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Having both worked in industry and academia, I think the author considers so called "real world knowledge" as the only kind of useful knowledge. For example, a
by jorleif 17y ago
Having both worked in industry and academia, I think the author considers so called "real world knowledge" as the only kind of useful knowledge. For example, a working programmer might learn Ruby on Rails very well by working with the framework but be completely oblivious to other frameworks or programming languages, not to mention theoretical computer science.
Academia, on the other hand, focuses more on a high level knowledge by focusing on publishing results in the form of short papers with the most central results and references to the most central knowledge about the problem in research literature.
I think that for someone who wants to work as a programmer grad school is indeed "broken", since it underemphasizes the first kind of knowledge. On the other hand, many advances to technology come from academia, so apparently that system also has its advantages.
- dmolnar 17y agoI disagree that the author considers "real world knowledge" the only kind of useful knowledge. If you read the preceding entry on "The Agony of Grad School" it clarifies that the main problem here is this person has a really high cost for context switching, plus a really low tolerance for distraction. That's a bad combination, because you end up thrashing all the time. In the preceding entry, he talks about how he wants to know what's going on in a theory of programming languages course (not really "real world knowledge" ;) but he can't due to the context switch overhead from real analysis. It sounds like the author unfortunately hit a place that requires more classes and teaching before getting to the point where research becomes the full time 100% job. It also sounds like the author was trying to take several courses and be a teaching assistant at the same time. That's a lot of work for anyone, even people who are good at multi-tasking.
- asimjalis 17y agoI feel the author is saying that knowledge should be tested against reality. The test should not be a quiz administered in a closed classroom. Knowledge should lead to outcomes in the real world. It should be hardened against the real world.
- jorleif 17y agoI suppose I was wrong about the author's reasoning, but I still think my description applies to many people. Personally, I think both camps have their problems. Academic people can be quite annoying when they talk about something like they know everything about it just because they've read some paper about it. On the other hand programmers knowing only one language and framework are equally limited in their view.