
Tech Industry Really Needs Professors and Teaching Talent - dpflan
https://insights.dice.com/2018/04/30/tech-industry-really-needs-professors-teaching-talent/
======
deong
As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open
faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading. The reason
only one in five is filled is not because there's a shortage of qualified
teachers. It's because the thousand faculty searches going on at any one time
are only interested in competing for the same hundred people.

Universities aren't trying to hire someone who can teach undergraduate CS
courses. They're trying to hire someone who can build a lab capable of
bringing in a steady stream of seven-figure grants. You need to have a PhD
from a top-five (ish) school, with an excellent publication record, and an
existing network of collaborators to be competitive for the vast majority of
open positions.

~~~
neilparikh
They should also publish the statistics for number of PhDs looking for a job
per faculty position open. That would tell the full story.

~~~
deong
I haven't been on a search committee in years, but in the mid 2000s, I think
3-500 was about the norm for a mid-range state school. Not all those people
were qualified, but I think you can assume you'll have somewhere on the order
of 2-300 qualified applicants for most jobs.

------
michaelt

      It takes five years to mint a Ph.D in computer science,
      and schools such as Stanford need more faculty now.
    

Looking at [https://cs.stanford.edu/jobs](https://cs.stanford.edu/jobs) I see
two job ads - both saying applications are no longer being accepted.

I guess they must have solved their faculty problems since the article was
written!

------
NPMaxwell
Part of the story is new assistant professors in Business are paid an average
of about $110K, while new assistant professors in CS are paid and average of
under $90K. [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/28/study-
finds-c...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/28/study-finds-
continued-large-gaps-faculty-salaries-based-discipline)

The OP is based on this report:
[https://www.nap.edu/read/24926/chapter/1](https://www.nap.edu/read/24926/chapter/1),
which is starting/pushing the conversation. They write:

"RECOMMENDATION 2.1: Institutions experiencing a computer science enrollment
surge should seriously consider an increase in resources to address the rising
workload on faculty and staff in computer science and related departments, and
the limitations arising from inadequate facilities."

"RECOMMENDATION 2.3: Institutional leadership should engage directly with
computer science departments or programs to develop appropriate faculty hiring
and faculty size targets, and develop strategies to improve faculty retention.
Increasing the number and enhancing the role of academic-rank teaching faculty
should be given serious consideration."

"RECOMMENDATION 2.4: Larger institutions—in particular, research
universities—should reevaluate the organizational placement of the computer
science department and other departmental units with a computational mission."

Basically, "Give CS a better deal"

~~~
jeffreyrogers
It's hard to fire someone or lower their salary when economic conditions
change, so it makes sense for academia to be a bit conservative here. What
happens if interest rates rise, VC funding goes down, and there are lots fewer
tech jobs in the future? You're stuck with a bunch of high paid professors and
low CS enrollment.

There could be a structural change that from here on we'll need a larger
number of CS professors, but I can see why the universities are being
conservative.

~~~
walshemj
I don't think "assistant professors" have tenure do they

~~~
mercutio2
True, but raising assistant professor’s salaries puts pressure on associate
professor salaries, and they are tenured.

Not to say the whole lot of them shouldn’t get raises; one thing missed in
this discussion is that CS programs are counter-cyclical, when there’s a
downturn in the tech industry and it’s hard to find a job, more candidates opt
for getting a masters in CS instead of going into industry/finding a new job
after a layoff.

~~~
sdenton4
There's a stupid amount of variation in academic compensation. I think a lot
of it comes down to people early in the pipe having ludicrously low
expectations, after many years of PhD stipends turning into a kinda laughable
postdoc salary. People coming back from industry (eg, to business schools)
know better how to negotiate and have higher expectations. But might have a
harder time getting in the door from industry in STEM areas, because it's
still pretty easy to get cheap kids from the postdoc pipeline.

Here's the transparent california list of UC salaries:
[https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2016/university-o...](https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2016/university-
of-california) The highest salaries are for surgeon profs, which, ok, sure,
why not?

Here's 50 prof's in the PROF-AY job with total comp >$450K; lots of them in
econ, based on some light perusal. The very-tenured math profs I worked with
seem to be in the range of ~$150K total comp, by comparison.
[https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=PROF-
AY...](https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=PROF-
AY-B/E/E&y=2016)

------
wellpast
I would also say that the tech industry desperately needs a better
understanding of what constitutes the professional practitioner skill set, and
how to teach and measure it.

Many or most of the individual contributing practitioners I've encountered in
my varied career across companies big (Microsoft, Google) and small (startups
early and mid-stage) consist of individual contributors who either fall up
into management or otherwise happily and unwittingly peak out in their skill
set.

The typical "high-quality" Senior Engineer is "smart and get things done"
(Junior) plus a little bit of experiential knowledge peppered in with cold
hard years on the resume.

But there's a craft and skill set to this work that takes (1) a very focussed
(presently, self-) training effort and value system and (2) takes years to
master, but where the payoff is enormous (i.e, where the 10x/Nx productivity
gain is found.)

That last statement is theory only inasmuch as it challenged by those that
don't want to believe that they're far from (the, or their) peak; I know it to
be true.

As a hint to what that skill set is, it's fairly simple to talk about
descriptively...the end result being building systems from composable,
contract-based abstractions of course respecting and knowing the current
available tools and how to wield them. The problem is able-to-describe and
able-to-do are miles apart; it takes many, many years of _conscious, directed
effort_ to perfect the craft. The few people I encounter that have that
ability had to care about it and muscle through it on their own. We need
something closer to an organized pedagogy and training and _measurement_
around this particular skillset to produce much more of it in the industry.

