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The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

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Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#31

Post by mseebach »

M_Bakhtiari wrote: post #29
mseebach wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that anyone is entitled to a secretary, that a secretary is a kind of status symbol, is rightfully falling out of fashion, and not just in Sweden. But it's not being replaced by nothing, it being replaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks. The department has student relations officers that deal with scheduling, enrollment, tracking grades etc, the university has a travel office, e…

> The idea that anyone is entitled to a secretary, that a secretary is a kind of status symbol, is rightfully falling out of fashion, and not just in Sweden. Indeed, the opposite error, seen in many ultra-high power distance societies, is arguably worse: when a secretary and a desk not facing a wall becomes an end in itself and nothing of value is produced. > But it's not being replaced by nothing, it being replaced…

> there will be no-one to do the more open-ended tasks, or tasks specific to the work of a particular person or group.

Staffs still exists. It's not unheard of for a manager in a company to instruct his department to undertake some particular task. Sometimes that's practically all "business development" does. In larger firms, there is often an "office of the CEO" which has a number of people working on particular tasks for the top management, often with a title like "special projects", and often seconded from staff offices with the relevant skills.

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#33

Post by Cyph0n »

erikb wrote: post #22
raverbashing wrote: post #9

While academia is a place of good ideas and discussions, the power-distance and the use of students as very cheap labour with the promise of a higher place of importance someday is a dark side of it Low skilled workers are treated better and more fairly than Graduate Students in a lot of occasions

True in most cases I'd say. In this case, even for $200/month and working hours of 60-80h/week I'd still argue most people would be proud to have this position. The learning, the networking effects, the constant intellectual challenge. I think this is also value, and in some regards a lot more rare than money.

Even learning and networking are not guaranteed. Your life is basically dependent on your relationship with your advisor. He/she can make or break you as a PhD student...

In my case, it's a bit different, but it has been disappointing enough that I'm trying to ditch the program with my MSc in hand.

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#34

Post by M_Bakhtiari »

corpMaverick wrote: post #30
Ma8ee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden and in other places, everything, including the universities, is nowadays run by economists. Since university professors don't produce anything that has any immediate monetary value it of course make perfect sense to save money by replacing administrative personel that costs money with the professors time, which is free since the professors pay their own sallaries with external funding.

> run by economists I am confused. Perhaps you meant to say managers, administrators or bureaucrats ?

Formally they're the ones with the job descriptions, but under New Public Management it's the economists that are the ultimate arbiters of truth.

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#35

Post by michaelt »

erikb wrote: post #22
raverbashing wrote: post #9

While academia is a place of good ideas and discussions, the power-distance and the use of students as very cheap labour with the promise of a higher place of importance someday is a dark side of it Low skilled workers are treated better and more fairly than Graduate Students in a lot of occasions

True in most cases I'd say. In this case, even for $200/month and working hours of 60-80h/week I'd still argue most people would be proud to have this position. The learning, the networking effects, the constant intellectual challenge. I think this is also value, and in some regards a lot more rare than money.

Eh, I think my pride and job satisfaction would drop off quickly if my boss was constantly mad at me for not completing the work I was supposed to complete; and my loved ones were constantly mad at me for not making time for them.

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#36

Post by jimmy1 »

jacquesm wrote: post #16
raverbashing wrote: post #9

While academia is a place of good ideas and discussions, the power-distance and the use of students as very cheap labour with the promise of a higher place of importance someday is a dark side of it Low skilled workers are treated better and more fairly than Graduate Students in a lot of occasions

Academia is stuck in the past in that sense. And it is already hurting them in quite a few disciplines where 'being published' is great but trumped by 'being able to afford a normal life'. So it filters out people that are willing to put their lives on hold in order to have their names at the top of a couple of papers. Some of them find that the lives they put on hold can not be put together again after a decade. Gra…

Already hurting them, and has been hurting them for almost a decade, even more at this point.

