[HN Gopher] The flight of the Weird Nerd from academia
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The flight of the Weird Nerd from academia
Author : apwheele
Score : 12 points
Date : 2024-01-10 14:39 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.writingruxandrabio.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.writingruxandrabio.com)
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I work both in an R&D group at a company and at the university
| and it's like night and day. At the company, if we need something
| to do the job it is simply purchased. At the university I had
| long meetings about whether or not I was allowed to spend 8 euros
| of my own grant money on VAT. In the company, if a project is
| under budget, good news! we can spend it on something else. At
| the university I was told to spend money before end of year on a
| software development project otherwise there may be budget
| issues. Moreover, the university provides very little reward for
| success unless you have a tenure track position.
|
| What is the reward for publishing papers, getting grants, or
| doing other things that provide direct benefit to the university?
| Well nothing except perhaps the continuation of your job. This
| isn't even guaranteed even if you can pay for yourself with
| grants. There is a case I know of recently of a researcher with a
| non-permanent position and plenty of ERC money who was fired.
| Why? The state ruled that he had been in his non-permanent
| position for too long and the university didn't have any deaths
| recently so there were no open positions for him.
|
| Ultimately, you have to ask yourself, what is the entire goal of
| academic research? Write more papers? The enshitification of
| academia has been the introduction of metrics, the expansion of
| the administration, the archaic phd-postdoc-tenure-track pipeline
| which simply ignores in many cases that a project may need more
| than one super star, perhaps they need a good team with different
| skills that work together. From my understanding, Edward Lorenz
| did not publish a paper for more than 5 years while he worked on
| his atmospheric circulation problem. This led to the entire field
| of chaos. Can you imagine a research scientist today simply
| rejecting writing papers, advising phds and master students,
| simply because he had things he was interested in doing?
|
| There is a constant pulling away from your curiosity towards
| whatever it is you think you will be evaluated on. And it is
| insidious. It typically doesn't come directly from your
| supervisor. It is simply the environment you find yourself
| surrounded in. Academic societies give awards and cite the number
| of papers an awardee has published in recent years. You think,
| perhaps i should publish more? Your colleague gets a grant and
| their contract is extended several years because they now have
| money to pay for themselves. So you think, i should apply for
| another grant. You see people organizing sessions, workshops,
| special issues, etc. They become "known". You think, perhaps I
| should organize a session or a special issue. Perhaps this is all
| my inability to keep myself focused on a singular task and push
| my projects forward. But I don't seem to be the only one with
| this experience. There is always another Nature/Science/whatever
| op-ed on the plight of the post-PhD, non-permanent scientific
| staff.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I don't hate my job. I love my job. I just
| wish I could find the singular focus that would drive me to
| complete more research instead of writing long essays on hacker
| news.
| MountainMan1312 wrote:
| I'm also realizing the enshitification of school, but as a
| student.
|
| For example, I'm currently worried I might fail my Python class
| because I'm waiting on tech support for this stupid product the
| school bought so the teachers wouldn't have to teach. I asked
| the instructor for help and his response was basically "well
| shit, hope you get it working because if you don't you fail the
| class, good luck"
|
| So, what now? Because of their incompetence, because they're
| too lazy to teach, I'm a failure? Makes no sense at all.
| Loughla wrote:
| If the technology doesn't work, and you didn't wait until the
| last possible minute to do it, file an appeal with the
| department or Dean.
|
| This is how it works when you have a shit faculty.
|
| Now. If the technology doesn't work because you aren't
| following the required specs, or you waited until the last
| minute to do anything, you're fucked.
|
| Source: I teach in higher ed, but I do not use third party
| software because it's all trash.
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