6 ms·

Why Do They Hate Us?

37 points by jedwhite 16y ago

jedwhite 16y ago
I majored in Computer Science and English at school. I don't tell people about the English part so much. But I would argue that Language and Literature has been every bit as valuable to being a good programmer in a media age as Properties of Algorithms. That's a micro-symptom of the issue that's well expressed in this article.
- grinich 16y ago
  Chris Wanstrath, co-founder and CEO of GitHub, was also an English major.
  - kingkilr 16y ago
    If you look at the Django core developers almost none are CS degrees, on the other hand Journalism, English, and Philosophy are all represented. I'm a CS student, however I don't care about my CS courses really, if you're passionate about programming (and some CS concepts) it's not terribly difficult to go far on your own, OTOH in life you rarely get the opportunity to study things like ethics, bioethics, or War in Afghanistan in an environment that seeks to further debate, discussion, and analysis.
- baddox 16y ago
  I find that hard to believe. What from your Language and Literature studies have been valuable to you as a programmer?
  - kemayo 16y ago
    The ability to communicate well, especially in writing, is important unless all you ever do as a programmer is work alone, never interacting with others or contributing to them. You'll use writing skills to communicate your ideas to your peers and management, and to document your code coherently. An English degree will do more to teach you about communication than a Comp. Sci. degree. Unless you go on to graduate-level work, in which case you'll probably learn the art of writing completely incomprehensible literary criticism. (e.g. How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html )
    - billswift 16y ago
      Anything that requires a lot of writing would probably do that - you would likely have been as well off taking history. Writing is a skill - the best way to improve your writing is to write, a lot, and hopefully have it criticized by competent writers.
    - philwelch 16y ago
      You can learn to write well without learning it in school, though, and you can learn to write well in school without studying English. Getting into arguments on the internet, for instance, is a usable way to improve your writing ability. If you don't get your points across clearly, people will misunderstand you and flame you, which is both more immediate and more incentivizing than writing class papers and having them graded. Then you learn to anticipate how people will respond to how you write things and how to get your points across better. But even in school, if you take something you're interested in that requires a lot of writing, like philosophy or history, then you get practice writing about something you care about, often in a certain style which is useful later. History, supposedly, is great for learning how to pull together different facts into a coherent picture while philosophy, in my experience, is good for learning how to write about tricky subjects clearly and logically. If you enjoy writing about whatever people in English classes are assigned to write about, it may be worthwhile. Your school was probably better than mine--I've known more than one English major who was a terrible writer.
      - kemayo 16y ago
        I entirely agree with you. Going to school is far from the only way to learn about a subject, especially if you're just doing it because you feel that it's what you should be doing. If you're just putting in the hours because you think you need it to get a job, you're probably not going to get much benefit. Ideally this would result in you not getting the degree... but that's apparently an unpopular position. Ultimately it comes down to practice. A humanities degree at a decent-ish college should force you to get that practice at communicating in English in order to graduate. Conversely, a science degree should force you to learn a lot about how to communicate in the specialist terminology of your discipline. But going out and spending four years starting a business would probably be at least as good as both of these, if you're motivated.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
Another reason why they might hate you: ...see parts one and two of my column "On Stupidity"... ...professors were worthy of some respect: We were gatekeepers, and we could help you.
- jbooth 16y ago
  That's some pretty impressive use of ellipsis there.
Xipe 16y ago
He should of teached people to write at least if he'll call himself a "professor". LOL
rflrob 16y ago
"Moreover, it takes, on average, about 20 years for professors to attain tenure" I'd be curious to see the source of that statistic, and what exactly it's including. For instance, is the PhD process part of those 20 years, as well as postdocs? Also, is there a difference for the sciences vs the humanities?
- ams6110 16y ago
  I'd guess they are starting the clock at high school graduation.
- stevenbedrick 16y ago
  I don't have the stats, but anecdotally I can report that that time emphatically does not include the PhD process, and almost certainly doesn't include post-doc time. There is probably a big difference between the sciences and the humanities here- my guess is that it's longer for humanities than sciences, but I could easily be wrong about that.
  - jayp 16y ago
    I do. At many/most well-known US research universities, a tenure-track position in Engineering (and possibly, Sciences too) is up for evaluation after six years from start of hire. The exact term may vary from institute to institute, but is six for most of the top universities. At that point, they either give you promotion (i.e., tenure) or a one-year notice (i.e., fire you). Note that this is not "full" tenure, this is technically a promotion from Assistant to Associate Professor. However, it is still tenure, and you can keep the job for life. It doesn't have the prestige of a full tenure. Full tenure is likely to follow, if you keep similar pace, in 3-5 more years. In summary, tenure can be had in as little as 6 years after completing PhD for professors in Engineering. But, those are probably the 6 hardest working years of their life. Makes the PhD almost feel like a cakewalk.
    - crystalis 16y ago
      To generalize from a few anecdotes, the Humanities professors that "do" something can get their Association card in as little as 5 years. (e.g., notable book, visible research, department responsibilities...)
dnewcome 16y ago
Alas, if anything I ever wrote commanded criticism akin to that in comment #59 by voralex I think I could die happy.
julius_geezer 16y ago
"So "hate" is not too strong a word, I think, for how nonacademics feel about us." Only in the sense that "hate" is not too strong a word for how New Englanders feel about the New York Yankees: the hate is valid for the duration of conversation over beers or one call to the sports talk station. I think about "professors", oh, five minutes a month if I'm preoccupied with higher education.
artsrc 16y ago
> courses must be prepared Why does every professor/university need to prepare their own courses?
