8 ms·

The other side of "academic freedom"

124 points by phenylene 13y ago

BruceIV 13y ago
Interesting to hear the other side of this. I'm a PhD student in Computer Science right now, and a lot of the appeal of the job is the ability to get paid for working on projects that interest me. That said, I have a nice government fellowship for my PhD and a generous funding package from my university - if I was missing one or both, things would be harder.
- sn0v 13y ago
  Do you mind me asking where you're doing your PhD?
  - BruceIV 13y ago
    University of Waterloo. They've got some great research groups, the funding's good, and you get to keep any IP you develop over the course of your studies.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - cperciva 13y ago
      What are you working on for your PhD?
      - BruceIV 13y ago
        Well, it's early days yet (I'm just finishing up my coursework, and haven't gotten far into my research yet), but my proposal is to build generic collections data structures for general-purpose GPU programming (and related architectures). Single-threaded performance is hitting some pretty serious walls so parallel execution seems to be the best way forward, but memory layout can make orders-of-magnitude difference in performance and is hard to get right. My goal is to build something analogous to the STL to make it easier for the average programmer to program for GPU.
        kame3d 13y ago
        Do you know about the 'thrust' library? http://thrust.github.io http://thrust.github.io
- moyix 13y ago
  This is one of my main worries about my impending graduation. Right now, I work on what I find interesting, publish when I have what I think are good results, and have not found that anyone has tried to dictate what I should be working on. Once I graduate though, I'll lose that luxury. Unfortunately I don't know of any "real-world" job that provides such freedom; perhaps grad students are only afforded it because we're so affordable.
  - Evbn 13y ago
    Right. It is rather easy for someone with a CS eduction to earn ~$40k a year and spend most of the year in freedom. Just get a contracting/freelance gig. The hard person is getting $100k or $200k or more and still having freedom.
tjr 13y ago
I'm surprised that we don't see more in the way of "open source" computer science research, done by unpaid volunteer enthusiasts.
- BruceIV 13y ago
  It may be difficult/expensive to get to research conferences without institutional support.
  - jseliger 13y ago
    It probably is, but I wonder how much one needs time at research conferences to produce interesting work. The word "wonder" is very deliberate here: I genuinely have no idea. In English lit, my own field, access to a research library (with peer-reviewed articles and books) is far more important than conference attendance, for example.
    - BruceIV 13y ago
      I'm not precisely sure myself - in CS, though, a lot of the research is digitized, and much of it is available for free online (if you know where to look - Google Scholar really helps), but as far as making useful research contributions goes, being able to provide citeable papers helps, and most of those are published at conferences.
    - jk4930 13y ago
      "80 percent of success is just showing up" — Woody Allen Use conferences to make connections and get inspirations and recommendations from talking to other researchers in your field. Being present + papers > papers.
      - Evbn 13y ago
        We have the Internet now. Conferences are more about career networking than intellectual networking.
apples2apples 13y ago
But this is all wrong. "Academic Freedom" means that you are free to publish your findings in an objective way without having to please your investors. Of course you have to do things that are interesting and impactful and the funding is less now than it has been in the decade prior, but that is much different than saying that academic freedom means doing whatever you want. I can just imagine Michelangelo writing this blog during his agony of painting the Sistine Chapel.
jseliger 13y ago
Two separate points: 1. I'm surprised that Welsh argues that tenured CS profs still have to follow what publication venues want to see. Why not just say, "Fuck it?", publish on blogs / arvix.com/, and let the field catch up to them? Certainly that's not a route to immediate promotions or status within the field, but there may be strong long-term returns to individuals who go this way and are vindicated over time. (This obviously doesn't apply to non-tenured faculty or grad students. I'll also note that this point is a related observation, not a criticism of his argument.) 2. This stands out to me: The final (and arguably most important) aspect of being successful as a faculty member is being able to solve new problems better than anyone else in your area. It is not usually enough to simply do a better job solving the same problem as someone else -- you need to have a new idea, a new spin, a new approach -- or work on a different problem. Genuinely new ideas are actually quite rare. Sometimes the difference between a "new" idea and someone else's discovery or implementation of that idea can be just a couple months difference! (See Steven Berlin Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From for one popular description of this.) Yet one person or group gets 99% of the credit / tenure / etc.
