
You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation - stochastician
http://www.argmin.net/2018/08/09/co-employment/
======
wanderfowl
Just a quick note: 'Dual Affiliation' is being used here differently than in
most academic contexts, so the headline's a bit odd.

Normally, it means having a joint appointment in two academic departments
(e.g. Linguistics and Cognitive Science at State U, or in the Department of
Linguistics at State U, with an appointment at the Head-and-Neck surgery
program at the local med school). This is a well-known and common practice,
and although it can be tricky (particularly with even splits, where there's
not one true home), it's not a 'harmful' thing.

As the author explains in the article per se, he's talking about an
industry/academic split. This is _much_ harder, for the reasons he's outlined,
and as an academic, I too am skeptical. It could be a nice idea in moderation,
and it'd be great to have more bridges between Academia and industry,
particularly given the brutality of the Academic Job Market.

But I can easily see that a professional administrator somewhere deciding that
it's cheaper to stock departments with 20% appointees than to actually hire
career professors and educators. And as any adjunct-heavy institution will
tell you, a department full of moonlighters is no place to make a life.
Perhaps more damning, 20% of anybody's life isn't enough to support all but
the weakest of teaching, even for a single course, so over-reliance on this
will just further damage the instructional core of universities.

So, one or two in a department could be nice, but I don't think it's a great
model for the future.

~~~
mi_lk
Dual affiliation meaning industry/academic split is unambiguous here since
that's the word Facebook AI Research choose to use [1][2] and the authors are
explicitly responding to Facebook's model.

[1]: [https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-yann-lecun-dual-
aff...](https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-yann-lecun-dual-affiliation-
model-ai-experts-2018-8) [2]:
[https://www.facebook.com/schrep/posts/10156638732909443](https://www.facebook.com/schrep/posts/10156638732909443)

~~~
beambot
Facebook's reappropriation of a well-understood term in academia doesn't mean
it's not ambiguous... If anything, it's disingenuous.

~~~
grigjd3
Maybe better to call it misguided.

------
bvc35
The bulk of academic work is chasing grants, not "curiosity driven research".
If universities want professors not to leave in droves to tech companies that
will consistently give them funding and cut away the bullshit that eats up the
majority of a professor's time, they should try competing, rather than
bemoaning that professors are no longer following the sacred path of academic
asceticism.

~~~
Fomite
While I would like to stop chasing grants as much as the next tenure track
assistant professor, I don't think it's fair to characterize "the bulk" of
academic work as chasing grants.

If anything, it's responding to emails ;)

~~~
_emacsomancer_
Emails and sitting in meetings (e.g.
[https://twitter.com/research_tim/status/1017506139137826819](https://twitter.com/research_tim/status/1017506139137826819)
).

------
reality_czech
Wow. I don't even know where to start on this one.

My experience with academia is that everyone is scrambling to get grants and
get published. Nobody ever asked questions about where the grants came from. A
lot (probably even the majority at the time) was from the department of
defense, and explicitly targetted to create weapons.

Professors spent a huge amount of their time writing grant proposals. It's
like pitching to a bunch of VCs, only you do it every month, and the amounts
of money are much smaller.

And this is the reward for a lifetime of achievement. If you're starting at
the bottom today, conditions are positively Dickensian. The average (not the
maximum, the average!) PhD in CS took 6 years. During that time you'll be paid
almost nothing, no matter what the cost of living is around you. And you are
essentially an indentured servant of the professor. If he wants you to do a
routine task that has nothing to do with your research, you have to do it.
Cumulatively these tasks could add up to years of delays. After you graduate,
you'll probably have to take multiple postdoc jobs, often at very low
salaries, in hopes of getting a faculty position. Sometimes the hopes come
true, but very often not.

And from what I understand, CS is actually one of the "good" subjects to go to
graduate school for. Things are much, much worse in the humanities.

It's truly incredible that anyone would hold this up as a better system than
how industry works. Hmm, let's see... a two week interview process, after
which the company will tell the applicant whether they're hired. Or, a two
year postdoc after which the university may choose to throw them away like
garbage. Spending half your time writing grants, versus spending a few minutes
a week writing a status report. Come on.

Also, the section about how "the students will suffer" from industry
partnerships reads like a bad joke. Students suffer because the most
universities hire faculty purely based on research, and not at all based on
teaching. Full stop. The top research schools have contempt for teaching
undergrads; that's why they hire adjuncts to do it at minimum wage. (Well,
they also dump some of the burden on graduate students, too.)

