At a large university in Texas, I had two professors - one amazing in everyway, the other not. The amazing professor published great research, wrote well, and had great teaching skills. The other professor gave lackluster classes, published research that was routine, and shocked me that they could be teaching at this level (inspiring in a pessimistic way).
Both up for tenure - the amazing professor was passed on because the other had a more desirable background. Both women. As a grad student, I understood the difficult of hiring, but this was honestly incredible.
I thought of this when I read the following from the article: "I was startled to learn that academic achievements were not always what mattered most." and "only to fall short of securing a faculty position due to factors outside my control."
Was the one who got tenure the one who brought in bigger grants? Unfortunately in the R1 Universities these days that is probably the most important thing, even more than your academic family tree https://academictree.org/
Sounds like academia is turning into another (internet) marketing agency where the best marketers also happen to be teachers and researchers as a side hussle.
Isn't it almost always the case when there's a job that there is more than one applicant who is qualified under a loose definition of the qualifications, and thus the decision makers have to come up with tighter and tighter definitions until there's one winner?
I suspect it's the case 99% of the time. You have some widget factory, some team leader leaves, and of his team of 10 you need a new leader. 4 of them are veterans and could do the work if you asked people who understand the business but are not involved in the decision. So then what? Well lets say you have to have published papers in the Journal of Widgets. Great, that leaves three. Now let's see how they do on random questions at interview. Fantastic, 4 of the 6 committee members think it's candidate B. Congrats.
It's an effect of the pyramid structure. People who can do the work have to be whittled away somehow, even if it's some silly criterion.
Academia seems to lean on the side of crap for the most part. That being said I've grown a keen, if naive, interest as I've enjoyed past mentoring opportunities. I remember reading a post of someone hosting a programming workshop at their local library and I feel it would be a worthy and approachable step towards feeling it out.
The problem with the community events approach is that the students you are mentoring rarely have the time to commit. It can happen, but it's rare.
If you just want to scratch that teaching and mentoring itch, you can opt out of most of the bullshit by avoiding the R1 tenure stream. A good route to take is Professor of Practice at a non-elite institution (just email the chair -- if you're an asset and don't want a TT position the wheels can turn surprisingly quickly), and if you happen across a grad student worth investing in sourcing a small grant and co-advising.
Probably from a more prestigious university or family background, which can cause some of that prestige to “rub off” and can assist in fund raising.
In startups this phenomenon takes the form of hires, board members, or advisors with all the right names in their CV (Stanford, Google, etc.) brought in to pump up the company’s prestige points in the eyes of potential investors.
You’re probably not alone thinking this because of all the noise about affirmative action. Academia is quite different behind the curtain than for students. Sure, they like hiring women because it helps improve their statistics, but the educational background, including institutions where the candidate did their undergrad and PhD is much more important.
technically there is one possibility: someone got into better schools due to AA, that benefits all things thereafter including possibly the case here. For those who lost the first chance due to AA, the lost is not over yet, unfortunately.
Legacy admits counted as much at many places that were segregated in living memory (so a more limited chain of legacies for formerly discriminated races).
Growing universities with colleges that want endowments, faculty whose families are deeply entrenched in related institutions or culture, and generally prestigious and well-connected people are all necessary and make for perfectly valid candidates.
Academics isn't all academics. You need people who can grow and sustain development, attract desirable talent, work at the state and local level, and pull in students. People have to manage the internal administrative duties and external involvement of each school. Plus, some people make excellent teachers and leaders but awful researchers, and vice versa. Others are mediocre but consistent, don't have higher prospects, and take on administrative burdens. There's no real "ideal professor" any more than there's any ideal human.
Just to be clear, donations help getting into a specific institution to study. Which does give a leg up to get a position later (most often in a different institution), but that’s a second-order effect. It does not directly help getting hired.
What has this got to do with the topic of donations? Here the reason is completely different. Also, some university having a policy against it does not prove that it’s a widespread problem, it’s merely an indication that some problems happened that were high profile enough to make the institution react.
That's the history of most institutions. There's a mistake about believing in merit and skills when it's usually a combination of political skills, ability to game the system (which are not necessarily the most important for the actual job) and initial privilege/wealth (a bad simplification of the point I'm trying to make on personal circumstances that don't relate to effort, it's more nuanced).
It's not the end of the world as long as you're not authortiarian and inclined to believe that in any hierarchy, the more valuable/skilled/apt person is naturally at the top.
It's very hard to create a system that scales and doesn't show signs of heavy bureocracy and/or corruption (if you know about the internals) because, very soon, it's easy to find out a gap between working for your career and working to maximise the output value of your job.
Nah, this is a lot of projection. More likely fanfic: could be that the one who got tenure had the former advisor who would add her to grants and bring in a lot of $$, or who started a center that would bring in a lot of $$.
Routine research often is easier to get through funding committees and get published. Less "what journal does this fit in, I'm not sure our division should fund this, does the PI truly have the expertise needed to do research in this, this result doesn't clearly advance the field"
The author's piece makes me think that all PhD students should serve at least once on an academic hiring committee. This would be a very clear way of communicating to PhD students what research universities want from their tenure-track faculty, by putting them in the room where the decisions are actually made.
I was in the author's shoes, but I was lucky enough to find out all the same information through Internet sites written by embittered PhDs who described what the negative side of the process was like. I went into industry instead, first for an R&D government contractor, then big tech. Like the author, I don't have any regrets about it.
I don't blame the committee for filtering on specialty, though. The academic job market is so tight for applicants that every PhD has to flood every job opening with applications to have a chance. There's something to be said for channeling people to the right job instead of any old job.
PhD programs IMO should stop being an implicit lottery for the ivory tower, maybe by having explicit "industry" and "academia" tracks and being careful with how many of the academic PhDs they're producing. But they'd have to admit just how unfair the system is to the students.
I also think that there needs to be a “non-professor” track in grad school.
Too often, grad school applicants are just kids that have overachieved in academic settings and think to themselves “I’ve been good at school my whole life, why not just do school forever?”. A lot of them would actually thrive in industry but they just continue doing school out of inertia.