- Lewisham 13y ago
  I'm surprised that Welsh argues that tenured CS profs still have to follow what publication venues want to see. Why not just say, "Fuck it?", publish on blogs / arvix.com/, and let the field catch up to them? Because funding agencies don't like it. They'll look back at previous funding you've been given, and rightly or wrongly, look at the peer-reviewed articles that came out of it. If you're pushing everything to arXiv, then it looks like something went badly wrong and you can't be trusted with future money. As the OP says, the problem is not just ideas, but how those ideas are disseminated and what that means to your funding stream. Saying "fuck it" is a really good way of screwing up your funding stream for years.
- sb 13y ago
  ad 1: Please also do keep in mind that there are career steps after obtaining tenure. If you say "Fuck it" right after getting tenure, you are almost certain to never make it thus far. I also do agree with the other comment regarding funding agencies. Another problematic way that NSF does business (inviting professors for peer review that is) is that this virtually guarantees that some of your peers know exactly what you're doing, which reduces effectiveness of double-blind submissions substantially (to the point where it is hard to believe it works at all; didn't it ever occur strange to anyone that the same people from the same top schools are consistently successful? [with grants and publications in the top venues])
jofer 13y ago
As someone who relatively recently decided to go into industry instead of academia after finishing my PhD, my reasoning was almost identical. Industry seems like a better chance to work on interesting problems and have a bigger impact. However, I'm really regretting it at the moment. I thought I'd at least have a say in how I approach problems, even if I didn't get to choose the problems I work on. Instead, I've literally been told, "Your job is not to do science. Your job is not think. Your job is to click a mouse. Do exactly what you're told in exactly the way you're told to do it. Now, stop asking questions and stop trying to think for yourself." I realize that the people I'm working with have a _lot_ more experience than I do, but I do think there's value in considering alternate approaches to solving problems. A lot of the fault lies with me, too. In the case above, I didn't clearly communicate the business impact of what I was suggesting to my mentor. Either way, it's frustrating. Most of it is finding the right team to be on. I still think I chose the right company, I just need to find a way to be on an R&D team. I'm under a 2 year contract, so I can't leave even if I did get frustrated enough to. At any rate, know what you're getting yourself into. I did two internships on similar teams, but at different companies. Things are definitely done differently here. There is certainly of lot of interesting work in industry, but it's very easy to wind up stuck doing menial repetitive tasks if you're not careful.
- mdwelsh 13y ago
  That's unfortunate. I'd be curious to know where you ended up taking a job. I have been surprised at how "academically inclined" Google is; however, I am sure there are groups here that have less interest in research-type endeavors than my group. Industry is by no means homogenous in this regard, which is why I decided to save that discussion for a later post.
  - jofer 13y ago
    I'm in the energy industry, rather than in software directly. (I'm a geophysist, rather than in CS.) I'm at one of the majors, but it's probably best if I don't say which one. There are certainly "academically inclined" groups where I work. I just need to work towards one of them. I've enjoyed all of your posts, by the way!
aaron695 13y ago
> My team at Google has a pretty broad mandate which gives us a fair bit of freedom. The other points might be fair but this would have to be the exception rather than the rule in private industry and even Google I would image would never give enough leeway to someone to "monitor volcanoes with sensor networks"
- mdwelsh 13y ago
  The sensor networks research was work I did at Harvard prior to joining Google. I don't think Google is very interested in my deploying sensor networks on volcanoes, although (to be fair) I have not asked.
  - Lewisham 13y ago
    google.org might be, if there's a humanitarian spin on it.
- tellarin 13y ago
  Interesting example, as I actually know people at a company that have that kind of leeway. And are actually doing it. :)
patio11 13y ago
I really wanted to get into academia because I had the perception that you got paid for thinking smart thoughts and occasionally writing about them, but when I actually tried academic research it seemed to be about 80% politics/grantwriting and 20% research delivery, so I went into private industry. If you have sufficient reputation to have a sinecure from Google, that's certainly an option for subsidizing research. Even if you don't, a lot of research in our field is not terribly expensive to do, and the materials/collaboration required to do it are within the grasp of e.g. anybody who runs a business which gives them sufficient scheduling flexibility. You can even get published in Real Academic Journals (TM), which surprised me.
