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T-Shaped People and Academia

bastian.rieck.me

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Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#121

Post by sackofmugs »

ModernMech wrote: post #120
throwawaygh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s a huge benefit that can total $40k or more per year before candidacy. No one does a phd for the coursework :) > travel This is worth perhaps $2K-$4K. Your industry friends could easily travel the world, and they wouldn't be stuck in a conference hotel for half their trip. > FICA taxes No! This isn't a good thing!!! The employer pays half of these, and paying them entitles you to the US social safety net! Uni…

> No one does a phd for the coursework :) Tuition also entitles you to access library resources, university software, campus gyms, sports facilities, child care, and university provided health services. I think your emoticon is implying your statement is tongue in cheek, but I mean.... they absolutely do though. If you don't consider taking courses a benefit to doing a Ph.D. then yeah, the value proposition of a Ph.D…

What's frustrating about these academia threads, is that Ph.D. experiences are so diverse and different, depending on the discipline, subfield, university, advisor. Yet so many commenters oversimplify their one experience or what they think it's like from knowing a couple of grad students.

I know Ph.D. students who made almost six figures by doing highly paid research internships. Some advisors only care about demos, while others care about startups, and yet others care about how the work is presented to funding agencies. I know Ph.D. students who did most of their Ph.D. in a completely different city than their degree-granting institution. I know Ph.D. students who were highly pressured to publish, and Ph.D. students who had no pressure to publish. I know Ph.D. students who basically had no advisor, and Ph.D. students with 3 world-expert advisors. Some Ph.D. students are funded by the university, others are funded by large collaborative grants, or by their own fellowships, and yet others are funded by small industry grants their advisor got.

It's like if threads about being a software developer had comments like "at tech companies, you only get rewarded for closing tickets."

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#122

Post by lmeyerov »

throwawaygh wrote: post #98
lmeyerov wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on the other end of such reviewers. Building community and engaging in it takes a whole ton of seemingly non-core work, but community-of-practice research is totally a thing, and for folks who empirically study innovation, one of the best approaches in practice. Likewise, it's common wisdom by systems researchers to invest in platform early to get compounding results later. Two of my best projects, include…

I don't dispute any of this post. Actually, to be blunt, the fact that you think any of this is a retort to "pay people for the type of work you expect them to do" is deeply concerning. > reviewers assume they know best. You are probably more adept at running a grant-funded research group than me. I have no doubt. My concern here is ethical. I do think the average PI is in waaaay too deep to admit how horrible even t…

My response is to the Reviewer #2 aspect of, instead of say championing a proposal on merit and, for their allocation issue, advocating for say increased budget for extra staff... rejecting it because of belief in Not My Job for something a good team would often either do scrappily or consider to be part of their job. One of the main costs and bottlenecks in modern academic R&D is the crazy low grant acceptance rates, forcing leaders to 5X grant writing time vs doing time, which makes this reviewer response 5X more nasty than you might otherwise think.

If you want to go ethical -

* PhD students, most of all, are learning how to do R&D: picking valuable problems, picking how to solve them, and most efficiently in time/money/etc solving then. Doing scrappy Day 1 work is very much a part of that skillset, surprisingly similar to a founding MVP team: Not My Job is teaching the wrong mindset and divorces you from the community + work, which may be what you are trying to learn.

* ... However, Learning to Outsource/delegate is indeed part of efficiency training, so let's dig in. The default answer in most prototyping is do a crappy cheapo version, replace with a more costly version when it becomes the need, and reserve your shoestring budget for a few really important things. So likely no to a commercial grade design firm on rerainer, yes to either a $50 logo on Fiverr or more likely, something funny you can make via a free tool, done. Later, when there is more need and budget, say Year 2, easy to revisit.

* Some things do merit staff. Should a bio lab partner with a CS team who wants to learn their needs as part of making new CS methods? That's T-shaped collaboration and good, and part of why academic teams can be so scrappy: there's ~always someone somewhere where your non-core work is their baby. Or, maybe they want to inhouse to get more speed/reliability/control. If that person will be like the CS team, ultimately making new CS methods, or a more computationally minded bio researcher helping with some of their own coding for faster EDA, great. But if they will always be Author #2 and has to code on projects they are not doing the science on, that's not a postdoc, that's a staff programmer. We should have more of those.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#123

Post by BeetleB »

ramraj07 wrote: post #65
BeetleB wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counter is that only a small minority of people who graduate with a PhD get to do research in their fields after graduating. It's a disservice to them if they don't gain skills beyond research. It's why many PhDs can't get jobs in teams like mine - they don't have the skills of people with lesser degrees, and while we're not against training new candidates, we don't want to pay them large sums of money when the g…

What skills are you talking about? Git commit and unit testing? Not saying they’re insignificant skills but a competent PhD should be able to learn them quite fast (in a month) in a competent environment. I and many others did. The issue is that there are a large number of phds who are actually much dimmer than your average programmer, and you’re not differentiating them in the interviews.