Grad school could help those kids figure out if they like working in industry by mixing in courses taught by industry folks and/or pushing for internships rather than traditional RA positions.
> Too often, grad school applicants are just kids that have overachieved in academic settings and think to themselves “I’ve been good at school my whole life, why not just do school forever?
Anecdotally, I did not observe this during my PhD studies (theorerical CS) in Central Europe. I think this might be due to the separate 3 year Bachelor track, then a 2 year Master track, and only then 4 year PhD studies.
Sure enough, a lot of applicants faced tough career decisions after graduating, but whoever started the PhD usually knew what research is about and that it's going to be work first and foremost, not just "more school".
> I also think that there needs to be a “non-professor” track in grad school.
There is, it's called getting a master's degree. Typically, the first two years of a US CS PhD are a mix of research and classes, and the remaining few years are pure research. Students that are good at classes but bad at research should be able to walk away with a master's degree after two years, whose requirements they have should be at least close to meeting. I'm sure this varies a bit between schools, though I hope not too much because it's an essential escape valve.
Students that know up front that they just want to continue to be students should go for a master's degree, and one without a research requirement if possible.
("Bad at research" meaning "bad at research in combination with their advisor", which can be due to the student, or the advisor, or the way they interact.)
the master "release valve" is important, but it's an early escape rather than a parallel non-prof phd path.
the non-prof path isn't for people that are 'bad at research', its for people that want to do research outside of universities. so their theses wouldn't be crafted around"what will get grants/be publishable" but instead focus on "what would an R&D department in my field find interesting/valuable".
This is just getting a PhD at a less prestigious school. Advisors there know most of their students won't stay in academia and mentor them accordingly.
Ultimately I don't think there is a need for something between a masters and a PhD. Any attempt to make an alternative PhD will just become "PhD-lite", and the best students (whether they want to stay in academia or not) will still funnel into the more prestigious traditional PhD program and will be more desirable hires in industry because they come from a more elite pedigree.
As a completed CS PhD I would not claim incoming PhDs are that naive. It's quite common for a PhD to have no interest in becoming a prof or staying in academia. I, too, made it clear to my advisor that I absolutely do not want to become a professor.
Many begin a PhD because they want to avoid becoming a code monkey at some company. They hope that the PhD opens doors to intellectually engaging work. And it often does. If you check the graduates of CS advisors, they often end up at prestigious, well-paid research labs. Or they simply start their own company based on work done in the PhD.
I am not sure if the non-professor track would change anything. Most schools already do not require teaching because they want their CS PhDs to focus on research.
This calculus might of course be completely different for other disciplines.
The only surprising thing to me about this is that anyone is surprised by any of it. It's been going on for decades if not centuries. It's not like industry is any better really
Industry tends to be more biased towards obvious concrete incentives too, so it's easier to see how to succeed. And those incentives pay the rent better.
Academia tends to be really opaque and BS heavy because the the games that need to be played are far more opaque (by design), and concrete objectively useful results far less important.
In theory, acedemia should be shielded from the pressures industry has to make money on products and whatnot. In reality, the pressured are distinct but similar.
With additional politics and a massive focus on prestige. You can essentially only work for a school that is lower than your prestige, not higher. In industry you often climb the latter by switching companies, but this is harder in academia.
Academia has the same issue because most of it is government/military funded. Unironically, a whole lot of the private sector is too. And a good deal of professors sell off their students for pennies to industry partners for 5-7 years. I would say, academia has it worse depending on where you sit.
Industry tends to be better because mediocre hires eventually feed into a company's performance against its competitors. Or putting things another way, the public sector operates in a fantasy world, whereas the private sector is constantly reality-checked by markets.
Academia isn't supposed to be about markets, and I'd argue that framing it this way is at the root of issues such as the reproducibility crisis. Academia's mission is to educate and research for the public good. These are not things that can be captured well by markets. Success of their goals are fuzzy and take a long time to manifest. This doesn't mean it operates in a fantasy world. Take the difficulty of evaluating employees in industry (which is generally not straight forward), and make it a lot fuzzier but put an even larger stress on these metrics.
The academic world (nothing to do with the public sector) has its own performance metrics. It also follows it rigidly and in a more cut-throat manner, because there is less jobs.
The criticism is that the performance metrics are often in opposition or irrelevant to the stated mission(s) of said academic institutions.
> The criticism is that the performance metrics are often in opposition or irrelevant to the stated mission(s) of said academic institutions.
This is something I deeply believe.
Goals: educate individuals and produce original research.
Metrics: h-index (h papers with >= h citations), frequency of publication, academic service (politics).
Teaching is generally not considered an important metric. H-index biases to quantity of papers rather than quality, and there is a pseudo-pursuit for novelty while the most important thing in science is reproducibility (hence our crisis). I would say that evaluation of academics is nowhere near aligned with the stated goal of academic institutions and there's a reason several Nobel prize winners have stated that they do not think they would have made it in today's system.
> The main problem is that no one knows how to measure it. There are many metrics, and as far as I know, all of them are mostly noise.
Teaching is a long game.
It’s a given that a professor should be knowledgeable in their own topic; but the measure of success for a teacher in higher education is in how knowledgeable and influential their own students are.
Contrast Emmy Noether to, say, Isaac Newton. Both were brilliant and loved their topics; but only one was an actual teacher. The other was paranoid and egotistical.
Now in matter of influence and metrics: It shouldn’t just be measured in novel research and publishing but the ability to replicate and/or filter out bullshit research as well.
Finally, I’d also go as far as to say professionals in industry should be able to link to their old professors and not just institutions.
I have so many old, no-name instructors (some dead) who somehow managed to ignite a genuine interest in their topics.
> the measure of success for a teacher in higher education is in how knowledgeable and influential their own students are.
this is exactly right, and if thought about carefully, probably impossible to measure without your later suggestion.
> only one was an actual teacher. The other was paranoid and egotistical.
Hot take. I approve.
