4 ms·
I left academia for industry a few years ago and still get hassled every week or so for help with open source code I published in conjunction with one of my pap
by academia_hack 4y ago
I left academia for industry a few years ago and still get hassled every week or so for help with open source code I published in conjunction with one of my papers.
My other papers, where I provided no artifacts, generate an average of zero support emails a year but are cited just as much.
The emails are often from first year PhD. students and are vaguely accusatory, along the lines of: "We're having issues replicating experiment X and wanted to give you a chance to correct/review before we publish on it." The cause of the issues is, 100% of the time to date, people not reading documentation or having more than a superficial understanding of the topic. However, I feel compelled to respond so that my old lab doesn't get dragged on twitter or at some conference over something that isn't true.
I barely got paid to do this sort of work when I was in academia and certainly don't now. If I could go back in time, I would have kept my research closed source. The personal benefits are essentially zero and the world would get along just fine if I had never written any papers, so the altruistic reasons aren't terribly compelling either.
- bell-cot 4y agoIf it's really "ever week or so", for years, I'd be tempted to compile data on the support e-mails and their senders. At some point, you've got a meta-paper on the people who contacted you for support, breakdowns of where they are in their careers, what topics they don't seem to have mastered yet, which parts of the docs they failed to read, etc. The fun could start when you let drafts of that meta-paper start circulating.