or lower their salary when economic conditions change, so it makes sense for academia to be a bit conservative here. What happens if interest rates rise, VC funding goes down, and there are lots fewer tech jobs in the future? You're stuck with a bunch of high paid professors and low CS enrollment. There could be a structural change that from here on we'll need a larger number of CS professors, but I can see why the universities are being conservative.
- walshemj 8y ago
  I don't think "assistant professors" have tenure do they
  - mercutio2 8y ago
    True, but raising assistant professor’s salaries puts pressure on associate professor salaries, and they are tenured. Not to say the whole lot of them shouldn’t get raises; one thing missed in this discussion is that CS programs are counter-cyclical, when there’s a downturn in the tech industry and it’s hard to find a job, more candidates opt for getting a masters in CS instead of going into industry/finding a new job after a layoff.

michaelt 8y ago

It takes five years to mint a Ph.D in computer science, and schools such as Stanford need more faculty now. Looking at https://cs.stanford.edu/jobs https://cs.stanford.edu/jobs I see two job ads - both saying applications are no longer being accepted. I guess they must have solved their faculty problems since the article was written!

volkk 8y ago

is it possible for something like this to happen: a huge shortage continues, and the demand for CS goes up, so the salaries for CS professors goes up thus making this position enticing once more?

kd0amg 8y ago
That's basically how the market works, but how much that happens depends on the extent to which universities are actually willing to pay more for things they think/say they don't have enough of.

paultopia 8y ago

Possible solutions include a program that takes Ph.Ds in other disciplines and runs them through a yearlong course in computer science, which gives them a Master’s degree. That qualifies them to teach CS courses, Roberts explained, and sets them up in a department where the prospect for tenure is greater. “We need more of those,” he added. “Universities are in a bind. Market forces will not solve this problem.” This is interesting. Depending on admissions standards for that program, I could see a ton of people from other disciplines jumping at it. The issue, of course, is that people would have to have a strong background to be competent to teach any kind of CS in a year. And the people with that background probably aren't the people looking for a career change. Just thinking about myself for example---I'd probably be better qualified than most people with phds in another discipline for such a thing, since I'm moderately quantitative and semi-decent at coding, but I don't think I would be qualified to teach college-level CS on the basis of a year of transition education.

wellpast 8y ago

I would also say that the tech industry desperately needs a better understanding of what constitutes the professional practitioner skill set, and how to teach and measure it. Many or most of the individual contributing practitioners I've encountered in my varied career across companies big (Microsoft, Google) and small (startups early and mid-stage) consist of individual contributors who either fall up into management or otherwise happily and unwittingly peak out in their skill set. The typical "high-quality" Senior Engineer is "smart and get things done" (Junior) plus a little bit of experiential knowledge peppered in with cold hard years on the resume. But there's a craft and skill set to this work that takes (1) a very focussed (presently, self-) training effort and value system and (2) takes years to master, but where the payoff is enormous (i.e, where the 10x/Nx productivity gain is found.) That last statement is theory only inasmuch as it challenged by those that don't want to believe that they're far from (the, or their) peak; I know it to be true. As a hint to what that skill set is, it's fairly simple to talk about descriptively...the end result being building systems from composable, contract-based abstractions of course respecting and knowing the current available tools and how to wield them. The problem is able-to-describe and able-to-do are miles apart; it takes many, many years of conscious, directed effort to perfect the craft. The few people I encounter that have that ability had to care about it and muscle through it on their own. We need something closer to an organized pedagogy and training and measurement around this particular skillset to produce much more of it in the industry. The problem is that any given business rightly has no interest in the kind of long-term investment required. And, at large, academia for many reasons doesn't have the practitioner context/focus/awareness to deliver the skill set, either. There's a hole to fill here somewhere...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nopinsight 8y ago

As someone who could be interested in teaching part-time, how much is the workload (in hours per week) one needs to spend when teaching an undergrad/grad course? Would a good 4-year university accept an adjunct who holds a Master's degree from a top-10 CS program, but not a PhD, to teach an upper-level course (that does correspond to the person's area of specialty)? --- Added: Thank you for all the ideas and esp detailed explanation from tom_b. It sounds like more work than I can allocate time for in the near term. Perhaps in the future. I thought up an alternative: Join/organize meetups and occasionally give talks or participate in panel discussions about recent/latest research sounds like more fun and less work than teaching in a formal setting. (Posted here in case someone would like to make use of the idea.)

BeetleB 8y ago
>Would a good 4-year university accept an adjunct who holds a Master's degree from a top-10 CS program, but not a PhD, to teach an upper-level course (that does correspond to their area of specialty)? They may, but adjuncts are poorly paid, and often have fewer benefits, than faculty members. Many adjuncts often have no real guarantee they'll have a job the following semester/year. They are the first to get axed when there are budget problems. And frankly, having spent time in academia, they do have a significant ego problem. Adjuncts will be treated poorly by professors. Many lower level courses will have a "director" who is a professor, and he will usually treat the adjunct poorly. Rarely do adjuncts have freedom in what homework is assigned and what the syllabus will be.
- hiram112 8y ago
  > Many adjuncts often have no real guarantee they'll have a job the following semester/year. They are the first to get axed when there are budget problems. So pretty much like every job I've ever had in the private sector.
  - BeetleB 8y ago
    >So pretty much like every job I've ever had in the private sector. Yes, but with a lot higher pay, and often with better insurance, etc. And your work experience in industry has more weight. I don't know how employable a person is if their only experience is teaching. Just looked up two of them in a nearby university. 12 month salary is $75-80K. No stocks, bonuses, etc. Both have MS degrees. It is a decent salary if the job is not stressful, and you are in a dual income family. But job security is likely poorer than in industry.

RightMillennial 8y ago

So like the supposed STEM shortage? Is there really a lack of qualified candidates? Or is there simply a lack of applicants because the pay is too low or the requirements are too stringent?

QML 8y ago
I would place my bets on low-pay. For example, working at a Big Four would probably net you more than working as a professor at Berkeley [1]. [1] http://projects.dailycal.org/paychecker/departments/computer-science/ http://projects.dailycal.org/paychecker/departments/computer...
shoguning 8y ago
So much to unpack here. The STEM label itself is extremely misleading. There are opportunities in TE (technology and engineering) but not in SM (science and math -- well unless you get a PhD, but even then maybe not). So people hear STEM shortage and go major in chemistry or biology and then find out there are few and poorly paid jobs so they have to accept that or get an advanced degree. Some simplification here, and individual exceptions exist of course.
- RightMillennial 8y ago
  That's a fair point. I've always heard it in the context of "STEM", but I think it was more referring to the technology area (primarily programmers, etc.). And even then I want to say it was about companies wanting cheap developers or specialists. So there's only a shortage if you're unwilling to pay the common rates.

zerostar07 8y ago

I thought they were building AI for that