Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse • Hacker News Board

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#131

Post by metaphorm » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:09 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #91

Lxr wrote: post #49

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…

> 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…

> But it's excellent at justifying a caste system

exactly. the managerial class claims dominion over the rest of us, and then swiftly constructs a rigid social system that locks in their position on top of it. this necessarily includes promulgation of unfounded myths and beliefs taken on faith to support the ossification of the system.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#132

Post by tensor » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:10 PM UTC

nickpinkston wrote: post #100

wpietri wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I would be more inclined to believe this if the pro-manager view didn't come from the managers the vast majority of the time. It seems too convenient and self-service. Of course managers want to think they make a massive difference.

Certainly some aspects can: keeping politics away from your group so that they can work, focusing work tasks by eliminating extraneous ones, advocating for people in the company. However, once you start getting into things like values and metrics it starts becoming a lot more grey. On the one hand metrics are a great idea, a tiny step towards making management more science driven. But on the other, the metrics so often used are such a poor and overly simple representation of a very complex system that it's often hard to see how they provide an accurate view of any given work place.

Goals and values are often completely lame. We value hard work! Your goal is to do your job! Somehow managers must know that they are ridiculed for this. After all entire movies are made doing so. Yet they still seem to want to believe this rhetoric works.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#133

Post by pdimitar » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:11 PM UTC

csneeky wrote: post #93

pdimitar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at any nature's habitat of N kinds of animals, even there what you see can't be called a hierarchy. It's a semi-stable state on the verge of chaos which can be very easily broken by introducing a species of animals new to the area. So no, it's not hierarchy. Lions can kill almost anything if they feel like it, but hyenas kill lions on a regular basis. Does that make them the top of the food chain in the s…

Not all lions kill as well as other lions though. Take a snapshot of all the lions in the world alive right now and rank them by their ability to kill and the number of offspring they have. Some are better at these two things (they killed more and attracted more mates). This is quantifiable and trivial to fit into a hierarchical scheme of some kind. It isn't hard to extract similar hierarchies from other species...in…

If we're talking about a single species, sure.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#134

Post by metaphorm » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:12 PM UTC

nickpinkston wrote: post #100

wpietri wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I tend to find that people with your view have a psychological and material necessity to believe the mythology.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#135

Post by nickbauman » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:14 PM UTC

Lxr wrote: post #49

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…

Bottom line: Taylorism only works well when applied to work that can be throughly quantified into time and motion studies. When you try to apply it to disciplines that require reflection and analysis or are by definition speculative in nature (can't think of anything more speculative than research or learning new things about the world that is academia), it's a catastrophe.

Video: The surprising truth about what motivates us

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#136

Post by Ziomislaw » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:14 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #60

johan_larson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to need some sort of controls, if only to kick out the folks who retire in place.

Retiring in place is actually quite boring, and the feeling of uselessness that results is depressing. People won't actually do that unless the alternative is worse. If you hire people who are passionate about whatever it they were hired to work on, they might not do work that is profitable, but they'll do work that is interesting and has some benefit.

I believe you undevalue the passion some people have for not working.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#137

Post by metaphorm » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:19 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #94

Fede_V wrote: post #66

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…

> Not every PhD should have a guaranteed spot as a professor (that would be insane) but when less than 8% of postdocs become professors, the system is in crisis. There are lots of industries like this, e.g., corporate law, sports, acting, music. Are they all "in crisis"? http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/ [EDIT] Others: military officers, investment banking, organized crime, tech start-up, trade…

just because a pathology is widespread does it not mean it isn't pathological.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#138

Post by flamedoge » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:21 PM UTC

deong wrote: post #83

quantum_state wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

I can do research with a thinkpad and being a part-time barista...

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#139

Post by arjie » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:21 PM UTC

eastWestMath wrote: post #110

arjie wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may not be true. Let's take the case of Stephen Smale. An incredibly smart man who would go on to win a Fields Medal. And yet, without someone providing the structure within which to work and without an external motivation, a mildly mediocre graduate student. All the credit for his work goes to him, of course. But one can easily imagine him completely flaming out with a different department head and advisor. It…

But that was the result were two academics recognizing a diamond in the rough. An MBA-type concerned with metrics would never even have accepted him for graduate studies.

That's fair. I'll accept my punishment.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#140

Post by metaphorm » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:22 PM UTC

trentnix wrote: post #71

wycx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An infernal situation. There is no solidarity in a meritocracy, and no reward for merit with solidarity.

On the contrary, consider team sports as a perfect example of a meritocracy which often also promotes solidarity. A good team, led by a good coach, recognizes merit is earned by the performance of the whole. The whole wins and the whole loses together. The best of sport very clearly defines success and failure. It uses competition to spur innovation and the pursuit of excellence. Solidarity is often the consequence o…

Team sports are highly unionized. It's also not a generalizable example because most industries are not controlled by a few hundred workers globally.