> Not saying they’re insignificant skills but a competent PhD should be able to learn them quite fast (in a month) in a competent environment. I and many others did.

They can also learn them quite fast before the interview/job, and it's a concern that they don't, when almost all other applicants do.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#124

Post by lmeyerov »

rscho wrote: post #55
lmeyerov wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on the other end of such reviewers. Building community and engaging in it takes a whole ton of seemingly non-core work, but community-of-practice research is totally a thing, and for folks who empirically study innovation, one of the best approaches in practice. Likewise, it's common wisdom by systems researchers to invest in platform early to get compounding results later. Two of my best projects, include…

Good for you if your products do well. But making logos and such is your job as PI if you want it to happen. It's certainly not your students' job. They're here to learn academic skills and advance the field, not to make products that do well. Any material advantage they get from that should be incidental, and not a goal in itself.

The student picks the PI, and as part of that, the field of methods they want to learn, which may include scrappy prototyping. If they don't think that kind of R&D is their thing, they should pick another PI and, potentially, field.

Ex: My wife's lab had paid staff, but she still had to feed cell cultures at 1am for the research she wanted to do, and later decided those methods were not for her and no longer does wetlab projects. That doesn't invalidate people still doing cell cultures as part of their methods, and I'd still love to see more robots & no-code & budget there to make it easier.

Edit: RE:products,

Whoosh. Academically derived products at that scale imply a community of practice and development: societal impact and dedicated makers growing it, including more knowledge. That should have the level of respect that a paper that opens up a small subfield gets. From a norms perspective, it's disappointing to see what sounds like a practicing academic to not value that. Separately, again, community of practice work values being embedded, so a student not enjoying it is their personal methods choice, not rules for others.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#125

Post by saltcured »

Topolomancer wrote: post #45
lmeyerov wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on the other end of such reviewers. Building community and engaging in it takes a whole ton of seemingly non-core work, but community-of-practice research is totally a thing, and for folks who empirically study innovation, one of the best approaches in practice. Likewise, it's common wisdom by systems researchers to invest in platform early to get compounding results later. Two of my best projects, include…

Author here---I love the term 'non-core work.' It encompasses a lot of the things that irk me in academia (and it's a little bit hypocritical because in the end, academic projects also benefit quite a lot from this non-core work...at least, if your goal is to build something that people actually want to use, as opposed to just pushing out papers.) PS: And upon writing this comment, I had the epiphany that 'pushing ou…

I am bemused that the vagueness of "non-core work" means everyone can consider this topic and imagine entirely different stories. As a computer science type peering into biology research with respect to bioinformatics, I have found it distressing how much biology researchers can treat their own experimental data and metadata management as "non-core work" to be avoided.

Some biology students and postdocs have described to me an antagonistic relationship to the funder or PI goals where they dismiss their responsibilities for data quality and reuse. For them, it isn't on the critical path to their paper and their career. Or, having data in disarray is, in their minds, giving them an edge to not be "scooped" in the lab. These cynical attitudes are almost subversive, in how the junior worker tries to evade or sabotage aspects of their job responsibility which do not serve them personally. I also see some who seem to engage in magical thinking, as if some other staff or informatician should come by later and clean up their mess of data, without the researcher putting in the effort. I often wonder whether they really misunderstand the problem so severely, or merely use this fig leaf to avoid feelings of shame.

I know that lines should be drawn between different roles, but there are inappropriate expectations on both ends of a spectrum. PIs should not treat junior researchers like assistants to get coffee, run personal errands, etc. But neither should junior researchers believe that the day to day grind of the scientific process is beneath them. At the scales that most labs work, there are many essential yet mundane tasks that need to be shouldered by "core" participants. The overhead of trying to delegate these tasks to a different person would either require more time than doing the task oneself, or result in abysmal quality when the hand-off is made with insufficient supporting effort.

I think that people exposed to the pop culture of startups and large corporations can absorb a mistaken idea of how easily human organizations scale. With vast numbers of skilled staff, you can create processes which scale beyond the capabilities of a typical small lab or group. These tend to develop lots of specialized roles to support that process. But, I think there is a huge inflection point between the efficient small group and the scalable large organization, where the marginal value of adding another staff member can be very small, or even negative. Many (most?) grant-funded research groups exist only because they can function in that small team mode, with relatively thin budgets and the need to wear many hats.

