28 ms·

Why I left my tenured academic job

385 points by adamnemecek 6y ago

BooneJS 6y ago
How does “publish or perish” relate to “my job at a public company evaluates my performance every 6 to 12 months?”
- kryptiskt 6y ago
  The stack ranking is turned upside-down in academia. Only a small sliver at the top will make it to a secure position.
  - tchalla 6y ago
    "How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang" https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/ho...
- klyrs 6y ago
  Original research is much riskier than a job at your typical public company. Or, it should be. "Publish or perish" encourages breaking research into "minimal publishable units" which produces gobs of churn for everybody involved. I've known a few professors that publish paper after paper with similar results and similar methods. I suspect each of having a much deeper theorem, either under their hat, or (more generously) at the tip of their tongue. If they'd take a bit of a break from the churn and focus on the deeper theorem, their actual impact on the field would be significantly more value. We'd all get to read, write, or review, a small handful of papers instead of dozens.
  - BooneJS 6y ago
    That makes sense. I suppose it’s easier to blend in on a team then the lead name with a team of students behind you.
  - vkou 6y ago
    > Original research is much riskier than a job at your typical public company. The typical job at the typical public company is also a lot less innovative than original research. I have a feeling that the author will discover that the grass is always greener on the other side. The private sector has no shortage of authoritarian big-men[1], dumb vanity-driven projects, asinine performance review metrics, PHDs doing the equivalent of licking envelope stamps, and your work being thrown out in the dumpster (With no ability to share it with the outside world, because trade secrets), because someone in upper management lost a political battle, and your division has been canned, or re-purposed. [1] Of either gender.
- branweb 6y ago
  Both require evaluation against some standard of good performance. I guess the difference is the definition of "good performance." If it's a function of # of papers published, and you don't care about publishing papers for the sake of publishing papers, I can see see why someone would want to jump ship.
- throw9872349872 6y ago
  It’s not just top-down pressure but bottom-up too. Your students, undergrads, grads, postdocs are also incentivized to publish as much as possible for their own careers. So you are supporting them.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  The expectation for a performance review is that, well, there's some attempt to look at the actual performance and evaluate it. For example, imagine that the job at the public company would "evaluate" the performance every 12 months by solely counting the number of projects launched. So if you're doing great in a 18-month project, your score is 0 (since it's not launched yet), and if you've been part of launching 3 small projects, then your score is 3, no matter how irrelevant or poor quality the projects were.
azhenley 6y ago
These same thoughts often cross my mind. But the grass is always greener on the other side. I do really love how unstructured being a prof is though.
alextheparrot 6y ago
I’m glad this was posted. I’m writing my personal statement for applying to PhD programs right now, after spending a few years in big tech and both the concerns as well as the benefits resonate with how I’ve modeled my expectations. I think I’ll end up in a similar place - hyper-focusing as a graduate student and then transitioning out of academia after. One understated part of academia is that for a lot of fields (Such as the bio-adjacent fields I’m interested in), academia is one of the few places willing to take on trainee risk. I hope we can keep academia as a place where we’re willing to take risks to educate, which I think starts with reforming the processes informed by the critiques this post levies. One thing I would advocate for is forcing pre-registration of experiments. Publishing a design for experiments with an intent, a hypothesis, and a afterwards a quick summary of the results. That process for FDA trials has naturally led to a large buildup of both positive and negative results, while also inhibiting post-hoc statistical baboonery.
- sgillen 6y ago
  I’m for pre registration for some fields with big large experiments.For other fields (robotics is what I have in mind),I think the experiments can be so rapid that pre registration would be a real hassle and slow down progress.
  - alextheparrot 6y ago
    This seems to be a separable point, though. The issue here is not the act of pre-registration, but the friction it imposes. I know most of the experiments and research I have done could have been summarized at the time in 10 minutes - to the effect of "I will manipulate variable X over time ranges Y, this is supported by <source or professional explanation> and I expect Z", or even "We performed a gradient over variables X and Y expecting to modulate Z and looked for phenotypes not previously described for further characterization". My experience in research is that there is very little pre-commitment on this level of granularity. Grant applications should be at the level of "We hope to study X because it is known to be correlated with Y and are hoping to elucidate a mechanistic relationship between these two". The experiments which go into proving such should more closely resemble mathematical proofs, is a viewpoint I currently hold.
crazygringo 6y ago
> Instead of just writing papers for our "real" target audience (the community), we go all-in with "defensive writing" and we start iper-optimizing every single sentence to make sure it can't possibly be misunderstood even by the dumbest reader. Papers can't just be "clear" for a benign reader: they need to be bulletproof against capricious people who are ready to reject things for random reasons. Considering how many papers I read that still are easily misunderstood even by smart readers... I think "defensive writing" is better understood as "good writing". Of course papers are expected to be "bulletproof." It's called a standard of excellence. Peer review is supposed to be meaningful, not a rubber stamp. But the sneaky secret is, the bar isn't even that high. I read so many papers where I wonder why an obvious alternative interpretation isn't even mentioned, or an opposing viewpoint isn't cited, or where the author subtly misrepresents another author. ("Capricious people" are a separate subject, but they certainly exist just as much in industry as in academia...) The rest of the post aside, this particular bit of the "rant" just feels like a defense of lazy writing. An academic paper isn't just a blog post, and it shouldn't be.
- redelbee 6y ago
  I took this to be more about writing for the express purpose of being accepted (or not rejected) instead of a defense of lazy writing. When the outcome of the work can only be “accept” or “reject” it incentivizes writing from a defensive perspective rather than one that is more speculative or questioning.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  > Of course papers are expected to be "bulletproof." It's called a standard of excellence. And sometimes it's just having to add verbiage in anticipation of a lazy or uninformed reviewer, who is not necessarily the audience that you actually care about. The net result is that there is a lot of work and fluff that interested readers often have to put up with that exists solely to get the paper through review and serves little other purpose. > The rest of the post aside, this particular bit of the "rant" just feels like a defense of lazy writing. An academic paper isn't just a blog post, and it shouldn't be. If your point here is that blog posts are "lazy writing", then I assure you I have read many blog posts that are much more thorough, well-researched, and worked-over than academic papers. I do agree with you that the two are separate things, but blog posts have a number of desirable qualities that academic papers have difficulty optimizing for–either because they are not prioritized, or because they would actively hurt the chances of acceptance.
supernova87a 6y ago
I think he's a little too focused on the paper-publishing aspect, but that may be just his specific corner of the world, and his experience. It might have been that in his sub-field, that seemed to be the main way to make impact. I think the point is, if you want to be successful in academia, you need to be producing something theoretical or practical that others can consume and find useful. The medium need not be papers. It could be: -- standards -- methodologies -- prototypes -- libraries of code, manuals of protocols even more practical things: -- convening people on a topic with authority -- writing popular works to publicize the field -- building a scientific facility -- even TV shows or blog posts You will find professors at universities who do a whole variety of these kinds of things, not just publish research papers. (and as they get more senior, they often find more interesting outlets for their work, if they're innovative) But you have to make something that others (in the scientific or industrial or popular community) can consume. All the paper counts in the world will not help, or make you satisfied, if they're just churned out for the goal of increasing your H-index but don't actually contain something wanted by others. It usually doesn't work as an approach. If you can't do any of these, then you are probably better off taking a normal job. The incentives of academia will not align with your talents. Personally, for example, I found that the things I was good at publishing or sharing with others wasn't groundbreaking novel research. So I went where that was valued, and have been happier since.
- CannoloBlahnik 6y ago
  Are you in academia? Papers are the standard metric of success for tenure in science. At research universities, it's most of the basis for tenure.
  - Balgair 6y ago
    It depends on the field, but yes. Many optics researchers really only do presentations and they 'count' as paper publications. The pressure is still intense though.
    - CannoloBlahnik 6y ago
_where 6y ago
The ugly at universities is much worse than what was posted. Athletes getting easy courses. People in power positions typically don’t deserve it but think they do. So, there are ridiculous projects, bias, and people getting paid in “non-standard” ways. Backroom deals with private industry and government. Things that would make no one want to go there. Universities should work more with private industry like they used to many years ago, government money should be poured into research more openly, and tuition needs to rise, then they can hire the best from private industry that are also excellent teachers or researchers. To do that, administrations and staff will need to be gutted.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Do note that the author is living in Europe.
  - izacus 6y ago
