3 ms·

Speaking of publication pressure, motivation etc.: I spent my post-doc trying to tackle a rather fundamental challenge (in the architecture of analytical DBMSe

Speaking of publication pressure, motivation etc.: I spent my post-doc trying to tackle a rather fundamental challenge (in the architecture of analytical DBMSes). The result of my efforts took a long time to materialize, and their form was not a short article of the kind you put in conferences, but a long tract. I believe it is very useful for my (now former) field; but I could simply not get it published. Not because I was rejected for lack of novelty or anything - it was simply not in the "least publishable unit" form, and not easily (or at all) reducible to that form. The large chunk of preliminaries required motivation in use, and the motivation required the preliminaries etc. But in my field, people don't publish new research as monographs. Bottom line - put the monograph on arxiv, very few people noticed it, and life goes on without it having left a mark. Plus, by the time this was done, my post-doc had ended, and my weird former career and lack of "publishable paper generation skills" meant I didn't have much chance at another position. So, in a sense, my personal experience is a bit of the flip-side to that of Feynman, described in the post. Still, the sentiment definitely resonated with me.

aargh_aargh 4y ago
A computational model for analytic column stores https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.12217 https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.12217
auggierose 4y ago
Try treating the conference paper as a 15-page long abstract. You can still try to publish now, you don't need to be a postdoc for that!
kriro 4y ago
The skill here is to find some ways to chunk the final output into smaller sizes. That usually means compromises and sometimes publishing some stuff that you want to reference later in lower level (or only tangentially related) conferences just to get it citable for later work. It's usually not fun and sometimes a huge compromise so I fully understand (and applaud) that you didn't go that route. If you're still interested in picking up an academic career I noticed you spent some time in Europe (if the link under this post is your puplication). I'm not sure about the Dutch system but in Germany there are universities of applied sciences. Requirement for tenure as a professor is usually PhD+3 years work experience in the field outside academia. It's very teaching focused and you have to slowly ease into research again because you'll start doing it as a one person show but it's a decent option for an academically inclined person with a PhD to "come back" into the system from odd/unfitting career paths. Not sure if this construct exists in other countries but my guess would be the anser is yes. These days there's also plenty of positions that are international programs so language might not be an issue.
bubblethink 4y ago
> it was simply not in the "least publishable unit" form, and not easily (or at all) reducible to that form I know a couple of people from grad school who worked on massive infrastructure projects ranging from designing the ISA to verilog implementation to compilers, simulators and everything in between. I think they faced similar challenges in that it's a lot of important work but not easily publishable. It's unfortunate that we don't have a good way of recognizing this type of work.

aargh_aargh 4y ago

A computational model for analytic column stores https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.12217 https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.12217

auggierose 4y ago

Try treating the conference paper as a 15-page long abstract. You can still try to publish now, you don't need to be a postdoc for that!

kriro 4y ago

The skill here is to find some ways to chunk the final output into smaller sizes. That usually means compromises and sometimes publishing some stuff that you want to reference later in lower level (or only tangentially related) conferences just to get it citable for later work. It's usually not fun and sometimes a huge compromise so I fully understand (and applaud) that you didn't go that route. If you're still interested in picking up an academic career I noticed you spent some time in Europe (if the link under this post is your puplication). I'm not sure about the Dutch system but in Germany there are universities of applied sciences. Requirement for tenure as a professor is usually PhD+3 years work experience in the field outside academia. It's very teaching focused and you have to slowly ease into research again because you'll start doing it as a one person show but it's a decent option for an academically inclined person with a PhD to "come back" into the system from odd/unfitting career paths. Not sure if this construct exists in other countries but my guess would be the anser is yes. These days there's also plenty of positions that are international programs so language might not be an issue.

bubblethink 4y ago

> it was simply not in the "least publishable unit" form, and not easily (or at all) reducible to that form I know a couple of people from grad school who worked on massive infrastructure projects ranging from designing the ISA to verilog implementation to compilers, simulators and everything in between. I think they faced similar challenges in that it's a lot of important work but not easily publishable. It's unfortunate that we don't have a good way of recognizing this type of work.