Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms • Hacker News Board

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#101

Post by BeetleB » Sun, Nov 24, 2024, 7:48 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #95

jjmarr wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are really what push you to work on interesting projects. This outweighs pretty much everything else for me. Your ego either inflates to infinity because you're a big fish in a small pond, or you get depressed being around really incompetent people. Every lecture I have is booked for 300 people but only 20-40 people ever show up. And yet everyone complains that…

I can't talk about liberal arts, but, in engineering, your peers aren't going to be incompetent. And, in my case, I found that the increased access to grad students and professors more than made up for any possible "weakness" in my peer group. The Westinghouse engineers used to have a friendly rivalry because so many of them came from both CMU and Pitt. However, if you got both groups drunk, the CMU engineers would g…

> but, in engineering, your peers aren't going to be incompetent.

True - they were not incompetent where I went. But they also didn't dream big, the way you'd see students at top universities do.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#102

Post by BeetleB » Sun, Nov 24, 2024, 7:52 AM UTC

insane_dreamer wrote: post #96

BeetleB wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to university). Find a low ranked state school that has a high teacher to student ratio. Also look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students. I did my undergrad at one of those pla…

> Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are really what push you to work on interesting projects. You also don't have access to those interesting research projects to begin with. To be that's the biggest downside (if you're in the sciences / engineering). I do generally agree with your post -- but I think it only works if you 1) apply yourself sufficiently despite not having peers pushing you (have to…

> You also don't have access to those interesting research projects to begin with.

Faculty members still need to do research to get grant money and pay part of their salary. They still want to publish papers. They still compete. At least where I went, the research was interesting enough.

> apply yourself sufficiently despite not having peers pushing you (have to be able and willing to buck the tide; not everyone is),

Yes, you need the motivation to do well. In my experience, and of those I've asked who were in a similar situation: If you are aiming high and go to such a school, you believe you're getting an inferior education (mostly false), and you compensate by studying more than what is assigned. Then you go to a top grad school and find you know more than your peers who went to a top university.

But if you're not motivated, then this whole thread is rather pointless. And if you're not motivated, you definitely are better off going to a mediocre state school. You could seriously get burnout at a top university and drop out. I've known fairly smart people at those top universities end up that way.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#103

Post by BeetleB » Sun, Nov 24, 2024, 7:54 AM UTC

jjmarr wrote: post #84

BeetleB wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to university). Find a low ranked state school that has a high teacher to student ratio. Also look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students. I did my undergrad at one of those pla…

> Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are really what push you to work on interesting projects. This outweighs pretty much everything else for me. Your ego either inflates to infinity because you're a big fish in a small pond, or you get depressed being around really incompetent people. Every lecture I have is booked for 300 people but only 20-40 people ever show up. And yet everyone complains that…

> Your ego either inflates to infinity because you're a big fish in a small pond, or you get depressed being around really incompetent people.

Neither was the case with me. If you want intellectual stimulation, just go talk to the professors!

> Is it easy and low stress? Probably. But I feel like I'm being driven into mediocrity.

Quoting another comment of mine:

"Yes, you need the motivation to do well. In my experience, and of those I've asked who were in a similar situation: If you are aiming high and go to such a school, you believe you're getting an inferior education (mostly false), and you compensate by studying more than what is assigned. Then you go to a top grad school and find you know more than your peers who went to a top university."

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#104

Post by blitzar » Sun, Nov 24, 2024, 8:27 AM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #73

insane_dreamer wrote: post #31

is this news? this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research not saying this is right -- adjuncts and postdocs absolutely need to be paid more commensurately with the value they provide -- but it has been the status quo for a long time; the bigger problem is that it used to be a temporary steppi…

> this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to university). Find a low ranked state school that has a high teacher to student ratio. Also look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students. I did my undergrad at one of those pla…

Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to university). Find a highest ranked school that will have you; attend, pass, get good work experience, slap it on your CV a get a good job.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#105

Post by blitzar » Sun, Nov 24, 2024, 8:30 AM UTC

HPsquared wrote: post #50

Universities are basically farms these days. They harvest funding from the research councils. Similar working practices and economic factors! Edit: I mean the research portion of course. The teaching part is more of a classic multi-level marketing scheme.

