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I was secretary for IEEE 802.20. It is a volunteer position as is the chair position, but some evil company usually has the "independent" chair on its payroll

I was secretary for IEEE 802.20. It is a volunteer position as is the chair position, but some evil company usually has the "independent" chair on its payroll (I'm looking at you, QUALCOMM). There are no paid editors draft standards are written by committee or companies as are change proposals (I have standardized many) and the chair usually merges the changes, for free. The only people paid at conferences are the registration people.

throwawayjava 7y ago
Wow, I didn't realize the standards stuff is also done by volunteers. > The only people paid at conferences are the registration people. ...if by paid you mean "free labor from local organizers and their students, plus some $1K-$3K travel awards for a PhD student in exchange for 20 hours of front desk registration, with maybe one association employee overseeing everything". TBF, the travel awards are actually a pretty reasonable rate (avg $2K for 1/2 week of labor) if you close your eyes and ignore that: 1. CS PhD students are under-paid by a factor of 10x 2. CS PhD students are probably the only tech workers who are expected to raise funds on their own for work-related travel multiple times per year 3. these organizations double-dip. They are essentially paying a bit over market rate for labor required to run their conference registration desks while claiming that this relatively small amount of $$$ gives them some moral justification for price-gouging everything else (see: any ACM/IEEE statement about open access policy, which inevitably mentioned sponsoring student travel...) 4. ...and then still lean on conference organizers to find corporate sponsors to supplement those travel awards. 5. and those same students do a ton of other free labor in the form of writing and reviewing papers. And so on. Basically, any time I think "oh yeah, ACM/IEEE do that thing I didn't think about. Well, those people must be paid / must be receiving honest-to-goodness grants", it turns out: nope! All the work is done by volunteers, and any "grants" come with labor requirements. TBF, none of that is totally unreasonable until you realize how much money these orgs are raking in. Where the hell does it all go!?
earthboundkid 7y ago
In the humanities, this is how all the journals work: professors and grad students do all the writing and editing for free for the reputation it gives them, then some asshole company charges $30 for a 5 page PDF from 1989.

throwawayjava 7y ago

Wow, I didn't realize the standards stuff is also done by volunteers. > The only people paid at conferences are the registration people. ...if by paid you mean "free labor from local organizers and their students, plus some $1K-$3K travel awards for a PhD student in exchange for 20 hours of front desk registration, with maybe one association employee overseeing everything". TBF, the travel awards are actually a pretty reasonable rate (avg $2K for 1/2 week of labor) if you close your eyes and ignore that: 1. CS PhD students are under-paid by a factor of 10x 2. CS PhD students are probably the only tech workers who are expected to raise funds on their own for work-related travel multiple times per year 3. these organizations double-dip. They are essentially paying a bit over market rate for labor required to run their conference registration desks while claiming that this relatively small amount of $$$ gives them some moral justification for price-gouging everything else (see: any ACM/IEEE statement about open access policy, which inevitably mentioned sponsoring student travel...) 4. ...and then still lean on conference organizers to find corporate sponsors to supplement those travel awards. 5. and those same students do a ton of other free labor in the form of writing and reviewing papers. And so on. Basically, any time I think "oh yeah, ACM/IEEE do that thing I didn't think about. Well, those people must be paid / must be receiving honest-to-goodness grants", it turns out: nope! All the work is done by volunteers, and any "grants" come with labor requirements. TBF, none of that is totally unreasonable until you realize how much money these orgs are raking in. Where the hell does it all go!?

earthboundkid 7y ago

In the humanities, this is how all the journals work: professors and grad students do all the writing and editing for free for the reputation it gives them, then some asshole company charges $30 for a 5 page PDF from 1989.