~~~
azhenley
It seems like once a week I see comments like this. This was not my experience
at all.

With internships, I made over 60k a year in grad school. I worked on projects
of my choice. I did not do a postdoc after graduating. I graduated from a
small, unranked department and got a tenure-track position at an R1 university
in a top 75 department.

~~~
closed
What field? Even at top tier institutions I've never seen grad students make
more than 40k, but I'm thinking of research heavy PhDs, where you continue
your research over the summer.

Edits: ah, just saw in your profile it was software engineering!

~~~
lazyjeff
I had the same experience as the grandparent, and averaged 70K a year. I had a
lot of great opportunities during my Ph.D so I was really fortunate, but I
felt that many students I met during internships were serial interns and got
fellowships too, so it seemed at the time like most strong PhD students in
Computer Science averaged about 60K a year and enjoyed it. Also note that you
don't pay FICA (Social Security / Medicare) on your PhD stipend so 25K is like
30K.

I graduated in 5 years into my dream tenure-track job, and 7/8 of the students
in my cohort got good tenure-track jobs too (the remaining one went back to
running a successful business unrelated to her research). The school I'm at
pays $40K/year stipends for PhD students, including the summer; so I think
many people only count the 9-month stipend for PhD students which is about
27K, and not the summer salary.

------
jjaredsimpson
Article says two masters which implicitly assumes industry would be some new
master pulling professors in some new direction. But right now professors have
multiple masters. Undergrads, grads, administrations, grants/funding, etc. The
idea that the previous master was "curiosity driven research" and now it will
be "shareholders" is an exaggeration. I could cynically say the previous
master was "least publishable unit."

It seems more likely to me this article assumes zero sum competition where
there are actually positive sum gains to be had. It's good Facebook wants to
pay for PhDs to do real market driven work instead of these people starving as
adjuncts somewhere.

------
gwbas1c
When I took computer science in 1999-2003, the best professors had rather
significant industry experience. The worst professors were completely clueless
because they never worked with a large computer program in their life.

I would have been thrilled if my freshman and sophomore computer science
classes were taught by guest "professors" who had legitimate careers, and
occasionally took the time to teach a class. I'm sure their feedback to my
department would have been extremely valuable, because, at the time, every
class was some professor's half-baked experiment on teaching computer science.

Now, almost 20 years later, I'd really enjoy the opportunity to take a
school's almost complete syllabus, and teach it to students.

How does this apply to Artificial Intelligence? I'm sure there are lots of
unwritten lessons from industry that haven't make their way back into
academia.

~~~
tialaramex
> The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with
> a large computer program in their life.

Seems like what you needed was a trade school. Maybe having a degree from a
more prestigious university helped you get an initial job, but in terms of the
things you were actually looking for, that's trade school stuff and barely
overlaps with Computer Science.

~~~
sgt101
This is a problem on so many levels.

The evolution of, management of and use of large computer programs over a long
period is pretty well unstudied. And yet 100's of millions of people have to
use these things every day.

The programming methods used by practioners (and now taught in the Ivy league)
have been developed by folk science, and are not rigorous in any way I can
think of.

