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

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#251

Post by portent » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 8:50 PM UTC

sevensor wrote: post #126

nickpinkston wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From ground level, though, it's really easy to see the dysfunctional cultures growing up around metrics. At the factory where I used to work, we'd zig-zag from metric to metric. Yield one quarter, Cpk the next, scrap rate the quarter after that. Special cross-departmental teams to manage the metric. Regardless of which metric was chosen, people would do really dumb things to try to meet it. If scrap rate was the metr…

This article by Ben Horowitz seems relevant - he mentions his history of managing teams by metrics. I like this quote:

"Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs."

http://a16z.com/2011/07/19/when-employees-misinterpret-manag...

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#252

Post by metaphorm » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 8:50 PM UTC

bshanks wrote: post #228

metaphorm wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're making the case for an administrative assistant, which is a very different role and set of responsibilities than a team of executives or managers.

No, this is not the solution; I've seen this sort of thing happen in academia even with professors with assistants (thankfully my own professors have never been like this). For example, the administrative assistant presents the professor with an employee timesheet that needs to be signed in order for some employee to be paid, and the professor says, "thanks, I'm busy now, just leave that here and don't bother me agai…

well, the problem is professors lack the motivation or ability to properly to administrative tasks so somebody else needs to do them instead.

however, installing a massive and expensive and authoritarian bureaucracy seems like an extremely bad solution as well and yet that is what we've got.

I'm suggesting that that bureaucracy ought to be dismantled and be replaced by a smaller number of more focused administrators who have the authority to do administrative work (i.e. are allowed to sign the payroll) but are not members of the managerial class that is strangling the life out of the academy.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#253

Post by zeteo » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:09 PM UTC

jnicholasp wrote: post #250

zeteo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) was (became; established a whole tradition of being) a hermit/beggar/monk; Socrates was a stone mason (occasionally); Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel and begged for food; Jesus was a carpenter and then a wandering preacher; Spinoza (as you note) was a lens grinder; Kant was a tutor; Einstein was a patent clerk. And, as you note, especially in the 19th and 18th centuries, many prot…

Note that having a job seems necessary though. Maybe it's a case of the golden mean? On one side you have people whose job absorbs all leisure. On the other you have some who draw sufficient income without having a job at all. These are Marx's infamous "coupon clippers", and historically they're not as prominent in intellectual history as people with undemanding jobs (personally I'm not aware of many philosophers / scientists who were rentiers). If leisure was the only variable, we'd expect people with guaranteed incomes (annuities, for example, have been sold since the Middle Ages) to have been the most prolific thinkers of history.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#254

Post by CountSessine » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:17 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…

We have to calm down with the metrics, accreditations and regulations, and accept that some people are better than others at certain things, hire the right people and trust them to do a good job.

Honest question - how do we know who is better at what if not by some measure/metric? How do we know who the right people are? Is it just a matter of 'expert opinion'? And if so, how do we prevent cliques and nepotism?

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#255

Post by darkmighty » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:19 PM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #229

technotony wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There doesn't need to be a metric for that, it's the manager's job to use their judgement to assess that by building a relationship with the person, seeing how well they communicate their ideas (a sign someone understands things), that they finish what they said they would do etc etc.

That just makes the problem circular. How do you find these managers that are good at judging people? Also, you're clearly laying out metrics: communication ability and timeliness. They're just somewhat generic metrics.

It's not exactly circular, since there are many less managers than low level workers, and progressively less people as you go higher. Presumably the people at the top were once successful managers or successful workers.

Basically, this promotes a system where metrics are given by how your peers and managers feel about you.

Perhaps while our metrics aren't perfectly capable of predicting how good a worker will turn out or judging it's progress, we shouldn't rely too much on them in place of peer judgement.

But indeed let's not fool ourselves that coworker judgement is perfect. It needlessly introduces a whole body of biases, unnecessary politics, and social engineering that can be as bad if not worse than a metric-only system, which at least are objective.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#256

Post by new_hackers » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:23 PM UTC

iamacynic wrote: post #217

wpietri wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not opposed to managers. I am one, after all. But I don't think "management" is a universal skill. I think somebody who manages developers should probably be a developer. I think somebody who manages doctors should be a doctor. And I think there's a lot of merit in non-hierarchical systems, like the way doctors and lawyers are mainly accountable to professional organizations. I agree that metricising knowledge wo…

> I think somebody who manages doctors should be a doctor. i could be wrong, but i believe in 'real' professions like medicine and law, there's some kind of board/bar rule that prohibits being managed by someone who never had the actual job they're managing. any one know if that's accurate?