> shouldn’t just be measured in novel research and publishing but the ability to replicate and/or filter out bullshit research as well.
Replication is the foundation of science. It is the only way to actually fight the tyranny of metrics because replication always necessitates variance from the original. Failure to replicate doesn't simply mean fraud, as many believe, but that there are confounding variables that were not uncovered in the original. That's just another piece of the puzzle. But whats destructive is that you can uncover there, formulate a better hypothesis, and then fail to get published due to lack of novelty. Generally associated with reviewers stating that your claim is obvious, despite it not being in the literature or not being able to get anyone to make similar claims prior to giving evidence. There's a reason scissors took a long time to invent, because despite what they look like, it isn't just slapping two knives together.
> I’d also go as far as to say professionals in industry should be able to link to their old professors and not just institutions.
At least this happens with the PhD level, but I do wonder if this could help at a lower level. Or if this would just end up making the tyranny of metrics worse as people try to extract too strong of a signal? I went to a low rank undergraduate school and I know for a fact that my math education was better than friends who went far more prestigious schools. I took more classes, went in more depth, and was able to solve more Putnam problems than them (only a few total btw, but I did physics not math).
With school rankings, I think it is quite silly how we quantify them. I mean if you take schools on csranking.org (at least the top 30) doing a linear regression of the rank against the number of faculty results in a extremely good fit. But I'm not sure why people would be surprised about this given that you're basically limited to teaching at universities ranked lower than the one you graduated from, which should result in homogenization. Yet we still care deeply. Tracking professors sounds like a lot of work, with similarly high variance. I can see utility given that it can help show that you took an easy or a hard professor, but that might just also end up with similar metric hacking where a professor becomes hard rather than successful (because people are likely to measure via failure rate than a more intangible and stochastic long-term outcome based metric which would be coupled with every other educator the student had). It seems easier to just not care. You should get nearly as good outcomes while exerting several orders of magnitude fewer resources. I'm not against it, I just think it would be likely to be far more abused than the current shitty metrics we already use. I think we just at the end of the day need to embrace the stochastic nature of things, and if we don't incorporate that into our models then we're going to end up with bad outcomes. Causal inference is crazy fucking hard because there are far more confounding variables than people assert and more often than not there are elements which are not distinguishable. That many different paths can lead to the same outcome. I'm certainly not saying to give up or abandon metrics, but rather that shits hard and when we start forgetting that we make big mistakes.
> The main problem is that no one knows how to measure it.
This is true for every single aspect of academia, even research. I don't think our metrics in research are good and that they are the reason we have the replication crisis. Metrics are always guides, having limitations and biases unique to each one. Over-reliance just results in Goodhart's Law, and instead of embracing the noise inherent to the system we have ill conceived attempts to remove it. Attempts to create meritocratic systems frequently result in less meritocratic systems than were being "improved" upon.
As a professor who served on a hiring committee this past year in a top-15 engineering department in the US (and not in CS), some of this did not really ring as true to me. Overall, I came away more pleasantly surprised by our process than how I might have assumed it to be as a PhD student (where I assumed it was entirely based on favoritism). Based on the intersection of publication record, research statement and topic areas we were recruiting for this cycle (which was clearly advertised in our position), there were really only about 20-25 applications which were plausibly competitive.
We ended up doing a standardized set of Zoom interviews for about 15 of them - here too, many candidates were simply unable to clearly explain their past work and make a clear pitch for their vision and work (even with slides). This is an essential skill for running a lab and one any prospective candidate should practice and refine! From that point on the whole department was involved and, at least for us, everyone had an equal say and felt safe speaking up. ~4-5 were invited for on-campus interviews and one candidate was liked the most by nearly everyone, leading to a consensus.
As a public university, there are a lot of things we do in a standardized way, and sets of personal questions etc. we do not ask. Is it fair? I'll leave others to judge, as selecting one person to hire out of ~200 applicants is not an easy task. But I don't think it was capricious either. At our department, we intend for everyone who comes as an assistant prof to be tenured, so it is very much a long-term hire and commitment we are making. We take that job seriously.
> "...many candidates were simply unable to clearly explain their past work and make a clear pitch for their vision and work (even with slides)..."
This is interesting, why do you think they fumbled? Is it a lack of practice/experience in presenting these ideas or is it an indicator of a grad student who has become a foot soldier for a PI?
I'm genuinely not sure! The virtual pre-screen interview has become the de facto norm in my field, so it's not like it's surprising or unexpected. And it's not like we are looking for TED speakers here - anyone should be capable with sufficient practice and preparation.
If anything, I've seen people that look great on paper, coming from the pedigreed lab/ and fancy PhD institution fail at this stage. So perhaps there's some overconfidence there. Indeed, no one in our department had any connection to, or prior knowledge of, the candidate who was ultimately given the offer. Once they got past the initial screening, through both virtual and in-person interviews, their technical depth and breadth, teaching skills and overall collegiality shone through.
All that being said, I don't doubt that all the questionable things mentioned in the article above occur, and perhaps widely. But, there is hope! And there's no better place to start than those of us who are younger faculty.
I remember talking to one my professors about this particular research topic I found interesting, and that I’d be interested in working with prof X about this topic. I was told that it was a great idea, it was also important that I understand I would never get a stable job in academia if prof X was my advisor, because of political reasons.
My father ( university professor) told me that unfortunately this was all too common.
My first job working for minimum wage in a theater, I was invited to go to IHOP or someplace like that after we closed. I asked what they talked about and the answer I got was, "mostly work politics", so I suppose that was a good early lesson for 15 year old me that basically wherever you get two people together, you will get politics.
My suspicion for the reason that academia is seen as being so political is because they're actually not very good at it. The top of the heap of political practitioners in my experience tend to be the VP+ level leadership in publicly traded companies.
I think academia is political because it’s a very small world, and chronically underfunded, so people fight. If there were loads of open positions, with unlimited research budgets, and decent salaries, I hope they wouldn’t fight and there would be no politics. But I might be wrong on that one :-)
I work on a daily basis with Vp+ level leadership of a publicly traded company and yes, they’re much better at it. But there’s just as much politics as in academia : people fight for power, money, prestige which are increasingly concentrated as you go up.