The problem is that any given business rightly has no interest in the kind of
long-term investment required. And, at large, academia for many reasons
doesn't have the practitioner context/focus/awareness to deliver the skill
set, either.

There's a hole to fill here somewhere...

------
nopinsight
Tenure-track faculty positions are hard to fill in this tech market no doubt.
However, with multi-billion endowment at top schools, couldn't they pay
competitively at least for part-time lecturers with PhD and some teaching
experience, who might be working in the industry, to fill in requisite
teaching needs?

I guess if the above is adopted, there could be issues with part-time adjuncts
getting higher hourly rate, by some measure, than tenure-track faculty. Thus,
a market-based bonus which could fluctuate with market conditions of each
field for tenured or tenure-track faculty members should be considered.

Added: By hard-to-fill, I meant hard-to-fill to the qualification threshold of
research universities implicitly referred to in the article.

~~~
magduf
>However, with multi-billion endowment at top schools, couldn't they pay
competitively at least for part-time lecturers with PhD and some teaching
experience, who might be working in the industry, to fill in requisite
teaching needs?

No. That could result in CS people (esp. non-tenured ones) making more money
than beginning business professors, and that simply cannot be tolerated.
Instead, they need to just keep salaries for CS people low, and then whine to
the press about how they can't fill all their CS positions.

A lot of corporations do the same thing.

------
paultopia
_Possible solutions include a program that takes Ph.Ds in other disciplines
and runs them through a yearlong course in computer science, which gives them
a Master’s degree. That qualifies them to teach CS courses, Roberts explained,
and sets them up in a department where the prospect for tenure is greater. “We
need more of those,” he added. “Universities are in a bind. Market forces will
not solve this problem.”_

This is interesting. Depending on admissions standards for that program, I
could see a ton of people from other disciplines jumping at it. The issue, of
course, is that people would have to have a strong background to be competent
to teach any kind of CS in a year. And the people with that background
probably aren't the people looking for a career change.

Just thinking about myself for example---I'd probably be better qualified than
most people with phds in another discipline for such a thing, since I'm
moderately quantitative and semi-decent at coding, but I don't think I would
be qualified to teach college-level CS on the basis of a year of transition
education.

------
nopinsight
As someone who could be interested in teaching part-time, how much is the
workload (in hours per week) one needs to spend when teaching an
undergrad/grad course?

Would a good 4-year university accept an adjunct who holds a Master's degree
from a top-10 CS program, but not a PhD, to teach an upper-level course (that
does correspond to the person's area of specialty)?

\---

Added: Thank you for all the ideas and esp detailed explanation from tom_b. It
sounds like more work than I can allocate time for in the near term. Perhaps
in the future.

I thought up an alternative: Join/organize meetups and occasionally give talks
or participate in panel discussions about recent/latest research sounds like
more fun and less work than teaching in a formal setting. (Posted here in case
someone would like to make use of the idea.)

~~~
BeetleB
>Would a good 4-year university accept an adjunct who holds a Master's degree
from a top-10 CS program, but not a PhD, to teach an upper-level course (that
does correspond to their area of specialty)?

They may, but adjuncts are poorly paid, and often have fewer benefits, than
faculty members. Many adjuncts often have no real guarantee they'll have a job
the following semester/year. They are the first to get axed when there are
budget problems.

And frankly, having spent time in academia, they do have a significant ego
problem. Adjuncts will be treated poorly by professors. Many lower level
courses will have a "director" who is a professor, and he will usually treat
the adjunct poorly. Rarely do adjuncts have freedom in what homework is
assigned and what the syllabus will be.

~~~
hiram112
> Many adjuncts often have no real guarantee they'll have a job the following
> semester/year. They are the first to get axed when there are budget
> problems.

So pretty much like every job I've ever had in the private sector.

~~~
BeetleB
>So pretty much like every job I've ever had in the private sector.

Yes, but with a lot higher pay, and often with better insurance, etc. And your
work experience in industry has more weight. I don't know how employable a
person is if their only experience is teaching.

Just looked up two of them in a nearby university. 12 month salary is $75-80K.
No stocks, bonuses, etc. Both have MS degrees.

It is a decent salary if the job is not stressful, and you are in a dual
income family. But job security is likely poorer than in industry.

------
RightMillennial
So like the supposed STEM shortage? Is there really a lack of qualified
candidates? Or is there simply a lack of applicants because the pay is too low
or the requirements are too stringent?

~~~
shoguning
So much to unpack here. The STEM label itself is extremely misleading. There
are opportunities in TE (technology and engineering) but not in SM (science
and math -- well unless you get a PhD, but even then maybe not).

So people hear STEM shortage and go major in chemistry or biology and then
find out there are few and poorly paid jobs so they have to accept that or get
an advanced degree. Some simplification here, and individual exceptions exist
of course.

~~~
RightMillennial
That's a fair point. I've always heard it in the context of "STEM", but I
think it was more referring to the technology area (primarily programmers,
etc.). And even then I want to say it was about companies wanting cheap
developers or specialists. So there's only a shortage if you're unwilling to
pay the common rates.

------
volkk
is it possible for something like this to happen: a huge shortage continues,
and the demand for CS goes up, so the salaries for CS professors goes up thus
making this position enticing once more?

~~~
kd0amg
That's basically how the market works, but how much that happens depends on
the extent to which universities are actually willing to pay more for things
they think/say they don't have enough of.

------
zerostar07
I thought they were building AI for that

