5 ms·

When you see how badly most academics and academic administrators are at actually running things from a business standpoint it no surprise the academic sector i

by JCM9 2y ago

When you see how badly most academics and academic administrators are at actually running things from a business standpoint it no surprise the academic sector is in such a mess at the moment. Sadly this whole mess is funded by debt handed out that’s not dischargeable in bankruptcy for degrees of highly questionable value. It’s really sad when you follow the money and think about who and how stuff like this is actually paid for. The whole thing is kept alive by the student loan program. Modify that or take it away and academia in the US would implode.

panzagl 2y ago
This doesn't sound like the academics', or even administrators' fault- this is being imposed by the state university system. Reading between the lines the change is a response to political pressure to reduce costs and impose restrictions on curricula.
- kkylin 2y ago
  I'm an academic at a large state university (not SUNY). Faculty, staff, and students generally have very little direct say in IT-related matters. These decisions often come down from central admin, through a process that is just as mysterious (and sometimes infuriating) to us.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    I will also chime in. Having contracted with multiple large, state universities, this is the norm. Staff and faculty have little, if any, input into the systems the university uses, and are often just as confused as the rest of us. Every institution I've worked for had a check-off for IT and central admin if software purchases were requested. These are well-known to be poison to most initiatives without a Dean level or above pushing for it.
  - itishappy 2y ago
    Nit: SUNY and CUNY are surprisingly unrelated. I had to look it up, and I live upstate.
  - bachmeier 2y ago
    I don't think people that criticize non-admin university employees have any idea how these things work. Not only do they not talk to the people that do the work to find out what they need, they're not open to feedback on the garbage they've cobbled together after they put it in production, and every decision is made assuming faculty, staff, and students are always wrong and they're always right. I could write a book about the things I've seen.
- phkahler 2y ago
  >> Reading between the lines the change is a response to political pressure to reduce costs and impose restrictions on curricula. Reduce costs by spending huge amounts of money to lose capability? This smells like someone got an "incentive" to spend public (govt) money on some corporate project. Not sure why anyone wants to impose restrictions on curricula, but that'd be a kind of separate thing.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >Not sure why anyone wants to impose restrictions on curricula I won't get too political, but that's the one part of this story that only got worse and more blatant over the decade since this posting.
deleted 2y ago
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PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
When you see how badly most business administrators are at actually running things from a business standpoint it no surprise the business sector is in such a mess at the moment.
- dpe82 2y ago
  And yet academia manages to be worse.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    Citation?
- api 2y ago
  If you've ever worked in a large corporation or government, you know that this is the norm. It's amazing that anything, anywhere, ever gets done at all in organizations larger than a few hundred people. We as humans are very bad at this. Companies like Oracle, Deloitte, McKinsey, etc. are experts at extracting large sums of money from large dysfunctional organizations.
  - jer0me 2y ago
    Are they themselves large, dysfunctional organizations?
  - m11a 2y ago
    > Companies like Oracle, Deloitte, McKinsey, etc. are experts at extracting large sums of money from large dysfunctional organizations. I wonder, how do they do it? How do they sell sub-par products/services that a company arguably doesn't need at a premium price?
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      Lot of people don't care about spending someone else's money efficiently. And in some cases spending more will make them look better and lead to better opportunities. And this happens on every level, lot of employees just don't care. And those that might probably focus on wrong things. And no software people are no better, going for expensive tools, expensive cloud spending or just next shiny thing is often argued with some time to market or future scaling excuse. Or just wanting to do something different.
etempleton 2y ago
I have found that most academics have zero interest in how the sausage is made. In fact, I would say there is a willful ignorance to understanding the intricacies and complexities of what it takes to run a University system and the precarious financial realities of most colleges and universities. However, every once in a while an academic decides to take on administrative responsibilities to fix all of the things they perceive as broken or to show everyone how smart / right they are. Usually the first year for them is incredibly difficult for them and everyone around them and they make a true and terrible mess of it. At this point, after a full year, they usually know just enough to realize how little they know about running a college, managing people, or generally being a leader. They then react in one of three ways: 1. Resign from their admin job and go back to just teaching as if nothing happened 2. Become humble and begin actually collaborating with people and not blaming everyone for every thing that isn’t as they see it. 3. Double down and truly blow everything up until they are either fired or whatever it is they are running collapses in on itself. This isn’t everyone. The faculty who transition best to leadership tend to be pretty humble to begin with.
nfw2 2y ago
I recently left a software dev job in academia, and the amount of inefficiency in the organization is insane. As part of my off-boarding, the lead engineer mentioned she would ideally like to hire 5 more developers to the team. That would bring the team size up to 15 (8 devs, 2 devops, 2 Ux, 1 graphic designer, 1 pm, 1 eng manager). The team maintains two things: - The static website for the library - A pretty basic image server and viewer for the library and museum collections Sure, the library needs a website, but that shouldn't require more than a person or two to maintain. The image viewer was only used by a handful of people. But it doesn't matter. The team gets funded because the students will keep paying their tuition. The engineers can keep sitting around watching youtube all day and the world keeps turning. Perhaps most egregious example was in my first 1:1 -- my manager said, "Don't expect much output from [SENIOR ENGINEER X]. He isn't a good engineer." The organization isn't willing to fire anyone. As a result, the people in charge are the ones who have been around the longest. That said, it's risky to fire anybody because hiring is so difficult. The salary bands are set at the university level for all employees, which means the maximum a software engineer can make is much lower than market rate. To make matters worse, working "in person" is mandated by the library dean, and the university is in a college town in the middle of nowhere. The interview process also includes NO coding sessions although I'm not sure whether that's due to some corporate process or just incompetence. To be fair, these sorts of issues aren't exclusive to academia, and I've seen similar issues in large organizations. Somewhat paradoxically, the more bullet-proof the business-model is, the more potential there is for rot to grow in a company.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  They hiring?
- loopdoend 2y ago
  I'd love to get a job like this seems amazing. Imagine all the gold plating you'd get to do. All the experiments and optimizations. You'd have the best library website ever. Imagine the job security.
  - nfw2 2y ago
    When you're on a team with 15 people, that means a lot of process to push through to get anything done. One of the other engineers was the owner for analytics, and as a result we had basically no analytics. Furthermore, the team lead would often say things like "developers aren't designers and shouldn't be thinking about the product". I wanted to implement a basic semantic search to help people find the resources they were looking for (#1 pain point from talking to people), but that was shut down at every turn. There actually was talk of firing someone once, but the reason was he didn't always arrive at the office at 9am sharp, and wasn't in any way related to his output.
lostlogin 2y ago
The university I was at had this amazing process for internal billing. Everything cost heaps and required entry in an arcane system. If you could do something inhouse, you were supposed to, either though the cost was astronomical. A $100k bit of software from an extra vendor was definitely $200k+ once the various IT departments (there were at least 4) had done their bit. There were managers all the way down and all were very important.