    I've been part of European academia and amount of corruption I've seen there is just staggering and way beyond most of private sector firms. I'm happy that the author of the blog article ended up in one of the organizations where politics, horse trading, faking of research results for grant audits and outright bribery isn't endemic.
- ivalm 6y ago
  I think your post comes from a non-academic viewpoint. A research prof’s concerns are about research, their scientific progeny (phd students and postdocs) and pressures to succeed in the related publish or perish/grant writing games. In this context the blog makes perfect sense and I agree with it. However, you write: >Athletes getting easy courses A prof doesn’t care about athletic admissions (those are undergrads anyways?). >there are ridiculous projects, bias, and people getting paid in “non-standard” ways. I am not sure what you mean about “ridiculous projects”? The university generally doesn’t control or fund a PI. Funding is nearly always external (in the US). >Backroom deals with private industry and government. I am not exactly sure whose research or publications this affects but I bet the number is tiny. This is not a concern I’ve actually ever seen play out in real life (again, I am sure you can find news where it happened, but it just doesn’t reflect the lived life of most PIs). >Universities should work more with private industry like they used to many years ago, government money should be poured into research more openly, I mean, I don’t think PIs are against working with industry, but industry usually wants IP, doesn’t want to publish, and wants RoI. The government funding process is already pretty open (at least NSF/NIH) but of course can be improved. >tuition needs to rise, then they can hire the best from private industry that are also excellent teachers or researchers. Most PIs are funded effectively from research grant overhead. Tuition is usually a smaller budget line. Increasing tuition will both not overall increase budget by much and add hardship to students. I do agree that more gov funding would be nice. >To do that, administrations and staff will need to be gutted I don’t think this follows from your previous statements but I do agree there is an explosion in administrative overhead that should be curtailed.
cbanek 6y ago
As someone who came from industry and now works with mostly academics at a scientific non-profit, I feel this. Especially the parts about publishing - there are so many people who are so obsessed by publishing, and most honestly don't have anything useful to say at all. I swear most of these papers aren't even read, even if they are cited. There are whole layers of publication politics that force people to cite work that is almost completely unrelated, if not unrelated and saying so, just to inflate citation counts. It's basically a follow-for-follow system. Same for author lists. Also totally agree that the papers are written for these referees, instead of the people reading them (which many times I think is not any). Many of these papers are also written in order to give presentations or talks at conferences where papers are expected, since it is publishing and not speaking that gives you a line on your CV. Also how tenure doesn't save you, I feel this is the same as in tech, where they won't fire you but they will try to manage you out or make life so unpalatable that you will just leave.
- foobarian 6y ago
  The comment about papers not being read resonated with me. At one point I published a paper at a large IEEE conference where the only audience in the session were the other paper presenters. And it was clear nobody wanted to be there. I didn't last long in that line of work after that :-)
  - jseliger 6y ago
    In the humanities, it's even worse. Academia is stuck in this negative equilibrium, and even though many individuals recognize this, few or no institutions have managed to get out of it. Tenure and publish-or-perish are both big problems. Publish-or-perish also wasn't the norm in most schools until relatively recently; today, so many schools want to be "research" schools, even when they have relatively little business doing so. https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-opportunity-costs/ https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo...
    - someguydave 6y ago
MrXOR 6y ago
I am a master's student, I think many times about academia vs industry for "research". Academia has a great advantage over industry: freedom, never dismiss it.
- BrandonM 6y ago
  Care to share some concrete examples of how academia is more free and how you expect that to make your daily life better overall? The author touched on that point a bit, especially when he described that tenure wasn’t as freeing as he expected. From his writing, he didn’t seem especially free to me.
  - MrXOR 6y ago
    I read his useful blog post. I think he will not find more freedom in Cisco Talos, but I hope he find!
    - BrandonM 6y ago
      I commented because I think academics may underestimate how much freedom there can be in industry. My experience has been that after establishing a baseline of trust (by delivering on goals, making good technical decisions, behaving honestly and ethically, etc.), my company and manager are happy to give me a lot of latitude to choose what I work on. Being one of our founding engineers, I have several times identified a need and implemented a solution without "seeking permission" first. When I do want more formal company backing to pursue a project, a conversation with my manager or an email or a one-page Google Doc all sound easier than writing and submitting a grant proposal. As our company has grown, I have seen my role change, and I have collaborated with my manager to determine a new direction and title for myself. Notably, I tried management for a while, and I ultimately decided to return to an individual contributor role (no direct reports). It didn't sound like Dr. Fratantonio had the option to stop mentoring other PhD candidates. Freedom is not exclusive to founding engineers. Our company has a prioritized list of features available for development, and devs have a big role in choosing the next feature they work on, even when it's not a current area of expertise. Established engineers and new hires alike have a lot of latitude to pick technologies, architect a solution to a problem, implement a novel algorithm, etc. One relatively junior new hire is embarking on a project to rewrite much of our frontend code, with support from all of us. Again, that's why I commented. Depending on what type of freedom you're seeking, industry may offer it and pay better and have better working conditions to boot.
locallost 6y ago
Interesting read although I am not a part of this world. The thing that caught my attention was the part about many very dumb professors. How true can this be? I have met some that were not the best, and maybe because of it arrogant, but it sounds a bit too harsh or with the bar being set too high. The part about life being short and spending it on things we enjoy hit me hard because I feel the same way and can't hide it anymore. Yet, I can't really do that.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> Problem 3: We move away from (potentially) very cool stuff I have bad news about the private sector, pal...
- skosuri 6y ago
  Lol. Totally agreed.
signaru 6y ago
The things you enjoy at the early stages of academe are not the things you do as you stay longer. Academic promotion exhausts the older/wiser people with teaching/supervising/admin work instead of using their accumulated knowledge to create new things. Of course, some students might be less naive and are actually aiming for positions per se. But I was one of those types who just wants to solve technical problems and get technical work done.
- jasperry 6y ago
  I am also one of those techy types and beginning to realize this. It was hard for me to understand why so many of my peer academics /want/ to get promoted into administrative positions. But maybe they just realized they were already doing a full-time administrative job, just with a teaching load on top of it. If you do stay involved in research, you spend more time hassling over a grant proposal that's a 1-in-10 shot than you would actually doing the technical work if you won the grant.
- BadassFractal 6y ago
  That seems true of many jobs, like programming. Become good enough and eventually you get promoted to manager, director, VP, C-level. You might have loved the joy of programming and making something yourself at some point, but sooner or later most career-successful programmers will become administrators or operators.
anticristi 6y ago
Nice write-up! I would like to insist more on the false "industry vs. academia" dichotomy, that was mentioned at the end of the post. I was asked the same question at the end of my PhD: "Do you want a one-way ticket to academia, or a one-way ticket to industry?" After 8 years of back-and-forth, I settled on both. I think this should be the norm. Professors should take a break from paper writing to work on a startup and/or be in industrial board meetings to know what to research next. I have so many friends that kept a foot in both industry and academia. I find the model very valuable.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > I settled on both. I think this should be the norm. As I understand it, law and medicine are run this way.
  - anticristi 6y ago
    I think you are right! In Sweden, clinical work is excluded from academic age when applying for positions or grants in medicine. In CS, "that year in industry" counts as a big whole in your publication list.
- raziel2701 6y ago
  100% agree with you, students are fed the trap that only academia and industry are possible, no one talks about the entrepreneurial path which is the only one that offers the opportunity of making it big. And it's the only scenario where I feel it's justified working 60-80 hr weeks: you're building your company/product. It's a position with a risk/reward ratio that you can't find in academia or industry, and I think most of us here know that you learn a lot when you're free to deep dive into ideas you love.
dredmorbius 6y ago
See also: I’m leaving academia (3 months ago | 70 comments) https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/i-quit-be062295f638 https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/i-quit-be062295f638 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23642795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23642795) Why I Quit Academia (4 months ago | 15 comments) https://aardvark-lily-k2lz.squarespace.com/transcripts/archives/quit-academia https://aardvark-lily-k2lz.squarespace.com/transcripts/archi... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23560528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23560528)
n0on3 6y ago
