211–220 of 274 posts
How does one go about measuring? They're not about to give a "mere programmer" access to the sales data or whatever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How long have you been out of grad school? If you are still in grad school... Write us back in ten years and tell us how academia is coming along. Meanwhile, carpe diem . If you're out of grad school, tell us how much more awesome your career is than those of your relatively-untrained peers. More money? More respect? More challenges? What? I went to grad school, and then I did a postdoc, and these things were indeed…
It's sad when academia is demoted to a "hobby." For me at least, money is less important than having discretion to work on novel projects. Also, I never called anyone arrogant, but rather the article itself. Big difference. I don't know Patrick personally, so I wouldn't label him as such.
Sure. Like I said: talk to me in ten years.
Maybe you'll still believe that academia gives you freedom to work on whatever you like. All my academic friends do. They are devoted and talented enough that they can soar blithely above the fact that:
A) In academia, you work where the research grants are. You are free to start a research project in an underfunded corner of academia to the precise extent that you are free to run your laboratory without any income;
B) You will spend the majority of your time writing those research grants.
C) Because your grant proposals can be anonymously torpedoed by any one of your colleagues with sufficient clout, you will actually spend a lot of time with your finger in the wind, carefully adjusting what you're working on to stay in tune with the zeitgeist.
None of the above feels much like freedom to me. Your own mileage may vary, of course. Maybe you're in CS and you can run your lab on a relative pittance. Maybe you'll meet a rich benefactor who loves to fund whatever you want to do. Maybe you can hold down a day job until your peers give you funding for your novel project, like my former field's big hero Judah Folkman did: His proposals to study antiangiogenesis went nowhere for something like fifteen years, so he just kept his day job as Director of Surgical Research at Children's Hospital Boston and kept trying. What can I say? Clearly my advice would have been useless to Folkman. Patrick and I are trying to advise the median programmer, not the fourth standard deviation.
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How about a surgeon? Their actual core competency is performing surgery. Should they not describe themselves as Surgeons? Edit: Are accountants high status? I'm not sure. They are generally regarded as making a fair bit of money but they are boring. Probably a bit more high status than a programmer, perhaps. But I wouldn't suggest to my accountant friends that they stop selling themselves as experts at accounting. An…
Engineering is a older profession that Medicine. Remember it was wheel and before that tools to invent the wheel that got invented. Software is a sub branch of engineering. Like veterinary doctors. In fact man kind had taken huge leaps in engineering before they took in medicine(Stuff like Pyramids of Giza etc). Doctors and Lawyers have a nature of work which if done badly or of subjectively low quality a persons qua…
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I'm a programmer. I program things. What, specifically, changes pretty frequently still. Going into detail can be useful when trying to score social points from the smalltalk question of "So, what do you do?" But depending on what you program, I think for most people "programming" is sufficient compared to "I currently write software to manage an elastic computer server farm running data analysis jobs for people." In…
If you were a carpenter, you wouldn't tell your friends "I hammer things all day", you'd tell them that you make things out of wood. I'd argue that the fact that you spend your day "programming" is more of an implementation detail of the bigger picture that your job is to create software.
If you were a janitor, you'd tell your friends you're a sanitation worker.
If you were a stripper, you'd tell your friends you're an exotic dancer.
Patio is saying we should say "engineer" instead of "programmer" because programmer has similar connotations to janitor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How long have you been out of grad school? If you are still in grad school... Write us back in ten years and tell us how academia is coming along. Meanwhile, carpe diem . If you're out of grad school, tell us how much more awesome your career is than those of your relatively-untrained peers. More money? More respect? More challenges? What? I went to grad school, and then I did a postdoc, and these things were indeed…
The main arrogance, I think, is his claim that journals are just blog posts with more elitism, combined with a strange sort of anger towards academia (which doesn't seem to be based on knowledge of how academia works; it's not much of an ivory-tower fairy land, but really quite industry-like, with professors as managers in charge of running moderate-sized organizations, which they need to do PR, mentorship, and manag…
Patrick stated that you can submit journal articles without being employed by a university or think tank. This is true.
