241–250 of 313 posts
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What is an IC? I think it should mean something like senior engineer but I've only seen this acronym in the context of intelligent community
Individual Contributor (i.e. not a manager). It's a standard term at Microsoft, but I don't know how widely it's used elsewhere.
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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…
Professional managers can of course learn about different jobs, but there is a massive and largely unpleasant difference between being manged by someone who's been promoted for their domain competence and someone who has been parachuted in because of their expertise in ordering people about. Since it's virtually impossible for junior workers to fire a manager they dislike then what appears to be efficiency is often achieved through exploitation. To know this and perpetuate that pattern is to disavow moral agency, converting what is nominally a cooperative enterprise into a zero-sum game.
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Agree but checklists have been shown to reduce error all around.
The target of the checklists is the problem. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The measure has to be concrete enough to not be manipulatable. For example, aircraft mechanical failures or hospital infections are very clear and obvious metrics. And besides outright lying and manipulation, the metrics speak for themselves and can't be corrupted. You can't, however, measure "education" or…
They are far from very clear and obvious.
“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…
How different is Thompson's idea from modern academy? PhD is granted for showing that you know how to do research. Tenure granted for showing that you can do research. Tenured professors are free to research however they like, and get paid as long as they teach.
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…
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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…
For sports one very important difference is that real time performance is monitored by a large number of people. People who do not pay salaries of sports person and do not meddle with working of sports team directly. For any other kind of job performance is measured by insiders. Outsiders may gauge performance on quarterly / annual basis.
(Well, mostly: http://www.fourfourtwo.com/us/features/confessions-carlos-ka...)
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Throw out the bureaucrats. Leave those with subject knowledge. My wife works in academia and all the 'managers' in her research department are experienced researchers that often split their time between management and research. And it just does not work according to her. They don't understand the job of a manager, deem it less important than their research duties and basically see dealing with 'minor' personnel issue…
Really though, what is there in an university that justifies a dedicated team of managers? One person in power (say, the dean) is enough to make sure grants are coming on time, and negotiate those beforehand. They need one accountant to make sure salaries, taxes etc. are in the legal bounds and people receive what they were promised. Honest question: what else is needed? Most of the managerial work I've witnessed in…
I have a different take its the lack of pay for professors and the lack of respect for public education (On average a college professor makes less then a public school teacher, in my discipline I would have averaged about $20k less IF I got tenure) As a former academic professional (Librarian at a college) The high cost of college is based on the demands of students. 30 years ago there was no internet, no smoothy bar…
You could cut all student amenities out and most public universities would still be in budget crisis.
“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…
There's a long tradition of important advances in knowledge being made by people with an undemanding job [1] [2]. The 19th century university became a hotbed of research because the teaching workload was relatively light and they didn't require that you also did research. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parson-naturalist [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza#Lens-grinding_a...
We ought to be finding ways to broaden the number of people who can pursue their interests, while not forfeiting security, dignity, and social respect. This is one of the arguments for universal basic income, that it could decouple (some) people's desire to pursue knowledge from the need to earn a living, and maybe even especially from the need to produce regular, measurable results. Right not we're channeling most of our people who are interested in and capable of developing new knowledge into jobs which demand "results" more than they demand that truth be followed wherever it leads, and however long it takes. This will lead to a great deal of dubious Normal Science [0], and very little revolutionary thought [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...