CMU’s computer science dean on its poaching problem • Hacker News Board

Re: CMU’s computer science dean on its poaching problem

#51

Post by mikeskim » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 3:54 PM UTC

arcanus wrote: post #49

bgalbraith wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely do not need a PhD for industry unless you want an R&D job in a handful of domains. A PhD is not simply learning more facts about a particular topic. It's an apprenticeship for conducting independently directed academic research. There are so many topics that you can not just learn from reading some online sources e.g. most experimental work. Most of the time spent in a typical PhD program is spent tryi…

> You absolutely do not need a PhD for industry unless you want an R&D job in a handful of domains. I know Phd.s at {MSFT, Google, Uber, Deepmind, GE, P+G} research divisions. I don't know anyone who works at those who does not have a doctorate. So I would say this applies to more than 'a handful of domains' -- If you want to do research, you should plan on having a doctorate, even in industry. The majority of data s…

I know people who work at those research divisions (they work with neural networks) without a PhD. So I just falsified your claim.

Re: CMU’s computer science dean on its poaching problem

#52

Post by mturmon » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 4:27 PM UTC

computervision wrote: post #14

kriro wrote: post #9

CMU has dropped significantly in my personal ranking of universities. None of that was related to faculty being hired away. All of it is related to activities like attacking the Tor network or accidentally admitting 800 students. Maybe they have a PR problem but my overal view of them is pretty meh even though they are one of the more elite CS schools (and I think Pittsburgh is a fairly nice city, never been there th…

Your metric for ranking universities is in no way based on how productive the university is in research or the quality of the graduating students. Even if you consider the things you mentioned as proxies for the quality of the university, they are extremely weak ones and there are better metrics available to judge the quality of a university. Am I wrong in viewing this comment as a flawed attempt to attack the univer…

You are correct that the comment is based on a couple of anecdotes that don't say much about the school, so it has little value.

Re: CMU’s computer science dean on its poaching problem

#53

Post by eli_gottlieb » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 5:11 PM UTC

mikeskim wrote: post #51

arcanus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You absolutely do not need a PhD for industry unless you want an R&D job in a handful of domains. I know Phd.s at {MSFT, Google, Uber, Deepmind, GE, P+G} research divisions. I don't know anyone who works at those who does not have a doctorate. So I would say this applies to more than 'a handful of domains' -- If you want to do research, you should plan on having a doctorate, even in industry. The majority of data s…

I know people who work at those research divisions (they work with neural networks) without a PhD. So I just falsified your claim.

Well yes, barriers to entry do get lower when markets are hot. What qualification do these guys you know have?

Re: CMU’s computer science dean on its poaching problem

#54

Post by SilasX » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:25 PM UTC

eitally wrote: post #21

chrisbennet wrote: post #16

As an aside, the use of the term "poaching" always bugged me. It implies that an employee is owned by a company like some deer in the King's forest.

Not really. It originated to describe high level employees who take a job and then exploit their personal network to hire away friends. This is super-common and expected, and is also the reason non-competes became popular. It wasn't until later, the tech boom, that "poaching" was repurposed to be more generalized luring of high potential employees from wherever using whatever ($, perks) means available.

Whatever the history, it's psychologically tied up with a lot of nasty baggage, and makes it seem inherently dirty, like there's something wrong with bidding up the value of labor by seeking to offer better compensation for workers.

Whatever the technical "correctness" of the term, it comes of as a sort of apology for setting better wages and we should use less loaded terms, like "recruited" or "bid/hired away".

Re: CMU’s computer science dean on its poaching problem

#55

Post by tikhonj » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 11:11 PM UTC

dunkelheit wrote: post #34

imgabe wrote: post #19

Academia in general is screwing itself. The main reason for anyone to go into it is to work on interesting problems in a self-directed fashion with amazing job security. You probably wouldn't get rich, but you'll have a nice upper-middle class salary and almost no way of getting fired. Now the available tenure-track positions are declining every year in favor of adjunct quasi-slave labor. Even if you do win the lotte…

Honest question: where do you learn advanced stuff if not in a graduate school? Academia undoubtedly sucks if one mainly takes money or career prospects into account. But among people who do challenging and sexy stuff (including in the industry) phd seems to be the norm, not the exception. One might object that phd has become unnecessary because nowadays all the relevant information is online but learning without the…

You'd have to find a community adjacent to your interests.

I like programming languages and functional programming and haven't had trouble finding things to learn and people to help me, mostly through the Haskell community. You have everything from completely disorganized but perfectly accessible help like IRC channels and mailing lists to things like type theory meetups and study groups (if you live near enough people with those interests). It'll be easier in the Bay Area or New York, but moving here has lots of other benefits and isn't nearly as constrained as going to grad school.

Once you know enough on your own you can parlay that into a "sexy" job if you're so motivated. I interned at a company that had their own internal language, for example, and one of the main people working on their compiler had a philosophy degree and (unless I'm misremembering) no grad school whatsoever. It's more difficult because interesting jobs are relatively rare and a lot of places (especially ones close to academia) are still disproportionately concerned with credentials but it's possible.

As long as you can concretely demonstrate your capabilities, you have a chance at progressive companies without credentials. This still isn't true within academia itself, at many government roles or at big rules-bound corporations, but it is possible within the "core" tech industry.

Re: CMU’s computer science dean on its poaching problem

#56

Post by tikhonj » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 11:13 PM UTC

chrisbennet wrote: post #16

As an aside, the use of the term "poaching" always bugged me. It implies that an employee is owned by a company like some deer in the King's forest.

I just mentally substituted "competition" for "poaching". It makes for a very different headline!

Re: CMU’s computer science dean on its poaching problem

#57

Post by kriro » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 6:42 AM UTC

computervision wrote: post #14

kriro wrote: post #9

CMU has dropped significantly in my personal ranking of universities. None of that was related to faculty being hired away. All of it is related to activities like attacking the Tor network or accidentally admitting 800 students. Maybe they have a PR problem but my overal view of them is pretty meh even though they are one of the more elite CS schools (and I think Pittsburgh is a fairly nice city, never been there th…

Your metric for ranking universities is in no way based on how productive the university is in research or the quality of the graduating students. Even if you consider the things you mentioned as proxies for the quality of the university, they are extremely weak ones and there are better metrics available to judge the quality of a university. Am I wrong in viewing this comment as a flawed attempt to attack the univer…

It's a personal judgement that is independent of the actual research performed. It's only a personal ranking to answer the question "would I want to work there".

I also downgrade universities that have a hard pro copyright stance, do heavy military research etc. It's a personal ranking and not one that I'd tell anyone to follow. People should rank by their own criteria.