Is academia actually underfunded, or does is just create a large, underpaid labor class it can motivate with a tenure carrot? I don't get a sense that there's actually that much more research that needs to be done as much as we need a lot of TAs and lecturers.
Personally I'm more under the impression that there's a lot of research that needs to be done, but parts of the system other than just funding make it hard to do it. "More funding" would be a necessary part of a solution, but would only work when coupled to other necessary measures to encourage genuinely productive science.
> Sayre's law states, in a formulation quoted by Charles Philip Issawi: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."
"You turn it into some Dynasty s**t, like: ”She’s trying to destroy me!” What the f**k are you talking about? You wrap up bags at J.C. Penney’s! What’s she doing, ripping up your paper?" - Chris Rock
They've never truly existed outside the school system, and in many ways never grew out of it. In many ways, academics stay kids thier entire lives.
When you look at school children's behavio and the politics of high school, it all makes sense that academia is highly "political" in the most childish manner.
Is the life path of a developer (particularly one interested in working for one of the large, monopolist tech firms) really so different? Isn't "staff" engineer a common goal? As I say, my experience has been that hard skills matter quite little beyond a certain point and political/soft skills take over, and it's as true of private industry as anywhere else.
> I was invited to go to IHOP or someplace like that after we closed. I asked what they talked about and the answer I got was, "mostly work politics"
Honestly, I'm surprised at the candor! Were the other employees also teenagers, or were you told this by an adult? I'd somewhat expect that somewhere with such a strong "workplace politics" culture would have been more worried that you'd be a competitor, but I could see an adult being more candid with someone much younger due to not perceiving them as a "threat".
This reminds me of "your personal statement sucks"[1] by Dr. Angela Collier(Physics PhD), who also served on a hiring committee. The advice she gives is that your personal statement is your one shot to convince the hiring committee that you have unique things that would be a huge positive to the role you seek. I thought it was worth the watch time.
Reminds me a lot of some of the ACOUP academic explanations, although those are history not science focused. The feel about academia being a tiny exclusionary club is the same.
It’s way worse on the humanities side, from my experience. Not that it’s easy in STEM, but there are more positions and also better funding from both industry and government.
The absolute best professor I ever had in undergrad or grad school was in his 60s, had been teaching for decades, and was still an assistant professor. He didn't publish much, had written one book a long time ago, but god damn he was just a natural master at teaching. I took classes I wasn't interested in, just because he was teaching them. He liked to do the thing professors are supposed to do, and was punished for it. I notice that academic achievements, even in this article about the messed up priorities of university hiring, doesn't seem to include being good at educating kids.
I think the real takeaway is the professor adamantly demanding his postdoc get an interview. In business or academia, leveraging personal connections is the only guaranteed way to make career progress.
It’s unsurprising though. If nothing else, it would be a good opportunity for the post doc. While there can be some stigma in staying at the same institution (cross-pollination is typically encouraged) it’s also a good show to at least pretend to like your own students/post docs enough to entertain keeping them around. Also keep in mind the professor has an interest in seeing the post doc succeed.
And a way to respond to that demand would be a allow one extra (that) post doc to interview. A trade off to humor that professor while keeping the good candidates around.
Unfortunately this sort of thing makes sense in the end: one in the hand is worth two in the bush. Yeah he likes the guy and probably gives him more than he is due, but they know who he is, what he acts like, where he's going. They know how to work with him. In all these kinds of matters, no matter how shiny someone presents themselves to be, its only over the course of many months and years of knowing them that you can get an accurate picture.
Very different experience than mine being on a hiring committee. The CS market has been so great that candidates have a lot of choice in where they land.
We’d sift through maybe 200 applications, quickly reject most (i.e., do they have any top pubs in the area we are hiring for?). Most of them were wildly out of scope.
Pick 10 from the remaining 30 applicants that we think (a) are the best and (b) would potentially accept the offer.
We had several failed searches after many, many interviews.
CS is going through the abundance phase of its cyclical mismatch between jobs-available and candidates seeking jobs. This is driven by a decade of healthy industry hiring, which has seen a lot of candidates (plus existing faculty) depart academia for greener pastures. (NB: if you happen to be in ML, then nothing you’re experiencing now should be viewed as normal — this an unusual hiring spree due to “hot field” FOMO.) Eventually the economy will cool down the way it did in the early 2000s and after the 2007/2008 cycle: then you’ll see what musical chairs looks like when the music stops.
Here is my own experience of getting hired into a startup.
The day I got hired the manager took the team out to lunch and I asked them how each one got hired. So results:
White male - Room mate of employee
White male - Room mate of employee
White male - Knew early employee from college in Switzerland
White female - Recruited off of LinkedIn
Indian American - Recruited off of LinkedIn
Immigrant Indian American - Recruited off of LinkedIn.
There is a lot of favoritism that goes on in industry as well. However, it is so large that it can accommodate both merit-based and network based hiring.
Hiring is a total crap shoot anyway and this is not to say that just because someone comes recommended by someone else they are automatically bad. They just look better in comparison because mentally we automatically lower the hiring bar as this person comes "recommended" from a known source.
If you are going to build a team you will probably select for people you know and trust first, so choosing from people in your network is a natural way of doing this. This is literally called 'networking'. If it isn't a startup this can become a problem as the hiring process should be more open for everyone otherwise you won't be able to get a job anywhere without knowing someone from there first.
> There is a lot of favoritism that goes on in industry as well.
There sure is, but I don't think your example is evidence for that. People just like to hire based on recommendations and through friends. Several times now I've been interested in some startup, and when I looked at their team page, they were all from the same group: either all Indian, or all russian speakers, or something else. I bet most startups are like this, just that some cases are more apparent than others.
I am struggling to see what you are trying to say here, especially since you use somewhat arbitrary way to group people by race and sex. Can you clarify?
