8 ms·

It is remarkable how much he contravened modern academic norms: no work to bring in external funding, relatively few papers, very little collaboration, almost n

It is remarkable how much he contravened modern academic norms: no work to bring in external funding, relatively few papers, very little collaboration, almost no PhD students. It's not an exaggeration to say that a young researcher with these characteristics today would likely get fired from any high-ranked American research university before even coming up for tenure review. Perhaps our modern academic metrics of merit are missing something?

nurettin 6y ago
It would be very funny to watch foremost experts in relatively new fields being denied because they don't have phd students. I somehow doubt this is the case, though.
marcosdumay 6y ago
> It's not an exaggeration to say that a young researcher with these characteristics today would likely get fired from any high-ranked American research university before even coming up for tenure review. He wouldn't even get in an university to get the chance to be fired. And that's not specific to the US, it applies to nearly all developed or developing countries. That person wouldn't be able to get much past a PhD, even as a student.
- gautamdivgi 6y ago
  You’re right. The right of passage for most US computer science PhD programs is publications in the “right” journals and conferences. If you don’t publish you will rarely get past your thesis proposal. I think there are very few, very select professors in the US that prohibit publishing prior to graduating. But their count is likely in the single digits. Also, by some miracle you manage to graduate by minimal publishing or no publications you will find all doors to getting research funding shut. This means that you are basically unemployable as a tenure track professor (universities prefer their newly minted assistant professors to come with funding).
  - mcguire 6y ago
    Yes, it's true. EWD published almost nothing. http://www.netlib.org/bibnet/authors/d/dijkstra-edsger-w.html http://www.netlib.org/bibnet/authors/d/dijkstra-edsger-w.htm... (The ones marked "circulated privately" are the EWD series.)
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      The best teachers I’ve had published little or nothing: they were teachers first, but researchers who also taught. It’s a shame the modern colleges and universities don’t make this really possible anymore.
hinkley 6y ago
People used to say of my alma mater that the teaching was decent but the facilities were amazing. There was a feel on campus that the people who were really going to 'make it' were only putting in B- or C+ work and spending the rest of their time working on side projects. There were very few days in a given year when more than half of the computer labs were full at the same time, and with Unix boxes you can always remote in to the flavor of machine you need. You don't need much research budget if you already have access to time on equipment. I'd be curious to know if Dijkstra had access to a similar embarrassment of riches.
- mhewett 6y ago
  In the article it says that Dijkstra didn't use a computer, TV, or cell phone.
  - User23 6y ago
    Socrates didn't use writing because he thought it was a mental crutch that would atrophy his memory and mind.
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  Which school did you go to?
- mschaef 6y ago
  > I'd be curious to know if Dijkstra had access to a similar embarrassment of riches. Dijkstra spent a good chunk of the latter part of his career at the University of Texas in Austin. There was plenty of access to facilities there, but that wasn't really what his research was about. He wrote longhand (scans here: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/) and didn't really use much technology directly in his work. This makes sense, because after all, Dijkstra is responsible for this famous quote: "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes". https://www.quora.com/What-did-Dijkstra-mean-when-he-said-Computer-science-is-no-more-about-computers-than-astronomy-is-about-telescopes https://www.quora.com/What-did-Dijkstra-mean-when-he-said-Co...
enumjorge 6y ago
That reminds me of the anecdote where one of Google’s hiring committees realized that they wouldn’t have gotten hired had they been judged by their own standards. It makes you wonder how much talent gets filtered out when we apply very stringent metrics to grade candidates.
- pkaye 6y ago
  Working at a smaller company, I knew a few people in the hiring committee that had unreasonable standards. We used to tease them that they wouldn't pass their own standards when they were hired. Fortunately we didn't need unanimous approval of candidates.
- texuf 6y ago
  I can't find it but I saw a presentation (I think from someone at Etsy) where the presenter described being on an interview panel that failed all of the candidates in a batch, only to find out that they had been given their own packets to review.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- akshat_h 6y ago
  If anyone is curious, it might be this talk. Moishe Lettvin - What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews at Google. It is on Etsy Eng channel Youtube url with the relevant time frame https://youtu.be/r8RxkpUvxK0?t=532 https://youtu.be/r8RxkpUvxK0?t=532
- bookofjoe 6y ago
  For many years many, if not most, of my fellow physicians have remarked that it's doubtful we would be admitted today to medical school. (me: UCLA Medical School, class of 1974)
rramadass 6y ago
They sure do. Here is Freeman Dyson; the Physicist without a PhD ( https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freeman-dyson-20140326/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freem... ); Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything.