- scott_s 16y ago
  You can change it to "courses must be prepared for" and it's still true. Even teaching a course that you know the material for backwards and forwards takes time to prep for - if you want to teach it well.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Good question. The short and unsatisfactory answer is because "that's the way it's done", and any professor who decided to copy someone else's course would face heavy criticism, and neither the students nor the department would feel like they'd be getting their money's worth. The system could work a different way, but it doesn't, and you can't really get there from here.
- Lewisham 16y ago
  One could view this as a by-product of the research university vs the teaching university. A research university is supposed to be a place where experts at the bleeding-edge of their fields congregate. That expertise is expected to trickle down to their undergraduate teaching, and so the argument goes that only they are qualified enough to prepare those courses. I think this is all largely unwritten and largely unsaid, but undergraduates would be pretty unimpressed if they were getting standardized lectures. A teaching university isn't bound by that sort of expectation, so one could imagine that courses can be more homogenous without penalty. Lots of textbooks provide "sample" slides to use, and if you're teaching out the textbook anyway, you may as well use the slides you're given. Having had no experience at a teaching university, I can't make any claim as to whether this happens with any regularity.
- sophacles 16y ago
  Many universities do their own course prep for 2 separate reasons. 1. Schools recruit by bragging about famous/accomplished graduates -- all taught by the $UNIVERSITY_NAME method. 2. Many schools research teaching methods, and therefore new things and materials are actually part of some experiment. There is actually a 3rd, sort of meta-reason. In academics it is considered "incestuous" for students to undergrad->phd->position at the same university. They like to send people around various places as a way of spreading ideas. This mostly plays out in graduate levels, but that same thinking applies to "different schools teach different ways". A final thought -- just like it is good to have multiple varieties of plants in fields, multiple brands of networking gear in a security conscious network, and so on, perhaps multiple teaching methods are good too, as a way of innocculating against "bad thinking".
drblast 16y ago
I like writing programming languages. No, I love writing programming languages. However, I don't expect that people would ever pay me to do it because there are so many people passionate about it that it gets done for free. I believe I would feel the same way if my passion were English literature. The barrier to entry is so low that if that's your thing, after some initial training you can accomplish whatever it is you want to do absent the assistance of a highly-paid professor. I don't understand why you would eschew the monetary value of something in one breath and then complain with the next that nobody is willing to pay you to teach it. If you're that passionate about it, screw the money and do it anyway. Either that or what you have is a hobby, not a profession. Or maybe I'm wrong and society is lacking that final breakthrough deconstruction of Proust before we all happily move forward toward enlightenment. But I doubt it.
- sophacles 16y ago
  So you write programming languages as an aside from your job of negotiating deliveries of livestock feed? Or are you maybe actually getting paid for your programming language work in the form of useful contacts, better reputation, better experience, and so on which increase your salary? I'd place money on the later -- so you don't do it for free, you just don't do it for direct money. I doubt you would write programming languages nearly as intensely if you were the aforementioned negotiator. The reward would be less and you would instead be going for drinks with clients and otherwise networking, it is a hobby people like that also ends up in professional payout...
  - drblast 16y ago
    It's closer to the former. My job is managerial and has nothing to do with writing code. There is not a single person at my office who knows, or cares, about my hobby.
- derefr 16y ago
  Something struck me about this statement: > Or maybe I'm wrong and society is lacking that final breakthrough deconstruction of Proust before we all happily move forward toward enlightenment. We already do have a group of people in our society who believe something similar: priests. They've survived quite a long while as a group without needing to be paid for any actions that directly benefit the people paying them; churchgoers just keep them alive and fed through donations, from a moral sense of obligation to the church itself. Perhaps, then, the readers of quality English literature need to form a religion (or, at least, a cult) around it, and pay tithes to the professors? Heck, that could probably also pay to get the literature itself written in a much more sensible way than publishing houses manage... ;)
tlb 16y ago
His argument conflates all kinds of professors. Public opinion isn't nearly so negative about medical research faculty, because they make an obvious contribution to society. It's less obvious how professors of literature contribute, or what would go wrong with the world if the government stopped funding them.
- cma 16y ago
  http://i.imgur.com/qhf9C.jpg http://i.imgur.com/qhf9C.jpg
philwelch 16y ago
It's arrogant how he confuses anti-intellectualism with anti-academicisim. It's dishonest to ignore somewhat sharper criticisms (is it really a worthwhile intellectual pursuit deserving of public funds to write up even more analyses of Walt Whitman?) and brand your opponents as anti-intellectual. He also characterizes this article (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-All-Faculty-Members-Real/25897 http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-All-Faculty-Members-Real/25...), "Do All Faculty Members Really Need Private Offices", as "anti-faculty", though my reading of the article doesn't lend itself well to this interpretation. (Let's take as given the obvious joke here.) Even on the surface level of treating private offices as symbols of prestige and status, it's rather disingenuous to claim one's profession is under attack by the mere suggestion of abandoning their private offices when many if not most white collar workers don't have private offices in the first place.
c1sc0 16y ago
Has our society become so utilitarian that we can't even spare the change for paying a few people to work on things that previous generations have considered worthy of pursuit? (a.k.a. The Arts) Sure, producing more widget workers for the foobar factory sounds good at first, but won't we all end up in wage slavery like this? I am a great supporter of 'useless' cultural pursuits, if only because that is what makes us human. Without culture, we're no more than monkeys with tools.