I was thinking about continuing my education to do research in distributed computing, but I learned midway through my undergraduate, majoring in computer science with the "Software Engineering" track, that our field was already playing catchup with industry. I learned this because I worked for a startup my senior year. Their pace, learning, and new innovation was nothing our dusty class with out of touch professors were able to keep up with. Even the ones that were trying to be "cool" by teaching stuff like Ruby on Rails (mind you, this was in 2008 so it was the hip thing at the time) instead of Java Server Faces, it was just bad. You could tell the professors had no idea what it took to build software. After being in the industry about 10 years now, probably the biggest joke of a course I took and arguably a complete waste of money was CS 3100 -- Software Engineering. It was an entire class on Object Oriented programming with Java, and using UML diagrams to model everything, and CRC cards and all this object oriented cruft. Everything was an object nail to drill with your object hammer. It was at this point I was becoming more familiar with LISPs and dynamic/functional programming languages, and I started to care more about behavior rather than creating a tangled web of leaky abstractions.

Anyways, why go get my masters in distributed computing when I know it will be hilariously out of date and all the best innovation in distributed computing is coming from large, internet-scale companies such as Twitter, Google, Netflix, Facebook et all? But unless I could get into Stanford, which is essentially the big tech firm's R&D arm, I don't see the point. I was thinking of the Georgia Tech OMSCS, but I think I am too jaded at this point.

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#37

Post by spectre256 »

jimmy1 wrote: post #36
jacquesm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academia is stuck in the past in that sense. And it is already hurting them in quite a few disciplines where 'being published' is great but trumped by 'being able to afford a normal life'. So it filters out people that are willing to put their lives on hold in order to have their names at the top of a couple of papers. Some of them find that the lives they put on hold can not be put together again after a decade. Gra…

Already hurting them, and has been hurting them for almost a decade, even more at this point. I was thinking about continuing my education to do research in distributed computing, but I learned midway through my undergraduate, majoring in computer science with the "Software Engineering" track, that our field was already playing catchup with industry. I learned this because I worked for a startup my senior year. Their…

I have a similar story for a college course also titled "Software Engineering". Essentially, it was a course on how to properly execute the waterfall model of design.

We were assigned teams of four, wrote hundreds of pages of requirement papers, design papers, everything papers. Then we wrote the code in PHP in one night.

For the final section of the class, 3 teams of 4 were merged into teams of 12. It's obvious that no college students have the desire or ability to manage a team of 12, as it's a huge task even for an experienced manager. The overhead of having 12 people involved was incredible. Fortunately, more than half the students in the group were happy to be "fired": we didn't talk to them at all, did the work in a smaller, more nimble group, and everyone got a good grade.

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#38

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

It was traditional belief that Einstein's assistant did nothing. The only requirement for him was to be a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany.

Einstein's assistant Kemeny ended up designing the BASIC language and being one of the founding fathers of computer science. His assistant Rosen ended up being president of Ben Gurion Univesity and co-founding the Israeli Academy of Sciences. Based on their accomplishments, seems to me like their religion was not the only requirement made of them.

Re: The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)

#39

Post by kriro »

mseebach wrote: post #8
M_Bakhtiari wrote: post #2

In some ultra-low power distance societies, places like Sweden, the idea that anyone, no matter how important, is ever entitled to an assistant or secretary is almost anathema. Imagine if von Neumann had been required to do all of that in addition to making his own airline and hotel reservations, as is the case for many university professors these days.

The idea that anyone is entitled to a secretary, that a secretary is a kind of status symbol, is rightfully falling out of fashion, and not just in Sweden. But it's not being replaced by nothing, it being replaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks. The department has student relations officers that deal with scheduling, enrollment, tracking grades etc, the university has a travel office, e…

The general idea of a secretary does make economic sense. In theory it's good if a professor spends more time researching/teaching and less time typing stuff and managing their appointments. I'm a generalist and would feel rather odd having a secretary but I can understand the general economic argument. It also makes sense to have a maid and someone who mows your lawn etc. etc. (except if you find the work inherently entertaining of course)
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