He also stated that, while it is perhaps thrilling to get a journal article published to an audience of hundreds, it is perhaps nearly as thrilling, plus one hell of a lot less work, to write essays on HN for an audience of tens of thousands. This is also true.
Don't conflate the two statements. Scientific papers and blog posts are not the same thing, I don't think Patrick is claiming they are, and I'm actually quite doubtful that they'll ever be the same thing. (Anonymous peer review is important, blogs don't support it, and the online systems that do support it don't look much like blogs, they look like online scientific journals.)
Now, on to other good stuff:
academia... [is] really quite industry-like
Indeed, it is very much like an industry. One with a tiny handful of customers, one of which is usually a major government. Often the government is the only customer. The difference between working for, say, a major military contractor, or a major pharmaceutical company, and working for a university is getting smaller every day.
It's nice work so long as your customer is buying. Once your only customer stops buying, however, finding another one can be a real pain.
Meanwhile, it's true that industry doesn't generally give a hoot about publishing new discoveries, often preferring to keep things secret. This is too bad. However, before we conclude that the only alternative is to become a professor, let me suggest that one could also look for a job where you can sell solutions to customers and keep control of your own IP, publishing it as you will. If you want to be told many stories about how this can work, go to an open source software conference.
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Please, let's not play this game- what have you heard?
There's no game. I've simply heard from people who've worked at Google that the revenue-generating groups are far from the highest-respected. So I think the cited example may in fact be a counterexample. (Certainly there are many angel investors among Googlers and former Googlers who worked in all sorts of areas.) Perhaps because Google was started by programmers, programmers don't have to pretend to be something els…
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The main arrogance, I think, is his claim that journals are just blog posts with more elitism, combined with a strange sort of anger towards academia (which doesn't seem to be based on knowledge of how academia works; it's not much of an ivory-tower fairy land, but really quite industry-like, with professors as managers in charge of running moderate-sized organizations, which they need to do PR, mentorship, and manag…
All sorts of stuff in there. Patrick stated that you can submit journal articles without being employed by a university or think tank. This is true. He also stated that, while it is perhaps thrilling to get a journal article published to an audience of hundreds, it is perhaps nearly as thrilling, plus one hell of a lot less work, to write essays on HN for an audience of tens of thousands. This is also true. Don't con…
I believe this is possible, but if your goal is to do novel scientific research and publish the results, it's exceptionally uncommon. I rely on all sorts of statistical and machine-learning techniques developed by other people, for example. It's relatively common to set up shop as an independent data-mining consultant, and you can fairly easily pay the bills that way. So you might think that they've produced some of the results I rely on. But the way the economics work out, independent consultants rarely spend much time on basic research. The actual techniques and advances, as a result, come almost exclusively from researchers in academia and industrial research labs.
In fact, I can't actually think of any influential advances in machine learning from the past few decades developed by independent researchers. Heck, looking through the R packages I use, even the software seems to come mainly from a mixture of universities and places like Rand (biggest surprise in this mini-inventory: lots of stuff from Merck, who I wouldn't have expected to be open-source-friendly).
Nonetheless, that's actually my medium-term goal, so I hope you're right. ;-)
Back in the day, John Carmack would micro-blog on the finger protocol ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol ). finger johnc@idsoftware.com got you Carmack's .plan file, a well-written and, for a time, frequently-updated journal of whatever programming challenges he happened to be facing at the time. finger @idsoftware.com got you the id corporate directory, a simple list of about 20 names and titles. The onl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How long have you been out of grad school? If you are still in grad school... Write us back in ten years and tell us how academia is coming along. Meanwhile, carpe diem . If you're out of grad school, tell us how much more awesome your career is than those of your relatively-untrained peers. More money? More respect? More challenges? What? I went to grad school, and then I did a postdoc, and these things were indeed…
I'm still an undergrad so it'd be completely logical to just ignore my opinion, but..... you went from doing research to supporting PHP apps? Did you initially want to go into more researchy things and then decide "this is boring, I want to just support PHP apps instead", or did you go into research knowing you'd eventually want to do something like supporting PHP apps? I'm unsure about my own career but going to gra…
Yeah, stripped of all the romance and intrigue, that's basically it.