Is the founder white? Does he/did he live in a majority white country (you mentioned a college in Switzerland, a country which is most likely 90% white)? If so, why is that weird and why does that matter? Unless you think that "white men" are fungible, using this category makes no sense.
For heaven's sake, think a little. This is an empirical discussion of hiring heuristics that result in a certain system. It's not just networking (generally used to refer to development of professional connections, though yes people use it to refer to smoking weed together or engaging in the same sport) and the poster didn't say nepotism either. It is certainly favoritism (hiring people you already know and like without necessarily casting a wider net) and it's clear that there are structural effects from it that develop on gender and race lines (you're in the men's hockey team together, you're in a fraternity or sorority, you're in an ethnic club).
What sriram_sun said is entirely factual, and a lot of us get left out of the networks for various reasons. That's also just factual. The fact that folks here are all "oh you're just jealous, you're calling it nepotism" -- nah, it's just facts, and there is no need to get emotional about it. There is nothing inherently wrong about hiring people you know -- like any move in a game, it has knock-on effects. If you'd like to help broaden networks, just do it. And for those who feel defensive about it, consider the phrase "hit dogs holler".
It's a razor thin line and we can't really tell unless the roommates were horribly unqualified for the job.
But I'd probably hire in a similar way for a startup. Not because of nepotism, but because I know the kinds of peope I want to hire are massively productive and good at their respective fields, I'd be honored if they could do that work under me.
(note: no real plan to do this and half my friends aren't in my specific domain regardless).
I'm a bit perplexed by the notion that it's somehow a problem when the founder hires his friends and former colleagues when starting a company with just 6 employees.
It was shocking to me that room mates could get hired that easily.
This was the bay area.
My comment is highlighting structural imbalances as they exist in society right now.
Even though networking as a way to grow, it is not an option for a lot of people until much later in their careers. That is because of social conditioning.
That sounds like plain envy to me, and it's not bizarre (although it might well be unhealthy) to be envious of those with better opportunities than you. As for whether that is associated with being a problematic employee, well, problematic can also mean profitable when envy is a powerful motivator.
Like I said above, it made me more empathetic, not envious.
However, I'm pointing at instances like this so that hiring managers with a enough resources also consider other pipelines.
Startups are an inherently risky venture that lacks the money and management to hire everyone they want. It's a horrible example.
Consider the empathy from the other side: I'm working in a stable job and my friend approached me saying he's got this big idea. May not even be funded yet. Do I use my part time to help on his dream in hopes that we get funding and maybe expand on the idea? That's a lot of trust and energy being put into another person.
On the end of the "nepotee" it really depends on the person and what you know. And it takes a certain style of mind to get on board that idea. That isn't the same in getting fast tracked to some cushy Google job.
If I was allowed, I'd consider an alternate hiring pipeline looking at IQ scores and doing anonymous interviews in air gapped rooms so we could blind hire.
But hey, government doesn't let me. So instead I'm going to assume experience by minorities is suspect due to discriminatory hiring practices like AA and DEI, and continue to hire mostly white and asian males because they're the most disenfranchised groups atm, especially in South Africa.
Oh quite! I myself am outside of the networks of industries I want to be in. There is an altruistic side to getting the job you really want - you'll be more motivated and probably better able to do well in it. Industries that operate exclusively with networking lose out on most of that altruism.
I'm surprised (or maybe not that surprised) no one has countered the "This is just how networking works" argument with: Yes, but if the network you're pulling from is mostly white guys, doesn't that signal a problem in itself?
No it does not. This is a bizarre way to look at things, that is all to common in the US but very much alien in most of the world. Why are those two dimensions important to you (white and male)? What about affluent/poor, educated/uneducated, ginger/blonde, immigrant/native, enthusiastic/bored, religious/atheist, left-wing/right-wing.
The only problem here is the insistence on seeing things through the clownish lens of the "race-sex" combo. It makes it sounds like you can pretty much interchange "white males", like - "I guess I've already got a white guy friend, now I need an asian, and a black one". Nobody sane makes friends like that.
I would be really surprised if you didn't have a:
"Indian guy - Room mate of employee"
"Indian guy - Room mate of employee"
"Indian guy - Room mate of employee"
network in many Indian startups. Except each of those dudes would be a different person, with different experience, differente world view, different likes and dislikes, so what does it matter that they are Indian?
> I would be really surprised if you didn't have a: "Indian guy - Room mate of employee" "Indian guy - Room mate of employee" "Indian guy - Room mate of employee" network in many Indian startups.
Don't forget caste details of each one in that list.
I mean, it jumped out me because ginger and blonde are both the two rarest hair colors and the ones more or less exclusive to people of European descent, but I also don't really want to waste energy debating someone who thinks it's "clownish" to note someone's race and gender in tandem, because we're clearly never gonna see eye-to-eye on this.
It is kinda clownish to note that the coworkers are white males when it's followed by the fact that they're all room mates. What is the comment trying to draw attention to? Are they trying to highlight the fact that hiring is biased toward recommendations from employees? Then why mention the sex/race? Is it evidence of "structural imbalances as they exist in society right now" that three white males live in the same apartment in bay area?
There is another dynamic that helps the recommended hire succeed in the workplace environment. They initially get help navigating the workplace. This is extremely important for career development.
For e.g. If you know what to look for in a code base that might make a difference between a commit on day one versus messing around the code base for a week and trying to be really careful.
I finished my Ph.D. in 1991 and thought I wanted to be a professor. I applied to a few dozen openings, but it was the middle of a recession [1] and there were hundreds of people applying for single openings. I was not a standout candidate so I never stood a chance.
In retrospect, having now learned more about the realities of academic life, this is probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. I think I would have been as miserable as a professor as I was as a grad student. The idea that tenure == freedom turns out to be a Big Lie. There is no more freedom in academia than there is anywhere else in the world. The life of a professor is, first and foremost, a never-ending Sisyphean treadmill of writing grant proposals. At the end of the day, it's all about the money.
