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Surely their research is not about shipping broken software though, then your goals would be in conflict. I suppose your point is that the researcher's goal in

Surely their research is not about shipping broken software though, then your goals would be in conflict. I suppose your point is that the researcher's goal in not exactly to ship working software either, but wouldn't that put the researcher's goals at worst neutral then? Likewise your goal is not to publish research, but it is also not to actively work against it either. From their standpoint you're also at worst neutral. It's also worth pointing out that the motivating factor doesn't necessarily have to be the same for each party to have a common goal. I'd argue that this is how it actually is most of the time. I do work for a customer so that my boss doesn't fire me and I get my paycheck, whereas my boss does work for the customer to bring money to their company and to not go bankrupt. The customer helps with the work we're doing for them because they want something out of the project that is their money's worth. Our motivations are different, but the goal is the same - to build a thing that works. My point is that it just seems very likely that some common ground can be found between you and the researchers, regardless of your individual motivations and since there's really no inherent conflict either.

Kamq 2y ago
> regardless of your individual motivations and since there's really no inherent conflict either. Within organizations, there's an inherent conflict between any orthogonal goals. In theory there's no conflict, but in practice, there is constant competition for time and resources. This creates conflict between any groups whose goals are not aligned, including groups whose goals are completely unrelated. This is also why organizational politics is the way it is.
- ikari_pl 2y ago
  you stated the condition/assumption - that the goals are orthogonal I believe these are not - researchers publishing how to create good software and developers creating software may be seen as goals as aligned as fixing an incident and publishing a post mortem, or as writing an RFC and implementing it. Or publishing a post on how you remodeled your infrastructure. They diverge at some point, yes, but that's not orthogonal at all
  - Kamq 2y ago
    > researchers publishing how to create good software I disagree that this is what researchers are doing (at least from my point of view). This is actually an area where I agree with the article, there's a gigantic gulf between researchers and practitioners. The things that academia puts out are not, generally, what I would consider to be good software. I think this fundamentally comes down to a difference in the definition of "good" between the two camps. So far as I can tell (not being an academic), the academic definition of "good" seems to revolve around software having certain provable characteristics. My definition of good software involves the software exhibiting useful characteristics. And those are, generally speaking, orthogonal. If not sometimes inhibiting each other. But, of course I would think this, I'm a practitioner. The academics probably have similar complaints about me.
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    I can see this is going to be one of those HN discussions that goes back and forth forever, maybe somebody should do some research on how orthogonal the goals really are!
TimPC 2y ago
If the researcher makes a neutral contribution and someone else you could hire with the same resources would make a strongly positive contribution you're always going to favor the strongly positive contribution.

Kamq 2y ago

> regardless of your individual motivations and since there's really no inherent conflict either. Within organizations, there's an inherent conflict between any orthogonal goals. In theory there's no conflict, but in practice, there is constant competition for time and resources. This creates conflict between any groups whose goals are not aligned, including groups whose goals are completely unrelated. This is also why organizational politics is the way it is.

ikari_pl 2y ago
you stated the condition/assumption - that the goals are orthogonal I believe these are not - researchers publishing how to create good software and developers creating software may be seen as goals as aligned as fixing an incident and publishing a post mortem, or as writing an RFC and implementing it. Or publishing a post on how you remodeled your infrastructure. They diverge at some point, yes, but that's not orthogonal at all
- Kamq 2y ago
  > researchers publishing how to create good software I disagree that this is what researchers are doing (at least from my point of view). This is actually an area where I agree with the article, there's a gigantic gulf between researchers and practitioners. The things that academia puts out are not, generally, what I would consider to be good software. I think this fundamentally comes down to a difference in the definition of "good" between the two camps. So far as I can tell (not being an academic), the academic definition of "good" seems to revolve around software having certain provable characteristics. My definition of good software involves the software exhibiting useful characteristics. And those are, generally speaking, orthogonal. If not sometimes inhibiting each other. But, of course I would think this, I'm a practitioner. The academics probably have similar complaints about me.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  I can see this is going to be one of those HN discussions that goes back and forth forever, maybe somebody should do some research on how orthogonal the goals really are!

TimPC 2y ago

If the researcher makes a neutral contribution and someone else you could hire with the same resources would make a strongly positive contribution you're always going to favor the strongly positive contribution.