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  My friend once said: - B.S. = bull shit - M.S. = more shit - PhD = piled higher & deeper
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    And HBS is 2/3 BS.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jayjohn436 6y ago
    Permanent Head Damage is what my advisor would tell me ;)
    - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
      Grad school was described to me as a self induced neurosis.
      - blue_potato 6y ago
elvis70 6y ago
"The Humble Programmer" is an exercise in self-mockery, as Dijkstra has always been very conscious of the value of his work. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340...
- rramadass 6y ago
  >"The Humble Programmer" is an exercise in self-mockery Definitely not! It is a philosophical paper.
- _Nat_ 6y ago
  Good read! That said, I don't know about self-mockery. A good line from the linked lecture transcript: > The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague. He seems to be addressing the issue of inflated egos influencing people to be "real programmers". For example, do you use a simple GUI interface? -- HA! I can type an arcane string into a command line with my TOES! Clearly, I art teh superior to thou. Which is stupid, because a proper GUI that shows the full scope of the API is awesome, while memorizing arcane strings is a silly practice. But, some folks let feelings of intellectual superiority cloud their judgement and beliefs, which Dijkstra was speaking out against. He repeats this theme several times, with the overall lecture being a tad repetitive and redundant as it states the same thing over and over in a repetitive series of repetitions, but for a specific example: > Finally, although the subject is not a pleasant one, I must mention PL/1, a programming language for which the defining documentation is of a frightening size and complexity. Using PL/1 must be like flying a plane with 7000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the cockpit. I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language —our basic tool, mind you!— already escapes our intellectual control. And if I have to describe the influence PL/1 can have on its users, the closest metaphor that comes to my mind is that of a drug. In short, Dijkstra strongly advocates intellectual minimalism. The "humility" he advocates is fortitude against ego-driven peacockery in decision-making; taking the simplest possible approach, that's the easiest to do, even when doing so doesn't show off one's intellect.
jes5199 6y ago
his papers are quite good though, and he did a lot of writing, just not for journals
random3 6y ago
One of my past career pet peeves was not being able to work in the same team with some people I was really excited to work daily with. I almost joined the research group, passed interviews, got accepted, but eventually everything got stalled because some "credentials" weren't there.
mcguire 6y ago
Perhaps. I can't really speak to his career before he came to UT Austin in 1984, he was already very famous (Bjarne Stroustroup at Texas A&M/Columbia or Brian Kernighan at Princeton famous); if I remember, his chair was created for him as a full professor and without many of the usual duties of a professor. (One of his stipulations was that he not be made Chairman of the department.) According to the article, as a young researcher, he was * A "programmer" (something like a research assistant, perhaps?) at the Mathematisch Centrum (Mathematical Centre) in Amsterdam. * Professor in the mathematics department of the Eindhoven University of Technology from 1962-1973. (As I understand, the "external funding" thing is less of a problem in mathematics. Also, I have no idea how tenure works there.) * Finally, research fellow at the Burroughs Corporation. It's true, he didn't have many direct PhD students (two?!), but his collaborations were many. (I don't know if the Tuesday Morning Group at UT is still active,[1] but it was rather well known and its members produced a great deal of what is now "theoretical computer science".) If you're trying to compare Dijkstra to J. Random Young Researcher, J's gonna have a hard time any way you look at it. [1] UT no longer requires automata theory or formal logic for CS undergraduates. They're dead to me.
- bch 6y ago
  > I don't know if the Tuesday Morning Group at UT is still active,[...] but it was rather well known and its members produced a great deal of what is now "theoretical computer science".) *Tuesday Afternoon Club [0]. [0] https://www.cwi.nl/about/history/e-w-dijkstra-brilliant-colourful-and-opinionated https://www.cwi.nl/about/history/e-w-dijkstra-brilliant-colo...
  - mcguire 6y ago
    Right, Tuesday Morning was the tchotchke store. It says something about me that I get them confused.
- Beldin 6y ago
  > Professor in the mathematics department of the Eindhoven University of Technology from 1962-1973. (As I understand, the "external funding" thing is less of a problem in mathematics. Also, I have no idea how tenure works there.) Back then, i think full professors were appointed by the Queen. (Certainly so for Beatrix, but he became a prof before her inauguration) Being appointed by the Queen made it really difficult to fire you - one of the reasons (I was told) they stopped this practice. Moreover, back then research funding worked very different from how it works now in .nl. Actually, I have some idea of how finding worked from the mid-90s on... but I've read that prior to early 80s, in .nl, most PhD students were part-time and not employed by the university. Not sure how accurate that is. Irrespective of its accuracy, it's clear that academic life had changed drastically since then. (In .nl at least)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

nurettin 6y ago

It would be very funny to watch foremost experts in relatively new fields being denied because they don't have phd students. I somehow doubt this is the case, though.