Of course you can get yourself into a nice comfortable niche where you are The Man and all your proposals are greenlit by default, but you can do that outside of academia too by finding a patron or a big enough group of fans, but then you are beholden to them. The only real freedom is having money of your own, and even that comes with strings attached because then you have to manage the money and deal with people asking you to write checks.
Always be careful what you wish for. The hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out what it is.
The idea that tenure == freedom turns out to be a Big Lie. (...) The life of a professor is, first and foremost, a never-ending Sisyphean treadmill of writing grant proposals. At the end of the day, it's all about the money. (...) The only real freedom is having money of your own, and even that comes with strings attached because then you have to manage the money and deal with people asking you to write checks.
As a tenured professor, I can confirm all this as an accurate description.
Furthermore, to add to what you said, you don't even have real freedom on things like where to publish - the typical question of "why don't you just refuse to submit articles to exploitative for-profit publishers like Elsevier?" - because you are almost always working with PhD students, postdocs, etc. And while your career may not depend on where you publish, theirs does. (A possible exception to this is mathematics, and maybe some other research fields, where many papers are single-author. But that only happens in a minority of disciplines).
There is something where the freedom is more or less real, though: choosing research subjects. This year I wanted to do some fun experiments with LLMs, not very related to my usual research. I found a collaborator, did that, had fun, and it's part of the work I'm paid to do. That's a kind of freedom that most jobs don't give you. Even that is quite restricted because most of your research has to be on things that funding agencies like, but at least it's something.
Sometimes it's hard to calibrate and compare expectations about something far in the future.
There's kind of a "haha, we're screwed" undertone to a lot of things. How is a young person really supposed to know which ones are really horrible dead ends and which ones are actually workable if you care?
Is a singing career or a professor more of a dead end? English PhD or history PhD? Lawyer or video game programmer?
Those all have different chances for success, different time horizons, and different off-ramps when they don't work out.
Tracks that allow you to have some kind of job earlier, even an unskilled/unrelated one, at least allow you to potentially collect some savings or maybe even start a family. It grounds you in reality somewhat so you can compare your life against the world around you rather than only seeing your peers struggling with you.
Not really my experience in a science department at a top university in Canada. I've served on several hiring committees and also been involved in about 20 hirings over the years. Yes, there are typically 100+ applicants, but only about 5-10 of them are truly excellent.
In contrast to what the writer described, I had an experience where a colleague strongly opposed considering his former PhD student for a position because their research interests were significantly different from the advertised position.
One thing that has consistently surprised me during these hiring exercises is encountering candidates who appear exceptional on paper and deliver a decent public talk about their past research but completely fail when it comes to their proposed research talk.
At least in science, if you're truly exceptional, you will find a position at a top place, despite whatever politicking or EDI considerations are influencing the hiring process.
> One professor strongly advocated for his own postdoc, even though his CV was not at all competitive. After considerable debate—and without consensus—he was invited for an interview anyway.
This alone happens more frequent than not. Idea here is to land (PhD) on a remarkable lab with a supervisor on the committee...
This is strange to me. Many universities, including mine, avoid interviewing applicants with a PhD or postdoc from the same institution to which they are applying.
Military officer corps at least comes with a insanely generous pay+benefits package when compared to PhD and post-doc. And the bar is lower and work easier for most positions.
At least in my department, this will not work as long as the applicant's supervisor or dissertation committee members are still in the department. The crux of the issue, in my mind, is that it is hard to have candid and unbiased discussion about a candidate when the supervisor / dissertation committee is part of that discussion.
This is such a generalization that I deem it devoid of value. Besides the fact that not all hiring decisions happen that way, R1 institutions are not the only ones around. If you have a passion for teaching and want to stay engaged in research, there are other options like primarily undergraduate institutions. There are good reasons to prefer industrial posts to academia, and vice versa.
It's great that the author found a good job and is happy, but being a tenured professor has its own advantages (at least in the US system)... 9 month years (three-four months holiday/year), essentially no boss, salary (maybe lower than equivalent in private sector, but is sufficient), paid sabbaticals, unpaid leaves, 2-days/week teaching and the rest of the time on pet projects, job security, ability to do contracting on the side. But to get that there is quite an upfront commitment and its uncertain. Probably if you did the same amount of effort in the private sector you could get some of those things, but I doubt all of them...
In what field do tenured professors take 3-4 months of holiday per year? In the hard sciences (US, R1 research universities), I saw tenured professors doing long hours of research all year, and treating summer as a time when they could focus more-fully on research and grant-writing with less of those pesky classes getting in the way.
That's because they like doing research, not because if they don't do it they'll get fired. If they wanted they could just take that time off, they have tenure after all. No classes basically means no work outside of the work that you want to do.
Do you understand what it takes to get tenure in the US? Generally 10 years post PhD of grinding, working summers and weekends. (That's from 3 years of postdocs and 7 before tenure.) By the time you get tenure you don't know how to not work through the summer, and you have graduate students who need to be supervised (they'll be doing a substantial portion of their research over the summer and you need them to get through). You'll have grant funding for summer research (because if you don't, you didn't get tenure) and you'll need to ensure that the work you've promised to the granting agency gets done in some form or another, not least so that you can get the renewal or extension of the grant, which is needed to pay the graduate students. You'll have some conferences that will require travel, and you'll need to get things done with your collaborator before she goes on sabbatical and your other collaborator before he becomes dean of students. You'll have a revise and resubmit or three, and you'll be trying to finish another article before the August 1 submission deadline for the special journal edition (yes it'll be pushed back but if you let it slide, the grad student working on it will start teaching mid-August and then progress will slow to a crawl and you'll really run into trouble, that student is supposed to be transitioning to another project as well due to a grant you have starting at the beginning of the academic year).
Heck, I have been out of academia 4 years now and I still have minor revisions to a paper complete in the next week!
I know a couple people who are tenure track professors at R1 universities. The amount of work they put in is absurd, and they would probably be directors at most big companies. 80 hour weeks is a norm for them
The summers are when research happens - this is not a holiday. Sabbaticals are also for research. "Pet projects" is actually just research. Did I mention research? There's also grant proposals.
