
CMU’s computer science dean on its poaching problem - doppp
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/26/it-isnt-just-uber-carnegie-mellons-computer-science-dean-on-its-poaching-problem/
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imgabe
Academia in general is screwing itself. The main reason for anyone to go into
it is to work on interesting problems in a self-directed fashion with amazing
job security. You probably wouldn't get rich, but you'll have a nice upper-
middle class salary and almost no way of getting fired.

Now the available tenure-track positions are declining every year in favor of
adjunct quasi-slave labor. Even if you do win the lottery and get a tenure-
track position, from what I understand you'll spend most of your time writing
grant proposals to chase funding, and at least 5-7 years trying to please the
tenure committee.

So, why exactly would anyone spend 10-15 years making a fraction of what they
could in industry for a vanishingly small chance of the eventual payoff of
tenure?

If you're going to slave away for 10-15 years anyway before you get to do what
you want, you may as well do it in industry where you could put away enough
money to be financially independent in that time. The only remaining obstacle
is that you still kind of need an institutional affiliation to be taken
seriously as a researcher and publish, but that might be slowly changing as
the Internet makes it easier to publish.

~~~
dunkelheit
Honest question: where do you learn advanced stuff if not in a graduate
school? Academia undoubtedly sucks if one mainly takes money or career
prospects into account. But among people who do challenging and sexy stuff
(including in the industry) phd seems to be the norm, not the exception. One
might object that phd has become unnecessary because nowadays all the relevant
information is online but learning without the help of a community and a
mentor is hard.

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bgalbraith
You absolutely do not need a PhD for industry unless you want an R&D job in a
handful of domains. A PhD is not simply learning more facts about a particular
topic. It's an apprenticeship for conducting independently directed academic
research. There are so many topics that you can not just learn from reading
some online sources e.g. most experimental work. Most of the time spent in a
typical PhD program is spent trying to solve problems that have no easy
answers and no easy guidelines to follow. While you can definitely gain
similar knowledge and experience in an industry setting, you almost never have
the freedom to take the 3+ years often necessary to explore a narrow topic,
struggle and fail repeatedly, be faced with and overcome crushing doubt and
frustration, and do so in a generally supportive community.

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arcanus
> You absolutely do not need a PhD for industry unless you want an R&D job in
> a handful of domains.

I know Phd.s at {MSFT, Google, Uber, Deepmind, GE, P+G} research divisions. I
don't know anyone who works at those who does not have a doctorate. So I would
say this applies to more than 'a handful of domains' \-- If you want to do
research, you should plan on having a doctorate, even in industry. The
majority of data scientists I know have doctorates, even if that strikes me as
(generally) overkill.

Otherwise, I agree with the rest of your statements.

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mikeskim
I know people who work at those research divisions (they work with neural
networks) without a PhD. So I just falsified your claim.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Well yes, barriers to entry do get lower when markets are hot. What
qualification _do_ these guys you know have?

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chrisbennet
As an aside, the use of the term "poaching" always bugged me. It implies that
an employee is _owned_ by a company like some deer in the King's forest.

~~~
eitally
Not really. It originated to describe high level employees who take a job and
then exploit their personal network to hire away friends. This is super-common
and expected, and is also the reason non-competes became popular. It wasn't
until later, the tech boom, that "poaching" was repurposed to be more
generalized luring of high potential employees from wherever using whatever
($, perks) means available.

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TheCowboy
The idea that they need non-competes to retain talent should still set off
some alarms that maybe companies aren't paying market rate salaries.

Most people don't leave a company for less money and no other benefits, and
there's nothing wrong with employees being lured away for more pay. That's how
it's supposed to work.

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kriro
CMU has dropped significantly in my personal ranking of universities. None of
that was related to faculty being hired away. All of it is related to
activities like attacking the Tor network or accidentally admitting 800
students. Maybe they have a PR problem but my overal view of them is pretty
meh even though they are one of the more elite CS schools (and I think
Pittsburgh is a fairly nice city, never been there though).

~~~
computervision
Your metric for ranking universities is in no way based on how productive the
university is in research or the quality of the graduating students. Even if
you consider the things you mentioned as proxies for the quality of the
university, they are extremely weak ones and there are better metrics
available to judge the quality of a university.

Am I wrong in viewing this comment as a flawed attempt to attack the
university? Open to any counterarguments.

~~~
tikhonj
Presumably OP's ranking cares about things _besides_ just research quality in
CS or graduating students? Those other things aren't _proxies_ for the quality
of the university, they're _components_ of it.

~~~
computervision
Unfortunately creating one's own idiosyncratic ranking holds no value to the
world if it doesn't conform to what the world values. (Open to counter
arguments on what the world values)

People generally use rankings to gauge how strong a university is perceived.
OP's comments do nothing to change my perception of the university's strength.

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eli_gottlieb
Well, I'm glad to hear CMU is hiring 17 new faculty and that the fields of
robotics, computer vision, and machine learning are all booming so rapidly
(though let's hope it's not a bubble)!

But as to the concept of "poaching", well, to quote the economist Homer
Simpson, " _Money_ can be exchanged for goods and services."

~~~
ericjang
The quote in context:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgct3Jn8pFA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgct3Jn8pFA)

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jaryd
Just curious: How many out there are yinzers? I knew there was a nice
technology scene here but am surprised to see Pitt/CMU on HN several times
over the past couple weeks.

~~~
dgacmu
CMU professor here. Currently on leave at Google for the 2015-16 academic
year, returning in August. (Not, in my case, for the money - I actually left a
startup I co-founded a few months before it was acquired because I decided
that I'd probably learn more at Google. Ask me in a few years if I regret
leaving that money on the table -- but thus far, I'm exceptionally glad about
the decision. Having a total blast. Sabbaticals/leaves are one of the under-
advertised benefits of being a faculty member. Which is useful, since the
salary delta to industry sucks. :)

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doppp
Hi, dga! I took 15-440 under you! Wasn't a very good student, though. Just
wanted to say hi and all the best in your sabbatical!

~~~
dgacmu
Hi and thanks! Hope post-440 life is going well. :)

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electriclove
Professors at CMU make incredibly great salaries.. they are not 'poor'

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robotresearcher
No one, here or in the article, claimed they were 'poor'. But most are not as
wealthy as similarly-qualified peers in industry. That's all. CMU's CS and AI
profs are among the best in the world and companies are keen for these skills.

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sgt101
Does anyone have any links to the emotion recognition work he talks about?

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burkaman
I think he was referring to this guy's work:
[http://www.pitt.edu/~jeffcohn/](http://www.pitt.edu/~jeffcohn/)