- SagelyGuru 13y ago
  Certainly, during a lifetime in academia, I have observed that the most successful professors are not the ones who work on what they like (with very few outstanding exceptions) but instead are those who learn to like what they must work on. Where 'must work on' is defined pretty much by what is described in this well informed article. The funding trends and the ability to anticipate them so as to be amongst the first in the line being the most important. Knowing the right people certainly not to be neglected. Ability to do any kind of useful or worthwhile science a long way down the list. This undesirable trend has been lately exacerbated by the race for the funding and the attendant unhealthy over competitiveness. Academia is now a very different world to what it used to be, where a fellow would get enough ad-hominem funding, on the strength of his proven ability and membership of an elite college. Indeed, without that, the phrase 'academic freedom' has lost most of its meaning. I believe that 'academic whoredom' would much more fittingly describe the current state of affairs.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
imrehg 13y ago
I had been thinking along similar lines in physics research as a post-doc, and wrote my experience and ideas up[0]. Then I got fired (unrelated to me writing that post:), and went in a job interview with another prof, who have read my post, and started off the discussion with that. In the end, he have seen the value, the ideals, and that the problems outlined were valid (he also worked in the Bell Labs which is one of my inspiration). In the end I decided that instead of joining another lab, or as the OP working in the industry, I'll wing it and see if I can set up things the way I want. So now my "main job" is to do research and set up the lab I would want to work in, and get the people who are just as ambitious on board. "Tall order" doesn't even begin to describe it, let's see what happens. [0] http://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2013/02/academia-is-failing-but-not-for-everyone/ http://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2013/02/academia-is-failing-bu... "The Academia is Failing But Not For Everyone"
- krichman 13y ago
  This is exactly what I'd like to do with my life if I could afford to. How is it going so far?
  - imrehg 13y ago
    Working on the foundations, as I still need a few months of Taiwanese visa to be able to start my own company here legally. In the meantime: - Figuring out useful products used in a physics lab that I can use for my research and sell it as well, plus other value added things (like software development, consulting) that can support the things. - Reviving and expanding my academic network (have researcher friends in England, India, Bangladesh, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, France) and see what would fit them well too - Expanding Taiwanese networks for actual researchers, developers, electronics, manufacturing, via the Geek Dinner I organized and our newly founded Taipei Hackerspace, as well as friends working in the industry - Expanding my knowledge via the likes of $100 Startup, Lean Startup, The Art of Innovation, Losing My Virginity, .... - Moonlighting with a local creative firm to learn more about real business and money side, and get more professional services contacts - Setting up a website and prototypes in the next month or so (sooner rather than later). If you ever wanna chat, I'm on gmail.com with the same username :)
tikhonj 13y ago
Amusingly, I think his dig at the programming language community actually underscores something that I really love about academia and that I think is virtually unique: you can focus on things that are not immediately practical just because they're elegant or beautiful. It's awesome. I couldn't imagine much room for it in industry (although it's not entirely impossible). Unfortunately, it also seems surprisingly rare even in academic CS. Certainly nobody I know at Berkeley operates this way :(. Maybe it's better in the mathematics department. For me, that would be the main draw to academia: being able to not worry about short-term usefulness and not needing to worry about marketing my work to the average programmer. Besides, those "esoteric abstractions"? They solve real problems. In surprisingly simple ways. Better than existing solutions. The only reason that "real software developers" don't benefit is that they aren't willing to learn them. And it is not--and should not be--the responsibility of the PL theory community to get the average programmer up to date. And, even so, some people are really trying. It brings to mind the usual saying about horses and water. Also, if I may make an observation: it seems his thoughts on PL design broadly reflect the philosophy of Google in general. This is just reinforced by the designs of Golang and Dart, as well as the promotional material surrounding the languages (presentations and the like). I personally think that this almost borders on anti-intellectualism: they seem to imply that something created by ivory-tower academics with an understanding of math cannot possibly be useful in the real world; only real software engineers™ make practical tools. And that is probably the main reason that I would choose a company like Jane Street over Google any day :P. Yeah, I'm probably more annoyed by this than it's worth. It really helps to lay my thoughts down on paper, and I still haven't started that blog I keep on considering. So HN will have to be my confidant for now.