Yes, pet projects is research. For me at least it's a holiday, I get to set my hours, I can do what I want, read what I want, be where I want. That sounds like a holiday to me.
In the private sector, you have to invest your higher salary and try to reach Financial Independence. Then you’ve bought yourself tenure, more or less.
I thought I wanted to work on cars for a living, then I delivered parts for O'Reilly during one summer and was told straight to my face "If you like cars don't do this job."
I'm reminded of (I think?) one of Paul Graham's essays on the difficult and rewarding things in life – that if you knew how difficult it would be, you might not have done it? You might not have started.
I don't know... sometimes, there are those things that might be difficult and then not worth it. It strikes me that to be a professor, you have to be a little out of it, maybe even a little psycho.
This is just what humans are like. I say this a lot but I still don't understand how people are so naive about this kind of thing. You're not going to find anywhere that isn't like this eventually. We not only don't live in a meritocracy but meritocracy itself is impossible. It's just idealism that disregards nature (unless you redefine it to some meaningless vague Darwinianism.)
In healthier environments results are better. For instance, if a qualified person applies to a useful and growing company, they are going to be treated with respect and offered good pay.
That's why I said eventually. And for every one of those, there's a few hundred where that isn't the case. What matters is what happens on average and the reality is it's probably much more like a bellcurve where your cases are outliers.
Move into useful and growing areas, and when they become useless and stagnant, then move somewhere else. Change is the only constant; be on the right side of it.
Leaving a toxic environment makes it less toxic for everyone else. Even the worst bosses will respond to the fact that people are walking out the door and nobody is walking in.
Rather, "meritocracy" is a theatre that provides perfect alibi for nepotism.
Referring to someone's CV is not in principle different from referral by a person. It's just another document that has been curated by people, for the same purpose.
If the position is such that it doesn't matter who is hired (meaning: there is usually no measurable difference in outcome for people in the role, and all candidates have basic qualifications), then nepotism isn't necessarily wrong, in my view. It creates a level of loyalty that true meritocracy does not, for example. I believe this is the mechanism for a lot of hiring through "networks". What I object to, in these cases, is pretending that the various versions of "basket weaving" are relevant merits, and that there is actual meritocracy.
When the position is such that there are specific requirements; those abilities/skills can be tested with interviews etc, like how it works in most recruitment for professionals.
This is my general perspective. There might be certain cases I'd have a different opinion.
I have posted on HN before: If you can get out of Academia, do so. It's in your best interest to get out. This article spells out why. Academia is like spending your adult life in middle school.
In CS this is trivial, as long as you're doing science that is still relevant to the world and not working on some inane corner of some pet project from the 1980s that people should've stopped thinking about a long time ago :)
Or maybe we're misunderstanding one another. By "inane corner" I mean "can't even fill a single session at a 100 person specialized conference". Even in the early 2000s NIPS was larger than I'd consider "inane corner sized".
Probably different understanding. I'd say VR/XR is still that sort of niche corner but I don't deny that eventually it will blow up. You can certainly fill a conference room with dozens of topics, though.
I see. Yeah, I mean more like the type of work where -- if you go back and read the initial papers -- the motivation was primarily engineering-related is long sense deprecated. And there is no reasonable new motivation. But lines of faculty have been working on it for long enough that everyone forgot why they still care about these "open problems".
Thanks for the reply — I guess my take on 'inane corner' is larger, volumetrically. I've been to conferences for fields that were well-attended but that I'd classify as corners because of the nicheness of the skillset and difficulty translating outside of academia.
I've switched between academia and industry several times in my career (which some academic friends of mine claimed was not possible).
Professorial hiring committees are often silly since they demand outrageous things yet the
pay is laughable. Since I have a lot of hiring experience as a research director in industry, I saw a lot of talent that I would try to grab, but that academic colleagues did not consider a good enough match due to the limited fit with the desired profile, even if that meant re-advertising and wasting another year.
While what you say about hiring committees is true, I would still not recommend to talented scientists to let all that deter them. If you have the passion for science, give it everything - so that you can say on your deathbed, "at least I tried"; any other life choice probably won't let you go in peace (who wants to
think "what if...?").
> which some academic friends of mine claimed was not possible
To be fair: "industry" is not one thing. There's a huge difference between being a software engineer at a non-R&D software company doing uninteresting consulting or project work and being a SWE in Google Brain/FAIR/etc. Hell, there's a huge difference between positions with the same job title in the same mega-corps.
Most professors -- even in CS -- aren't able to get the types of industry jobs that keep the academic door open. It's really only a few subfields where those industry jobs are available.
So, as a general role, saying that it's difficult to move between the two is fairly accurate.
> since they demand outrageous things yet the pay is laughable.
The process is prohibitive before the packet even reaches the committee. Writing three or four essays, asking for three letters of recommendation, and committing to a full on-site interview loop for a job that comes with at least a half million dollar pay cut.
Being a hiring manager in Silicon Valley for a decade taught me how hiring really works. I will never again take it personally (or take it seriously) when I am not hired, because hiring is inherently irrational and can be subject to all sorts of weird biases.
It’s like dating. If a company is just not into me, I shrug and move on.
A friend's spouse wanted to be a professor. They completed a PhD in electrical engineering, and some post-docs. Finding the market too hard, they decided to go back for another PhD, this time in Computer Science.
The friend got a job at Google, and as far as I can tell, is supporting their spouse's dedication to this job search.
I just don't have ... that. Give me a decent project and weekends, please.
I don't know. If you ask a professor, they say it takes tenacity and grit, and accepting compromises regarding where you life, what work you do, etc.
But that's a sampling problem. If you listen to that too much, you end up like this person. The 9X.YY% of those who want to be a professor probably had all that, plus a healthy dose of realism to get out while the getting is good. The absolute worst part of all this is that very few profs seem all that happy.
Kind of like CEOs, but I think being a wage-earning, low-to-moderately successful founder has a higher likelihood of panning out than being a wage-earning professor by a long shot.
