
When the A.I. Professor Leaves, Students Suffer, Study Says - Osiris30
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/technology/when-the-ai-professor-leaves-students-suffer-study-says.html
======
arcanus
Pay the professor more money. Top Universities are sitting on tens of billions
of dollars of endowments, and are willing to pay football and basketball
coaches millions of dollars. They are not insulated from market pricing.

In many cases, a new assistant professor's salary at a top university is lower
than than entry level salaries for software engineers in technology. For
considerably higher stress, harder work conditions, and _less_ job security
until they make tenure.

Compare this with medical doctors at teaching med schools: they are often paid
slightly less or competitive with practicing doctors.

I am a research scientist with a PhD, and while academia has perks, I'm very
happy I went to industry.

~~~
liability
Consider the plight of the medical student though. Worse than that of a CS
grad student, that's for sure. Made to practice medicine on people while sleep
deprived as a form of industry-approved hazing, a practice that doubtlessly
has a substantial death toll associated with it.

~~~
chronic839
> Consider the plight of the medical student though.

While not as bad, ML/NLP/CV/AI grad school is still pretty bad. Maybe 60-70%
of what med students (more specifically, residents) go through.

~~~
benmaraschino
No way. It's not even close. And I say this as a PhD candidate in one of these
fields at Stanford. Grad school is what you make of it, to a large extent.
There's definitely toxicity, but it's not as systematic or ritualized to the
extent that it is in medicine. In grad school, you have wide leeway over who
you work with, and you can distance yourself from the toxic personalities if
that's what you want to do without taking a career hit. That's not really
possible in medicine.

~~~
paggle
Yeah, med school is the only “brainy” career path that endures military-style
hazing on a ritualized and widespread basis.

~~~
stephencanon
To be precise: med school is (comparatively) a walk in the park. Years 3 and 4
of med school are a sort of "residency lite" where you rotate in different
specialties, but the doctors don't really expect you to be useful, so it's
fairly low-pressure other than odd hours. Study up so you can know what you're
talking about, don't get in people's way, and you'll be fine. Residency is
when the 80+hrs/week institutional hazing happens.

~~~
paggle
Yes, “medicine” would have been the correct term.

------
gjstein
The blog post "You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation"[1]
from prominent AI researchers Ben Recht, David A. Forsyth, and Alexei Efros
also highlights the challenges of co-employment by big tech companies. Well
worth a read.

[1] [http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-
employment/](http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-employment/)

------
samfisher83
Pretty much all of the highest paid state employees are medical professors.

[https://salaries.texastribune.org/highest-
paid/](https://salaries.texastribune.org/highest-paid/)

Even normal engineering professors are make 200-300k + they can still do
consulting. Being a professors at a good university helps you market yourself
and gets you those high paid side gigs.

~~~
sologoub
That’s pretty incredible - #100 of the top 100 best paid still makes $652,640.

However, CS seems to be more in the sub-$200k range with only a few over
$200k. That’s pretty easy to exceed in the industry and why people are likely
choosing to leave.

------
CryoLogic
I actually think a lot of Universities in America are hiring bottom-of-the-
barrel programers for their tenured positions as a result of the income
difference from University to Industry.

I went to a top-10 CS school as well, and saw it happen several times.
Professor that is actually really talented, educated and capable of
articulating advanced CS concepts ends up leaving to be a sr. engineer at G,
FB, MS, etc. due to differences in pay.

We lost our best math prof, and our best CS prof in my 4 years because of
this. They both got replaced with imports from other countries that couldn't
teach as well due to language barrier but probably where happily willing to
accept the visa sponsorship and shot at USA life (which I understand).

------
Nasrudith
"Plundering" and "poaching" are inherently wrongheaded notions of gross
entitlement from employers expecting unilateral loyalty.

The problem should be approached as "how can we attract and retain the best"
not thinking of them as property and their competitors as thieves.

~~~
hinkley
I can’t even get software developers to think I’m terms of teamwork (Mostly I
can filter by ones that are sympathetic). Imagine trying to get academics to
do so.

