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Vint Cerf on Why Programmers Don't Join the ACM
jfruh writes "The Association for Computing Machinery is a storied professional group for computer programmers, but its membership hasn't grown in recent years to keep pace with the industry. Vint Cerf, who recently concluded his term as ACM president, asked developers what was keeping them from signing up. Their answers: paywalled content, lack of information relevant to non-academics, and code that wasn't freely available."
I can get every thing I need from Google. Why would I pay money to join the ACM? A 25 year old bottle of Scotch is a much better value.
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Change the acronym to Applying Computers to Money and you'd have a popular organization.
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I've been a member for some time but let it lapse a few years ago because it got to the point that the benefits didn't justify the expense. Or rather, the benefits hadn't justified the expense for some time, I finally got fed up hoping that might change. I finally noticed I wasn't getting my money's worth and pulled the plug on it. Much of ACM seems designed to extract maximum income from its membership. That gravy train is over, as far as I'm concerned.
While you're taking CS courses in a university, ACM membership is great! But in the corporate world there's often not a good reason to join.
I was president of my university's ACM chapter at one point, but I've let my membership lapse. The value proposition just isn't worth it to me at the moment.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Did the blurb just say the ACM was for programmers? The only people I know who give the slightest of shits about ACM are students and professors. For computer programmers my ass.
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ACM is a great resource and I regularly borrow journals from friends.
My issues are simple.
1) I'm self educated. ACM discriminates against people like me. It doesn't matter that I have 20 years experience in protocol and codec design or that I've designed algorithms which they have published articles analyzing.
2) price. ACM is too expensive for individuals and programmers who are actual scientists and actual engineers as opposed to Python coding web site developers have a hard enough time getting bosses to pay for RAM upgrades. Things like "club memberships" are generally out of the question.
3) Too many journals to choose from and each one costs more. Professional programmers probably want 3-5 different journals. I haven't checked in a while, but I would want the journals on compilers, machine vision, signal processing and probably AI (if those are all categories) but I wouldn't want to pay for all 3. A downloadable printable version of the actual journals or at least an ebook would be welcome. Last I checked, they only offered article by article.
Finally, I never see ACM articles linked from Google. You'd imagine searches for things like "reduction of inter block artifacts in discrete wavelet transforms" should nail 5 ACM articles on the first page. Instead, I see mailing lists.
Because of Internet.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
There is nothing in there that low grade code monkeys, which is the vast majority of the software industry, need to know. I mean, how much skills do you have to have to run a mom and pop web store, publish the jillionth fart app, or maintain a payroll system?
Of course, these code monkeys get swamped whenever the next major technology change comes along but, hey, we can't all be good enough to work for Google or Apple, etc.
Turns out some recent conferences have their presentations recorded in HD video. An example is POPL. OK, so I went and downloaded a few videos on formal methods hoping to see something I cared about. I downloaded some 5 videos in one day. Next day I get an e-mail saying my ACM DL subscription has been frozen due to excessive use and I need to contact membership services to get it reopened.
In addition to this, the ACM DL terms of use still prohibit "systematically downloading" articles which according to them means downloading all articles of an issue of a journal or all the articles of a conference. This is just plain stupid.
Most of these organizations and associations completely fail to understand how they would be able to create added value for their potential members. As an electronic engineer I'm supposed to be a member of IEEE. I can't think of a single reason why I would subscribe, and the people and letters of IEEE didn't make things better. On the contrary.
There is as an academic. Apparently being a member of the ACM has a negative value, because in exchange for the $99/year membership fee I typically get a $100-150 discount on attending ACM conferences. If you go to a couple of conferences a year then that's a good deal. For people outside academia, there's less relevance. ACM Queue, which provides material for 'practitioners' section of Communications of the ACM, generally has some good material, but it's all free whether your an ACM member or not.
I like the ACM as an organisation, but they're hard pressed to justify the cost of membership.
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ACM carries a historic name, but subscriptions cannot justify buying just that. IMHO, most techie people do try it out and then have their memberships lapse.
Yes, whenever I've been googling for something and run across a paywalled ACM article on the subject I think "f*** those guys" and get my info somewhere else
I listed my membership on my résumé, along with the ACM logo.
This was 15 years ago and I was a contractor around Washington, DC, doing many short-term contracts.
Yes, it was effective.
In the course of interviews, the interviewer would often tell me that they had been meaning to join, or had heard of it, but not once that they were themselves a member. Just a little psychological advantage, I guess. This helped,too, because I never went to college.
