111–120 of 313 posts
If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion. There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fun…
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> There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. That's a great way of summing up what I've heard called "managerialism". There's a theory behind, e.g., the MBA that a competent manager can manage anything. That what one manages makes no difference as long as you're a real manager. One of the corollaries of that theory is that all one has to…
I tend to find people with your view have never been an executive managing the managers, or even a manager. When you are (like myself) then you see that good managers / leadership (including tech team leads, etc.) really do make a massive difference in performance with the same people. Things like metrics, values, and re-orgs might seem like Dilbert-esque corporate speak (a view I used to share), but they're incredib…
But I don't see the difference being systems and metrics. I see it much more as interpersonal relationships, respect, and caring about the people that work for you. The manager's competence in the domain itself is also important.
Selecting the right person for the job is also vital, but you are specifically addressing different performance by the same team with a different manager.
My wife works as a teacher at one of the largest schoolboards in Québec, and she can tell you that the solution "hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability" doesn't work in a unionized system. Complacency a systemic problem. When your union protects your job, you don't need to actually put effort into doing the job. Of course, that doesn't mean ALL teachers are…
> Of course, preventing public school teachers from unionizing will simply allow the government to exploit them. What are the examples in modern liberal democracies where governments exploited non-unionized workers? The arguments for unions assume an adversarial relationship between employer and employees. But they don't go through for governments. http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/02/bu...
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What people misunderstand about these metric-based systems in the US is that their purpose is not to reform systems or improve performance. It's to create a layer of interference that either channels control into a new managerial class or to wrest it back into the hands of higher-level administrator from whom it was somehow ceded. The purpose of business consultants is to make money for business consultants. Pushing…
I'm fairly anti-capitalist, and even I can see this is a bit of a stretch. The way managers are taught is that you can't improve upon a process unless you know exactly what to improve. They look for something definite like metrics because a change in those can actually mean something and it's more definite than "they're doing good work." The drive to use metrics actually kind of revolutionized how we improve work. Th…
But I don't think this true in the context of the modern US economy(why I qualified my statement as such). The political/economic situation is such that the efficacy of a given model is secondary to the viability of abstractions that make reference to it. How it performs in the meta-context of "salesmanship," re-inforcing acceptable political narratives, and social media, supercede its actual utility. The implosive (and false) model of finance, where the derivative of some object or system possesses more value than the thing which it references, has pervaded every aspect of our economy and culture.
That list is correct, but it's only half of the problem. The other other half of the problem is supply. In fields like mathematics, physics, computer science, grad students have excellent non-academic options. There is an oversupply of PhD students with respect to the number of available positions, but the excess PhD students have fantastic career avenues. In fields like the humanities, and, to a lesser extent, the m…
Tim harford Ted talk about error and evolution is about how the only way to manage complex system is about trial and error, perhaps he would subscribe that trial and error is the only way to search for a better way of managing academia.
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In a university setting, it seems to me that teaching in combination with support from endowment (not research grants) can be one of the scenario for this ... key is still to have fundamentally good people with passion and joy for the endeavor ..
The thing that always infuriated me about computer science (my field), is that I don't actually need the big research grant. There are people who do, of course, but I could do most of what I found interesting and useful with a high-end desktop PC and some free time. But universities don't operate that way anymore. It doesn't matter that all I need is $5K and some time -- the university needs their 40% cut of a multi-…
40%?!? I would kill for overhead that low. Most places are over 50 now. I've heard of 70% at the absolute top.
“If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to…
I can't help but thinking that one of the real problems is that a lot of academia isn't that valuable anymore as a field of study.
Don't get me wrong I consider ex. philosophy as one of the most important fields but I also feel like it doesn't belong as an indiependent discipline anymore. Maybe I am wrong but after postmodernism I really don't see what new revelations are going to be of fundamental value to society.
I see plenty of need for applying philosophy in various fields as interpretation of those fields such as neuroscience, quantum mechanics, technology etc. but as a stand alone field I think it gave us what we needed. And even if I am wrong you don't need an academic faculty to support it anymore.
I feel the same with something like psychology which to me is even more problematic as it it's based on a premise that you can learn about the human mind by studying humans. Again it should be tied to something like Neuroscience instead.
That way the fields are put to good use rather than being self servant.
I am aware this might not be a popular opinion and it's not something that I am 100% certain of myself but it seems to be that a lot of academia could be learned without large institutions to support and and thus with the need to measure it the only way large institutions normally can.
Thoughts?