by JCM9 2y ago

panzagl 2y ago

This doesn't sound like the academics', or even administrators' fault- this is being imposed by the state university system. Reading between the lines the change is a response to political pressure to reduce costs and impose restrictions on curricula.

kkylin 2y ago
I'm an academic at a large state university (not SUNY). Faculty, staff, and students generally have very little direct say in IT-related matters. These decisions often come down from central admin, through a process that is just as mysterious (and sometimes infuriating) to us.
- Loughla 2y ago
  I will also chime in. Having contracted with multiple large, state universities, this is the norm. Staff and faculty have little, if any, input into the systems the university uses, and are often just as confused as the rest of us. Every institution I've worked for had a check-off for IT and central admin if software purchases were requested. These are well-known to be poison to most initiatives without a Dean level or above pushing for it.
- itishappy 2y ago
  Nit: SUNY and CUNY are surprisingly unrelated. I had to look it up, and I live upstate.
- bachmeier 2y ago
  I don't think people that criticize non-admin university employees have any idea how these things work. Not only do they not talk to the people that do the work to find out what they need, they're not open to feedback on the garbage they've cobbled together after they put it in production, and every decision is made assuming faculty, staff, and students are always wrong and they're always right. I could write a book about the things I've seen.
phkahler 2y ago
>> Reading between the lines the change is a response to political pressure to reduce costs and impose restrictions on curricula. Reduce costs by spending huge amounts of money to lose capability? This smells like someone got an "incentive" to spend public (govt) money on some corporate project. Not sure why anyone wants to impose restrictions on curricula, but that'd be a kind of separate thing.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >Not sure why anyone wants to impose restrictions on curricula I won't get too political, but that's the one part of this story that only got worse and more blatant over the decade since this posting.

deleted 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago

When you see how badly most business administrators are at actually running things from a business standpoint it no surprise the business sector is in such a mess at the moment.