That said, I got absolutely nothing from their articles or other content.
-- My Weblog.
Thank God money evolved before humans or else we would never exist.
rewriting history since 2109
This is, unfortunately, the case with a number of funding bodies in academia. For example, DARPA won't pay for my membership, but will pay for the conference. My institution decided to pay for membership out of a different pot of money that doesn't have these restrictions, which ends up with a saving of a few hundred dollars on one account and a cost of a hundred dollars on another.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I am a long time member of the ACM, and I've always thought the value for money was excellent. I'm not an academic and I don't go to conferences. The Safari and 24/7 Books Online subscriptions, plus the skillsoft training is where I see most of the value.
I thought about joining a while ago for the group health insurance plan, but they dropped that. So I did not join.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I am an ACM member, but I'm not happy with it. My biggest complaint about the ACM is their failure to understand why copyright is bad and needs massive reform or abolishment. Instead, they jump in bed, ideologically, with copyright extremists! $100 membership isn't good enough for access to the digital library, have to pay another $100 for that? What a total money grab, locking up knowledge and for what? To coerce membership fees from researchers? Aren't they supposed to be a non-profit organization? The digital library should be public! Freely available to all, including non-members. Some years, CACM has had a "special" issue in the summer devoted to intellectual property issues. Some of those CACM articles are downright shameful in their unquestioned support of the current system, preferring to dive into how to use copyright when they haven't discussed why. It's like the whole fake "teach the controversy" debate between Evolution and Creationism. Any science magazine that dared treat Creationism as if it was valid science would quickly lose all respect and become a laughingstock. But the ACM still soberly talks as if copyright can somehow still work. It's like listening to some cranks say that they can fix the problems with the Theory of Intelligent Design, just have to do more exploration and research.
It's embarrassing. On technological matters, the ACM ought to be one of the most progressive organizations in existence. Instead, they were slow to get on the Internet. Their early websites were garbage nearly devoid of content, seemingly made live only because it was even more embarrassing not to have a website at all! They were late to the party for online renewal of membership. Yes, ACM has done online renewal for years, but they weren't the first to do that, far from it. Now they're going to be late to the death of copyright.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
At least your local Mensa usually has a monthly games night.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I've been a member of both ACM & IEEE for several decades. As a dinosaur, I much prefer print versions of all their varied pubs to any of the lame digital editions. I come from the academic world, but have been out of it for a long time and still find ACM relevant, especially after their revamp of Communications a couple of years ago. Practitioners? The Kode Vicious column is nearly the worth the price of subscription. I've never been interested in the Digital Library at extra cost, but it's probably worth it to some.
IEEE? Their Computer Society is marginally OK, but only for the Hal Berghel articles, as far as I'm concerned. IEEE Spectrum has become an exercise in suckitude, the bastard child of Wired's graphic design and Popular Science's "in depth" examination of current topics. Tired of this and their pimping life insurance, I've lapsed on IEEE membership and may do so for the Computer Society too in the near future.
I think this highlights why the time of organizations like ACM might be drawing to a close. Historically it was not just a paywalled website like many others, it was a professional organization which people from similar backgrounds joined so they could share resources and networking among their peers. In the past it made sense, 'this is our resource for us, we all pay to create and maintain it', but today it is so easy for communities to come together for next to nothing that it does not really make as much sense. In many ways, the internet killed professional societies. Outside organized represention communities to other institutions (like working groups setting standards or meeting with regulators) they do not really have much function anymore.
It's not a "CS club", it's one of the largest academic communities in the world. Their weight varies by discipline, but in mine (computer graphics) they're ubiquitous: SIGGRAPH is run by the ACM. That's a conference with tens of thousands of attendees every year where major companies like Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Autodesk and more go to show off their new research and products, both hardware and software.
The problem the ACM has is that joining has little incentive if you don't go to a conference. If you do, especially as a student, the steep discount makes it more than worth it, but otherwise there's little to gain that cannot be had elsewhere. Computer science in general has always been strong on giving out pre-prints of articles published in journals and conference proceedings, so you rarely need privileged access to eg. the ACM's publications. Their newsletter is neat in that they give job listings that I probably would have a hard time finding elsewhere, being so very focused, yet it's not particularly useful due to geographical spread and it's most certainly not worth the standard admission fee. I've had no incentive to dig around and figure out what else a membership offers, which goes to show...
From the point of view of academics, the response of Suresh Venkatasubramanian to Cerf's letter has been getting a lot of well-deserved attention, and is worth a read.