37 points by jedwhite 16y ago

I majored in Computer Science and English at school. I don't tell people about the English part so much. But I would argue that Language and Literature has been every bit as valuable to being a good programmer in a media age as Properties of Algorithms. That's a micro-symptom of the issue that's well expressed in this article.

grinich 16y ago
Chris Wanstrath, co-founder and CEO of GitHub, was also an English major.
- kingkilr 16y ago
  If you look at the Django core developers almost none are CS degrees, on the other hand Journalism, English, and Philosophy are all represented. I'm a CS student, however I don't care about my CS courses really, if you're passionate about programming (and some CS concepts) it's not terribly difficult to go far on your own, OTOH in life you rarely get the opportunity to study things like ethics, bioethics, or War in Afghanistan in an environment that seeks to further debate, discussion, and analysis.
baddox 16y ago
I find that hard to believe. What from your Language and Literature studies have been valuable to you as a programmer?
- kemayo 16y ago
  The ability to communicate well, especially in writing, is important unless all you ever do as a programmer is work alone, never interacting with others or contributing to them. You'll use writing skills to communicate your ideas to your peers and management, and to document your code coherently. An English degree will do more to teach you about communication than a Comp. Sci. degree. Unless you go on to graduate-level work, in which case you'll probably learn the art of writing completely incomprehensible literary criticism. (e.g. How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html )
  - billswift 16y ago
    Anything that requires a lot of writing would probably do that - you would likely have been as well off taking history. Writing is a skill - the best way to improve your writing is to write, a lot, and hopefully have it criticized by competent writers.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    You can learn to write well without learning it in school, though, and you can learn to write well in school without studying English. Getting into arguments on the internet, for instance, is a usable way to improve your writing ability. If you don't get your points across clearly, people will misunderstand you and flame you, which is both more immediate and more incentivizing than writing class papers and having them graded. Then you learn to anticipate how people will respond to how you write things and how to get your points across better. But even in school, if you take something you're interested in that requires a lot of writing, like philosophy or history, then you get practice writing about something you care about, often in a certain style which is useful later. History, supposedly, is great for learning how to pull together different facts into a coherent picture while philosophy, in my experience, is good for learning how to write about tricky subjects clearly and logically. If you enjoy writing about whatever people in English classes are assigned to write about, it may be worthwhile. Your school was probably better than mine--I've known more than one English major who was a terrible writer.
    - kemayo 16y ago
      I entirely agree with you. Going to school is far from the only way to learn about a subject, especially if you're just doing it because you feel that it's what you should be doing. If you're just putting in the hours because you think you need it to get a job, you're probably not going to get much benefit. Ideally this would result in you not getting the degree... but that's apparently an unpopular position. Ultimately it comes down to practice. A humanities degree at a decent-ish college should force you to get that practice at communicating in English in order to graduate. Conversely, a science degree should force you to learn a lot about how to communicate in the specialist terminology of your discipline. But going out and spending four years starting a business would probably be at least as good as both of these, if you're motivated.