I wish the best to the author and I hope he finds a great environment in Talos to do great things (afaict he probably will). However, and this is mostly for the sake of others reading this, be aware that the security industry has its own versions of the problems mentioned affecting the academic environment, and these versions are in most cases way worst than in academia. With the exclusion of some enlighten cases (which most often coincide with a good financial situation that allows for teams that do cool stuff without too-pressing metrics on the immediate business), in private companies literally everything is driven by money and to that one must add up that the incentives that the people part of the companies have (to this: in private companies the turnover is way higher than in academia). Some examples: - Papers that don't deserve to be written? wait for that endless stream of tasks that does not deserve to be done that way (but need to be done that way the same, because <reason-you-cannot-argue-against>). - Optimizing for the wrong things? wait for words like "cost-effective" to pop up. - Move away from very cool stuff? yeah, that does not happen because the cool stuff are not even on the table, unless they can bring in money fast. - Non peer-review things dismissed? wait for not-approved-by-manager-X or not-in-the-agenda-of-key-person-Y or subject-to-approval-of-Z-who-cannot-possibly-even-understand-the-value-of-that. - No time for tech stuff? sorry, that doesn't change much unless your job is highly operational (which you won't enjoy much because it will have to be "cost-effective", thus most likely repetitive and metrics-based). I'm not saying that every private company is a circle of hell in the security industry, but unfortunately most have far harder-to-deal-with problems than those listed for people looking for things like the author. Afaik, the common big difference is you get paid more and you see real-world cases as they happen. (edit: formatting)
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Most large companies have research divisions that do a variety of tasks which are not directly tied to short term money. The work varies from almost-pure to almost-applied but generally has different KPIs than product teams (patents for example). They're usually run closer to an academic institution in terms of structure and management. Granted there's generally some incentive to get other teams in the company to actually implement whatever you came up with.
  - 6y ago
GoodJokes 6y ago
College being free in the US would help a lot with this. Again, I blame capitalism.
sciencethrow123 6y ago
I can certainly feel some of the points the author makes. I am in a different field (astrophysics) and I have recently moved from the professor job in the US to UK. And one thing I particularly feel is a burn-out. After going through undergrad + PhD + getting tenure which all involved pretty much round-the-clock work, I just can't work 60 hours a week anymore. And somehow in academia, it often is required. Basically you have so much stuff that you must do that takes a large fraction of your 40h/week (telecons, students, lectures, seminars, refereeing, etc), so anything interesting -- actual science that you do yourself has to be done in the extra-time (i.e. weekends/evenings). I am currently hoping that in the UK I'll be at least a bit better placed than in the US, as the pressure to get grants is lower, and people are more mindful of the working hours, but I am still not 100% sure that I'll stay. (throwaway account)
75dvtwin 6y ago
And this is it. A reward system based on paper publishing and conference speeches is fundamentally broken. There are really no built-in checks and balances, unless commercial interests care for it to do a 'check', that benefit that commercial interest. Adding to that, a now well known, built-in corruption of student acceptance and grading, it is impressive that we get any forward movement at all in applied sciences. >".. . Now, in general, negative results may have value, and it may be worth sharing them. You could write a negative result paper (I think they are valuable). But wait, most conferences don't like those! Shit. So what do you do? You could write a blog post — as detailed as you want, no page limits, etc. you are the boss! — and move on with life with something better? But wait, blog posts "don't count" (more on this later). And in many environments, "no paper" == "I completely lost my time from the eyes of the public"... "
- phkahler 6y ago
  >> A reward system based on paper publishing and conference speeches is fundamentally broken. After reading that I'm wondering, what is the reward?
  - konjin 6y ago
    You aren't fired - sorry you can't get fired from a tenure job - you don't get paid peanuts to fund research.
  - skosuri 6y ago
    Post-tenure? Peer-recognition & Funding.
  - joshvm 6y ago
    From a computer vision perspective. If you get a paper into CVPR, or SIGGRAPH, or NeurIPS, it has the potential to make your career. It's that important to some employers (academic and not) and that's why everyone struggles to publish in those "top" venues. It's not like you won't have a career without a paper in these places (I really want to stress this), but it's enough of a boost to your reputation that everyone wants to. Think of it like getting a Nature or Science paper, or something in Phys Rev, or Cell. It's about prestige. The real issue is conferences taking the place of academic journals. In most fields conferences are laid back places to share your WIP. In CS, conferences require full papers which means many ML researchers (for example) structure their whole year around meeting the NeurIPS and ICML/ICLR deadlines. It's a bit broken because those conferences have limited capacity and it can be a lottery if you get in. Journals don't have the same restriction and don't have deadlines unless you're going for a special issue, so you can actually take the time to polish before submitting.
cozzyd 6y ago
Hmm, in experimental particle physics I don't feel like there is as much of a pressure to publish. Probably helps that most work is done as part of collaborations, so there are always papers coming out with your name on them even if you only write a couple a year. But you really have to love what you do, otherwise there's no point.
frozenport 6y ago
Students were a big reason I left. Why mentor and depend on children when you could instead lead a team of adults?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
annoyingnoob 6y ago
> Too many tasks, no time for tech stuff Its possible that this part will not change.
yurlungur 6y ago
Some very valid points. As a PhD student I had similar considerations and on top of that my biggest reason was that I did not want to go into a painful postdoc career only to start on the arduous path of obtaining tenure. That said, despite the limitations, academia is still by far the best place do research (on average). Especially as a professor, you really do enjoy freedoms that are rarely if ever found in other realms.
TaupeRanger 6y ago
I understand the motivation (or rather...demotivation) underlying this. But I'm wondering: is this becoming more common? And if so, what is it going to take to fix this warped incentive structure?
tinyhouse 6y ago
Industry doesn't follow the publish an perish but industry research labs also publish a lot of garbage for the sake of publishing. And there are a lot of BS incentives in the industry too.
lukevp 6y ago
This was a long read, but very enlightening. Thanks for posting. It really resonated with me, since I’m going through a similar period of self-reflection, and searching for the true meaning of life and what makes me happy. For the longest time, I have been telling myself why my job is good, but that “not right” feeling has never gone away. Since I’ve been remote due to COVID, my life has been remarkably better. I don’t work any less (perhaps more), but I am much happier. It is far more compatible with my lifestyle. I love being at home with my wife and my pets, I love being able to cook all my own food. Like the author, my physical and mental health have both improved; at the start of the pandemic, I could barely hang from a bar, and now I can do multiple pull-ups in a row. Same with squats, bench and everything else. I was never able to build a workout routine, but now I have. And I haven’t eaten any fast food or low quality food in this time, is all been homemade from scratch, and way more delicious and nutritious. I feel the same about my company and my team, I really have made friends there and have built a great career, but they have made it very clear that remote work is not an option going forward. This is just not compatible with the way I want to live. If you’re reading this and are in need of a technically skilled, motivated, hardworking individual with many years of experience, have an interesting project to work on, and support remote work, please reach out: https://lukep.dev https://lukep.dev for more info on me. I am experienced at building teams, delivering products, and leading others, and am looking for a management level role. Again, thanks so much for the post. It’s difficult to articulate this feeling when things just change for you and there’s no going back, but I feel you and I know that you’re making the right move. Best of luck at CISCO!
j7ake 6y ago
Nice write up. I would just like to point out that the variability across academic jobs is as large as variability across startups, or across corporate jobs. So the important part is not so much whether you're in industry or academia (there are toxic environments in both), but that you find an environment where you work on problems you care about and with people that make you better. Those places are available in both academia and industry. Although I admit the worst environment probably is found in academia because of the lack of checks and balances (being in the wrong lab can really be a nightmare), I would argue the best environment may also be in academia.
- harerazer 6y ago
  > Although I admit the worst environment probably is found in academia because of the lack of checks and balances (being in the wrong lab can really be a nightmare), I would argue the best environment may also be in academia. Isn’t this equivalent to saying that academia has the highest variability?
  - j7ake 6y ago
    I'm saying something about both the spread and the center of the distribution. You can have a distribution with higher variability vs reference but still higher lower-bound because of different means of the distribution.
lacker 6y ago
The key point I learned from this that I didn't really realize before: even if you already have tenure, you're surrounded by smart people that you want to work with, and they're often earlier in their careers and don't have tenure. So the need for tenure affects everyone in the system.
skosuri 6y ago
I don't know. I think people overblow this publish or perish thing. Shipping something and regularly is a thing that's important to practice; whether in industry or academia. The reason it's important is that both cases, at some level, one needs to justify the use their use of resources. Places without some real world feedback are usually not a great thing long term. Same goes for publishing in glamour journals/conferences. In the end it's a competition for attention, and things often have to be judged by presentation and storytelling as well. Prioritizing your time on working on your best projects is likely a good thing. If you feel something strongly that no one else sees, you will likely have less resources to accomplish it. That's life everywhere.