The Academy has failed in these two ways, at least. For large systems it's a
market failure. The study of systems in the field over decades is not a way to
get tenure - so it has largely not happened. The development practices created
by and advocated by academia failed in the field; so we got "Agile" and we
can't get rid of it with science (or at least, we haven't so far)

We can dismiss this all as artisanal, but in that case we need to separate
Computer Science from Software Engineering properly. This means that Comp Sci
goes to the Maths faculty and SE goes to Engineering. Crucially the expected
level of funding for Comp Sci goes to Maths levels; buy a whiteboard and get
on with it. This is no solution to be honest, but better than the current
situation where the community owns to be tacking the problems of industry but
actually addresses little in the core.

~~~
sidr
I actually agree with your separation of Software Engineering and Computer
Science comment, but completely disagree with the funding level statement. The
notion that branches of Mathematics don't use computer resources is absolutely
laughable. If anything, I don't see why the best practices for managing people
who are developing the same CRUD apps over and over again needs any
significant investment of any kind besides a few laptops. Computer Science can
not and should not give a shit about development practices like Agile or its
alternatives. CS people do own a lot of problems facing industry like machine
learning and AI, and they address plenty of problems "in the core"...just
nothing to do with process.

Also, this split absolutely does happen at some universities, and the funding
is decided by agencies based on their priorities. One such university is the
University of Waterloo, and the CS department is not wanting for
funding...certainly not at the buy a whiteboard and get on with it levels
you're suggesting.

~~~
lsc
>The notion that branches of Mathematics don't use computer resources is
absolutely laughable.

The best right out of school sysadmins I've seen were failed physicists.
Apparently they run some moderately large stuff.

~~~
sgt101
I had a really good one work for me - but he went off back to physics so that
he could play with a real computer!

------
chriskanan
I'm a professor working in AI.

I'd say the raiding of AI faculty is a reality, so Facebook's proposal is
better than the raw poaching that is occurring. With salaries more than 3-6x
higher in industry than in academia, the cost of being in academia is high for
AI researchers compared to other fields where it is close to 1.5x. The program
I received my PhD from had many faculty leave entirely to join companies, and
this "dual affiliation" seems like a reasonable compromise.

Facebook enables PhD students to be funded, provides access to massive
resources for building datasets and for compute power, and removes much of the
grant writing burden allowing one to focus more on curiosity-driven research.

Faculty have so many things that pull them away from research, grant
writing/fundraising, teaching multiple courses, and university service.
Because things are moving so fast in AI, it requires more time to stay current
on research activities which is hard to do in academia because so much time is
spent doing other things.

------
AndrewKemendo
_You can’t do disruptive entrepreneurism if 80% of what you do is owned by a
big company._

This should be the headline.

The most critical issue here is Intellectual Property. In academia the IP is
owned by the academic institution and has traditionally found its way into
published research before being put through a technology transfer office or
taken out of the universities by their creator. Don't forget Stanford still
gets HUGE annuities from their licensing of the tech to Brin/Page[1].

Alternatively, corporations own the IP from any research from the outset, and
history would indicate that trade secrets or patents that can monopolize a
technology made from the research, will be pursued before or simultaneous to
any publishing in research journals.

You have to pay one of them eventually if you want to make a product with it.
So the question is, do we want corporations or academic institutions being the
primary driver/owner of new knowledge?

Or is it just totally pragmatic, and we let the one with the most money win?

[1][https://www.redorbit.com/news/education/318480/stanford_earn...](https://www.redorbit.com/news/education/318480/stanford_earns_336_million_off_google_stock/)

------
variational123
I think an important factor is the salary disparity. Unless you live in the
middle of nowhere, academic salaries cannot provide an upper middle-class
lifestyle anymore. Academics are only human and it is natural to want the
lifestyle all of their peers from grad school, college (or even their recently
graduated student who works for FAANG) seem to enjoy. Unless academic salaries
in CS increase significantly (and match say, business school salaries), this
trend will continue.

~~~
s0rce
I'm guessing salaries may come down somewhat CS industry jobs as supply of
people with software development training increases. Salaries are much lower
in physical science, engineering and biology even for PhDs compared to
software development/CS/"tech". Although in industry salaries are still higher
than academic ones, although the difference is not as dramatic.