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  As an academic/industrial researcher* in the programming languages community, I agree with Matt. And who do you think makes up a vast majority of Google's PhDs anyways? That's right, PL researchers who want to do do real work and solve real problems (e.g. Jeff Dean). > The only reason that "real software developers" don't benefit is that they aren't willing to learn them. This is a stupid response: its like saying, "users are just stupid, fix the users, not the device!" We are simply not willing to listen to what their real problems are. We aren't solving their problems, so why should real developers care about us? > And it is not--and should not be--the responsibility of the PL theory community to get the average programmer up to date. Does the PL theory community actually cared about programmers? There isn't much empathy on both sides. > Also, if I may make an observation: it seems his thoughts on PL design broadly reflect the philosophy of Google in general. If you are going to attack something on hackernews, please give at least a few details. > I personally think that this almost borders on anti-intellectualism: they seem to imply that something created by ivory-tower academics with an understanding of math cannot possibly be useful in the real world; only real software engineers™ make practical tools. Why is this so weird? You know, the ivory tower's output is super cutting edge research + people. They aren't supposed to be making practical tools. * disclaimer: I don't work for Google, but I do work for Microsoft.
Create 13y ago
"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper
qwerta 13y ago
I want to study astronomy. After first year I found it to be a dead end. So I went to private sector, got nice 9-5 job and hack astronomical software over evenings. More freedom, more money and my software is still used by thousands of astronomers.
af3 13y ago
I have a question for tenured profs, why one needs to apply for grants after getting tenured? my guesses: to increase its own salary; to buy equipment; to support the group. is it possible, to do research alone (maybe having one or two grad students) ?
- _delirium 13y ago
  Those are basically the reasons you'd need grants, yes. And yes, it's possible to go another route, and do research alone or with few students, in which case you don't need many grants (perhaps any). In areas where not much grant money is available in the first place (pure mathematics, say), that is what people do by necessity. The author of this post comes from an area, systems, where large-budget, many-student labs are the norm, partly because of the type of research, and partly just because the (relative to other areas) availability of funds means most of your colleagues are going the large-budget, many-student-lab route.
- gregpilling 13y ago
  The university takes an overhead charge on any grant money, perhaps 40% of the total. The professor can then use the rest of the money to purchase equipment (computers, tape recorders paper), pay research assistants (grad students), travel to conferences, buy datasets or software like SPSS, or pay themselves summer salary or extra salary. If your research requires none of these things, and you have tenure and don't care about showing your field that you are capable of bringing in grant money to help fund your department, then you don't need to worry about grant money. This is probably less than 1% of the tenured professors. It also has to do with ego; your peers will know who is bringing in the big grants and who is not.
sramsay 13y ago
I realize it's in quotes, but very few academics hearing the phrase "academic freedom" would think of "the ability to work on anything you like." They would, rather, think of what Wikipedia aptly describes as: ". . . the belief that the freedom of inquiry by faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy as well as the principles of academia, and that scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts (including those that are inconvenient to external political groups or to authorities) without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment." I've been in academia for (including graduate school) a little over twenty years, and I've been astounded at the ways in which freedom of inquiry is threatened from without and from within. And while few American and European academics face imprisonment for their views or objects of study, many academics in other parts of the world do. And U.S. and European academics certainly can face job loss or sanction for being interested in "inconvenient" things. I would encourage the author to confine his use of this phrase to its traditional meaning, lest anyone forget the far more important problem to which it refers.

