
How to Get Tenure - norswap
http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/
======
jackson1372
A really fascinating personal story. One thing that bothered me though:

The author's wife quit her job to become a full-time mom. I would guess that
the author was only able to have so much professional success because of this.
Perhaps you _can 't_ get tenure/be really successful while also taking care of
a child with disabilities. It just happens to be the case that the author
_didn 't_ have to take care of a child with disabilities (his wife did), and
so his professional career was unaffected.

~~~
danharaj
It turns out, when you have a whole other human being doing full time unpaid
labor that is completely essential to your well being, you can succeed
professionally.

I find the other comments full of praise tarnished by their elision of this
crucial detail. This is the story of a family, not a man.

~~~
barry-cotter
This is an example of partnership, division of labour, and increasing returns
to expertise. This is a normal upper middle class marriage insofar as one
partner has a successful career and the other provides support to that career.
There are other ways of doing an upper middle class marriage. The ones that
involve two high powered careers necessitate full time support staff, whether
paid, two nannies, or extremely supportive family, usually grandparents.

Very few people get to their thirties without realising that a marriage is a
partnership and that having a family is a demanding project which requires a
lot of work.

~~~
danharaj
My point was all the comments adulating the one man when there is literally
another person putting all of her effort into making their lives possible. The
author certainly spares no effort in praising his partner. But this woman is
all but invisible outside of this comment thread.

Society used to be legally structured around a system where people were paired
on a gender system optimized for a nuclear family, where both individuals
contribute their labor to their common good while one receives all of the
autonomy, financial control, status, praise, and respect; the one who received
all of this was always male.

The only thing that has changed is that women are legally allowed to be the
breadwinner. Enormous social and economic structures still pressure them into
being the less valued member of the family unit. Domestic labor is still
heavily undervalued, disrespected, and seen as a woman's sphere. The number of
full time fathers is still extremely low, and people still judge family units
with a full time father as less prosperous than one with a full time mother.

When we descend by class and race down the social hierarchy, the picture
becomes extremely complicated, of course.

But I was just talking about Internet comments, you know?

~~~
cjbprime
Thanks for writing this.

> The author certainly spares no effort in praising his partner.

Though it appears he did so _after_ being prompted by a (female!) questioner
asking what his wife's up to; he wrote the original Quora answer without
mentioning anything about how her career was altered.

~~~
danharaj
Well then.

------
ChuckMcM
I found that article really inspiring. And I especially liked the validation
of switching from externally driven goals to internally driven goals. Many,
many times, when someone has asked me "What do I need to do to get a top job"
or "Get into company X" my answer has been a variant of the author's epiphany:

 _" I stopped working on problems for the sole purpose of notching up a
publication. I shifted gears to cybersecurity. I found a project on cancer in
the med school. I joined a project in chemical engineering using super-
computing to fight global warming."_

The truth is that you can't serve two masters of "chasing success" and
"solving a problem." Pick hard problems to solve and run them down. That says
way more about you than any sort of resume buffing you might do.

~~~
mjn
I liked most of the article, but the part you quoted struck me as a bit
contrary to the main thrust of it. As a CS researcher, I occasionally think,
what would be the #1 thing I'd do if my sole goal were to chase career success
in academia? And it would be this: transition into a currently hot, well-
funded applied area like cybersecurity, cancer research, or climate modeling
(or big-data analytics, or robotics, or a few other such things). A lot of
things just become easier if your research aligns with the current opinion
among deans and funding agencies regarding which areas are important. So he
did... exactly that as an _alternative_ to chasing success?

I mean it's certainly believable that he moved to those areas because he's
personally interested in them, rather than just following the money. If so, he
had the good fortune that his personal interests aligned closely with the
current priority areas of major U.S. funding agencies. There are plenty of
cases where that isn't true, so I think it's a bit dangerous to take it as the
normal outcome. If your passion is something people with money are not
currently interested in, the odds that everything will just work out fine if
you focus on your passion are much lower. So my modified advice would be: to
get tenure, follow your passion and solve problems rather than micro-
optimizing citations, _but_ first macro-optimize research area by choosing
problems that the NIH, NSF, and/or DARPA are pouring money into. :-)

------
kkkkllll
> Life is too precious and too fleeting to waste my time on bullshit like
> tenure. I didn’t become a professor to get tenure. I became a professor to
> make the world better through science. From this day forward, I will spend
> my time on problems and solutions that will matter. I will make a
> difference.

This is hypocritical and heartless to those who are now starting their careers
as scientists. You spent a decade of your life to get to a tenure-track
position, and now that decade and the rest of your life are on the balance.
You can bullshit all you want about making the world a better place, but
you'll be teaching Java Programming 101 in Podunk state college unless you
deliver publications and grants.

~~~
kaitai
A lot of the people teaching Java Programming 101 at Podunk Directional
University are making the world a better place. Compare that to actually
_doing_ Java programming 101, for instance: teaching is about a lot more than
communicating the meaning of syntax.

------
seibelj
What an unexpectedly interesting post. I read a bunch of other posts he made
and they are all very well thought out, with little fluff. He sounds like a
really great and brilliant guy.

~~~
branchless
Agreed, cracking communicator. And smart.

------
dude_abides
Easily the most amazing "How to Get Tenure" article that I've ever read, even
though (or maybe because) it hardly talks about how to get tenure! Passion and
success are so strongly correlated, and Matt Might is such a great example of
this, as are most successful researchers and entrepreneurs.

