
What are you waiting for? - lemoncurd
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6414/610.long
======
phkahler
>> After all, the number of available tenure-track faculty slots is
essentially fixed—at MIT, there are approximately 1000. To create room for a
new faculty member, an existing one has to leave. But after a brief dip, we
thought, retirements should return to normal, creating room for new recruits.

I would have hoped for better intuition from professors at MIT. To me it seems
obvious that if the average term of service lasts longer, you'll need
replacements at a lower rate.

To me it just pointed to the fact that there are more people looking for such
positions as there are positions. The later retirement just made an existing
problem worse.

~~~
dahart
> To me it seems obvious that if the average term of service lasts longer,
> you’ll need replacements at a lower rate.

I feel dumb right now that it wasn’t obvious to me. I was thinking in terms of
throughput vs latency, and how for a single pipe, increasing latency doesn’t
affect throughput. So why would it change for multiple pipes? My bad intuition
was that letting people stay longer would drop throughput until everyone that
was in the pipe during the latency change retired, and then throughput would
restore to the same as before.

Doing the arithmetic, it’s easy to see why you’re right, but because it wasn’t
obvious to me, I’m not surprised it wasn’t obvious to others. Or at least it
makes me feel better...

~~~
phkahler
Think of waiting in line for an amusement park ride. If the ride runs 4
minutes, you'll have to wait in line longer than if ir runs 3 minutes. Same
thing, if the guy in the office will leave after 30 years instead of 40 the
line waiting or it will move much faster.

And don't feel dumb. We all get hit with it at times ;-)

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timbit42
I'm waiting for a headline that describes what the article is about.

~~~
fidla
It's about an old dude just realizing that by staying in his job past 65, he's
put 9 people out of work.

~~~
stabbles
Not 9 people; he realizes he removed 9 years from someone else's career.

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friedman23
Somewhat unrelated but this article reminded me about a passage from "The Book
of the New Sun" where the protagonist of the book meets with the master of the
guild of librarians. The library is pitch black and the librarian in his old
age has gone blind but still holds onto his position as master librarian and
his apprentice who is now a balding man in his middle years still attends him
waiting for his master to pass away so that he can assume the mantle.

The master in the story still exceeds at his work despite his blindness and
his blindness is actually what enabled him to discover via touch that the
material of the books themselves was just as impressive as the contents :)

I imagine the result of removing something like forced retirement ages is
similarly nuanced

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iaaacdev
What is the impact outside of academia? Are there similar effects in the
corporate sector?

~~~
rococode
Not sure about the corporate sector, but it certainly seems to at least have
an impact on American politics. Some 2014 statistics [0] have the average age
of representatives and senators at 57 and 62, and several current senators
have served for well over 25 years (3 senators right now have been in their
offices for over 35 years) [1]. I'm sure it's hard for even the brightest
young politician to oust someone who's been in office since before they were
born, especially if they're in the same party.

[0] [https://www.senate.gov/CRSpubs/0b699eff-
adc5-43c4-927e-f6304...](https://www.senate.gov/CRSpubs/0b699eff-
adc5-43c4-927e-f63045bdce8e.pdf)

[1]
[https://www.senate.gov/senators/longest_serving_senators.htm](https://www.senate.gov/senators/longest_serving_senators.htm)

------
SomewhatLikely
Naive question: why can't they just have more tenure positions?

~~~
rococode
It sounds like his pay as a "professor, post-tenure" was reduced to 49% of
what it was before, so it's almost certainly a money problem.

~~~
iguy
But these post-tenure 49% positions are the new thing to encourage people to
go -- the previous option was emeritus, not only 0% but also unable to be the
PI on grants etc. So they must have found a magic money tree somewhere to pay
for them.

Not mentioned yet is the change from defined benefit pensions. If you had a
final-salary pension, then there was no financial incentive not to go
emeritus, in the good old days. Whereas on a defined-contribution scheme,
retiring a year earlier does literally cost you (or your estate) a year's
salary.

~~~
nine_k
Large and famous universities sit on very large piles of money. They just
choose to invest them differently — or maybe the monies are granted on
particular conditions to spend them.

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lifeisstillgood
I am not tenure material but I am working towards a plan - I intend to self
fund my own tenure (at least 6 months a year), just to work on the stuff I
want to.

One day (not really UBI) we shall all self fund tenures ...

~~~
eykanspelgud
Interesting. If you don't mind me asking, how do you plan to do this? Grants?
Investors? Trust fund?

If you can sustain yourself longer than 6 months, have you considered just
starting your own lab/business?

~~~
lifeisstillgood
The plan is basically early semi-retirement - not tax payer funded tenure.
That seems to have come across wrong - the idea is to find a way to fund
myself (through my own earnings /savings /business) so Incan do the things I
really want.

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fidla
this goes into the "obviously" column

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leroy_masochist
Slightly off-topic, but isn't it a bit weird that Science Magazine isn't
running on HTTPS?

~~~
sh87
Article isn't paywalled. Did not need me to login/register. They did not ask
me for my email. Don't care about http/https. Should I ?

~~~
someguy101010
If you are on a public internet connection you should. I could theoretically
replace the content of that page with whatever I want. A crypto currency
miner, some zero day JavaScript exploit that will download a key logger on
your computer etc. Https helps to mitigate these sort of man in the middle
attacks, even on static content.

~~~
rand_r
I'm on a public internet connection, but I'm not too worried because to
perform such an attack, you would have to compromise some physical network
infrastructure between me and sciencemag.org, and do it in a such a way to not
get yourself in trouble with the law.

It's possible sure, but it seems difficult enough to not worry about.

~~~
fjsolwmv
It's easy for an attacker on your WiFi network, in some cases.

Your WiFi network might be encrypted, which might be a broken encryption, or
might be unencrypted to discourage excessive use.

