
The other side of "academic freedom" - phenylene
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-other-side-of-academic-freedom.html
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patio11
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
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.

------
jofer
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
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
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!

~~~
mjn
This varying a lot by field is a good point. It also depends on what you mean
by academically inclined: are you interested in _doing_ research, in
_publishing_ the results of your research, or both? In chemical engineering,
for example (not my own area, but some of my family are in the field), it's
much easier to find a research-oriented industry job than to find a research-
oriented industry job that will let you publish openly.

------
tikhonj
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.

~~~
qznc
> The only reason that "real software developers" don't benefit is that they
> aren't willing to learn them.

Willingness is probably not the problem. Can you provide an example of such an
"esoteric abstraction"? I am pretty sure, you will get an extensive list of
downsides in the comments.

~~~
infinite8s
Monads are a pretty general encapsulation/sequencing abstraction being useful
for more than just IO handling in pure languages. Although to be fair, they
are starting to show up in more mainstream languages (ie Clojure)

~~~
qznc
A Monad is just a theoretic abstraction, not a useable one. Only specific
Monad instances (IO,Maybe,List,etc) can be "useable", hence "useful". There is
no generic "bind" for example, it has to be implemented specifically for every
Monad.

While Monads are pretty useful in pure languages, they are often over-
engineering in imperative languages.

What I consider the actual point that the OO world is currently learning from
the FP world is abstracting over computation. OO can abstract data and state,
but computation is rarely modeled as an object. Monads are simply a pattern
you can observe often, when computation is abstracted.

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sramsay
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.

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apples2apples
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
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.

~~~
mdwelsh
Thanks for the comments; I replied on the blog post itself. TL;DR: Even
tenured profs care about helping their students get good jobs, which means
publishing in top venues.

~~~
_delirium
It depends on the kind of research you do, but one viable approach in some
areas (which I've seen work in practice) is just to not have as many students.
Plenty of tenured theory profs out there have one, maybe two PhD students at a
time. They do still need to work with that student to send the student's
papers to top venues so he/she can eventually get a job, but it's a lot less
of a constraint than if it's a systems-style lab full of 5 or 10 PhD students
who _all_ need to be pumping out top-tier publications, and leaves
considerable time to work on one's own projects with fewer constraints.

------
aaron695
> 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
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
google.org might be, if there's a humanitarian spin on it.

------
qwerta
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.

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

~~~
BruceIV
It may be difficult/expensive to get to research conferences without
institutional support.

~~~
jseliger
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.

~~~
_delirium
CS is a bit different in that conference proceedings are where a lot of the
peer-reviewed papers are published. E.g. in graphics, SIGGRAPH is the top
place to publish, and in HCI, the same goes for CHI. So attending conferences
to present papers is part of the process of getting papers published. Journals
do exist, but tend to be used for big archival papers: you might take 3 or 4
years' of conference papers on a project and wrap them up into a giant 40-page
journal article for posterity. But they aren't really where recent research is
being published & read.

Admittedly that's less true in some areas, where journals do have a larger
role. For example, in machine learning, while it's common to publish at
conferences like ICML or NIPS, it's also perfectly fine to skip them and just
submit to JMLR (<http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/>).

~~~
cperciva
_Journals do exist, but tend to be used for big archival papers: you might
take 3 or 4 years' of conference papers on a project and wrap them up into a
giant 40-page journal article for posterity._

That's the polite interpretation, at least. I'd say the pattern I see more
often is that _the exact same_ research gets presented repeatedly at 3 or 4
conferences before getting published as a journal paper. Also, the research
was probably done by 1-3 people, but an entire group of 6-10 people will have
their names on all the papers...

------
imrehg
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-
bu...](http://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2013/02/academia-is-failing-but-not-for-
everyone/) "The Academia is Failing But Not For Everyone"

~~~
krichman
This is exactly what I'd like to do with my life if I could afford to. How is
it going so far?

~~~
imrehg
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 :)

~~~
krichman
That sounds tough but feasible. I think the consultancy bootstrap is a good
idea. I'll get in touch via email, I'm quite interested in knowing how it goes
:)

------
Create
"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

------
BruceIV
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.

~~~
moyix
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
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.

------
af3
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) ?

~~~
gregpilling
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.