124 points by phenylene 13y ago

Interesting to hear the other side of this. I'm a PhD student in Computer Science right now, and a lot of the appeal of the job is the ability to get paid for working on projects that interest me. That said, I have a nice government fellowship for my PhD and a generous funding package from my university - if I was missing one or both, things would be harder.

sn0v 13y ago
Do you mind me asking where you're doing your PhD?
- BruceIV 13y ago
  University of Waterloo. They've got some great research groups, the funding's good, and you get to keep any IP you develop over the course of your studies.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - cperciva 13y ago
    What are you working on for your PhD?
    - BruceIV 13y ago
      Well, it's early days yet (I'm just finishing up my coursework, and haven't gotten far into my research yet), but my proposal is to build generic collections data structures for general-purpose GPU programming (and related architectures). Single-threaded performance is hitting some pretty serious walls so parallel execution seems to be the best way forward, but memory layout can make orders-of-magnitude difference in performance and is hard to get right. My goal is to build something analogous to the STL to make it easier for the average programmer to program for GPU.
      - kame3d 13y ago
        Do you know about the 'thrust' library? http://thrust.github.io http://thrust.github.io
moyix 13y ago
This is one of my main worries about my impending graduation. Right now, I work on what I find interesting, publish when I have what I think are good results, and have not found that anyone has tried to dictate what I should be working on. Once I graduate though, I'll lose that luxury. Unfortunately I don't know of any "real-world" job that provides such freedom; perhaps grad students are only afforded it because we're so affordable.
- Evbn 13y ago
  Right. It is rather easy for someone with a CS eduction to earn ~$40k a year and spend most of the year in freedom. Just get a contracting/freelance gig. The hard person is getting $100k or $200k or more and still having freedom.

tjr 13y ago

I'm surprised that we don't see more in the way of "open source" computer science research, done by unpaid volunteer enthusiasts.

BruceIV 13y ago
It may be difficult/expensive to get to research conferences without institutional support.
- jseliger 13y ago
  It probably is, but I wonder how much one needs time at research conferences to produce interesting work. The word "wonder" is very deliberate here: I genuinely have no idea. In English lit, my own field, access to a research library (with peer-reviewed articles and books) is far more important than conference attendance, for example.
  - BruceIV 13y ago
    I'm not precisely sure myself - in CS, though, a lot of the research is digitized, and much of it is available for free online (if you know where to look - Google Scholar really helps), but as far as making useful research contributions goes, being able to provide citeable papers helps, and most of those are published at conferences.
  - jk4930 13y ago
    "80 percent of success is just showing up" — Woody Allen Use conferences to make connections and get inspirations and recommendations from talking to other researchers in your field. Being present + papers > papers.
    - Evbn 13y ago
      We have the Internet now. Conferences are more about career networking than intellectual networking.

apples2apples 13y ago

But this is all wrong. "Academic Freedom" means that you are free to publish your findings in an objective way without having to please your investors. Of course you have to do things that are interesting and impactful and the funding is less now than it has been in the decade prior, but that is much different than saying that academic freedom means doing whatever you want. I can just imagine Michelangelo writing this blog during his agony of painting the Sistine Chapel.

jseliger 13y ago

Two separate points: 1. I'm surprised that Welsh argues that tenured CS profs still have to follow what publication venues want to see. Why not just say, "Fuck it?", publish on blogs / arvix.com/, and let the field catch up to them? Certainly that's not a route to immediate promotions or status within the field, but there may be strong long-term returns to individuals who go this way and are vindicated over time. (This obviously doesn't apply to non-tenured faculty or grad students. I'll also note that this point is a related observation, not a criticism of his argument.) 2. This stands out to me: The final (and arguably most important) aspect of being successful as a faculty member is being able to solve new problems better than anyone else in your area. It is not usually enough to simply do a better job solving the same problem as someone else -- you need to have a new idea, a new spin, a new approach -- or work on a different problem. Genuinely new ideas are actually quite rare. Sometimes the difference between a "new" idea and someone else's discovery or implementation of that idea can be just a couple months difference! (See Steven Berlin Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From for one popular description of this.) Yet one person or group gets 99% of the credit / tenure / etc.