------
killbrad
Our government, and moreso, our society through cultural and government apathy
has devalued anything academic that does not produce material gains - capital,
wealth, patents, etc.

I fear that the total commercialisation of academia means that we are unlikely
to see meaningful material gains for society in terms of new cures to disease
or technology advances outside of those that can be monetised for recurring
revenue in the next decade.

It's really an unfortunate but self inflicted American problem.

~~~
lsc
It's a problem, sure... but the problem is that we're not funding schools. If
we spent some tax dollars on our education system, academia would be more
independent from business, and could focus more on the sorts of long-term and
difficult-to-monitize research that business is not so great at.

------
vowelless
Semi orthogonally, in my opinion, Ben Recht is one of the most important
voices in ML and AI. I highly recommend people follow him.

~~~
PAClearner
I agree-he is a very crisp and clear thinker.

------
sgt101
Why does "faculty working elsewhere mean cancelled classes" \- if the faculty
is paid for 100% by facebook, but works 20% at the university does this not
mean that the students receive a bonus teacher? Is there no scope for
enrichment of computer science by industry? And what is "academic computer
science"? I mean, look down at your keyboard - nothing in computer science is
purely academic; it's the most applied of domains!

The only exceptions I can think of are the fringes of physics attacked by
complexity analysis - but these really are fringes!

~~~
Fomite
Working 80% for Facebook basically precludes the time commitment for teaching
classes.

~~~
sgt101
As per many other comments - doing admin and applying for grants takes up ~80%
of normal academic time - and yet classes get taught.

~~~
sgt101
Ok - let's say that the departmental budget for professors is $1m, and you pay
$100k to fund 10 professors, who then teach 50 classes. All is well.

Now, one of these professors announces that Facebook will pay them $500k
instead, but they will allow 20% of time at the university, and will pay you
$50k

Now you have $150k, and 1 class per year already in the bank. You need to find
4 more classes taught, and by spending $120k you are able to do that, you also
have $30k for TAs.

------
andyidsinga
snip snip:

> The proposal harms our students directly. Our faculty at their best secure
> everyone’s future by teaching talented students how to understand the
> challenges facing the broader world. Such mentorship is enriched by the
> courage, independence, security, and trained judgement of senior scholars to
> guide students’ perspectives on what is worth doing, what is likely
> irrelevant, and what is wrong. Engaging with a student body requires an all-
> in commitment, both in teaching and advising roles. Faculty primarily
> working elsewhere means cancelled classes. Faculty wedded to a company means
> advice that’s colored by the interest of the company.

I'm not sure I agree with the implications of what follows the first sentence
in the paragraph above - these are rather broad generalizations.

Academia may certainly help students understand challenges of the larger world
but in my experience this is as mixed a bag as other settings: working in the
private sector, working in non-profits and volunteering.

Finally, faculty working elsewhere seems like a very common thing. I've hired
academics as consultants in the past and worked in companies where this was
common and seemed encouraged by their universities. Note that they weren't
_primarily_ working for us - so this is a good distinction - but it also begs
for a more clear definition of what "All-in commitment" means above.

(edits : grammar etc)

------
gweinberg
Yeah, working 80% of your time in industry would be catastrophically
destructive to most academics' intellectual freedom. You know what else would
be catastrophic to their intellectual freedom? Working 20% of their time at a
university.

~~~
vkou
Where exactly do I sign up to get paid to do research on topics that don't
have immediate business application?