Teaching is a loss leader for universities, if they could get rid of it they would.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#106

Post by m463 » Sun, Nov 24, 2024, 8:48 AM UTC

MrMcCall wrote: post #28

burnt-resistor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schwab. I worked across from it in the reclaimed basement of Toyon like some sort of hidden Brazil ductwork steampunk menagerie for workers. Their IT department was well-regarded because each department did their own thing, which was inherently efficient in flexibility, control, and service but not in cost of delivery. I was an obsessive control freak, wannabe computer science researcher, and LTT-like PC putter-toget…

>> hidden Brazil ductwork steampunk menagerie As a huge fan of William Gibson, that's some lovely writing, my fellow greybeard. >> I was an obsessive control freak There are 'control freaks' and there are the rest of the sea of humanity. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Einstein, Feynman, ... I like my place in the set of the control freaks of the world. The key is to not ever try to control other people, only our own c…

(Brazil wasn't gibson btw)

I thought Brazil was weird when I first saw it, but over the years I've overlaid it on reality sort of, and it has matched up quite well.

For example, are you DeNiro in real life when you run an adblocker?

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#107

Post by m463 » Sun, Nov 24, 2024, 8:50 AM UTC

insane_dreamer wrote: post #31

is this news? this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research not saying this is right -- adjuncts and postdocs absolutely need to be paid more commensurately with the value they provide -- but it has been the status quo for a long time; the bigger problem is that it used to be a temporary steppi…

I wonder if medical residents get paid ridiculously low salaries too given their hours?

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#108

Post by jart » Sun, Nov 24, 2024, 11:46 AM UTC

pdfernhout wrote: post #87

stanford_labrat wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is all my opinion as a 3rd year phd candidate who is thoroughly disillusioned. in STEM science there are two types of labor: thinking of experiments to do, and actually doing experiments. doing experiments is high-skill, manual labor. you often work with dangerous materials for crazy hours (some experiments take 10 hours to just do and you have no choice but to work from start to finish) and do tasks that are ph…

Thanks for your informative post. Related background on why that has happened by Dr. David Goodstein of Caltech from 1994: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects d…

You don't need UBI to pursue your intellectual dreams. The upper classes already have UBI which is called living off interest and dividends. Even if you don't have a trust fund, you can still pursue your dreams. Just go backpacking and surf some couches. People will feed you and put a roof over your head if they believe in your dream too.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#109

Post by jltsiren » Sun, Nov 24, 2024, 12:17 PM UTC

anonymousDan wrote: post #54

jltsiren wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a postdoc in Cambridge, the problem was that there were too many PhD students and postdocs who wanted to teach. Not because of the compensation but for the experience. A lot of people wanted to try a career in the academia, and they needed teaching experience for that. But there were not enough undergraduates for them all to teach.

FYI you really don't need teaching experience to get a good academic job. The number one criteria is excellent publication record.

Excellent publication record is the baseline. Every serious candidate has it. But if you are not a superstar, research merits alone are not enough. There are enough excellent candidates that universities often use checklists to filter the number of applications to a more manageable level. Why bother considering excellent researchers without teaching experience, when there is no shortage of candidates with similar research merits and some experience?

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#110

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sun, Nov 24, 2024, 1:09 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #81

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what kind of academic work you're looking for, right? If you're going for a teaching career, then yes, of course you need to have some teaching experience. If you're after a research career, e.g. a research fellowship like the ones from the Leverhulme Trust or the Royal Society of Engineering, then you really do need an astounding publication record and I don't reckon that having any teaching experience…

> depends on what kind of academic work you're looking for, right? It depends on where you are. British universities value teaching more than American ones, which are more focussed on research.

I didn't know that, thanks. The article and the OP are about the situation in UK universities.