marcosdumay 6y ago

> It's not an exaggeration to say that a young researcher with these characteristics today would likely get fired from any high-ranked American research university before even coming up for tenure review. He wouldn't even get in an university to get the chance to be fired. And that's not specific to the US, it applies to nearly all developed or developing countries. That person wouldn't be able to get much past a PhD, even as a student.

gautamdivgi 6y ago
You’re right. The right of passage for most US computer science PhD programs is publications in the “right” journals and conferences. If you don’t publish you will rarely get past your thesis proposal. I think there are very few, very select professors in the US that prohibit publishing prior to graduating. But their count is likely in the single digits. Also, by some miracle you manage to graduate by minimal publishing or no publications you will find all doors to getting research funding shut. This means that you are basically unemployable as a tenure track professor (universities prefer their newly minted assistant professors to come with funding).
- mcguire 6y ago
  Yes, it's true. EWD published almost nothing. http://www.netlib.org/bibnet/authors/d/dijkstra-edsger-w.html http://www.netlib.org/bibnet/authors/d/dijkstra-edsger-w.htm... (The ones marked "circulated privately" are the EWD series.)
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    The best teachers I’ve had published little or nothing: they were teachers first, but researchers who also taught. It’s a shame the modern colleges and universities don’t make this really possible anymore.

hinkley 6y ago

People used to say of my alma mater that the teaching was decent but the facilities were amazing. There was a feel on campus that the people who were really going to 'make it' were only putting in B- or C+ work and spending the rest of their time working on side projects. There were very few days in a given year when more than half of the computer labs were full at the same time, and with Unix boxes you can always remote in to the flavor of machine you need. You don't need much research budget if you already have access to time on equipment. I'd be curious to know if Dijkstra had access to a similar embarrassment of riches.

mhewett 6y ago
In the article it says that Dijkstra didn't use a computer, TV, or cell phone.
- User23 6y ago
  Socrates didn't use writing because he thought it was a mental crutch that would atrophy his memory and mind.
ampdepolymerase 6y ago
Which school did you go to?
mschaef 6y ago
> I'd be curious to know if Dijkstra had access to a similar embarrassment of riches. Dijkstra spent a good chunk of the latter part of his career at the University of Texas in Austin. There was plenty of access to facilities there, but that wasn't really what his research was about. He wrote longhand (scans here: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/) and didn't really use much technology directly in his work. This makes sense, because after all, Dijkstra is responsible for this famous quote: "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes". https://www.quora.com/What-did-Dijkstra-mean-when-he-said-Computer-science-is-no-more-about-computers-than-astronomy-is-about-telescopes https://www.quora.com/What-did-Dijkstra-mean-when-he-said-Co...

enumjorge 6y ago

That reminds me of the anecdote where one of Google’s hiring committees realized that they wouldn’t have gotten hired had they been judged by their own standards. It makes you wonder how much talent gets filtered out when we apply very stringent metrics to grade candidates.

pkaye 6y ago
Working at a smaller company, I knew a few people in the hiring committee that had unreasonable standards. We used to tease them that they wouldn't pass their own standards when they were hired. Fortunately we didn't need unanimous approval of candidates.
texuf 6y ago
I can't find it but I saw a presentation (I think from someone at Etsy) where the presenter described being on an interview panel that failed all of the candidates in a batch, only to find out that they had been given their own packets to review.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
akshat_h 6y ago
If anyone is curious, it might be this talk. Moishe Lettvin - What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews at Google. It is on Etsy Eng channel Youtube url with the relevant time frame https://youtu.be/r8RxkpUvxK0?t=532 https://youtu.be/r8RxkpUvxK0?t=532
bookofjoe 6y ago
For many years many, if not most, of my fellow physicians have remarked that it's doubtful we would be admitted today to medical school. (me: UCLA Medical School, class of 1974)

rramadass 6y ago

They sure do. Here is Freeman Dyson; the Physicist without a PhD ( https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freeman-dyson-20140326/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freem... ); Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything.

