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T-Shaped People and Academia

bastian.rieck.me

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Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#131

Post by rscho »

lmeyerov wrote: post #124
rscho wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wet…

Well, I guess we have different opinions about what academia should be, then. IMO, material incentives outside core academic activities are cancer and I think university spin-offs are heresy. If even tenured staff now attempts to "develop products" and thinks academia and industry R&D are similar, I think western science is finished.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#132

Post by ramraj07 »

BeetleB wrote: post #123
ramraj07 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed; to be clear I and others learned it before our interviews. But it didn’t take long.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#133

Post by lmeyerov »

rscho wrote: post #131
lmeyerov wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wet…

Well, I guess we have different opinions about what academia should be, then. IMO, material incentives outside core academic activities are cancer and I think university spin-offs are heresy. If even tenured staff now attempts to "develop products" and thinks academia and industry R&D are similar, I think western science is finished.

I don't think academia should be one thing, that's kind of the point of tenure

You're promoting both a super traditional view yet also one that seems divorced from the last ~100 years of sociology studies wrt how society progresses wrt inventions and how people fit into that. So, it's great you follow old beliefs handed down by generations of giants from much earlier ages -- there's clearly precedent -- and I encourage you to learn about new ones from the last few generation of scientists who took a more scientific method to learning how recent progress often works. These methods are not for everyone, but it's useful to at least know about them before calling the techniques of your peers 'cancer'. Personally, as technology keeps speeding up, I expect this to become even more important, but at the same time, do value head-in-the-sand research too ;-)

Also, to be clear: I am not rejecting the scientific method here. Products, and more importantly, the communities of practice around them, have a lot to do with hypothesis generation, methods, and evaluation. Most industrial labs, and ironically, especially ones that force researchers to embed into existing internal product teams, put a lot of hand cuffs on this process so academic env helps. It does take humility and empathy and time to incorporate them, so not so easy (kind of like startup-lite), but it is a family of tools and one aimed at more intentional progress.

And no, 'products' is not synonymous with financial motivation: most OSS projects have no paid piece, for example.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#134

Post by elijahwright »

periheli0n wrote: post #57

It will be near impossible to get tenure if one develops T-shaped qualities. You simply cannot amass the number of grants and papers necessary when dancing on several academic parties, or even doing devops. I've seen too many PhD students doing that and then hitting an academic dead end in their first postdoc or directly after graduating. It's great for the PI if they have T-shaped students on their team, but they mu…

T shaped person here. Abandoned PhD due to politics and abusive environment- much happier doing devops work and living a life of learning.
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