- lambdatronics 6y ago
  Journal referees are about as far from "real world feedback" as you can get. There's an interesting clash of incentives -- the grant-funding agencies optimize for stuff that is low-risk, but they claim to want highly-novel work, which also what gets published in better journals. So often what you must do is dress up incremental progress as revolutionary progress. It's soul-sucking.
  - skosuri 6y ago
    What would you propose as an alternative to peer-feedback? I really enjoyed academia and didn't find it soul sucking. Does it suck to get rejected sometimes? Yes. Does the work eventually get out; yes? With pre-prints these days, most of the people that are in the field already read the paper before acceptance if it's good. So the journal/conference name itself is largely a symbolic judgement of your peers.
    - lambdatronics 6y ago
      I don't think we should go without some form of review -- just that other academics are not representative of the real world. Perhaps a system where the 'relevance' claims are evaluated by industry reviewers, and the scientific claims are evaluated by academics? Post-publication (I'm counting arxiv here as publication) review is an improvement. My branch of science doesn't use arxiv to any real extent, unfortunately. Edit: I left a word out.
anjc 6y ago
Although I sympathize with the author, I believe most academics are aware of/experienced all these issues after their first year of PhD. Becoming a professor these days is hyper competitive, you don't accidentally become a prof, or become one by default. So it's a pity that this person would quit over issues that they were aware of from early on. Regarding papers that shouldn't be papers because it's a waste of resources, I think it's unkind/elitist for someone who rose to a prof position via these resources to then propagate such a sentiment. Only experts and geniuses should attempt to publish? Only people from certain institutions? Why should an author self-censor their own work because one person who chose to be a PC member, to pad their CV (which OP also criticises), doesn't think it's worthy? In general if people are making poor contributions, their careers in academia will be short-lived, and their individual draining of resources will be minimal. If they get published then it's likely on merit.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Most research papers are just a forced ceremonial sacrifice of time and resources. There is so much junk for every good article. The PhD should be judged on their work rather than some semirandom publishing process. Eg. like the normal thing should be one or zero papers published during a technical doctorial thesis and the effort is put into the thesis itself.
x87678r 6y ago
> I finally managed to establish many new healthy habits: I started eating in a healthier way, I lost 10kg+ ... Damn, that's the opposite from what I've seen around here.
baby 6y ago
I find it weird that people who live abroad complain about life when they chose not to learn the local language. If you’re planning to stay for some time, learn the damn language.
- igornotarobot 6y ago
  Yes, it is weird. Now imagine. You learn English as a foreign language at school. You do a PhD and move for a postdoc to another country, say, Austria, because that's how academics do it. You work there, though you are not very motivated to learn German, as you know that it is unlikely to get tenure there. In the end, you learn German. You apply for tenure-track and tenure everywhere, because that is how academics do it. In the end, you get a tenure in France -- they have plenty of permanent jobs. Now you start learning French. You are motivated to learn the language. But having learned two foreign languages already, you see that it will take you 3-5 years to learn it. All public services in France require French beyond advanced, as you have to remind the officials about every single application ten times, before you get anything. Want to have fun? Try to rent an apartment and open a bank account in France, not being a French resident. I am not the blog author, but I had a similar academic trajectory. Before judging people, try it yourself.
kabdib 6y ago
Q: "Why is academia so cut-throat?" A: "Because the stakes are so low." My dad was a professor and researcher (in ecology) in the 60s and 70s. He had a cartoon on his office wall, later relocated to his office at home, which depicted two priests having a conversation beneath the image of a very famous prophet being tortured (honestly, it doesn't matter which prophet). One priest is saying to the other, "He was a great teacher, but he didn't publish." My dad had a stress-related heart attack at 50, which he survived, and he semi-retired to a part-time professorship at a different university so that he could continue to work with grad students, which he loved doing.
raziel2701 6y ago
I wish academics were challenged to bring a technology to life. A working gizmo cannot be argued away. We need some mechanism by which the products of research are exposed to reality, a little bit of a market force to help us evaluate what works and what doesn't. Already there is a replication crisis. What we need is to make talk less cheap, ideally give the academics skin in the game. This would be a system where people toil away for years before producing something, and some may never succeed, but when they do they get all the upside from creating a new technology, and we as a society benefit from having this new invention. Essentially, I would break apart the monolithic idea of academia. There's too many inefficiencies, we waste away the talent of very smart people working on incomprehensible details that only a handful of people care about, and they write papers no one will read, only to then go to finance or tech where they'll wonder what was the point of grad school since a small percentage of their skills/specialized knowledge is necessary to make a living. We're creating all these PhDs and we don't know what to do with them. We need to foster a more entrepreneurial path in these people, they're stuck thinking that they only have two choices: academia or industry.
- hikingsimulator 6y ago
  This would be terrible for research. You would be throwing away so-called pure endeavours. Where would pure math fit in your vision? Homotopy Type Theory would be a no-go for instance. Market forces are not and can't be the start and end of how resources are allocated, especially in academia/research. You would be stiffling that which does not seem to yield immediate, visible results (profit). Except that's what research does. It's why it's called research.
  - raziel2701 6y ago
    Math can continue its current structure because as far as I know there is no reproducibility crisis in it, it's all supposed to be logical proofs that should stand by themselves. My idea would be for the experimentalists, give them the opportunity to tinker and trial and error without the bs pressures of publish or perish, and/or crotchety advisors. I just want the academic to be exposed a little bit to something from reality that can give them feedback, market forces is what came to mind because the introductions of so many papers talk about the potential applications of their niche research, but you never see anyone actually do the application. So how about they give that a shot? Let's put the models to the test and see if they can build something. That is in my opinion a much better approach at evaluating what can be reproduced. If they build something and did so without their academic models, well, then now we need theoreticians to figure out what's going on there. To me this seems a more organic approach, where the direction of research is being led by stochastic discoveries fueled by an acceptance of the risks of trial and error. The top-down, directed research approach we have is hard to stomach with inherently biased people at the top, and this type of system will only change its preferences on research directions one funeral at a time. That's a lot of time to waste for many many 20 - 30 year olds that have ideas but don't have a fighting chance to try.
PeterStuer 6y ago
Having been through this whole cycle I can certainly symphatize with the author. Everything he sees wrong with academia is correct. Sadly, after a few honeymoon years he will discover almost the exact same problems with industry. Sure, it will not be about papers, but about useless client projects, spinng bad tech choices because of commitments, making your boss/company save face when things fail, spending massive amounts of time on proposals andreporting that will never be read by anyone. Insane administration practices. Pointless HR 'events' in evenings and weekends that chip away team morale... Thruth: we tend to run from one pigsty to the next, because the grass looks greener, only to realize it was towards the same shit we left behind until we tire of running. I would advise in hindsight not running, but grabbing a shovel and cleaning a small corner of the barn.
- yodsanklai 6y ago
  > because the grass looks greener I also left academia to work for a company. I agree it's not all black and white. But one important thing to take into account is salary. I earn now twice as much. I'm not materialistic but it makes a big difference. It's something I didn't care about when I chose to work in academia but I'm increasingly worried about future pensions, health system and social safety net in my country. It seems to go downward and my salary as a professor wasn't enough for me to plan adequately.
  - ajsnigrutin 6y ago
    Meh... even if you disregard the second half of your post, if you have a shitty job A or a shitty job B, it's still better to have a shitty job that pays 2x the money than the other one. Plus, in industry, if you're good, you can always go higher, earn more, move to other industries, and earn even more. In academia, you can pretty much just choose the (almost) same job in a different institution, which probably pays nearly the same salary (especially in europe... even if you change countries, in the developed ones, pay (adjusted to cost of living) is nearly the same everywhere).
    - iorrus 6y ago
anm89 6y ago
I could not be happier that I decided not to go back for a PhD. There's no way I would have made it in that system. And anyway, I make great money making Ruby on Rails apps with my degree from youtube (although I do have an unrelated bachelors). We are wasting the brightest minds of our generation with this nonsense.
JensRantil 6y ago
> Confession: I have secretly (?) envied my industry friends for many years, and not for their money. I envied them because they could seemingly have some work/life balance and at the same time spend their time on something technical and used "for real". Work/life balance is not necessarily better outside of academia. In fact, my observation it might generally be worse.
thepolymath 6y ago
Publishing for the sake of publishing is one of the reasons that a portion of the papers in every field is extremely low quality.