The only safe way to scale work under these grants is what we see already: schools expand to have additional PIs running their own small, independent labs. These eventually compete with each other almost as much as they compete with outside labs. From the host school, they get actual "non-core" services like building facilities, human resources, payroll, contracts and legal support, etc. But, no one group can really scale to have more staff and specialization focused on a single research effort. There is a reason that "big science" projects are few and far between and are mired in much more politics---the granting agencies have to be motivated to write different kinds of funding opportunity to bootstrap such projects and to continue their operation. The budgets and timelines are vastly different.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#126

Post by simplestats »

xmprt wrote: post #41
mehrdada wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are taking a huge financial opportunity cost to work on uniquely high leverage problems. Maintaining your research group's build system is not what they signed up for. Not necessarily an opportunity cost. Often they are paid in a more valuable commodity, i.e. visas.

If someone just wants a visa, then it's much easier to get a quick and easy masters instead of doing a PhD with 5 years of research.

Master's degrees cost about $30k per year for a couple years. Not available to the average person I'd say. And even so, judging by the proliferation of MS programs at unranked schools without research programs, many of which overwhelmingly serve international students, I'd rank the visa as the most important part of the price, followed by the credential, and lastly the education itself (given that cheating is so rampant).

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#127

Post by lmeyerov »

throwawaygh wrote: post #111
Topolomancer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here---I love the term 'non-core work.' It encompasses a lot of the things that irk me in academia (and it's a little bit hypocritical because in the end, academic projects also benefit quite a lot from this non-core work...at least, if your goal is to build something that people actually want to use, as opposed to just pushing out papers.) PS: And upon writing this comment, I had the epiphany that 'pushing ou…

> academic projects also benefit quite a lot from this non-core work Yes, of course they do. The whole point is that this type of labor is valuable. > if your goal is to build something that people actually want to use, as opposed to just pushing out papers. Neither of those things is the purpose of a phd... If a student's goal is to build something that people actually want to use, they are much better served by tak…

A lot of systems research is socially guided where community-of-practice approaches help. If you haven't, I recommend reading something like Rogers' surveys of papers in 'Diffusion of Innovation' for why, especially before writing publicly that students following such methods would be better off abandoning them for industry jobs. Industry jobs, including R&D, are generally not like the old days of Bell Labs.

Startups are kind of like that, but still quite different because VC/P&L/growth/sales still warp things. (And PhD programs are great places to experiment before that jump, as the learning & investigation can take an unknown amount of time.)

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#128

Post by simplestats »

auxym wrote: post #116
mehrdada wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe--very much depends on the source and destination country. Fact on the ground is lots of people have ended up choosing that as their path, optimal or not. You can master-out in the middle of a PhD program, which is frowned upon, but it is difficult to get funding if you directly apply for a masters degree. Perhaps the solution is to decrease the negative cultural backlash against predisposed intention of leaving…

In Canada, research masters are a prereq for entering a PhD program.

In the US I think it's entirely up to the school. Or at least the accreditation bodies in different fields and regions.

When I was in school, one applied to "MS/PhD" programs most typically. And all imaginable variants existed in terms of funding and likelihood of leaving with only a MS. Some schools would fund no one till they finish the MS stage, and others would fund everyone from the beginning (just give every accepted student a full fellowship for the first couple years). And also some schools were pretty notorious for kicking people out at the end of the MS stage, with a difficult exam at this step or not enough advisors to take them on for the PhD.

One positive side, though, is if you wash out of a PhD program at any later stage, you at least walked away with a Master's.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#129

Post by throwawayjd »

auxym wrote: post #116
mehrdada wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe--very much depends on the source and destination country. Fact on the ground is lots of people have ended up choosing that as their path, optimal or not. You can master-out in the middle of a PhD program, which is frowned upon, but it is difficult to get funding if you directly apply for a masters degree. Perhaps the solution is to decrease the negative cultural backlash against predisposed intention of leaving…

In Canada, research masters are a prereq for entering a PhD program.

I don't think so. It is funded and recommended, but direct doctorate is also possible, unlike many European schools.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#130

Post by Topolomancer »

saltcured wrote: post #125
Topolomancer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here---I love the term 'non-core work.' It encompasses a lot of the things that irk me in academia (and it's a little bit hypocritical because in the end, academic projects also benefit quite a lot from this non-core work...at least, if your goal is to build something that people actually want to use, as opposed to just pushing out papers.) PS: And upon writing this comment, I had the epiphany that 'pushing ou…

I am bemused that the vagueness of "non-core work" means everyone can consider this topic and imagine entirely different stories. As a computer science type peering into biology research with respect to bioinformatics, I have found it distressing how much biology researchers can treat their own experimental data and metadata management as "non-core work" to be avoided. Some biology students and postdocs have describe…

That's an awesome perspective! I will link to it in the post!
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