Lewisham 13y ago
I'm surprised that Welsh argues that tenured CS profs still have to follow what publication venues want to see. Why not just say, "Fuck it?", publish on blogs / arvix.com/, and let the field catch up to them? Because funding agencies don't like it. They'll look back at previous funding you've been given, and rightly or wrongly, look at the peer-reviewed articles that came out of it. If you're pushing everything to arXiv, then it looks like something went badly wrong and you can't be trusted with future money. As the OP says, the problem is not just ideas, but how those ideas are disseminated and what that means to your funding stream. Saying "fuck it" is a really good way of screwing up your funding stream for years.
sb 13y ago
ad 1: Please also do keep in mind that there are career steps after obtaining tenure. If you say "Fuck it" right after getting tenure, you are almost certain to never make it thus far. I also do agree with the other comment regarding funding agencies. Another problematic way that NSF does business (inviting professors for peer review that is) is that this virtually guarantees that some of your peers know exactly what you're doing, which reduces effectiveness of double-blind submissions substantially (to the point where it is hard to believe it works at all; didn't it ever occur strange to anyone that the same people from the same top schools are consistently successful? [with grants and publications in the top venues])

jofer 13y ago

As someone who relatively recently decided to go into industry instead of academia after finishing my PhD, my reasoning was almost identical. Industry seems like a better chance to work on interesting problems and have a bigger impact. However, I'm really regretting it at the moment. I thought I'd at least have a say in how I approach problems, even if I didn't get to choose the problems I work on. Instead, I've literally been told, "Your job is not to do science. Your job is not think. Your job is to click a mouse. Do exactly what you're told in exactly the way you're told to do it. Now, stop asking questions and stop trying to think for yourself." I realize that the people I'm working with have a _lot_ more experience than I do, but I do think there's value in considering alternate approaches to solving problems. A lot of the fault lies with me, too. In the case above, I didn't clearly communicate the business impact of what I was suggesting to my mentor. Either way, it's frustrating. Most of it is finding the right team to be on. I still think I chose the right company, I just need to find a way to be on an R&D team. I'm under a 2 year contract, so I can't leave even if I did get frustrated enough to. At any rate, know what you're getting yourself into. I did two internships on similar teams, but at different companies. Things are definitely done differently here. There is certainly of lot of interesting work in industry, but it's very easy to wind up stuck doing menial repetitive tasks if you're not careful.

mdwelsh 13y ago
That's unfortunate. I'd be curious to know where you ended up taking a job. I have been surprised at how "academically inclined" Google is; however, I am sure there are groups here that have less interest in research-type endeavors than my group. Industry is by no means homogenous in this regard, which is why I decided to save that discussion for a later post.
- jofer 13y ago
  I'm in the energy industry, rather than in software directly. (I'm a geophysist, rather than in CS.) I'm at one of the majors, but it's probably best if I don't say which one. There are certainly "academically inclined" groups where I work. I just need to work towards one of them. I've enjoyed all of your posts, by the way!

aaron695 13y ago

> My team at Google has a pretty broad mandate which gives us a fair bit of freedom. The other points might be fair but this would have to be the exception rather than the rule in private industry and even Google I would image would never give enough leeway to someone to "monitor volcanoes with sensor networks"

mdwelsh 13y ago
The sensor networks research was work I did at Harvard prior to joining Google. I don't think Google is very interested in my deploying sensor networks on volcanoes, although (to be fair) I have not asked.
- Lewisham 13y ago
  google.org might be, if there's a humanitarian spin on it.
tellarin 13y ago
Interesting example, as I actually know people at a company that have that kind of leeway. And are actually doing it. :)

patio11 13y ago

I really wanted to get into academia because I had the perception that you got paid for thinking smart thoughts and occasionally writing about them, but when I actually tried academic research it seemed to be about 80% politics/grantwriting and 20% research delivery, so I went into private industry. If you have sufficient reputation to have a sinecure from Google, that's certainly an option for subsidizing research. Even if you don't, a lot of research in our field is not terribly expensive to do, and the materials/collaboration required to do it are within the grasp of e.g. anybody who runs a business which gives them sufficient scheduling flexibility. You can even get published in Real Academic Journals (TM), which surprised me.