For a professional engineer's license, you have to demonstrate competence and have 4 letters of recommendation from PEs who have either managed you directly, or have overseen your work. So there is not a requirement that you (as a budding prospective PE) may never work for someone who isn't a PE, however it does limit your ability to achieve your own license. Therefore, there is a desire from the younger engineers to seek out PEs to work under.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#257

Post by pdimitar » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:26 PM UTC

Fomite wrote: post #248

pdimitar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Given I know someone who works rather hard, full time, on negotiating grants and other contracts and they're far from the Dean level, I'd suggest you're off from the amount of work required to run and administer a university by a pretty hefty margin.

Well, I don't mind being wrong on that one, it's mostly side observations plus some intuition, and we know these aren't exactly objective criteria.

That being said, in your example maybe the dean simply couldn't be bothered? :P

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#258

Post by freshhawk » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:29 PM UTC

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #206

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 don't think this theory makes much sense when you examine it. But it's excellent at justifying a caste system, one where all workers are controlled by wise managers, and where there's a stable hierarchy of executives above that. I note that the hierarchy established is basically equivalent to those of feudalism. It also has the handy property of justifying high compensation for managers and executives; since work…

Seems you both agree but are talking about modern management practices vs the concept of having someone "manage". The workplace class of "Management" is much more than just the act of managing you describe.

What you describe is how I've seen software dev management properly work, managers are a support structure for the workers, like Admin. They have important and useful skills, but don't get the position of metaphorical aristocracy.

When you have MBA style dated general management they operate by putting the devs subordinate to their management "expertise" and then they don't "triage work effectively, help engineers unblock their work, help identify people in the org that contain the domain knowledge necessary to help one of their direct reports, etc etc." because it's not really in their interest to do so.

It's not just incentives either, there is a huge cultural component, which is why it's so easy to parody "tech management" and have the caricature be recognizable around the world.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#259

Post by trishume » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:37 PM UTC

ThomPete wrote: post #168

trishume wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really easy to make punchy-sounding arguments about why a certain field isn't as important to teach, so we should be rather reluctant to go along with them. For example your argument about psychology could equally applied to almost any field and physics. "I feel the same way about (Computer Science|Biology|Chemistry) which to me is even more problematic as it is based on the premise that we can learn about (comp…

I know which is why I said it with some reluctance. But your rubutals aren't good examples. Physics, Computer Science and Chemistry still have many still unanswered questions and provide clear benefits and ways to uncover those. In psychology we have a much better way into the human mind through neuroscience. Asking humans about their own behavior is filled with the very bias that we try to battle through the scienti…

Why do you think neuroscience is a better way to learn about human behaviour (which is what psychology deals with)? Neuroscience is incredibly difficult and the brain is super complex. We have learned far far less about human behaviour through neuroscience than through psychology studies.

Learning about behaviour through neuroscience is working at the wrong level of abstraction, we're not capable of comprehending large systems at low levels.

You cite bias in psych studies, but neuroscience has lots of issues too. See fmri study that can find results on a dead salmon. Also inability of neuroscience tools to figure out what the net of a tiny microprocessor does, let alone anything larger.

I wasn't the one who down voted you.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#260

Post by jgamman » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 9:44 PM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #253

jnicholasp wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) was (became; established a whole tradition of being) a hermit/beggar/monk; Socrates was a stone mason (occasionally); Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel and begged for food; Jesus was a carpenter and then a wandering preacher; Spinoza (as you note) was a lens grinder; Kant was a tutor; Einstein was a patent clerk. And, as you note, especially in the 19th and 18th centuries, many prot…

Note that having a job seems necessary though. Maybe it's a case of the golden mean? On one side you have people whose job absorbs all leisure. On the other you have some who draw sufficient income without having a job at all. These are Marx's infamous "coupon clippers", and historically they're not as prominent in intellectual history as people with undemanding jobs (personally I'm not aware of many philosophers / s…

i think you have to go back to the 18th century for that. i'm thinking britain where science was something acceptable that gentlemen could do in their spare time (with smart+poor doing a lot of heavy lifting) and in particular Antoine Lavoisier in France who literally bought the rights to be a tax farmer so he could do his research. he lost his head in the revolution so there's that. YMMV.