385 points by adamnemecek 6y ago

BooneJS 6y ago

How does “publish or perish” relate to “my job at a public company evaluates my performance every 6 to 12 months?”

kryptiskt 6y ago
The stack ranking is turned upside-down in academia. Only a small sliver at the top will make it to a secure position.
- tchalla 6y ago
  "How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang" https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/ho...
klyrs 6y ago
Original research is much riskier than a job at your typical public company. Or, it should be. "Publish or perish" encourages breaking research into "minimal publishable units" which produces gobs of churn for everybody involved. I've known a few professors that publish paper after paper with similar results and similar methods. I suspect each of having a much deeper theorem, either under their hat, or (more generously) at the tip of their tongue. If they'd take a bit of a break from the churn and focus on the deeper theorem, their actual impact on the field would be significantly more value. We'd all get to read, write, or review, a small handful of papers instead of dozens.
- BooneJS 6y ago
  That makes sense. I suppose it’s easier to blend in on a team then the lead name with a team of students behind you.
- vkou 6y ago
  > Original research is much riskier than a job at your typical public company. The typical job at the typical public company is also a lot less innovative than original research. I have a feeling that the author will discover that the grass is always greener on the other side. The private sector has no shortage of authoritarian big-men[1], dumb vanity-driven projects, asinine performance review metrics, PHDs doing the equivalent of licking envelope stamps, and your work being thrown out in the dumpster (With no ability to share it with the outside world, because trade secrets), because someone in upper management lost a political battle, and your division has been canned, or re-purposed. [1] Of either gender.
branweb 6y ago
Both require evaluation against some standard of good performance. I guess the difference is the definition of "good performance." If it's a function of # of papers published, and you don't care about publishing papers for the sake of publishing papers, I can see see why someone would want to jump ship.
throw9872349872 6y ago
It’s not just top-down pressure but bottom-up too. Your students, undergrads, grads, postdocs are also incentivized to publish as much as possible for their own careers. So you are supporting them.
PeterisP 6y ago
The expectation for a performance review is that, well, there's some attempt to look at the actual performance and evaluate it. For example, imagine that the job at the public company would "evaluate" the performance every 12 months by solely counting the number of projects launched. So if you're doing great in a 18-month project, your score is 0 (since it's not launched yet), and if you've been part of launching 3 small projects, then your score is 3, no matter how irrelevant or poor quality the projects were.

azhenley 6y ago

These same thoughts often cross my mind. But the grass is always greener on the other side. I do really love how unstructured being a prof is though.

alextheparrot 6y ago

I’m glad this was posted. I’m writing my personal statement for applying to PhD programs right now, after spending a few years in big tech and both the concerns as well as the benefits resonate with how I’ve modeled my expectations. I think I’ll end up in a similar place - hyper-focusing as a graduate student and then transitioning out of academia after. One understated part of academia is that for a lot of fields (Such as the bio-adjacent fields I’m interested in), academia is one of the few places willing to take on trainee risk. I hope we can keep academia as a place where we’re willing to take risks to educate, which I think starts with reforming the processes informed by the critiques this post levies. One thing I would advocate for is forcing pre-registration of experiments. Publishing a design for experiments with an intent, a hypothesis, and a afterwards a quick summary of the results. That process for FDA trials has naturally led to a large buildup of both positive and negative results, while also inhibiting post-hoc statistical baboonery.

sgillen 6y ago
I’m for pre registration for some fields with big large experiments.For other fields (robotics is what I have in mind),I think the experiments can be so rapid that pre registration would be a real hassle and slow down progress.
- alextheparrot 6y ago
  This seems to be a separable point, though. The issue here is not the act of pre-registration, but the friction it imposes. I know most of the experiments and research I have done could have been summarized at the time in 10 minutes - to the effect of "I will manipulate variable X over time ranges Y, this is supported by <source or professional explanation> and I expect Z", or even "We performed a gradient over variables X and Y expecting to modulate Z and looked for phenotypes not previously described for further characterization". My experience in research is that there is very little pre-commitment on this level of granularity. Grant applications should be at the level of "We hope to study X because it is known to be correlated with Y and are hoping to elucidate a mechanistic relationship between these two". The experiments which go into proving such should more closely resemble mathematical proofs, is a viewpoint I currently hold.

crazygringo 6y ago

> Instead of just writing papers for our "real" target audience (the community), we go all-in with "defensive writing" and we start iper-optimizing every single sentence to make sure it can't possibly be misunderstood even by the dumbest reader. Papers can't just be "clear" for a benign reader: they need to be bulletproof against capricious people who are ready to reject things for random reasons. Considering how many papers I read that still are easily misunderstood even by smart readers... I think "defensive writing" is better understood as "good writing". Of course papers are expected to be "bulletproof." It's called a standard of excellence. Peer review is supposed to be meaningful, not a rubber stamp. But the sneaky secret is, the bar isn't even that high. I read so many papers where I wonder why an obvious alternative interpretation isn't even mentioned, or an opposing viewpoint isn't cited, or where the author subtly misrepresents another author. ("Capricious people" are a separate subject, but they certainly exist just as much in industry as in academia...) The rest of the post aside, this particular bit of the "rant" just feels like a defense of lazy writing. An academic paper isn't just a blog post, and it shouldn't be.

redelbee 6y ago
I took this to be more about writing for the express purpose of being accepted (or not rejected) instead of a defense of lazy writing. When the outcome of the work can only be “accept” or “reject” it incentivizes writing from a defensive perspective rather than one that is more speculative or questioning.
saagarjha 6y ago
> Of course papers are expected to be "bulletproof." It's called a standard of excellence. And sometimes it's just having to add verbiage in anticipation of a lazy or uninformed reviewer, who is not necessarily the audience that you actually care about. The net result is that there is a lot of work and fluff that interested readers often have to put up with that exists solely to get the paper through review and serves little other purpose. > The rest of the post aside, this particular bit of the "rant" just feels like a defense of lazy writing. An academic paper isn't just a blog post, and it shouldn't be. If your point here is that blog posts are "lazy writing", then I assure you I have read many blog posts that are much more thorough, well-researched, and worked-over than academic papers. I do agree with you that the two are separate things, but blog posts have a number of desirable qualities that academic papers have difficulty optimizing for–either because they are not prioritized, or because they would actively hurt the chances of acceptance.

supernova87a 6y ago

I think he's a little too focused on the paper-publishing aspect, but that may be just his specific corner of the world, and his experience. It might have been that in his sub-field, that seemed to be the main way to make impact. I think the point is, if you want to be successful in academia, you need to be producing something theoretical or practical that others can consume and find useful. The medium need not be papers. It could be: -- standards -- methodologies -- prototypes -- libraries of code, manuals of protocols even more practical things: -- convening people on a topic with authority -- writing popular works to publicize the field -- building a scientific facility -- even TV shows or blog posts You will find professors at universities who do a whole variety of these kinds of things, not just publish research papers. (and as they get more senior, they often find more interesting outlets for their work, if they're innovative) But you have to make something that others (in the scientific or industrial or popular community) can consume. All the paper counts in the world will not help, or make you satisfied, if they're just churned out for the goal of increasing your H-index but don't actually contain something wanted by others. It usually doesn't work as an approach. If you can't do any of these, then you are probably better off taking a normal job. The incentives of academia will not align with your talents. Personally, for example, I found that the things I was good at publishing or sharing with others wasn't groundbreaking novel research. So I went where that was valued, and have been happier since.