------
jhbadger
All this reminds me of the late 1990s, when 50% of academics who knew HTML ran
to a dot-com. It didn't last, and a few years later an awful lot of former
professors begged for their jobs back. Some of them got it, but most didn't.

~~~
baron_harkonnen
I've noticed a trend of basically any PhD who knows Python getting hired to
join any of the many growing "data science" teams in large companies. Despite
having PhDs (usually in non-related fields like biology or even education)
most of these people know very little about engineering, statistics, CS and
surprisingly science. All they know how to do is stitch together a bunch of
keras code and try to get some arbitrary cost function drop.

I immediately realized that we are definitely in some kind of bubble, and that
last time I saw this was the dotcom era. The new HTML is python + some NN
library. As soon as the next recession really hits companies are going to
realize that the majority of these data science projects are just huge houses
of cards that provide questionable value. I honestly miss the post-dotcom era,
where nearly everyone in tech was genuinely interested in the field and
solving interesting problems.

I guess enjoy the fact that salaries are high and work is stupidly easy to get
now, I suspect the party will be over pretty soon.

------
neilv
> _Tech companies disagree with the notion that they are plundering academia.
> A [typical large dotcom] spokesman, for example, said the company was an
> enthusiastic supporter of academic research._

On occasion, I've asked multiple professors why they don't criticize
particular dotcoms or industry practices, or warn undergrads about the nasty
cultures of particular companies, and they've said they need the funding from
those dotcoms.

Personally, I'd love it if undergrads learned a sense of professional ethics
and objective understanding of current industry _before they applied for
internships_ , and, consequently, anyone who went to one of the worst (but
best-paying) ones for a summer would have greatly increased difficulty getting
dates when they returned.

~~~
chronic73829
> Personally, I'd love it if undergrads learned a sense of professional ethics
> and objective understanding of current industry before they applied for
> internships

Even with an understanding of ethics, undergrads, new grads, professionals and
startup founders _usually_ pick the "unethical" option.

\- Facebook knows this (in 2019) and thus offers more money to offset it.
Several of my grad school friends from MIT/Stanford/Berkeley chose to work at
Facebook because "they gave $300K-$400K total yearly compensation."

\- US-based start-ups routinely sell products, give up equity control, or sell
directly to the Chinese government or investors. Many times precluding them
from selling to US customers/government. My startup recently closed a $20M
computer vision deal with a Chinese customer related to person re-
identification. Unethical? Probably to someone, yes.

The reason for all of this? Because "everyone has a price." If you believe
your ethics can't be compromised, well then you haven't been offered enough
money.

~~~
acollins1331
You realize the Chinese government is going to use your tech in their
concentration camps and you don't care at all?

------
wolfgke
Perhaps those academic institutions should simply offer tenure much faster if
they want to keep these professors.

It is hard to compete on money with the industry, but this is something that
universities _can_ offer.

~~~
NickM
From the article:

 _At Carnegie Mellon, 17 professors, all of them tenured, have moved into
industry_

Not sure about other universities, but it doesn’t sound like tenure made much
difference at CMU.

------
neilv
I think this is not new in CS-ish university departments. With the start of
dotcoms, it seemed a lot of professors and departments wanted their students
to do startups, and the professor/dept. would get a cut of it.

This affected time spent on students, affected what some wanted students to
work on (use the uni as a startup incubator, rather than research), and
affected how some selected students.

I also recall professors who were almost no-shows, spending most of their time
on their students' startups, didn't actually teach their one class for the
term, and even their PhD students complained about having trouble getting
meetings.

I don't know that some CS departments ever recovered from that, and it seems
some are permanently in pursuit of commercial spinoff riches mode.

------
babakd
What’s the study’s control group? If we compare the number of companies
founded by students over different time periods it doesn’t say much about the
effects of the “brain drain”.

------
rdlecler1
First we should abolish the 5-7 year PhD program and make it three years.
Second universities should use this crisis as an opportunity to rethink Their
approach to entrepreneurism. Third this actually creates opportunities for
students to become professors. In most fields good luck!

~~~
protastus
Reducing the length of PhD programs (in the U.S. -- PhDs in Europe tend to be
shorter) would have the side-effect of having even more PhD grads (of lower
quality) that can't find a job.

Getting rid of tenure would facilitate mobility and increase accountability.

~~~
rdlecler1
So keep them out of the workforce longer?

------
Gatsky
This is a broader trend in academia, have seen it happening in life sciences
and medicine as well.

It isn’t just about salary. It is more about working conditions and job
security. A university can never match private industry on those things, even
if it could match the pay.

~~~
esoterica
Tenured professors have vastly better job security than anywhere in the
private sector.

------
hcnews
Is there a way to access nytimes without signing in?

~~~
wolfgke
Use archive.is, e.g.

> [http://archive.is/2qktN](http://archive.is/2qktN)