yummyfajitas 16y ago

Another reason why they might hate you: ...see parts one and two of my column "On Stupidity"... ...professors were worthy of some respect: We were gatekeepers, and we could help you.

jbooth 16y ago
That's some pretty impressive use of ellipsis there.

Xipe 16y ago

He should of teached people to write at least if he'll call himself a "professor". LOL

rflrob 16y ago

"Moreover, it takes, on average, about 20 years for professors to attain tenure" I'd be curious to see the source of that statistic, and what exactly it's including. For instance, is the PhD process part of those 20 years, as well as postdocs? Also, is there a difference for the sciences vs the humanities?

ams6110 16y ago
I'd guess they are starting the clock at high school graduation.
stevenbedrick 16y ago
I don't have the stats, but anecdotally I can report that that time emphatically does not include the PhD process, and almost certainly doesn't include post-doc time. There is probably a big difference between the sciences and the humanities here- my guess is that it's longer for humanities than sciences, but I could easily be wrong about that.
- jayp 16y ago
  I do. At many/most well-known US research universities, a tenure-track position in Engineering (and possibly, Sciences too) is up for evaluation after six years from start of hire. The exact term may vary from institute to institute, but is six for most of the top universities. At that point, they either give you promotion (i.e., tenure) or a one-year notice (i.e., fire you). Note that this is not "full" tenure, this is technically a promotion from Assistant to Associate Professor. However, it is still tenure, and you can keep the job for life. It doesn't have the prestige of a full tenure. Full tenure is likely to follow, if you keep similar pace, in 3-5 more years. In summary, tenure can be had in as little as 6 years after completing PhD for professors in Engineering. But, those are probably the 6 hardest working years of their life. Makes the PhD almost feel like a cakewalk.
  - crystalis 16y ago
    To generalize from a few anecdotes, the Humanities professors that "do" something can get their Association card in as little as 5 years. (e.g., notable book, visible research, department responsibilities...)

dnewcome 16y ago

Alas, if anything I ever wrote commanded criticism akin to that in comment #59 by voralex I think I could die happy.

julius_geezer 16y ago

"So "hate" is not too strong a word, I think, for how nonacademics feel about us." Only in the sense that "hate" is not too strong a word for how New Englanders feel about the New York Yankees: the hate is valid for the duration of conversation over beers or one call to the sports talk station. I think about "professors", oh, five minutes a month if I'm preoccupied with higher education.

artsrc 16y ago

> courses must be prepared Why does every professor/university need to prepare their own courses?

scott_s 16y ago
You can change it to "courses must be prepared for" and it's still true. Even teaching a course that you know the material for backwards and forwards takes time to prep for - if you want to teach it well.
hugh3 16y ago
Good question. The short and unsatisfactory answer is because "that's the way it's done", and any professor who decided to copy someone else's course would face heavy criticism, and neither the students nor the department would feel like they'd be getting their money's worth. The system could work a different way, but it doesn't, and you can't really get there from here.
Lewisham 16y ago
One could view this as a by-product of the research university vs the teaching university. A research university is supposed to be a place where experts at the bleeding-edge of their fields congregate. That expertise is expected to trickle down to their undergraduate teaching, and so the argument goes that only they are qualified enough to prepare those courses. I think this is all largely unwritten and largely unsaid, but undergraduates would be pretty unimpressed if they were getting standardized lectures. A teaching university isn't bound by that sort of expectation, so one could imagine that courses can be more homogenous without penalty. Lots of textbooks provide "sample" slides to use, and if you're teaching out the textbook anyway, you may as well use the slides you're given. Having had no experience at a teaching university, I can't make any claim as to whether this happens with any regularity.
sophacles 16y ago
Many universities do their own course prep for 2 separate reasons. 1. Schools recruit by bragging about famous/accomplished graduates -- all taught by the $UNIVERSITY_NAME method. 2. Many schools research teaching methods, and therefore new things and materials are actually part of some experiment. There is actually a 3rd, sort of meta-reason. In academics it is considered "incestuous" for students to undergrad->phd->position at the same university. They like to send people around various places as a way of spreading ideas. This mostly plays out in graduate levels, but that same thinking applies to "different schools teach different ways". A final thought -- just like it is good to have multiple varieties of plants in fields, multiple brands of networking gear in a security conscious network, and so on, perhaps multiple teaching methods are good too, as a way of innocculating against "bad thinking".

