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You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

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Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#51

Post by s0rce »

azhenley wrote: post #40
reality_czech wrote: post #39

Wow. I don't even know where to start on this one. My experience with academia is that everyone is scrambling to get grants and get published. Nobody ever asked questions about where the grants came from. A lot (probably even the majority at the time) was from the department of defense, and explicitly targetted to create weapons. Professors spent a huge amount of their time writing grant proposals. It's like pitching…

It seems like once a week I see comments like this. This was not my experience at all. With internships, I made over 60k a year in grad school. I worked on projects of my choice. I did not do a postdoc after graduating. I graduated from a small, unranked department and got a tenure-track position at an R1 university in a top 75 department.

I don't know a single person who has gotten a recent (5 years) faculty position without one or more postdocs. I'd say this is extremely uncommon experience. Nor have a seen salaries more than 40k for students, even postdocs don't always make 50k.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#52

Post by azhenley »

s0rce wrote: post #51
azhenley wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like once a week I see comments like this. This was not my experience at all. With internships, I made over 60k a year in grad school. I worked on projects of my choice. I did not do a postdoc after graduating. I graduated from a small, unranked department and got a tenure-track position at an R1 university in a top 75 department.

I don't know a single person who has gotten a recent (5 years) faculty position without one or more postdocs. I'd say this is extremely uncommon experience. Nor have a seen salaries more than 40k for students, even postdocs don't always make 50k.

All of my friends on the market this year from a variety of schools got faculty positions without postdocs. It isn’t uncommon in CS.

My salary as a student wasn’t 40k. My income from my RA position plus my internship was more than 60k.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#53

Post by s0rce »

variational123 wrote: post #12

I think an important factor is the salary disparity. Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, academic salaries cannot provide an upper middle-class lifestyle anymore. Academics are only human and it is natural to want the lifestyle all of their peers from grad school, college (or even their recently graduated student who works for FAANG) seem to enjoy. Unless academic salaries in CS increase significantly (and matc…

I'm guessing salaries may come down somewhat CS industry jobs as supply of people with software development training increases. Salaries are much lower in physical science, engineering and biology even for PhDs compared to software development/CS/"tech". Although in industry salaries are still higher than academic ones, although the difference is not as dramatic.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#54

Post by PAClearner »

Fomite wrote: post #48
ansgri wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a big can of worms. This dual employment may have its drawbacks (I think mostly due to the fact that this is a mega-corp; for a small bootstrapped company it's only good, I think), but consider the following two topics: * People would work in academic institution XOR your company: you cannot give the grant to the best in your field and still have him work for you, so you'd always want to hire the best you can,…

It's trivial to structure grants (or indeed contracts) such that they have concrete deliverables, even for academic research.

I think the moment a 'grant' has concrete deliverables (to a private firm?) it ceases being a grant and starts being some kind of consulting. I think people try to do this around ucla pretty often i.e. (I give a professor money -they do the research- I keep the IP)- it is pretty frowned upon in that context. In ML and CS I think this is probably more kosher-Michael Kearns seems to have a pretty thriving consultancy.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#55

Post by s0rce »

azhenley wrote: post #52
s0rce wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know a single person who has gotten a recent (5 years) faculty position without one or more postdocs. I'd say this is extremely uncommon experience. Nor have a seen salaries more than 40k for students, even postdocs don't always make 50k.

All of my friends on the market this year from a variety of schools got faculty positions without postdocs. It isn’t uncommon in CS. My salary as a student wasn’t 40k. My income from my RA position plus my internship was more than 60k.

I guess I'm not in CS, maybe thats the difference.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#56

Post by AndrewKemendo »

Fomite wrote: post #49
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they wouldn't own the research and the resultant capabilities by default. Yes they do and might continue open sourcing most of their research, but they have right of first refusal to publish, which is really the most important piece.

It's relatively easy to structure a grant program such that the rights are either shared, or can be licensed for a pretty nominal amount. There are other sectors of academic research that are quite good at this.

Nobody is saying you can't do it, however it's just rarely done. The default way is to not share/license, so that's what normally happens.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#57

Post by azhenley »

sid-kap wrote: post #46
azhenley wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like once a week I see comments like this. This was not my experience at all. With internships, I made over 60k a year in grad school. I worked on projects of my choice. I did not do a postdoc after graduating. I graduated from a small, unranked department and got a tenure-track position at an R1 university in a top 75 department.

60k per year doing internships? I thought a typical tech internship paid $5-8k/month, which means at most $25k over the summer. (Maybe my number is for undergrads, and grad student interns get paid significantly more?)

$6-9k a month for research internships with the ability to extend them beyond 3 months.

It worked out well since I would be doing basically the same research whether I was at the company or at my university.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#58

Post by gwbas1c »

tialaramex wrote: post #34
gwbas1c wrote: post #23

When I took computer science in 1999-2003, the best professors had rather significant industry experience. The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with a large computer program in their life. I would have been thrilled if my freshman and sophomore computer science classes were taught by guest "professors" who had legitimate careers, and occasionally took the time to teach a class. I'm…

> The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with a large computer program in their life. Seems like what you needed was a trade school. Maybe having a degree from a more prestigious university helped you get an initial job, but in terms of the things you were actually looking for, that's trade school stuff and barely overlaps with Computer Science.

It was a technical university that promoted itself as preparing students to enter engineering careers. To be quite blunt, during their open houses they advertised that students would have high salaries upon graduation.

Clearly, the professors didn't get the message that they were teaching classes at a teaching school, and not a research University.

I also need to emphasize that most students at this school do not pursue academic careers. Heck, most students pursuing a bachelor's degree do not pursue academic careers! If you think most educational institutions exist purely for research, then I don't think you understand the point of getting an education.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#59

Post by killbrad »

Our government, and moreso, our society through cultural and government apathy has devalued anything academic that does not produce material gains - capital, wealth, patents, etc.

I fear that the total commercialisation of academia means that we are unlikely to see meaningful material gains for society in terms of new cures to disease or technology advances outside of those that can be monetised for recurring revenue in the next decade.

It's really an unfortunate but self inflicted American problem.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#60

Post by listenYou »

Last time I checked, adjuncts make shit, get shat on, and have to work multiple jobs anyway.

Without dumping blame on Universities, the point is that the cost of "teaching" gets passed on to students, saddling them with debt. Profit or no, the ratio of most tuitions often boils down to students paying what might be the cost of a 1:1 student:teacher ratio, effectively paying an entire adjunct salary (gross pay), for 4 years straight, single handedly.

Take a look at what that means when the reality is a 30:1 ratio or worse. But, the rationalization being: they get a diversity of expertise, vetted for world class quality (hopefully) even if they don't get the one-on-one personal touch of a direct hands-on apprenticeship, with the personal attention of a mentor.

But hey, yeah the campus grounds cost money, and accredation, and administrative bureaucratic overhead, and so one.

But yeah, adjuncts make shit, work part time, and have more than one source of income anyway. So, suck it, ivory tower!

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