Frankly, most 'hard-workers' aren't doing the innovative work.
Tenure-track faculty have barely any time to breathe given all the hassle they have to go through. It's mostly done by grad students who are still learning the ropes. Ofc. this is different in places like Math depts. where it can't work the way it does in CS/EE.
I think they'd say that constantly writing grants, publicizing, and coaching is the work they do now to keep those grad students fed, productive, and equipped. At least in my lab, the advisor was very attentive to make sure we were all doing our best work, even if he wasn't doing the work himself.
> I began to see a career in business as an appealing alternative to the personal sacrifices, hypercompetitiveness, and arbitrary hiring decisions I would encounter in academia
Perhaps there is an issue with expectations - which might be managed with schools actually teaching about what professional life is about (whether academic / industry, empoyed / freelance, for profit / nfp, etc), including teaching things like how debt works and what it's for, funding independence, funding retirement.This was ignored by ALL the schools and universities I have been through. People are expected to learn this on their own (or by reading HN which is also seriously flawed).
For example it's okay for a PhD not to be a professor, not to do research, not even work in their original field, etc - and have a satisfactory career trajectory. It also happens to get a PhD, "do everything right" and get tenure and not be happy about it. The problem whether with PhD or anything else, is this "shot in the dark" problem and lack of well, guidance about the wealth of options out there.
A superficial “my one experience” story published in Science by a recent PhD in chemical engineering two years ago. Little more than a non-specific catalyst for HN comments that are much more interesting.
The bit about expertise overlap is curious. After all, why hire someone that can eventually be your competition? Academia is viciously competitive on the inside and it just doesn't look rational.
Another perspective on this is that departments will have a long term hiring strategy that balances breadth of the overall research program against depth in a particular subdiscipline, with the goal of building a coherent ecosystem with good opportunities for faculty and students. That may be a factor beyond a candidate's control, but not necessarily just anticompetitive behavior in the hiring process.
I have seen the hiring process too when doing my PhD and decided to go to others sector too. Scarily similar story to OP.
Granted it was not the main motivator for my leaving, as it also showed me that being close to faculty staff similar guaranteed a position eventually and I was generally close to all senior faculty. But I saw people being skipped with stellar records.
Industry hiring isn't fair either, but there is a lot less competition, more flexibility and generally much better pay.
In Spain, we have a quite idiosyncratic system. There is very little mobility, people typically stay in the university where they graduate. A PhD student often starts by doing their Master's or even Bachelor's thesis with a professor. If the professor is happy, they can suggest the student to apply for competitive grants to study a PhD, or hire them directly with grant money (the PhD here is typically seen as a job, almost all PhD students get a salary).
Right after the PhD, people typically apply for entry-level positions at that same university. At that point, there is some "weeding out" (no positions for everyone) but if you get one, you're pretty much set for stability. You need to endure years of crappy salary and a lot of evaluations, but if you can generate a decent amount of publications (even if not stellar) you will typically promote until you eventually get to a permanent position. In theory, promotions are public calls open to anyone, but in practice the "home" candidate almost always wins because no one wants to kick out someone who is already working there and familiar with the specific research topic, courses, etc. to hire someone who would have to learn from scratch. Plus, if you do that, the disgruntled candidate will then try to kick others out of their positions to take their place, people don't want to open that Pandora's box, so most promotions (e.g. from associate to full professor) have only one candidate, the "home" candidate.
This system has obvious problems: first, nepotism is easy, because the real selection (not the promotions that are mostly just a formality, as I explained) is done quite early and typically the professor has a lot of say on who to hire. Mostly professors want the best candidates, because there is a lot of competition for grants, salary complements, etc. (everything is evaluated and measured here), but sometimes people will just favor a friend, relative or whatever. Second, mobility is almost impossible, because you'll practically never be able to get a non-entry-level position from a different university. Let alone applying to a Spanish position from outside Spain!
This system is frowned upon, many in society view university as corrupt, so there is a lot of push to go towards an "Anglo-Saxon" system as described in this post. Now they are emphasizing a second way to become a professor, by applying to a competitive postdoc with forced mobility to the government, as universities are incentivized (with money) to create permanent positions for people who have that.
It's good that there is this alternative as a backup for good candidates, and I would definitely support other measures like making selection for entry-level positions fairer or reserving a percentage of positions for outside candidates, but after seeing accounts like this, I think our system is less bad than it gets credit for and it wouldn't be a good idea to go full Anglo-Saxon.
For all its faults, at least here you finish your PhD at 27 years old or so (it's 3-4 years, not 5-6 as in the US) and not much later, you already have an idea of your chance for a position. Better to be unfairly excluded due to nepotism at that point in your career than 10 years later, like the post seems to be describing. And if you leave for industry, the PhD was a job with a normal salary so you haven't paid too harsh an opportunity cost.
Under the more "modern" Anglo-Saxon system, it's common to be in your late thirties doing postdocs, moving from place to place (something that most Spaniards don't want, here family ties are stronger than in the US and most people want to stay close to family) and with difficulties to form a family or settle down due to uncertainty and constant mobility. And if that were implemented here, we wouldn't even have the consolation of a good salary, as academia is quite underpaid here - so I think it would actually lower the quality of the staff hired by making the academic career quite undesirable for many...
I wonder if there is an ideal system with the best of both worlds. I have good vibes about France (I know people who got permanent positions there soon after PhD, under what seemed like a merit-based system with committees) but maybe I'm just idealizing due to ignorance, as many Spaniards do with the Anglo-Saxon system which they view as fair and free from corruption.
The last 4 paragraphs of that piece feel like it was AI generated. The overall nonspecificity and upbeat positive prose feels like something output by ChatGPT.
Both up for tenure - the amazing professor was passed on because the other had a more desirable background. Both women. As a grad student, I understood the difficult of hiring, but this was honestly incredible.
I thought of this when I read the following from the article: "I was startled to learn that academic achievements were not always what mattered most." and "only to fall short of securing a faculty position due to factors outside my control."
Just a different story from academia.