4 ms·

Having worked in higher ed for a number of years, I'm frankly surprised that this doesn't happen more often. At least, to the level of being reported like this.

Having worked in higher ed for a number of years, I'm frankly surprised that this doesn't happen more often. At least, to the level of being reported like this. Faculties regularly operate independently and have their own ideas about the proper way to secure the information they have access to (which, in some cases, is not at all). As a security representative in the central IT department, I was often tasked with finding, reporting and attempting to work with the various faculties that did not follow posted data access and privacy policies but, almost every time my efforts were superseded by "academic freedom". Incredibly frustrating experience.

ef47d35620c1 13y ago
I call this the "PhD from MIT Syndrome". A few of them actually think that they know everything about everything no matter their field of study. The are polymaths (in their own minds at least). Years ago, a physics professor scoffed at me when I cautioned him about storing 64-bit ints in 64-bit doubles. He said, "who is this that speaks to me as though I needed advice?" He could not understand why his program failed sporadically. Must be a bug in the compiler. It certainly wasn't his code.
- existencebox 13y ago
  You know, I once sat in on a discussion between one of the sysadmins on my team and a researcher; that went something like (barely paraphrased, only insofar as my memory is bad) "Did your code run in test? What is test? Do you deploy your code to the test environment before steamrolling a running production instance. No no, why would I ever do that." (after literally cursing out one of our sysadmins for not fixing why his code was no longer running for him.) Things like this are why I left academia back to industry, unfortunately for how many fantastic opportunities academia has to offer :/
Yhippa 13y ago
It probably does happen with great frequency; it's just that the perpetrators aren't caught!

ef47d35620c1 13y ago

I call this the "PhD from MIT Syndrome". A few of them actually think that they know everything about everything no matter their field of study. The are polymaths (in their own minds at least). Years ago, a physics professor scoffed at me when I cautioned him about storing 64-bit ints in 64-bit doubles. He said, "who is this that speaks to me as though I needed advice?" He could not understand why his program failed sporadically. Must be a bug in the compiler. It certainly wasn't his code.

existencebox 13y ago
You know, I once sat in on a discussion between one of the sysadmins on my team and a researcher; that went something like (barely paraphrased, only insofar as my memory is bad) "Did your code run in test? What is test? Do you deploy your code to the test environment before steamrolling a running production instance. No no, why would I ever do that." (after literally cursing out one of our sysadmins for not fixing why his code was no longer running for him.) Things like this are why I left academia back to industry, unfortunately for how many fantastic opportunities academia has to offer :/

Yhippa 13y ago

It probably does happen with great frequency; it's just that the perpetrators aren't caught!