

Are your "peers" in academia worse than your boss in industry? - amichail

Your boss at least wants you to succeed.  Your peers not so much unless your research serves their agenda.<p>Although academia promises freedom, this freedom is often taken away by your peers (e.g., by not funding your research, accepting your papers, etc.).
======
Tangurena
I disagree. My boss' idea of "succeed" is not the same as my idea. And I don't
particularly believe that my boss' idea of success is good for the company in
the long run either. My boss wants to look good to his bosses.

As another example of why I claim you're wrong, let me give an example of a
company I worked at for far too long. It was a small family run business that
sold and serviced automobile radios. At that time, car manufacturers
contracted that service out to hundreds of smaller repair shops. This was one
of them.

As part of their service program, a dealership could call up and request a
radio to take care of a customer's problem. The radio would get shipped, the
customer would get a call from the dealership to come by and swap it out. This
way, there would be no hole in the dash, as most drivers would go insane if
they didn't have some sort of radio (or CD or cassette) playing in their car.
At least one dealership figured out how to game the system this company used
(we figured that they ordered the top of the line radios to use as upgrades
for the sales department). Consequently, they were stealing more than
$1k/month of product from the company. Mostly it was due to crappy paperwork
that ended up in a filing cabinet, never to be seen again. I came up with a
simple VB/Access application that used a barcode reader and a barcode printer.
I also made the mistake of using my own money to buy a PDA with built-in
barcode reader (specifically, a Symbol SPT1500) and writing an app to track
paperwork for the employees.

The boss hated it because his wife hated it. She hated it because it would
make her have to do things slightly differently. Furthermore, the boss also
hated it because it showed a flaw in his business system, and he treated it as
if it were a bad mark on himself: he looked bad, therefore he was a bad person
(that was his psychological take on the matter).

Between bad customers (the service department at that dealer wasn't the only
crooked one), bad employees (at least one went into business for himself
filling his garage with inventory before quitting), and a bad workflow system,
he was losing between $50k and $150k per year that I could figure out.

Anything that involves more than 1 human will involve politics. And academia
isn't any better or worse than any other business when it comes to the stupid
nonsense that humans do to each other.

------
lee
Depending on which field in Academia you're in, this could change.

Several years ago, I was the webmaster for the Hearing Research Center at
Boston University. It's a collection of 20 or so labs, each run by a
professor, with associated grad students, etc..

The first thing I noticed was that most of the researchers were universally
and remarkably happy people. (I had come from a background in Physics, which
had more angst.) Then I noticed a huge number of collaborations as I was
compiling the professors online CVs, and a huge number of publications. Before
a certain date, for the older professors, there were individual authorships,
but not after. This was a tantalizing mystery.

The department hosted an annual party for hearing researchers worldwide, and I
hung out with the diehards at the end of the night - the old timers - and
asked them what the story was. It's fascinating.

Those who are department heads now were all in school together at MIT thirty
years ago and they all had the same professor who sat them down and told them
that research didn't have to be competitive and backbiting. While these people
were grad students, they decided to take control of how science would be
practiced in their discipline.

Hearing research doesn't get anything like the same kind of grant money that,
for example, vision does. In order to advance the discipline the most
efficient way, with limited funds, they COULDN'T afford to duplicate research.
They need to share data, yet give researchers the freedom to use the data
differently if they have different ideas.

So patiently, these people took over their discipline, and groomed their grad
students into the culture where people are rewarded based on sharing and
collaboration. Perhaps there's a little less thunder, but people are
publishing very frequently and the discipline is advancing much more quickly
than it would have otherwise. They took control and set up the reward system
differently.

Did I mention that these scientists were some of the happiest people I've ever
met?

------
dxjones
I think the degree of supportiveness among peers varies considerably across
disciplines. Peers in some fields are extremely competitive and hyper-critical
of each other, despite being capable researchers, and they unwittingly
undermine the reputation of their entire field. Peers in some other fields
support each other, giving constructive comments when reviewing papers and
grant proposals, ... always searching for the silver lining in a cloudy
submission. These fields prosper.

It is an interesting question in Game Theory, what strategy is optimal for
academic peers.

~~~
gtt
Could you arrange fields by competitiveness?

------
dxjones
Your boss wants your success to serve his agenda.

Try being successful in a way that makes your boss look bad, and you'll
discover he isn't the least bit interested in your "success".

~~~
amichail
True. Both scenarios are bad. But most people probably don't realize how bad
academia is.

------
apu
At least in computer science, most of the major conferences are double-blind
reviewed. This means that it's more difficult to figure out whose paper one is
reviewing. This helps curb some of the abuses you seem to be worried about.

Another thing to keep in mind is that academic papers are supposed to be about
the truth, and so there is ostensibly an "objective" standard to which papers
are held. Of course this varies a lot by quality of the conference, but the
best conferences will generally do a fairly good job of letting the best
papers in and keeping the bad papers out (most of the confusion/"unfairness"
comes at the borderline papers, where it is understandably more difficult to
make a judgement).

That being said, I think some types of competition will always be a problem in
any discipline, although it's not at all clear that the corporate world is at
all better.

~~~
cperciva
_At least in computer science, most of the major conferences are double-blind
reviewed. This means that it's more difficult to figure out whose paper one is
reviewing._

Theoretically, yes. In practice, anonymizing work is hard to do -- if you're
prominent enough in a field to be asked to review papers, you probably have a
good idea who is doing what work, and you'll probably be able to recognize
authors' individual writing styles.

I've been asked to review "anonymized" papers in the past, but with the
exception of one which wasn't really in my field (I wrote back to tell the
editor that I didn't think I was qualified to review the paper, and he found
other referees) I've always been pretty sure who the authors were.

~~~
beetle_b
>if you're prominent enough in a field to be asked to review papers,

There aren't that many prominent people in a given discipline (and some of
them do a poor job in reviewing anyway - slow, etc). It's quite normal to have
a nonprominent person do the reviewing.

This is, after all, __peer __reviewing.

------
gruseom
Your question reminds me of what I (and a lot of people I know) went through
in grad school, figuring out that academia wasn't what I had been hoping for.
In the end, it's the same human nature in both places, so the grass isn't
greener on either side of the fence.

But not all environments are equally bad. There are green patches on both
sides, or at least greenish :) Your job is not to settle for a brown one.

~~~
dxjones
Here is another clear difference between industry and academia:

When your million-dollar grant gets funded, you buy your grad students a beer.

When your million-dollar contract gets signed, you buy yourself a car.

------
arupchak
I never really thought about this when working in academia. I had peers shoot
down work of mine, but I never considered them to be the ones I work for (ie.
get me my paycheck) but there is a direct comparison there.

Unfortunately, the current system in academia of peer-reviews always felt
awkward to me simply because you are not aligning self-interests. Any
researcher in a field knows that by approving someone else's work, he is
creating more competition for precious funds. Sure, a terrible boss can shoot
down a good idea of yours for pride's sake/other reasons, but that would hurt
the company in the long-run. At least when you are working for a boss in
industry, your self-interests are aligned and you both are aiming for the same
goal.

------
scott_s
That's a strange comparison to make. Perhaps a better one would be "Are your
'peers' in academia worse than your _competitors_ in industry?"

~~~
amichail
Do you normally depend on your competitors to fund your business or evaluate
your products?

In academia, you write grant proposals and research papers that are evaluated
by your peers.

~~~
scott_s
Yes, this is true, but I still think it's a better comparison.

Part of what I was getting at is the analogy isn't perfect because each have
their own unique characteristics. We can make a mapping from one to the other,
but we probably won't learn anything from it.

