The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)

http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/05/secret-lives-of-professors.html

by sinc • 16 years ago

168 56 16 years ago

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

phreeza• 16 years ago

I wish some of my professors would have read this as grad students. Become a professor because you love teaching, not because you want to do research.

Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?

hugh3• 16 years ago

Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?

Being a staff scientist at a national lab is about as close as you can get to this in the US. Compared to being a professor you'll get similar money (sometimes more), less prestige, more time for research and slightly more annoying bureaucracy. There's upsides and downsides of each.

pgbovine2• 16 years ago

Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?

an academic research lab sponsored by a big company (note that this is not the same as a corporate R&D division) ... in the 1970's, this was epitomized by Xerox PARC and AT&T Bell Labs. today, Microsoft Research is currently the leader in this category.

pwhelan2• 16 years ago

MSFT Research also sends the nicest rejection letters you can imagine.

_delirium5• 16 years ago

A handful of universities have Research Professor positions. At Carnegie Mellon, it's basically the same as a normal Professor (tenured, similar prestige, etc.), except that you don't normally teach, and in return, you're expected to fund a portion of your own salary out of the grants you bring in. (If you don't bring in grants some year, you can fall back on teaching to earn your keep, so research profs do occasionally teach.)

pwhelan2• 16 years ago

Some of these profs will offer special classes that might otherwise not really get offered or have enough students to warrant forcing someone to teach.

I loved these classes because the profs were usually really passionate about the subject and that showed in their efforts. There was less droning on and emphasis on arcane, irrelevant minutiae and more "basic principles... now we build stuff and talk about the fun problems there". Those classes were so enjoyable that they almost made me pursue a PhD even though I am not right for that -- at least for now.

amichail2• 16 years ago

It's more fun to create something novel that many people use and appreciate (e.g., an iPhone game).

Much better than research prototypes that go no where beyond a publication or two.

pgbovine2• 16 years ago

ok, i'll bite ;)

if everyone thought the way that you did, then we'd still be programming by submitting our punch cards to some gigantic centralized machine. think about how much basic academic research occurred before the invention of something like the iPhone became possible

natrius• 16 years ago

There are plenty of necessary things in life that aren't exciting to do. There's nothing wrong with pointing it out unless you're trying to get more people to unwittingly do those things without fully understanding their choice.

EDIT: I'm not trying to say that pure science is universally unexciting. Few things are. But generally, more people seem to be interested in consumer products than pure science research.

endtime2• 16 years ago

Seriously? You'd rather implement Tetris in Obj-C than make a fundamental, provable improvement to an important algorithm? We have very different ideas of fun.

amichail2• 16 years ago

A Tetris clone would not be novel though.

I would rather build novel games based on my ideas for the iPhone than do basic research.

nostrademons• 16 years ago

If by "fundamental, provable improvement to an important algorithm", you mean something like discovering Floyd-Warshall, then yes. I'd rather be programming Tetris in Obj-C. Floyd-Warshall, while cool, wouldn't be recognized by 99.9999% of the people out there, while iPhone Tetris would be used by millions. More to the point, if you hack up iPhone Tetris, you have a game that you can play, while if you invent Floyd-Warshall, you have a graph algorithm that you can...er, it's bound to be useful sometime. Plus it takes maybe a day or two to hack up Tetris, while it takes several years to do basic CS research.

This is why I'm not an academic.

I can respect basic CS research without wanting to do it myself. I use the fruits of it all the time. But when faced with a problem, I'd rather hack up something that's good enough to get something on the screen than spend the time necessary to cross all the Ts and dot the Is for a publishable paper. To me, the code and what you can do with it speaks for itself.

gvb• 16 years ago

Sir Isaac Newton would disagree with you.

"I know not what I appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, whilest the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Quotations/Newto...

tjmaxal2• 16 years ago

classic quote

greendestiny2• 16 years ago

Those downvotes seem harsh. I agree with you. While amazing, groundbreaking research is possible in academic computer science - the general lifecycle of research is some irrelevant poorly made prototype that ignores any number of real world concerns and leads to a couple of uninspired papers that noone reads.

The point of making game is actually in having an effect on people, mostly the point of writing papers is padding out an academic resume.

arethuza• 16 years ago

At the end of my time in academia I had become, as one friend put it "hyper cynical". However, this actually made me much better at playing the publications game - pretty much every collaboration with colleagues involved some negotiation over where in the list of authors my name would go.

I left, co-founded a company, moved onto other things and have never regretted leaving academia - I much prefer building things people do use to writing papers about things that people will probably ignore (that being the fate of most academic research).

The only bit about academic life that I wouldn't mind having is the nice juicy final salary pension scheme!

abstractbill• 16 years ago

This nicely sums up a bunch of reasons why I decided not to do a postdoc, and instead joined my first startup after finishing my PhD. I'm sure it works for some people, but I just couldn't see myself being happy with it.

timr• 16 years ago

Same for me. I had a few opportunities for good post-docs, but I just couldn't see the point. I didn't really want to be a professor, and if you don't want to be a prof, a post-doc is just a really low-rent job.

anongradstudent3• 16 years ago

Do you think there's a point to getting a PhD at all? I've been debating dropping out of my PhD program (after one year), mostly for personal reasons, but partially because most grads from my (top N) program end up not being able to land a research or academic position after graduation. If I end up like 95% of the graduates from my program, will it have been a waste of time?