drblast 16y ago

I like writing programming languages. No, I love writing programming languages. However, I don't expect that people would ever pay me to do it because there are so many people passionate about it that it gets done for free. I believe I would feel the same way if my passion were English literature. The barrier to entry is so low that if that's your thing, after some initial training you can accomplish whatever it is you want to do absent the assistance of a highly-paid professor. I don't understand why you would eschew the monetary value of something in one breath and then complain with the next that nobody is willing to pay you to teach it. If you're that passionate about it, screw the money and do it anyway. Either that or what you have is a hobby, not a profession. Or maybe I'm wrong and society is lacking that final breakthrough deconstruction of Proust before we all happily move forward toward enlightenment. But I doubt it.

sophacles 16y ago
So you write programming languages as an aside from your job of negotiating deliveries of livestock feed? Or are you maybe actually getting paid for your programming language work in the form of useful contacts, better reputation, better experience, and so on which increase your salary? I'd place money on the later -- so you don't do it for free, you just don't do it for direct money. I doubt you would write programming languages nearly as intensely if you were the aforementioned negotiator. The reward would be less and you would instead be going for drinks with clients and otherwise networking, it is a hobby people like that also ends up in professional payout...
- drblast 16y ago
  It's closer to the former. My job is managerial and has nothing to do with writing code. There is not a single person at my office who knows, or cares, about my hobby.
derefr 16y ago
Something struck me about this statement: > Or maybe I'm wrong and society is lacking that final breakthrough deconstruction of Proust before we all happily move forward toward enlightenment. We already do have a group of people in our society who believe something similar: priests. They've survived quite a long while as a group without needing to be paid for any actions that directly benefit the people paying them; churchgoers just keep them alive and fed through donations, from a moral sense of obligation to the church itself. Perhaps, then, the readers of quality English literature need to form a religion (or, at least, a cult) around it, and pay tithes to the professors? Heck, that could probably also pay to get the literature itself written in a much more sensible way than publishing houses manage... ;)

tlb 16y ago

His argument conflates all kinds of professors. Public opinion isn't nearly so negative about medical research faculty, because they make an obvious contribution to society. It's less obvious how professors of literature contribute, or what would go wrong with the world if the government stopped funding them.

cma 16y ago
http://i.imgur.com/qhf9C.jpg http://i.imgur.com/qhf9C.jpg

philwelch 16y ago

It's arrogant how he confuses anti-intellectualism with anti-academicisim. It's dishonest to ignore somewhat sharper criticisms (is it really a worthwhile intellectual pursuit deserving of public funds to write up even more analyses of Walt Whitman?) and brand your opponents as anti-intellectual. He also characterizes this article (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-All-Faculty-Members-Real/25897 http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-All-Faculty-Members-Real/25...), "Do All Faculty Members Really Need Private Offices", as "anti-faculty", though my reading of the article doesn't lend itself well to this interpretation. (Let's take as given the obvious joke here.) Even on the surface level of treating private offices as symbols of prestige and status, it's rather disingenuous to claim one's profession is under attack by the mere suggestion of abandoning their private offices when many if not most white collar workers don't have private offices in the first place.

c1sc0 16y ago

Has our society become so utilitarian that we can't even spare the change for paying a few people to work on things that previous generations have considered worthy of pursuit? (a.k.a. The Arts) Sure, producing more widget workers for the foobar factory sounds good at first, but won't we all end up in wage slavery like this? I am a great supporter of 'useless' cultural pursuits, if only because that is what makes us human. Without culture, we're no more than monkeys with tools.