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Academia's 1%

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Re: Academia's 1%

#141

Post by daleroberts »

michaelochurch wrote: post #135
lsc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then there are the tribal effects. Why do bankers and traders earn 3x what programmers do, and why do we as programmers earn 3x what academics do, at each level? Because the worst place you want to be in a market is side-by-side with someone who's similarly competent in the rendered service but has no organizational or social skill, nor sense of self-worth; he'll sell himself very short, and drag you down with him b…

I am. Bankers back each other and know how to fight for themselves and the group. Programmers generally don't. You'll see a engineer rat another engineer out to management when there's nearly nothing to gain. This has been shown in companies with peer performance reviews: the bankers and traders give each other top ratings, while the programmers tend to beat each other up. It's not that bankers are better people and…

As someone who's spent some of their career in each one of these groups, I have to agree 100% with your analysis.

An interesting intersection is the Finance/Management/Business faculty. A new Assistant Professor in Finance can make significantly more in salary than a full Professor in Mathematics.

Here is some interesting data to back up my point and this is average salary. The amounts can be much higher at top institutions.

https://www.higheredjobs.com/Salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?Survey...

Re: Academia's 1%

#142

Post by mbreese »

skosuri wrote: post #106
mbreese wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tuition part is wrong. Stanford postdocs do pay tuition, but it isn't out of pocket. They are legally unmatriculated graduate students, so they pay some kind of tuition/registration fee for the year/quarter (I can't remember which). It isn't something that they are necessarily responsible for, and it is a small amount. But it is paid in their name.

That's a peculiarity of stanford; but it's like $200/year. At UCLA we have something similar called an infrastructure fee which is about the same amount a year. Importantly, this is not something they are responsible for paying ever.

I think that the point is so that it looks like you are really a student for tax purposes. It is a small amount that isn't ever directly billed to you - but it does count as a taxable benefit.

Re: Academia's 1%

#143

Post by sheepmullet »

lsc wrote: post #139
michaelochurch wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am. Bankers back each other and know how to fight for themselves and the group. Programmers generally don't. You'll see a engineer rat another engineer out to management when there's nearly nothing to gain. This has been shown in companies with peer performance reviews: the bankers and traders give each other top ratings, while the programmers tend to beat each other up. It's not that bankers are better people and…

>A typical, politically-inept programmer will say, "the low performers are Alice, Bob, and Charlie", just because he's asked. You don't have to offer him anything. He ends up losing in the deal for two reasons. First, if people find out that he's a snitch who tried to endear himself to management by selling others out, then everyone will hate him. That's just human nature. Second, low performers can be good for your…

"Clearly, there are factors that don't have to do with political skill at work here, and those factors have effects that can completely swamp the effects of political skill."

Too much supply can certainly swamp the effects of political skills. So does the fact that the best McDonalds workers are only 1.2-1.5x as good as the average worker. So does the fact that McDonalds are rarely limited by number of staff; it scales well.

In the software world though we have a very different landscape. There is strong demand. The good are 5x better than the average, who are 5x better than the worst. And scaling a software team is incredibly inefficient due to communication overheads such that even if the average programmer was 5x cheaper the outputs of a team of 30 average programmers can be less than the output of 5 3x programmers.

Re: Academia's 1%

#144

Post by ChrisLomont »

nhstanley wrote: post #138
ChrisLomont wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Scientific breakthroughts historically do not favor top rate institutions. What proof of this do you have? Quick looks over Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals, or even lists of top scientific breakthroughs demonstrate that top rate universities do produce far more scientific breakthroughs than other universities.

How frequently do those people move to those universities after they've made the scientific breakthrough for which they receive the award?

For Nobel Prizes, it's abundantly clear that people from and/or working at top schools win them vastly more than small schools by people that were at the school when the work was done. [1] Harvard has around 150. Many of the top schools have around 100. Ohio State, despite being much bigger [2,3], has 4, and is much more in line with most state (right below top tier) schools.

If you want to challenge that the top schools have much more productive researchers (and those making significant breakthroughs) on average, feel free to present evidence. Any metric I can find for which I can get enough information implies otherwise.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_univ...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University

[3] http://www.osu.edu/osutoday/stuinfo.php

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