Is there any value in a PhD if you do your own startup, become a dev at a huge company like Google, or become a dev at a small company like Yelp? And if so, what does it get you over having five years of experience? I don't mean in monetary terms -- a PhD is obviously a net negative monetarily; what I'm looking for is the chance to make a living working on 'interesting' problems.

vlad• 16 years ago

Since others may not know, you and Bill completed your PhD's in Mathematics and Biology/Chemistry, respectively. You both had experience programming and are now early employees of a software startup. Would you say you were partially drawn to the software world to change things up? Are there counter-examples on Hacker News of graduate students in Computer Science looking forward to doing a post-doc (i.e., the reverse situation)?

nagrom• 16 years ago

This depends on your situation. I'm doing a post doc right now, while looking for something else. But I was 24 when I got my PhD, and through the post doc position got the chance to go and live in Japan, China, Germany and Switzerland. I set my own hours, work on whatever I want within reason and get a lot of shiny toys to play with.

I probably don't want to become a lecturer because I see it as a service job - you're dealing with members of the public. But doing a post doc has paid as much as I'd get in industry, but with a lot more freedom.

If I could find an interesting startup I'd probably leave though.

_delirium5• 16 years ago

This does vary based on the field and kind of school. It's definitely accurate for being a professor at a top-tier research university in the sciences or engineering. A prof job at those kinds of places could accurately be titled "research manager": the main job requirements are managing and bringing in funding for a fairly large research lab of 5-10 grad students and possibly some research scientists and postdocs.

But you can shift the balance of the various components if you go to different kinds of schools. To take the opposite end of the spectrum, if you're the CS prof at a small liberal-arts college, your job will involve a lot more teaching and mentoring undergrads, and a lot less grant-writing and research-lab management. It's unfortunately not true that there's a happy medium to fit every kind of temperament, but there are some options at least.

holdenc• 16 years ago

When you join an elite school as an academic you become a bureaucrat in a bureaucracy. Want to spend the institution's money? Make an important decision? Get people to help you? Get ready to grovel, and sacrifice much of what you believe is worth fighting for.

winzie• 16 years ago

I can certainly see the entrepreneurial aspect of being a professor -- managing a lab, hiring and firing people, and sourcing funding, and I don't disagree that professors are there to inspire the next generation. However, there is still a part of me that feels professors have that "safety net". Tenured professors are paid a monthly salary by the university, and often times at / above industry (that's true at least in Canada anyways). With a steady income, they have no risk, and the risk factor is a big part of being an entrepreneur.

_delirium5• 16 years ago

> With a steady income, they have no risk, and the risk factor is a big part of being an entrepreneur.

For first-time entrepreneurs I agree, but there are a lot of "serial entrepreneurs" who sold a company for multi-millions, and are now founding new companies. Millions in the bank definitely seems like a big safety net that insulates you from most real-world risk...

fadmmatt• 16 years ago

I was an entrepreneur (failed twice), and I'm now a professor.

Being a pre-tenure professor is way more terrifying than being an entrepreneur was.

And, depending on the field, between 25% and 75% of your salary as a professor will come from being able to procure external funding.

If you can't convince the funding agencies to pay you, then tenure buys you an office, a teaching load and health care.

It's been terrifying for me because my hit rate is about the same as Matt's. I've had very little luck getting funding for my research.

And, at the last funding panel I served on, the funding rate was down to 5%. My own fund-seeking overhead is now at 60% of my time, and I'm still not getting any.

Either we have too many scientists, or not enough science funding. I don't think the current system is sustainable.

frossie• 16 years ago

Either we have too many scientists, or not enough science funding.

A little bit of both, to which I would add a third: the way we fund science is... I'm going to charitably say "sub-optimal"

tensor2• 16 years ago

As others have said, you pay a LOT to get that tenured position. You also risk a lot. Imagine being 32 and just starting a tenure track position. All your friends in industry are already earning nearly 100k and have been earning decent salaries all the while you were in graduate school and post-docs for the past eight years. They already have houses, cars, and other items giving them some form of security. You are maybe in debt, and have very little if not.

Now you get to work for five years to earn your tenure. You work nights, maybe weekends. Your salary is better, but not that much better than your friends got out of university. At the end of the five years, you may be denied tenure. Are you going to give it another shot after that? Another five years?

Also, "and often times at / above industry (that's true at least in Canada anyways)", I do not see this to be true. Especially not for people of similar technical skill who work hard and long hours.

The biggest reason people do not pursue a tenure track position is a distinct lack of a safety net. The above only deals with the monetary aspect of it as well. The social cost is equally high: you never know where you will end up settling down.

wisty• 16 years ago

On salary, keep in mind that getting tenure is a "tournament" game, just like getting a VP (or CXO) position. You have to work hard, and prove that you are better than all your peers (who are also pretty damn smart, and are also working hard).

The rewards are there (until someone decides that a restructure will get rid of all the deadwood - people who won the tournament then quite rationally began resting on their laurels) but it's not an easy game to play.

DannoHung2• 16 years ago

Where the fuck is all the money going?

DannoHung2• 16 years ago

I'm sorry, but I wasn't just referring to the grant money. I mean the money that colleges get from tuition, donations, etc. Where is all that money going to? What is costing so much now?

For all the talk about costs of colleges going up, I have never seen a single explanation of where the money is going. And if it ain't going into research, then it's gotta be going somewhere.

tjmaxal2• 16 years ago

I really liked how he compared being a young professor to being in a startup. I don't know how accurate that analogy really is but it's certainly fun to think about. At my undergrad they had a whole program designed to commercialize faculty research by funding school centric startups. I still find the whole thing fascinating.

The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)

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