Pick your poison here. Either you're a servant to teaching, training grad
students, chasing grants, and academic politics, or you only get to work on
things that will make Facebook, Google, etc, money.

~~~
throwaway_bob
FAIR, DeepMind, Brain, MSR and many others all employ large numbers of people
working on pure research with no immediate business application, and with at
least as much freedom as their academic counterparts.

------
listenYou
Last time I checked, adjuncts make shit, get shat on, and have to work
multiple jobs anyway.

Without dumping blame on Universities, the point is that the cost of
"teaching" gets passed on to students, saddling them with debt. Profit or no,
the ratio of most tuitions often boils down to students paying what might be
the cost of a 1:1 student:teacher ratio, effectively paying an entire adjunct
salary (gross pay), for 4 years straight, single handedly.

Take a look at what that means when the reality is a 30:1 ratio or worse. But,
the rationalization being: they get a diversity of expertise, vetted for world
class quality (hopefully) even if they don't get the one-on-one personal touch
of a direct hands-on apprenticeship, with the personal attention of a mentor.

But hey, yeah the campus grounds cost money, and accredation, and
administrative bureaucratic overhead, and so one.

But yeah, adjuncts make shit, work part time, and have more than one source of
income anyway. So, suck it, ivory tower!

------
kiallmacinnes
I feel lots of this applies to Open Source too. The notion of wearing the
company or community hat is pretty common, and often used to persuade others
of your good intentions.

The number of times I've read a sentence that started with something similar
to "Wearing my community hat, .." and felt the sentence was anything but
community orientated is way higher than I would like. I'm sure a certain
percentage of this is actually my own biases, but I'm also pretty sure that
percentage isn't 100%.

------
infinity0
TL;DR some professors are worried that their poorly-paid students doing grunt-
level work that professors find beneath themselves to do, will realise quite
quickly what the better deal is after working 80% for a company and 20% for a
university.

------
austincheney
> This model assumes people can slice their time and attention like a
> computer, but people can’t do this.

I disagree. Perhaps the most famous exception is Grace Hopper, a naval
reservist who had both a civilian employer and a separated military career.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper)

I too am an officer reservist, though Army not Navy. Two separate careers with
often unrelated skills in unrelated industries. Yes, there are challenges to
division of effort in this regard. To say humans are incapable of doing this,
though, is ignorance from people who have never tried it or magnificently fail
at it.

Another example I worked with personally: MG Scottie Carpenter. He is also an
Army Reservists with two separated careers. When I worked with him in his
first general command he was a senior leader of the North Carolina State
Troopers (state police). He is now the deputy commanding general of the Army
Reserves. [http://www.usar.army.mil/Leadership/Article-
View/Article/126...](http://www.usar.army.mil/Leadership/Article-
View/Article/1262474/maj-gen-scottie-d-carpenter/)

Yes, competent and career minded individuals can achieve dual affiliation
serving two masters. It is completely possible and some people excel very well
at it.

\---

What people don't see about dual affiliation is that there is extra insight
gained from these struggles that other people cannot relate to. I have tried
to explain this to people many times before and it is often utterly
incomprehensible.

My civilian employment is a senior JavaScript developer at a big bank. The
military considers itself a profession, and like other professions there is
mandated education and certification to do anything. Other civilian careers,
nearly everything I can think of, has this but software does not. As a result
there are somewhat fewer incompetent people that get promoted to higher
responsibility compared to the corporate world. Trying to explain this kind of
incompetence to software developers is like shooting yourself in the face.

In the civilian corporate world software development is a big common thing. In
the military it is nearly nonexistent. The primary reason for this is
workplace culture and the near absence of a professional nature around
software in the civilian world that the military can model internally. By
professional nature I mean there is no widely accepted definition of skills
(even in an ad hoc defacto way), licensing, or code of conduct that defines
the profession. Trying to explain how the military is behind the times and
could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year by aggressively building an
internal professional culture of its own around software development is
equally frustrating.

Another example is that people in the civilian world are sometimes easily
offended. This is incredibly frustrating when every conversation is a midnight
tip toe on egg shells. This accepted degree of sympathy and sensitivity are
what, in my opinion, allow the Dunning-Kruger effect to occur (sometimes
rampantly).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

Conversely, in the military you want to be just kind enough to avoid crushing
someone's soul and destroying their self-esteem, unless they have honestly
earned a good soul destroying moment. Kindness has a far lower value than
honesty, which is a wildly different work culture. Jumping between these work
cultures can be disorienting. Brutal honesty is a pretty simple thing to
figure out, even if emotionally scaring, compared to guessing at people's
self-serving emotional motives. So in the corporate world you really have to
slowly test the waters before challenging peoples' opinions even if you have
20 years experience and they have none.

Perhaps the most similar quality between the military and the corporate
software world are the various irrational things people do to assert job
security. In the military it is hard to fire people, but it is easy to cancel
a contract and swiftly eliminate a large swath of civilian contractors. This
can result in some software products that are massively complex and hardware
bound so that they need continued, exclusive, and highly specialized support
from particular vendors. In the corporate world, on the other hand, it is very
person for themselves resulting high doses of _invented here_. God forbid
software developers ever expose their incompetence by writing original
software, so instead write as little software as possible and simply glue
third party products together as much as possible. This is why many developers
in the web world spend their careers painfully specializing around
framework/libary APIs instead of spending a few hours learning the standard
APIs that everything compiles to.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here)

------
btilly
Their response is different from my first thought. Which is that Facebook
wants the freedom to embed their employees inside universities where they are
in a position to get the best and brightest students into Facebook's hiring
pipeline.

------
sharemywin
I find the idea odd. if you want to contribute to academic research create a
grant(s) with your budget.