Things I would tell someone in your position:
Don't underestimate the wonderful things that money can do for your life.
Don't underestimate the joy of being given money by grateful customers because you have made them incredibly happy in real time by doing something that's completely trivial for you, like running EXPLAIN on a SQL query from the slow log and then doing an OPTIMIZE TABLE and a CREATE INDEX and refactoring a simple loop to use a hash properly.
Know this: Even "fundamental" and "ground-breaking" work may only be read by a few dozen people, then filed away, perhaps never to be of any use at all, except as a very important footnote in the paper that catches fire ten years from now. And the large majority of research projects take five or ten years and then fail to discover anything noteworthy. Learn to be perfectly happy with that, or do something other than research.
Do not underestimate the fundamentally slow and boring nature of research. It is a long, long game, the kind of game that started before you were born and that may make only a handful of moves in your lifetime. Your field may go backwards for decades at a time. Don't worry, do good work, all will sort itself out eventually.
You will spend literally decades getting it right, exploring all the important side tracks, perfecting the difficult techniques. Going to school in science, reading other people's science, is about novelty, because you discover new things as quickly as you can read. But your own science is about consistency. Think of Knuth, who started his grand project nearly fifty years ago and who is up to volume 4 of 7.
Remember that, by the time you are the world expert in some fundamental and ground-breaking field, it won't seem that special to you. It's like being the world expert on your own backyard. You will know more about half of the plants in your yard than mankind was meant to know, but you'll also live in secret terror because people expect you to know about the other half as well, and you know that you really don't. And, unless you're lucky and the soil in your backyard turns out to contain the cure for stomach cancer, you will never meet anyone who particularly cares that you're the world expert on your own backyard. It will bore people almost as much as talk of PHP applications bores people. [1] Except at the annual convention of backyard fetishists. There's a couple hundred of you in the world. Those conventions are the highlight of your professional year.
Read the life story of Gregor Mendel. That's you. Now, by all accounts Gregor Mendel had a pretty good life, puttering around in the pea patch, but he was out of biology, and dead, before people figured out he was on to something. That's fundamental research for you. Don't go into research because you want to be a superstar. Go into it because you like puttering around with peas and hanging out with the other smart gardeners.
Start writing a research grant today, even if the first draft sucks, even if it takes you months to read the existing literature and figure out something new and interesting to propose. I used to think it was torture for universities like MIT to force first-year grad students to pick an adviser at the time of admission and propose their own research. Now I'm not so sure. Practice grant-writing now, because that's really what your future in research is about. If you can't sell your line of research to the customer in advance, you don't want to be a researcher.
Read A Ph.D. is Not Enough, read Hamming's You and Your Research, and good luck to you! Grad school in science or engineering may or may not be a mistake in any particular case, but at least it's one of the most survivable mistakes you'll ever make.
Oh, that's right, I almost forgot: For god's sake, survive. Be alert for signs of depression. First-year grad school is overwhelming, and actually getting out of grad school can be even harder. Hardest thing I ever did.
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[1] There is at least one exception to this rule: You can take up cancer research. The good news: People will fall over themselves to thank you for heroically working on cancer, even if all you really do is change the light bulbs in the oncology department elevator. It will be only slightly surreal. The bad news: If you actually talk about cancer, which is an absolutely fascinating subject, civilians will always be grossed out, at least subliminally. Often, they will be utterly terrified. You see, the word cancer will never again mean the same thing to you as it does to everyone else.