CannoloBlahnik 6y ago
Are you in academia? Papers are the standard metric of success for tenure in science. At research universities, it's most of the basis for tenure.
- Balgair 6y ago
  It depends on the field, but yes. Many optics researchers really only do presentations and they 'count' as paper publications. The pressure is still intense though.
  - CannoloBlahnik 6y ago

_where 6y ago

The ugly at universities is much worse than what was posted. Athletes getting easy courses. People in power positions typically don’t deserve it but think they do. So, there are ridiculous projects, bias, and people getting paid in “non-standard” ways. Backroom deals with private industry and government. Things that would make no one want to go there. Universities should work more with private industry like they used to many years ago, government money should be poured into research more openly, and tuition needs to rise, then they can hire the best from private industry that are also excellent teachers or researchers. To do that, administrations and staff will need to be gutted.

saagarjha 6y ago
Do note that the author is living in Europe.
- izacus 6y ago
  I've been part of European academia and amount of corruption I've seen there is just staggering and way beyond most of private sector firms. I'm happy that the author of the blog article ended up in one of the organizations where politics, horse trading, faking of research results for grant audits and outright bribery isn't endemic.
ivalm 6y ago
I think your post comes from a non-academic viewpoint. A research prof’s concerns are about research, their scientific progeny (phd students and postdocs) and pressures to succeed in the related publish or perish/grant writing games. In this context the blog makes perfect sense and I agree with it. However, you write: >Athletes getting easy courses A prof doesn’t care about athletic admissions (those are undergrads anyways?). >there are ridiculous projects, bias, and people getting paid in “non-standard” ways. I am not sure what you mean about “ridiculous projects”? The university generally doesn’t control or fund a PI. Funding is nearly always external (in the US). >Backroom deals with private industry and government. I am not exactly sure whose research or publications this affects but I bet the number is tiny. This is not a concern I’ve actually ever seen play out in real life (again, I am sure you can find news where it happened, but it just doesn’t reflect the lived life of most PIs). >Universities should work more with private industry like they used to many years ago, government money should be poured into research more openly, I mean, I don’t think PIs are against working with industry, but industry usually wants IP, doesn’t want to publish, and wants RoI. The government funding process is already pretty open (at least NSF/NIH) but of course can be improved. >tuition needs to rise, then they can hire the best from private industry that are also excellent teachers or researchers. Most PIs are funded effectively from research grant overhead. Tuition is usually a smaller budget line. Increasing tuition will both not overall increase budget by much and add hardship to students. I do agree that more gov funding would be nice. >To do that, administrations and staff will need to be gutted I don’t think this follows from your previous statements but I do agree there is an explosion in administrative overhead that should be curtailed.

cbanek 6y ago

As someone who came from industry and now works with mostly academics at a scientific non-profit, I feel this. Especially the parts about publishing - there are so many people who are so obsessed by publishing, and most honestly don't have anything useful to say at all. I swear most of these papers aren't even read, even if they are cited. There are whole layers of publication politics that force people to cite work that is almost completely unrelated, if not unrelated and saying so, just to inflate citation counts. It's basically a follow-for-follow system. Same for author lists. Also totally agree that the papers are written for these referees, instead of the people reading them (which many times I think is not any). Many of these papers are also written in order to give presentations or talks at conferences where papers are expected, since it is publishing and not speaking that gives you a line on your CV. Also how tenure doesn't save you, I feel this is the same as in tech, where they won't fire you but they will try to manage you out or make life so unpalatable that you will just leave.

foobarian 6y ago
The comment about papers not being read resonated with me. At one point I published a paper at a large IEEE conference where the only audience in the session were the other paper presenters. And it was clear nobody wanted to be there. I didn't last long in that line of work after that :-)
- jseliger 6y ago
  In the humanities, it's even worse. Academia is stuck in this negative equilibrium, and even though many individuals recognize this, few or no institutions have managed to get out of it. Tenure and publish-or-perish are both big problems. Publish-or-perish also wasn't the norm in most schools until relatively recently; today, so many schools want to be "research" schools, even when they have relatively little business doing so. https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-opportunity-costs/ https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo...
  - someguydave 6y ago

MrXOR 6y ago

I am a master's student, I think many times about academia vs industry for "research". Academia has a great advantage over industry: freedom, never dismiss it.

BrandonM 6y ago
Care to share some concrete examples of how academia is more free and how you expect that to make your daily life better overall? The author touched on that point a bit, especially when he described that tenure wasn’t as freeing as he expected. From his writing, he didn’t seem especially free to me.
- MrXOR 6y ago
  I read his useful blog post. I think he will not find more freedom in Cisco Talos, but I hope he find!
  - BrandonM 6y ago
    I commented because I think academics may underestimate how much freedom there can be in industry. My experience has been that after establishing a baseline of trust (by delivering on goals, making good technical decisions, behaving honestly and ethically, etc.), my company and manager are happy to give me a lot of latitude to choose what I work on. Being one of our founding engineers, I have several times identified a need and implemented a solution without "seeking permission" first. When I do want more formal company backing to pursue a project, a conversation with my manager or an email or a one-page Google Doc all sound easier than writing and submitting a grant proposal. As our company has grown, I have seen my role change, and I have collaborated with my manager to determine a new direction and title for myself. Notably, I tried management for a while, and I ultimately decided to return to an individual contributor role (no direct reports). It didn't sound like Dr. Fratantonio had the option to stop mentoring other PhD candidates. Freedom is not exclusive to founding engineers. Our company has a prioritized list of features available for development, and devs have a big role in choosing the next feature they work on, even when it's not a current area of expertise. Established engineers and new hires alike have a lot of latitude to pick technologies, architect a solution to a problem, implement a novel algorithm, etc. One relatively junior new hire is embarking on a project to rewrite much of our frontend code, with support from all of us. Again, that's why I commented. Depending on what type of freedom you're seeking, industry may offer it and pay better and have better working conditions to boot.

locallost 6y ago

Interesting read although I am not a part of this world. The thing that caught my attention was the part about many very dumb professors. How true can this be? I have met some that were not the best, and maybe because of it arrogant, but it sounds a bit too harsh or with the bar being set too high. The part about life being short and spending it on things we enjoy hit me hard because I feel the same way and can't hide it anymore. Yet, I can't really do that.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> Problem 3: We move away from (potentially) very cool stuff I have bad news about the private sector, pal...

skosuri 6y ago
Lol. Totally agreed.

signaru 6y ago

The things you enjoy at the early stages of academe are not the things you do as you stay longer. Academic promotion exhausts the older/wiser people with teaching/supervising/admin work instead of using their accumulated knowledge to create new things. Of course, some students might be less naive and are actually aiming for positions per se. But I was one of those types who just wants to solve technical problems and get technical work done.

jasperry 6y ago
I am also one of those techy types and beginning to realize this. It was hard for me to understand why so many of my peer academics /want/ to get promoted into administrative positions. But maybe they just realized they were already doing a full-time administrative job, just with a teaching load on top of it. If you do stay involved in research, you spend more time hassling over a grant proposal that's a 1-in-10 shot than you would actually doing the technical work if you won the grant.
BadassFractal 6y ago
That seems true of many jobs, like programming. Become good enough and eventually you get promoted to manager, director, VP, C-level. You might have loved the joy of programming and making something yourself at some point, but sooner or later most career-successful programmers will become administrators or operators.

anticristi 6y ago

Nice write-up! I would like to insist more on the false "industry vs. academia" dichotomy, that was mentioned at the end of the post. I was asked the same question at the end of my PhD: "Do you want a one-way ticket to academia, or a one-way ticket to industry?" After 8 years of back-and-forth, I settled on both. I think this should be the norm. Professors should take a break from paper writing to work on a startup and/or be in industrial board meetings to know what to research next. I have so many friends that kept a foot in both industry and academia. I find the model very valuable.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> I settled on both. I think this should be the norm. As I understand it, law and medicine are run this way.
- anticristi 6y ago
  I think you are right! In Sweden, clinical work is excluded from academic age when applying for positions or grants in medicine. In CS, "that year in industry" counts as a big whole in your publication list.
raziel2701 6y ago
100% agree with you, students are fed the trap that only academia and industry are possible, no one talks about the entrepreneurial path which is the only one that offers the opportunity of making it big. And it's the only scenario where I feel it's justified working 60-80 hr weeks: you're building your company/product. It's a position with a risk/reward ratio that you can't find in academia or industry, and I think most of us here know that you learn a lot when you're free to deep dive into ideas you love.