dpe82 2y ago
And yet academia manages to be worse.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Citation?
api 2y ago
If you've ever worked in a large corporation or government, you know that this is the norm. It's amazing that anything, anywhere, ever gets done at all in organizations larger than a few hundred people. We as humans are very bad at this. Companies like Oracle, Deloitte, McKinsey, etc. are experts at extracting large sums of money from large dysfunctional organizations.
- jer0me 2y ago
  Are they themselves large, dysfunctional organizations?
- m11a 2y ago
  > Companies like Oracle, Deloitte, McKinsey, etc. are experts at extracting large sums of money from large dysfunctional organizations. I wonder, how do they do it? How do they sell sub-par products/services that a company arguably doesn't need at a premium price?
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    Lot of people don't care about spending someone else's money efficiently. And in some cases spending more will make them look better and lead to better opportunities. And this happens on every level, lot of employees just don't care. And those that might probably focus on wrong things. And no software people are no better, going for expensive tools, expensive cloud spending or just next shiny thing is often argued with some time to market or future scaling excuse. Or just wanting to do something different.

etempleton 2y ago

I have found that most academics have zero interest in how the sausage is made. In fact, I would say there is a willful ignorance to understanding the intricacies and complexities of what it takes to run a University system and the precarious financial realities of most colleges and universities. However, every once in a while an academic decides to take on administrative responsibilities to fix all of the things they perceive as broken or to show everyone how smart / right they are. Usually the first year for them is incredibly difficult for them and everyone around them and they make a true and terrible mess of it. At this point, after a full year, they usually know just enough to realize how little they know about running a college, managing people, or generally being a leader. They then react in one of three ways: 1. Resign from their admin job and go back to just teaching as if nothing happened 2. Become humble and begin actually collaborating with people and not blaming everyone for every thing that isn’t as they see it. 3. Double down and truly blow everything up until they are either fired or whatever it is they are running collapses in on itself. This isn’t everyone. The faculty who transition best to leadership tend to be pretty humble to begin with.

nfw2 2y ago

I recently left a software dev job in academia, and the amount of inefficiency in the organization is insane. As part of my off-boarding, the lead engineer mentioned she would ideally like to hire 5 more developers to the team. That would bring the team size up to 15 (8 devs, 2 devops, 2 Ux, 1 graphic designer, 1 pm, 1 eng manager). The team maintains two things: - The static website for the library - A pretty basic image server and viewer for the library and museum collections Sure, the library needs a website, but that shouldn't require more than a person or two to maintain. The image viewer was only used by a handful of people. But it doesn't matter. The team gets funded because the students will keep paying their tuition. The engineers can keep sitting around watching youtube all day and the world keeps turning. Perhaps most egregious example was in my first 1:1 -- my manager said, "Don't expect much output from [SENIOR ENGINEER X]. He isn't a good engineer." The organization isn't willing to fire anyone. As a result, the people in charge are the ones who have been around the longest. That said, it's risky to fire anybody because hiring is so difficult. The salary bands are set at the university level for all employees, which means the maximum a software engineer can make is much lower than market rate. To make matters worse, working "in person" is mandated by the library dean, and the university is in a college town in the middle of nowhere. The interview process also includes NO coding sessions although I'm not sure whether that's due to some corporate process or just incompetence. To be fair, these sorts of issues aren't exclusive to academia, and I've seen similar issues in large organizations. Somewhat paradoxically, the more bullet-proof the business-model is, the more potential there is for rot to grow in a company.

giraffe_lady 2y ago
They hiring?
loopdoend 2y ago
I'd love to get a job like this seems amazing. Imagine all the gold plating you'd get to do. All the experiments and optimizations. You'd have the best library website ever. Imagine the job security.
- nfw2 2y ago
  When you're on a team with 15 people, that means a lot of process to push through to get anything done. One of the other engineers was the owner for analytics, and as a result we had basically no analytics. Furthermore, the team lead would often say things like "developers aren't designers and shouldn't be thinking about the product". I wanted to implement a basic semantic search to help people find the resources they were looking for (#1 pain point from talking to people), but that was shut down at every turn. There actually was talk of firing someone once, but the reason was he didn't always arrive at the office at 9am sharp, and wasn't in any way related to his output.

lostlogin 2y ago

The university I was at had this amazing process for internal billing. Everything cost heaps and required entry in an arcane system. If you could do something inhouse, you were supposed to, either though the cost was astronomical. A $100k bit of software from an extra vendor was definitely $200k+ once the various IT departments (there were at least 4) had done their bit. There were managers all the way down and all were very important.