SagelyGuru 13y ago
Certainly, during a lifetime in academia, I have observed that the most successful professors are not the ones who work on what they like (with very few outstanding exceptions) but instead are those who learn to like what they must work on. Where 'must work on' is defined pretty much by what is described in this well informed article. The funding trends and the ability to anticipate them so as to be amongst the first in the line being the most important. Knowing the right people certainly not to be neglected. Ability to do any kind of useful or worthwhile science a long way down the list. This undesirable trend has been lately exacerbated by the race for the funding and the attendant unhealthy over competitiveness. Academia is now a very different world to what it used to be, where a fellow would get enough ad-hominem funding, on the strength of his proven ability and membership of an elite college. Indeed, without that, the phrase 'academic freedom' has lost most of its meaning. I believe that 'academic whoredom' would much more fittingly describe the current state of affairs.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

imrehg 13y ago

I had been thinking along similar lines in physics research as a post-doc, and wrote my experience and ideas up[0]. Then I got fired (unrelated to me writing that post:), and went in a job interview with another prof, who have read my post, and started off the discussion with that. In the end, he have seen the value, the ideals, and that the problems outlined were valid (he also worked in the Bell Labs which is one of my inspiration). In the end I decided that instead of joining another lab, or as the OP working in the industry, I'll wing it and see if I can set up things the way I want. So now my "main job" is to do research and set up the lab I would want to work in, and get the people who are just as ambitious on board. "Tall order" doesn't even begin to describe it, let's see what happens. [0] http://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2013/02/academia-is-failing-but-not-for-everyone/ http://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2013/02/academia-is-failing-bu... "The Academia is Failing But Not For Everyone"

krichman 13y ago
This is exactly what I'd like to do with my life if I could afford to. How is it going so far?
- imrehg 13y ago
  Working on the foundations, as I still need a few months of Taiwanese visa to be able to start my own company here legally. In the meantime: - Figuring out useful products used in a physics lab that I can use for my research and sell it as well, plus other value added things (like software development, consulting) that can support the things. - Reviving and expanding my academic network (have researcher friends in England, India, Bangladesh, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, France) and see what would fit them well too - Expanding Taiwanese networks for actual researchers, developers, electronics, manufacturing, via the Geek Dinner I organized and our newly founded Taipei Hackerspace, as well as friends working in the industry - Expanding my knowledge via the likes of $100 Startup, Lean Startup, The Art of Innovation, Losing My Virginity, .... - Moonlighting with a local creative firm to learn more about real business and money side, and get more professional services contacts - Setting up a website and prototypes in the next month or so (sooner rather than later). If you ever wanna chat, I'm on gmail.com with the same username :)