dredmorbius 6y ago

See also: I’m leaving academia (3 months ago | 70 comments) https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/i-quit-be062295f638 https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/i-quit-be062295f638 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23642795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23642795) Why I Quit Academia (4 months ago | 15 comments) https://aardvark-lily-k2lz.squarespace.com/transcripts/archives/quit-academia https://aardvark-lily-k2lz.squarespace.com/transcripts/archi... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23560528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23560528)

n0on3 6y ago

I wish the best to the author and I hope he finds a great environment in Talos to do great things (afaict he probably will). However, and this is mostly for the sake of others reading this, be aware that the security industry has its own versions of the problems mentioned affecting the academic environment, and these versions are in most cases way worst than in academia. With the exclusion of some enlighten cases (which most often coincide with a good financial situation that allows for teams that do cool stuff without too-pressing metrics on the immediate business), in private companies literally everything is driven by money and to that one must add up that the incentives that the people part of the companies have (to this: in private companies the turnover is way higher than in academia). Some examples: - Papers that don't deserve to be written? wait for that endless stream of tasks that does not deserve to be done that way (but need to be done that way the same, because <reason-you-cannot-argue-against>). - Optimizing for the wrong things? wait for words like "cost-effective" to pop up. - Move away from very cool stuff? yeah, that does not happen because the cool stuff are not even on the table, unless they can bring in money fast. - Non peer-review things dismissed? wait for not-approved-by-manager-X or not-in-the-agenda-of-key-person-Y or subject-to-approval-of-Z-who-cannot-possibly-even-understand-the-value-of-that. - No time for tech stuff? sorry, that doesn't change much unless your job is highly operational (which you won't enjoy much because it will have to be "cost-effective", thus most likely repetitive and metrics-based). I'm not saying that every private company is a circle of hell in the security industry, but unfortunately most have far harder-to-deal-with problems than those listed for people looking for things like the author. Afaik, the common big difference is you get paid more and you see real-world cases as they happen. (edit: formatting)

marcinzm 6y ago
Most large companies have research divisions that do a variety of tasks which are not directly tied to short term money. The work varies from almost-pure to almost-applied but generally has different KPIs than product teams (patents for example). They're usually run closer to an academic institution in terms of structure and management. Granted there's generally some incentive to get other teams in the company to actually implement whatever you came up with.
- 6y ago

GoodJokes 6y ago

College being free in the US would help a lot with this. Again, I blame capitalism.

sciencethrow123 6y ago

I can certainly feel some of the points the author makes. I am in a different field (astrophysics) and I have recently moved from the professor job in the US to UK. And one thing I particularly feel is a burn-out. After going through undergrad + PhD + getting tenure which all involved pretty much round-the-clock work, I just can't work 60 hours a week anymore. And somehow in academia, it often is required. Basically you have so much stuff that you must do that takes a large fraction of your 40h/week (telecons, students, lectures, seminars, refereeing, etc), so anything interesting -- actual science that you do yourself has to be done in the extra-time (i.e. weekends/evenings). I am currently hoping that in the UK I'll be at least a bit better placed than in the US, as the pressure to get grants is lower, and people are more mindful of the working hours, but I am still not 100% sure that I'll stay. (throwaway account)

75dvtwin 6y ago

And this is it. A reward system based on paper publishing and conference speeches is fundamentally broken. There are really no built-in checks and balances, unless commercial interests care for it to do a 'check', that benefit that commercial interest. Adding to that, a now well known, built-in corruption of student acceptance and grading, it is impressive that we get any forward movement at all in applied sciences. >".. . Now, in general, negative results may have value, and it may be worth sharing them. You could write a negative result paper (I think they are valuable). But wait, most conferences don't like those! Shit. So what do you do? You could write a blog post — as detailed as you want, no page limits, etc. you are the boss! — and move on with life with something better? But wait, blog posts "don't count" (more on this later). And in many environments, "no paper" == "I completely lost my time from the eyes of the public"... "

phkahler 6y ago
>> A reward system based on paper publishing and conference speeches is fundamentally broken. After reading that I'm wondering, what is the reward?
- konjin 6y ago
  You aren't fired - sorry you can't get fired from a tenure job - you don't get paid peanuts to fund research.
- skosuri 6y ago
  Post-tenure? Peer-recognition & Funding.
- joshvm 6y ago
  From a computer vision perspective. If you get a paper into CVPR, or SIGGRAPH, or NeurIPS, it has the potential to make your career. It's that important to some employers (academic and not) and that's why everyone struggles to publish in those "top" venues. It's not like you won't have a career without a paper in these places (I really want to stress this), but it's enough of a boost to your reputation that everyone wants to. Think of it like getting a Nature or Science paper, or something in Phys Rev, or Cell. It's about prestige. The real issue is conferences taking the place of academic journals. In most fields conferences are laid back places to share your WIP. In CS, conferences require full papers which means many ML researchers (for example) structure their whole year around meeting the NeurIPS and ICML/ICLR deadlines. It's a bit broken because those conferences have limited capacity and it can be a lottery if you get in. Journals don't have the same restriction and don't have deadlines unless you're going for a special issue, so you can actually take the time to polish before submitting.

cozzyd 6y ago

Hmm, in experimental particle physics I don't feel like there is as much of a pressure to publish. Probably helps that most work is done as part of collaborations, so there are always papers coming out with your name on them even if you only write a couple a year. But you really have to love what you do, otherwise there's no point.

frozenport 6y ago

Students were a big reason I left. Why mentor and depend on children when you could instead lead a team of adults?

deleted 6y ago

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annoyingnoob 6y ago

> Too many tasks, no time for tech stuff Its possible that this part will not change.

yurlungur 6y ago

Some very valid points. As a PhD student I had similar considerations and on top of that my biggest reason was that I did not want to go into a painful postdoc career only to start on the arduous path of obtaining tenure. That said, despite the limitations, academia is still by far the best place do research (on average). Especially as a professor, you really do enjoy freedoms that are rarely if ever found in other realms.

TaupeRanger 6y ago

I understand the motivation (or rather...demotivation) underlying this. But I'm wondering: is this becoming more common? And if so, what is it going to take to fix this warped incentive structure?

tinyhouse 6y ago

Industry doesn't follow the publish an perish but industry research labs also publish a lot of garbage for the sake of publishing. And there are a lot of BS incentives in the industry too.

lukevp 6y ago

This was a long read, but very enlightening. Thanks for posting. It really resonated with me, since I’m going through a similar period of self-reflection, and searching for the true meaning of life and what makes me happy. For the longest time, I have been telling myself why my job is good, but that “not right” feeling has never gone away. Since I’ve been remote due to COVID, my life has been remarkably better. I don’t work any less (perhaps more), but I am much happier. It is far more compatible with my lifestyle. I love being at home with my wife and my pets, I love being able to cook all my own food. Like the author, my physical and mental health have both improved; at the start of the pandemic, I could barely hang from a bar, and now I can do multiple pull-ups in a row. Same with squats, bench and everything else. I was never able to build a workout routine, but now I have. And I haven’t eaten any fast food or low quality food in this time, is all been homemade from scratch, and way more delicious and nutritious. I feel the same about my company and my team, I really have made friends there and have built a great career, but they have made it very clear that remote work is not an option going forward. This is just not compatible with the way I want to live. If you’re reading this and are in need of a technically skilled, motivated, hardworking individual with many years of experience, have an interesting project to work on, and support remote work, please reach out: https://lukep.dev https://lukep.dev for more info on me. I am experienced at building teams, delivering products, and leading others, and am looking for a management level role. Again, thanks so much for the post. It’s difficult to articulate this feeling when things just change for you and there’s no going back, but I feel you and I know that you’re making the right move. Best of luck at CISCO!

j7ake 6y ago

Nice write up. I would just like to point out that the variability across academic jobs is as large as variability across startups, or across corporate jobs. So the important part is not so much whether you're in industry or academia (there are toxic environments in both), but that you find an environment where you work on problems you care about and with people that make you better. Those places are available in both academia and industry. Although I admit the worst environment probably is found in academia because of the lack of checks and balances (being in the wrong lab can really be a nightmare), I would argue the best environment may also be in academia.

harerazer 6y ago
> Although I admit the worst environment probably is found in academia because of the lack of checks and balances (being in the wrong lab can really be a nightmare), I would argue the best environment may also be in academia. Isn’t this equivalent to saying that academia has the highest variability?
- j7ake 6y ago
  I'm saying something about both the spread and the center of the distribution. You can have a distribution with higher variability vs reference but still higher lower-bound because of different means of the distribution.

lacker 6y ago

The key point I learned from this that I didn't really realize before: even if you already have tenure, you're surrounded by smart people that you want to work with, and they're often earlier in their careers and don't have tenure. So the need for tenure affects everyone in the system.

skosuri 6y ago

I don't know. I think people overblow this publish or perish thing. Shipping something and regularly is a thing that's important to practice; whether in industry or academia. The reason it's important is that both cases, at some level, one needs to justify the use their use of resources. Places without some real world feedback are usually not a great thing long term. Same goes for publishing in glamour journals/conferences. In the end it's a competition for attention, and things often have to be judged by presentation and storytelling as well. Prioritizing your time on working on your best projects is likely a good thing. If you feel something strongly that no one else sees, you will likely have less resources to accomplish it. That's life everywhere.