PopeDotNinja 6y ago
My friend once said: - B.S. = bull shit - M.S. = more shit - PhD = piled higher & deeper
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  And HBS is 2/3 BS.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jayjohn436 6y ago
  Permanent Head Damage is what my advisor would tell me ;)
  - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
    Grad school was described to me as a self induced neurosis.
    - blue_potato 6y ago

elvis70 6y ago

"The Humble Programmer" is an exercise in self-mockery, as Dijkstra has always been very conscious of the value of his work. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340...

rramadass 6y ago
>"The Humble Programmer" is an exercise in self-mockery Definitely not! It is a philosophical paper.
_Nat_ 6y ago
Good read! That said, I don't know about self-mockery. A good line from the linked lecture transcript: > The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague. He seems to be addressing the issue of inflated egos influencing people to be "real programmers". For example, do you use a simple GUI interface? -- HA! I can type an arcane string into a command line with my TOES! Clearly, I art teh superior to thou. Which is stupid, because a proper GUI that shows the full scope of the API is awesome, while memorizing arcane strings is a silly practice. But, some folks let feelings of intellectual superiority cloud their judgement and beliefs, which Dijkstra was speaking out against. He repeats this theme several times, with the overall lecture being a tad repetitive and redundant as it states the same thing over and over in a repetitive series of repetitions, but for a specific example: > Finally, although the subject is not a pleasant one, I must mention PL/1, a programming language for which the defining documentation is of a frightening size and complexity. Using PL/1 must be like flying a plane with 7000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the cockpit. I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language —our basic tool, mind you!— already escapes our intellectual control. And if I have to describe the influence PL/1 can have on its users, the closest metaphor that comes to my mind is that of a drug. In short, Dijkstra strongly advocates intellectual minimalism. The "humility" he advocates is fortitude against ego-driven peacockery in decision-making; taking the simplest possible approach, that's the easiest to do, even when doing so doesn't show off one's intellect.

jes5199 6y ago

his papers are quite good though, and he did a lot of writing, just not for journals

random3 6y ago

One of my past career pet peeves was not being able to work in the same team with some people I was really excited to work daily with. I almost joined the research group, passed interviews, got accepted, but eventually everything got stalled because some "credentials" weren't there.

mcguire 6y ago

Perhaps. I can't really speak to his career before he came to UT Austin in 1984, he was already very famous (Bjarne Stroustroup at Texas A&M/Columbia or Brian Kernighan at Princeton famous); if I remember, his chair was created for him as a full professor and without many of the usual duties of a professor. (One of his stipulations was that he not be made Chairman of the department.) According to the article, as a young researcher, he was * A "programmer" (something like a research assistant, perhaps?) at the Mathematisch Centrum (Mathematical Centre) in Amsterdam. * Professor in the mathematics department of the Eindhoven University of Technology from 1962-1973. (As I understand, the "external funding" thing is less of a problem in mathematics. Also, I have no idea how tenure works there.) * Finally, research fellow at the Burroughs Corporation. It's true, he didn't have many direct PhD students (two?!), but his collaborations were many. (I don't know if the Tuesday Morning Group at UT is still active,[1] but it was rather well known and its members produced a great deal of what is now "theoretical computer science".) If you're trying to compare Dijkstra to J. Random Young Researcher, J's gonna have a hard time any way you look at it. [1] UT no longer requires automata theory or formal logic for CS undergraduates. They're dead to me.

bch 6y ago
> I don't know if the Tuesday Morning Group at UT is still active,[...] but it was rather well known and its members produced a great deal of what is now "theoretical computer science".) *Tuesday Afternoon Club [0]. [0] https://www.cwi.nl/about/history/e-w-dijkstra-brilliant-colourful-and-opinionated https://www.cwi.nl/about/history/e-w-dijkstra-brilliant-colo...
- mcguire 6y ago
  Right, Tuesday Morning was the tchotchke store. It says something about me that I get them confused.
Beldin 6y ago
> Professor in the mathematics department of the Eindhoven University of Technology from 1962-1973. (As I understand, the "external funding" thing is less of a problem in mathematics. Also, I have no idea how tenure works there.) Back then, i think full professors were appointed by the Queen. (Certainly so for Beatrix, but he became a prof before her inauguration) Being appointed by the Queen made it really difficult to fire you - one of the reasons (I was told) they stopped this practice. Moreover, back then research funding worked very different from how it works now in .nl. Actually, I have some idea of how finding worked from the mid-90s on... but I've read that prior to early 80s, in .nl, most PhD students were part-time and not employed by the university. Not sure how accurate that is. Irrespective of its accuracy, it's clear that academic life had changed drastically since then. (In .nl at least)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]