tikhonj 13y ago

Amusingly, I think his dig at the programming language community actually underscores something that I really love about academia and that I think is virtually unique: you can focus on things that are not immediately practical just because they're elegant or beautiful. It's awesome. I couldn't imagine much room for it in industry (although it's not entirely impossible). Unfortunately, it also seems surprisingly rare even in academic CS. Certainly nobody I know at Berkeley operates this way :(. Maybe it's better in the mathematics department. For me, that would be the main draw to academia: being able to not worry about short-term usefulness and not needing to worry about marketing my work to the average programmer. Besides, those "esoteric abstractions"? They solve real problems. In surprisingly simple ways. Better than existing solutions. The only reason that "real software developers" don't benefit is that they aren't willing to learn them. And it is not--and should not be--the responsibility of the PL theory community to get the average programmer up to date. And, even so, some people are really trying. It brings to mind the usual saying about horses and water. Also, if I may make an observation: it seems his thoughts on PL design broadly reflect the philosophy of Google in general. This is just reinforced by the designs of Golang and Dart, as well as the promotional material surrounding the languages (presentations and the like). I personally think that this almost borders on anti-intellectualism: they seem to imply that something created by ivory-tower academics with an understanding of math cannot possibly be useful in the real world; only real software engineers™ make practical tools. And that is probably the main reason that I would choose a company like Jane Street over Google any day :P. Yeah, I'm probably more annoyed by this than it's worth. It really helps to lay my thoughts down on paper, and I still haven't started that blog I keep on considering. So HN will have to be my confidant for now.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
As an academic/industrial researcher* in the programming languages community, I agree with Matt. And who do you think makes up a vast majority of Google's PhDs anyways? That's right, PL researchers who want to do do real work and solve real problems (e.g. Jeff Dean). > The only reason that "real software developers" don't benefit is that they aren't willing to learn them. This is a stupid response: its like saying, "users are just stupid, fix the users, not the device!" We are simply not willing to listen to what their real problems are. We aren't solving their problems, so why should real developers care about us? > And it is not--and should not be--the responsibility of the PL theory community to get the average programmer up to date. Does the PL theory community actually cared about programmers? There isn't much empathy on both sides. > Also, if I may make an observation: it seems his thoughts on PL design broadly reflect the philosophy of Google in general. If you are going to attack something on hackernews, please give at least a few details. > I personally think that this almost borders on anti-intellectualism: they seem to imply that something created by ivory-tower academics with an understanding of math cannot possibly be useful in the real world; only real software engineers™ make practical tools. Why is this so weird? You know, the ivory tower's output is super cutting edge research + people. They aren't supposed to be making practical tools. * disclaimer: I don't work for Google, but I do work for Microsoft.

Create 13y ago

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

qwerta 13y ago

I want to study astronomy. After first year I found it to be a dead end. So I went to private sector, got nice 9-5 job and hack astronomical software over evenings. More freedom, more money and my software is still used by thousands of astronomers.

af3 13y ago

I have a question for tenured profs, why one needs to apply for grants after getting tenured? my guesses: to increase its own salary; to buy equipment; to support the group. is it possible, to do research alone (maybe having one or two grad students) ?

_delirium 13y ago
Those are basically the reasons you'd need grants, yes. And yes, it's possible to go another route, and do research alone or with few students, in which case you don't need many grants (perhaps any). In areas where not much grant money is available in the first place (pure mathematics, say), that is what people do by necessity. The author of this post comes from an area, systems, where large-budget, many-student labs are the norm, partly because of the type of research, and partly just because the (relative to other areas) availability of funds means most of your colleagues are going the large-budget, many-student-lab route.
gregpilling 13y ago
The university takes an overhead charge on any grant money, perhaps 40% of the total. The professor can then use the rest of the money to purchase equipment (computers, tape recorders paper), pay research assistants (grad students), travel to conferences, buy datasets or software like SPSS, or pay themselves summer salary or extra salary. If your research requires none of these things, and you have tenure and don't care about showing your field that you are capable of bringing in grant money to help fund your department, then you don't need to worry about grant money. This is probably less than 1% of the tenured professors. It also has to do with ego; your peers will know who is bringing in the big grants and who is not.

sramsay 13y ago

I realize it's in quotes, but very few academics hearing the phrase "academic freedom" would think of "the ability to work on anything you like." They would, rather, think of what Wikipedia aptly describes as: ". . . the belief that the freedom of inquiry by faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy as well as the principles of academia, and that scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts (including those that are inconvenient to external political groups or to authorities) without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment." I've been in academia for (including graduate school) a little over twenty years, and I've been astounded at the ways in which freedom of inquiry is threatened from without and from within. And while few American and European academics face imprisonment for their views or objects of study, many academics in other parts of the world do. And U.S. and European academics certainly can face job loss or sanction for being interested in "inconvenient" things. I would encourage the author to confine his use of this phrase to its traditional meaning, lest anyone forget the far more important problem to which it refers.