~~~
ansgri
That's a big can of worms. This dual employment may have its drawbacks (I
think mostly due to the fact that this is a mega-corp; for a small
bootstrapped company it's only good, I think), but consider the following two
topics:

* People would work in academic institution XOR your company: you cannot give the grant to the best in your field and still have him work for you, so you'd always want to hire the best you can, and give the grants to the rest;

* Grants most often support publications, not working solutions. At least with government-sponsored grants it's best when the academic analysis and publication is sponsored from a grant, whereas industrial involvement guarantees that the work is relevant and the published solution actually works.

~~~
Fomite
It's trivial to structure grants (or indeed contracts) such that they have
concrete deliverables, even for academic research.

~~~
PAClearner
I think the moment a 'grant' has concrete deliverables (to a private firm?) it
ceases being a grant and starts being some kind of consulting. I think people
try to do this around ucla pretty often i.e. (I give a professor money -they
do the research- I keep the IP)- it is pretty frowned upon in that context. In
ML and CS I think this is probably more kosher-Michael Kearns seems to have a
pretty thriving consultancy.

~~~
mattkrause
DARPA structures a lot of its research funding like this. The 'award' is a
contract, typically for data, models, etc. For example, the statement of work
for my last project has about a dozen deliverables of the form "tabulated data
comparing [outcome] against [experimental variable 1], [exp. variable 2],
...." or "a computational model relating...." As far as I can tell, they are
not _actually_ interested in the data itself; this is just a hack to use the
procurement process to fund research. They were happy to let the researchers
keep and share the data.

In theory, the contract structure seems a lot more limited than an NIH, NSF,
etc. grant, where you are minimally constrained by the proposal, but in
practice, the program managers seem willing to amend the contract so that no
one collects a bunch of obviously useless data.

~~~
PAClearner
mmmm today i learned something new-thanks.

------
nicodjimenez
Companies also have this problem...

------
sharemywin
Seems more like 80% industry 20% spy to me.

~~~
ansgri
As a person working like 40% academy, 60% industry, I'd say it is in reverse:
you get to 'spy' on industry's knowledge and practice and transplant it into
academic setting, where it is very likely publishable.

------
MrEfficiency
I find this a bit silly.

80/20 is more like "Somewhere between 60/40 and 100/0"

I had a boss ask me not to take a second university class, this was smart for
everyone involved.

There are busy times and work and boring times at work, to push that it
unrealistic to manage a structured life outside of work is silly.

Ive worked with professors that let me take 2 weeks off for Work Travel.

I've had to cut out of work because I had a class. I came in early the next
day and prepared for my meeting, things were fine.

I'm a big fan of moderation, and this article claims an extreme situation that
is temporary and often unlikely.