------
daxfohl
Annoyed by all the "feel-good" pieces out of wherever. Push "all the bad
things" into one little scapegoat and suddenly the _rest_ of life becomes
nothing but good.

I mean, that's great for the people for whom it works (if there are any), but,
guess what, when "the rest of us" want to "emulate that person", we get a few
steps and realize we can't be that person because all of us are imperfect.

It'd be more inspiring if these kinds of posts also included existing
"skeletons-in-closet" to make the person seem more mortal.

And not the interview answer "I'm too much of a perfectionist" skeleton. What
does it _really_ take? "My wife resents my success." "My kid doesn't even
like/know me." "My grad student actually did all the work." "I'm sleep
deprived and suicidal most of the time." "Half my statistics are lies."

Seriously, nobody has a perfect life. What does it _really_ take to make (at
least) a "successful" one?

------
rayiner
> So, if you love your spouse and you want to have kids, then have kids.

This is a great takeaway for ambitious people who worry about the impact of
having kids on their career.

~~~
eitally
Yes, but you need to both go into it with eyes wide open. Children absolutely
will have an impact of some kind on almost any career.

------
trequartista
What an amazingly insightful post.

I've always wondered how people derive the internal strength to do amazing
things in the face of severe personal adversity. This post addresses this in
some ways.

~~~
bbcbasic
Reminds me of
[http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/Taoist_Farmer.html](http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/Taoist_Farmer.html)

------
Rainymood
A lot of his articles are awesome, I especially like this one
[http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-
pictures/](http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/)

~~~
_asummers
This is a pretty terrific list, as well.

[http://matt.might.net/articles/what-cs-majors-should-
know/](http://matt.might.net/articles/what-cs-majors-should-know/)

------
BiologyRules
He says:

"Applying the cold logic so common in computer science to the cell biology of
the disorder, we’ve started predicting therapies, some of which have since
come to bear fruit and improved my son’s quality of life beyond measure."

I curious to read his research on this, but I haven't been able to find it
here:

[http://matt.might.net/#papers](http://matt.might.net/#papers)

It's mostly security/GPU/Static analysis stuff.

~~~
a_e_k
Most of it is here:

[http://www.overcomingmovementdisorder.com/](http://www.overcomingmovementdisorder.com/)

------
JamesBarney
"I even won what some academics jokingly call the “kiss of death” for tenure –
the annual oustanding instructor award – the year before I went up for
tenure."

Ugh I don't know why we force so many researchers to teach. My university was
filled with very smart and passionate professors who had absolutely no
interest in talking to or teaching another human being.

~~~
dspearson
"The Dignified Professor"

excerpts from "'Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!' Adventures of a Curious
Character" by Richard Feynman, Bantam Books: New York, 1986

I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to
have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting
anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing
something; I am making some contribution" \-- it's just psychological.

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great
minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for
their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this
lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations
whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by
themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every
opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe
that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of
you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens.
Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're
not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to
answer questions from the students. Nothing!

In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and
you've got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it's the
greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer period
of time when not much is coming to you. You're not getting any ideas, and if
you're doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can't even say "I'm
teaching my class."

If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you
know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any
harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The
elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new
thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the
class. If you do think of something new, you're rather pleased that you have a
new way of looking at it.

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often
ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on,
so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again
and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the
thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they
remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that
problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never
accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me
where I don't have to teach. Never.

------
gcb0
tl;dr wife gave up her career so he could have his.

down vote and deny all you want.

~~~
mattmight
Not exactly:

[http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum](http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum)

~~~
gcb0
i read it all before commenting. how did you interpret "she drop her career
and spent years caring for the son" as NOT dropping her career?

note how all the accomplishments are a result of staying at home. and the only
big effort listed was raising funds for his research.

not saying it was right or wrong. I'd probably have dropped my career in
similar situation. but trying to spin it is weird.

------
bachmeier
I feel compelled to respond to his (by no means unique) claims about teaching
and tenure.

"Doing a good job with teaching is perversely seen as a cardinal sin in some
departments."

Name one. Give some examples. If you're going to play this game of taking the
obviously popular side of "ethical enough to do your job" then you need to be
more forthcoming. The part about teaching is self-promotional BS.

Perhaps in the very best departments, where they have so much money that good
researchers rarely teach, tenure decisions are not based solely on research.
There are very few institutions for which that is true though. You don't have
to be a star teacher, but claiming that anyone not entertaining the students
at a level to win university-wide teaching awards means they are "Torturing a
captive audience every semester with soul-sapping lectures is criminal theft
of tuition" is quite a jump.

This is one of the most arrogant blog posts I've ever read. He did what most
faculty members do to get tenure. He did research, teaching, and service at an
acceptable level.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
He mentioned his adviser, Olin Shivers (works on Scheme, inventor of CFA, very
famous in PL).

~~~
bachmeier
He was at Georgia Tech. The tenure standards are very high. It's unlikely that
he was denied tenure because he won a teaching award.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
No, there was politics involved, as always. And that dean is no longer there,
I heard.

~~~
mattmight
Olin (my advisor) deserved tenure on his strength as a teacher alone. (If
tenure were awarded on such things anyway.)

He also founded the entire field of static analysis for higher-order languages
(like Scheme, Python and Haskell). His long-term research impact has been
extremely significant.

It's hard to figure out any surface reasoning on which to deny him tenure,
except that he refuses to thin-slice his work into many tiny papers.

He operates on the model of "one paper = one major idea."

Denying Olin tenure (after an overwhelming faculty vote in favor of tenure)
seemed to me to be the tipping point that led ultimately to the ouster of the
Dean.

