Computing Is Indeed a Discipline in Crisis

https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/computing-is-indeed-a-discipline-in-crisis/

by tchalla • 9 months ago

11 2 9 months ago

cacm.acm.org

chermi• 9 months ago

Cycles are inevitable. If they're all right about LLMs being overhyped, then they will get their reward for working on the better thing.

If the "problem" is recent grads or PhDs getting paid to much to leave academia, what they're really complaining about is not having cheap (underpaid) labor. I don't think that's a valid or humane complaint.

"The unrelenting growth of academic computing departments over the past 15 years has been driven by the attractiveness of computing as a career. I still remember that computer-science students would tell me they chose to pursue computer science because they enjoyed programming in high school. That later changed to “computer science offers good jobs,” which later changed to “computer science offers good money.”

What's the actual issue here? They're unhappy if there's too few students and unhappy if there's too many. Maybe the issue could be found by looking in the mirror: the universities as they exist are becoming obsolete and certainly overpriced for many people (working at chipotle wouldn't hurt as much if you weren't 200k in debt, not that I'm at all happy people aren't getting the jobs they want). Maybe the majority of people going into programming don't/didn't need a BS, at least as universities are currently structured and priced. A university was originally designed for the few highly intellectual people who wanted to be in research and hasn't changed much since. And now even state schools (CSUs vs UCs) are expensive. (In the US) they have a stranglehold on being the universal "job certification", and they are backed by federal loan guarantees, so they charge whatever they want and people have to pay. And they are basically a cartel, never granting new charters so they can artifically supress supply and certainly never letting any college-like institution that tries to do something even a little different have a chance.

Maybe this is part a healthy self-correction away from everyone needing a BS. Maybe we we need to rethink the education/training system and bring universities back to being research institutes and come up with new insitutions for those only looking for job training/skill acquisition. If someone's aim is to get a programming job and they don't care about theory then they shouldn't need to pay so much for a certificate that isn't even efficient at training them for the job. Of course in an ideal world, everyone should be able to get a great, broad classical and intellectually stimulating education AND job training/"skill certification". But the system trying to both at once doesn't seem to be working very well especially for the latter, and again, costs too damn much. It's so widely accepted that the actual major/specialization doesn't even matter for most jobs (outside of technical jobs) that people don't even think about how wild that is. The VAST majority of people getting a BS/BA aren't trying to be researchers. If the student's goal and thus value of the university was training/job qualification, shouldn't the degree major matter?! It's clearly inefficient and not cost effective, as evidenced by student loan debt being such a big political issue (in the US).

Sorry for the long rant, but I don't think it's too off-topic. The issue is systemic and I guarantee the university system is ecstatic that AI is being blamed instead of themselves. Of course the actual PI's don't have much power over the system, but they should be a little more aware of their surroundings before they conclude the problem is the current AI boom. For example, the implication here "For example, in view of the growing gap between increasingly tight federal funding for academic computing research and the widely generous industrial funding, many AI researchers are questioning the viability of the academic path." is that industrial funding is a major cause of the decline in the attractiveness of working at a university. News flash: unless you're the top 0.01% in your field, academia sucks and has for many years and blaming it on industry is very weak. The implication seems to be that you need to make industry less attractive to make universities more attractive... why not work on making universities more attractive? I promise that making industry less attractive will even further reduce your talent pool.

musicale• 9 months ago

$250M would pay for a lot of grad students. Mixture of non-experts.

Computing Is Indeed a Discipline in Crisis

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