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Could you elaborate? In my experience the relationship is highly asymmetrical, in that the two communities are talking past each other (disclosure: former acade

by _dps 15y ago

Could you elaborate? In my experience the relationship is highly asymmetrical, in that the two communities are talking past each other (disclosure: former academic who is now doing a startup). (Caricatured) Businesses think most of academics is useless in the sense of not creating profits or anything actionable. They don't have any opinion of its merit in a Platonic sense. They've just done an ROI calculation and said "ROI is zero or negative" (Caricatured) Academics think that most of business is beneath them because it is not a dignified pursuit for powerful minds. Academics believe business is, in a Platonic sense, worse than academic pursuits. Obviously, as I indicated, this is a caricature. But I think that business is not interested in academia, whereas academia is "too good for" business. I'd be interested to hear your take on it though :)

eli_gottlieb 15y ago
My take, complete with caricatures: Businesses think academia generates nothing useful. Not ideas, not programs, just a bunch of papers. Businesses, unfortunately, mostly don't read or follow these papers and dissertations. Academics mostly don't want to "waste time" implementing anything that is, from their point of view, 25-40 years behind the times. For a nice example of the dichotomy at work, look at Golang. It's an act of pure, truest industry stupidity: they built a programming language by ignoring the entire academic field of programming languages. The result has been universally panned by PL experts. For an example of the academics going to make money in the same field, look at Martin Ordersky, Scala, and TypeSafe. Business often seems to think it knows technology, when in fact it knows the small subset of technology that is fashionable or just plain old enough to pass into the industrial mainstream. Academia just doesn't care to re-solve a "solved" problem, even if by "re-solve" we mean make usable for common people and capture heaps of cash. Admittedly, each of these biases arises from how each group gets paid: entrepreneurs by staying on the "business frontier", but academics by staying on the technological research frontier. So oftentimes, academia will invent something in the first place, but a full generation later, entrepreneurs will finally get rich off it.
- digitalzombie 15y ago
  I just want to be fair to business: Sometime they get it right, Erlang is an example. It's great for telecom, and maybe more. Horrible at numerical stuff.
  - eli_gottlieb 15y ago
    Ehhhh... speaking from experience, Erlang's VM is pretty badly documented. I'll grant them that they built a good PL (other than the godawful syntax) for internal business use, but their lack of interest in making a public product of it is visible.
_delirium 15y ago
I often see that, but I also often see the reverse: academics just not interested in business or even positive on it, but business people who see themselves as "too good for" academia. A lot of business people (and people in tech) have strongly negative views of academics that seem to verge on animosity, not just lack of interest; sentiment along the lines of "those who can't do, teach" and "ivory-tower wankery". And a lot of academics have moderate-to-positive views of industry, especially in tech; collaborations with industry are pretty common, especially in certain areas of research like systems and storage.
- _dps 15y ago
  Reading your comment, I think I could be giving the business caricature too much credit; I've certainly heard the "ivory-tower wankery" line. I guess I always interpreted it as a dismissive (rather than hostile) attitude, but you make a good point. There's a strong case to be made that deep in its soul business believes it does all the "real work" whereas academics merely speculate about what work someone might do some day.

by _dps 15y ago

eli_gottlieb 15y ago

My take, complete with caricatures: Businesses think academia generates nothing useful. Not ideas, not programs, just a bunch of papers. Businesses, unfortunately, mostly don't read or follow these papers and dissertations. Academics mostly don't want to "waste time" implementing anything that is, from their point of view, 25-40 years behind the times. For a nice example of the dichotomy at work, look at Golang. It's an act of pure, truest industry stupidity: they built a programming language by ignoring the entire academic field of programming languages. The result has been universally panned by PL experts. For an example of the academics going to make money in the same field, look at Martin Ordersky, Scala, and TypeSafe. Business often seems to think it knows technology, when in fact it knows the small subset of technology that is fashionable or just plain old enough to pass into the industrial mainstream. Academia just doesn't care to re-solve a "solved" problem, even if by "re-solve" we mean make usable for common people and capture heaps of cash. Admittedly, each of these biases arises from how each group gets paid: entrepreneurs by staying on the "business frontier", but academics by staying on the technological research frontier. So oftentimes, academia will invent something in the first place, but a full generation later, entrepreneurs will finally get rich off it.

digitalzombie 15y ago
I just want to be fair to business: Sometime they get it right, Erlang is an example. It's great for telecom, and maybe more. Horrible at numerical stuff.
- eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  Ehhhh... speaking from experience, Erlang's VM is pretty badly documented. I'll grant them that they built a good PL (other than the godawful syntax) for internal business use, but their lack of interest in making a public product of it is visible.

_delirium 15y ago

I often see that, but I also often see the reverse: academics just not interested in business or even positive on it, but business people who see themselves as "too good for" academia. A lot of business people (and people in tech) have strongly negative views of academics that seem to verge on animosity, not just lack of interest; sentiment along the lines of "those who can't do, teach" and "ivory-tower wankery". And a lot of academics have moderate-to-positive views of industry, especially in tech; collaborations with industry are pretty common, especially in certain areas of research like systems and storage.

_dps 15y ago
Reading your comment, I think I could be giving the business caricature too much credit; I've certainly heard the "ivory-tower wankery" line. I guess I always interpreted it as a dismissive (rather than hostile) attitude, but you make a good point. There's a strong case to be made that deep in its soul business believes it does all the "real work" whereas academics merely speculate about what work someone might do some day.