lambdatronics 6y ago
Journal referees are about as far from "real world feedback" as you can get. There's an interesting clash of incentives -- the grant-funding agencies optimize for stuff that is low-risk, but they claim to want highly-novel work, which also what gets published in better journals. So often what you must do is dress up incremental progress as revolutionary progress. It's soul-sucking.
- skosuri 6y ago
  What would you propose as an alternative to peer-feedback? I really enjoyed academia and didn't find it soul sucking. Does it suck to get rejected sometimes? Yes. Does the work eventually get out; yes? With pre-prints these days, most of the people that are in the field already read the paper before acceptance if it's good. So the journal/conference name itself is largely a symbolic judgement of your peers.
  - lambdatronics 6y ago
    I don't think we should go without some form of review -- just that other academics are not representative of the real world. Perhaps a system where the 'relevance' claims are evaluated by industry reviewers, and the scientific claims are evaluated by academics? Post-publication (I'm counting arxiv here as publication) review is an improvement. My branch of science doesn't use arxiv to any real extent, unfortunately. Edit: I left a word out.

anjc 6y ago

Although I sympathize with the author, I believe most academics are aware of/experienced all these issues after their first year of PhD. Becoming a professor these days is hyper competitive, you don't accidentally become a prof, or become one by default. So it's a pity that this person would quit over issues that they were aware of from early on. Regarding papers that shouldn't be papers because it's a waste of resources, I think it's unkind/elitist for someone who rose to a prof position via these resources to then propagate such a sentiment. Only experts and geniuses should attempt to publish? Only people from certain institutions? Why should an author self-censor their own work because one person who chose to be a PC member, to pad their CV (which OP also criticises), doesn't think it's worthy? In general if people are making poor contributions, their careers in academia will be short-lived, and their individual draining of resources will be minimal. If they get published then it's likely on merit.

rightbyte 6y ago
Most research papers are just a forced ceremonial sacrifice of time and resources. There is so much junk for every good article. The PhD should be judged on their work rather than some semirandom publishing process. Eg. like the normal thing should be one or zero papers published during a technical doctorial thesis and the effort is put into the thesis itself.

x87678r 6y ago

> I finally managed to establish many new healthy habits: I started eating in a healthier way, I lost 10kg+ ... Damn, that's the opposite from what I've seen around here.

baby 6y ago

I find it weird that people who live abroad complain about life when they chose not to learn the local language. If you’re planning to stay for some time, learn the damn language.

igornotarobot 6y ago
Yes, it is weird. Now imagine. You learn English as a foreign language at school. You do a PhD and move for a postdoc to another country, say, Austria, because that's how academics do it. You work there, though you are not very motivated to learn German, as you know that it is unlikely to get tenure there. In the end, you learn German. You apply for tenure-track and tenure everywhere, because that is how academics do it. In the end, you get a tenure in France -- they have plenty of permanent jobs. Now you start learning French. You are motivated to learn the language. But having learned two foreign languages already, you see that it will take you 3-5 years to learn it. All public services in France require French beyond advanced, as you have to remind the officials about every single application ten times, before you get anything. Want to have fun? Try to rent an apartment and open a bank account in France, not being a French resident. I am not the blog author, but I had a similar academic trajectory. Before judging people, try it yourself.

kabdib 6y ago

Q: "Why is academia so cut-throat?" A: "Because the stakes are so low." My dad was a professor and researcher (in ecology) in the 60s and 70s. He had a cartoon on his office wall, later relocated to his office at home, which depicted two priests having a conversation beneath the image of a very famous prophet being tortured (honestly, it doesn't matter which prophet). One priest is saying to the other, "He was a great teacher, but he didn't publish." My dad had a stress-related heart attack at 50, which he survived, and he semi-retired to a part-time professorship at a different university so that he could continue to work with grad students, which he loved doing.

raziel2701 6y ago

I wish academics were challenged to bring a technology to life. A working gizmo cannot be argued away. We need some mechanism by which the products of research are exposed to reality, a little bit of a market force to help us evaluate what works and what doesn't. Already there is a replication crisis. What we need is to make talk less cheap, ideally give the academics skin in the game. This would be a system where people toil away for years before producing something, and some may never succeed, but when they do they get all the upside from creating a new technology, and we as a society benefit from having this new invention. Essentially, I would break apart the monolithic idea of academia. There's too many inefficiencies, we waste away the talent of very smart people working on incomprehensible details that only a handful of people care about, and they write papers no one will read, only to then go to finance or tech where they'll wonder what was the point of grad school since a small percentage of their skills/specialized knowledge is necessary to make a living. We're creating all these PhDs and we don't know what to do with them. We need to foster a more entrepreneurial path in these people, they're stuck thinking that they only have two choices: academia or industry.

hikingsimulator 6y ago
This would be terrible for research. You would be throwing away so-called pure endeavours. Where would pure math fit in your vision? Homotopy Type Theory would be a no-go for instance. Market forces are not and can't be the start and end of how resources are allocated, especially in academia/research. You would be stiffling that which does not seem to yield immediate, visible results (profit). Except that's what research does. It's why it's called research.
- raziel2701 6y ago
  Math can continue its current structure because as far as I know there is no reproducibility crisis in it, it's all supposed to be logical proofs that should stand by themselves. My idea would be for the experimentalists, give them the opportunity to tinker and trial and error without the bs pressures of publish or perish, and/or crotchety advisors. I just want the academic to be exposed a little bit to something from reality that can give them feedback, market forces is what came to mind because the introductions of so many papers talk about the potential applications of their niche research, but you never see anyone actually do the application. So how about they give that a shot? Let's put the models to the test and see if they can build something. That is in my opinion a much better approach at evaluating what can be reproduced. If they build something and did so without their academic models, well, then now we need theoreticians to figure out what's going on there. To me this seems a more organic approach, where the direction of research is being led by stochastic discoveries fueled by an acceptance of the risks of trial and error. The top-down, directed research approach we have is hard to stomach with inherently biased people at the top, and this type of system will only change its preferences on research directions one funeral at a time. That's a lot of time to waste for many many 20 - 30 year olds that have ideas but don't have a fighting chance to try.

PeterStuer 6y ago

Having been through this whole cycle I can certainly symphatize with the author. Everything he sees wrong with academia is correct. Sadly, after a few honeymoon years he will discover almost the exact same problems with industry. Sure, it will not be about papers, but about useless client projects, spinng bad tech choices because of commitments, making your boss/company save face when things fail, spending massive amounts of time on proposals andreporting that will never be read by anyone. Insane administration practices. Pointless HR 'events' in evenings and weekends that chip away team morale... Thruth: we tend to run from one pigsty to the next, because the grass looks greener, only to realize it was towards the same shit we left behind until we tire of running. I would advise in hindsight not running, but grabbing a shovel and cleaning a small corner of the barn.

yodsanklai 6y ago
> because the grass looks greener I also left academia to work for a company. I agree it's not all black and white. But one important thing to take into account is salary. I earn now twice as much. I'm not materialistic but it makes a big difference. It's something I didn't care about when I chose to work in academia but I'm increasingly worried about future pensions, health system and social safety net in my country. It seems to go downward and my salary as a professor wasn't enough for me to plan adequately.
- ajsnigrutin 6y ago
  Meh... even if you disregard the second half of your post, if you have a shitty job A or a shitty job B, it's still better to have a shitty job that pays 2x the money than the other one. Plus, in industry, if you're good, you can always go higher, earn more, move to other industries, and earn even more. In academia, you can pretty much just choose the (almost) same job in a different institution, which probably pays nearly the same salary (especially in europe... even if you change countries, in the developed ones, pay (adjusted to cost of living) is nearly the same everywhere).
  - iorrus 6y ago

anm89 6y ago

I could not be happier that I decided not to go back for a PhD. There's no way I would have made it in that system. And anyway, I make great money making Ruby on Rails apps with my degree from youtube (although I do have an unrelated bachelors). We are wasting the brightest minds of our generation with this nonsense.

JensRantil 6y ago

> Confession: I have secretly (?) envied my industry friends for many years, and not for their money. I envied them because they could seemingly have some work/life balance and at the same time spend their time on something technical and used "for real". Work/life balance is not necessarily better outside of academia. In fact, my observation it might generally be worse.

thepolymath 6y ago

Publishing for the sake of publishing is one of the reasons that a portion of the papers in every field is extremely low quality.