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Can High-Tech Academia Survive Silicon Valley's Talent Binge?
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this year, Carnegie Mellon had one of the most capable robotics research centers in the world. Then, Uber hired away dozens of workers in a frantic push to jump start development of autonomous driving technology, which left CMU reeling. Now the NY Times asks whether such high-tech labs can continue to exist; Silicon Valley seems ready to flood such organizations with money whenever a vital new technology is almost ripe. "Carnegie Mellon's experience is a familiar one in the world of high-tech research. As a field matures, universities can wake up one day to find money flooding the premises; suddenly they're in a talent war with deep-pocketed firms from Silicon Valley. The impacts are also intellectual. When researchers leave for industry, their expertise winks off the map; they usually can't publish what they discover — or even talk about it over drinks with former colleagues. ... [Also], the intellectual register of their work changes. No more exploring hard, ''basic'' problems out of deep curiosity; they need to solve problems that will make their employers money."
If the professors want to make money, let them. It's not a requirement to sell your soul to the university, or to devote yourself to poverty in the name of higher-learning.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This 'story' is just an attempt to create the illusion of a shortage of AI researchers. I think it's pretty clear that a) there is no such shortage, and b) if there were, then colleges, as teaching institutions, would be uniquely able to deal with it themselves.
All of this talent was started and cultivated out of the 2004 DARPA project. That was a decade ago. The technology is finally ready for prime time. It's no longer "10 years in the future".
What academia needs to do is figure out what needs to be done in 2025, not 2015.
A lot of R&D follows a pretty repeatable pattern.
Self driving cars are now in phase 2. Google, Uber, and Apple are going to push hard to get the first cars out the door ASAP. In 2 decades what was once PhD level math and controls classes will be an introductory class for freshmen.
A university probably is involved in literally everything you mentioned. Especially curing your disease.
Ultimately, part of me is screaming "Good! Who cares?!" inside.
That's because educational institutions should be staffed with people who have the burning desire to teach other people. It's not for everyone, but there's a big difference between the person who is really interested in a subject, and the person who is really interested in sharing knowledge about the subject with as many others as possible.
If an entire lab full of faculty was poached by corporations, that tells me those people were more interested in big paychecks and/or being a part of a commercial project than in teaching.
It's a big mistake for a college or university to go down the road of trying to pay more and more, to "compete" with businesses for staff. That just raises the price of tuition and puts the education out of reach of more people. Precisely what the schools should NOT be about. Maybe they need to consider more flexible options to let experts in these industries come in and teach 1 or 2 classes, part-time? Otherwise, maybe they're getting too specific with what they're teaching, if their workers keep getting pulled right out for very specific corporate projects. Seems to me you can run a technology or science lab that teaches all sorts of concepts useful to a person interested in building an autonomous vehicle, without running autonomous vehicle research labs themselves.
Usually private industry can outbid universities in terms of salary but lags behind in terms of academic freedom, access to talented colleagues.
However, usually there are sufficient (good) academics who opt for a poor (typically for post-docs and junior assistant professors), modest (assistant to associate professors) to adequate (associate and full professors) salary (depending on whether or where you can get tenure) in an academic atmosphere over a more highly paid job where you're just another employee.
It mostly works out in the long run. Of course there are blips when you get patented ideological nutcases like gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and even core staff are pushed out. But mostly it evens out. Even for valuable tech subjects.
Very good professors (full, associate, and assistant) often manage to combine academic work and consultancy (especially at technological institutes). Especially when they aren't bogged down by their teaching workload.
It is completely logical what is happening here. What is valued most by many people in our society? Yes, it's money. So what these people do is simply apply what our culture teaches: go and earn lots of money. In other societies (in the past , now , or in the future , or elsewhere on earth) other values were or could become the most principal ones : knowledge , education , honesty, ... . Apparently we value knowledge , but maybe not enough. If knowledge gathering would be considered as the highest good then our society would have taken measures to associate a very high value with it , easily attracting the best of our minds.
less is more
in my life. The threat to Academia is our non-stop budget cuts driven by right wing politics and an overall anti elitist attitude (even against people who are legitimately elite and contribute their talents to society). For what I wish was the last God Damned Time people who are that fucking smart are _not_ in it for the money. They're not in it for those fat fat gov't grants. These people are so much more intelligent than you and me that money is just a means to their intellectual ends. Einstein was a patent clerk for fucks sake.
Yes, Academia is severely threatened right now; but not by better job offers...
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The summary glosses over the character of CMU itself. CMU is a research focused, selective private university that operates in large part from public and private grants and research contracts. It is not a public land-grant university set up to provide education opportunity to the general population. Teaching is a responsibility, but obtaining grant funding, then producing marketable research to obtain more grant funding, is a much bigger priority.
In addition, CMU benefits from patents. Just because there is public funding for the research, does not prevent the faculty and university from patenting the technology developed on the research projects. So the "raid" of CMU by Uber will likely result in another windfall later to CMU from patent licenses.
As Slashdot knows, the STEM shortage isn't a shortage of talented people, it is a shortage of jobs, so less people do it. In the 90s, my physics professors lamented less people coming in to physics. This is because there isn't a lot of jobs in physics like there is with computers.
If big business starts poaching smart people, more people will have incentive to get an education. It's not like university research is going away, but there will just be different faces as always. The net gain for society is more R&D and more educated folk.
I probably worked with some of those guys who got in with Uber when I also worked with the self driving car down Carnegie Mellon. Good for them.
God spoke to me
Part of the problem is that it takes experience to get experience. There are only a few top positions that have access to plenty of resources. Thus, only a few get a chance to learn how to work in such conditions where they have a lot of leverage, meaning those with the talent AND experience leveraging a lot of resources are very limited in number and thus highly sought after. You can't find that combo with a written test.
Warren Buffett can take bigger risks than medium-sized investors, and uses that capability to "gamble smartly" in a way the rest cannot (unless they risk crashing their company). He has the necessary skill, experience, and leverage, putting him at a big advantage over those with just 2 of those traits.
It's a kind of bottleneck at the intersection of skill and experience.
Table-ized A.I.
Except for the business schools, you are basically full of shit. Universities (as opposed to teaching colleges) are mainly interested in research and rather esoteric knowledge. The fact that business decided to use them as gatekeepers is the fault of business. In that, they aren't using the knowledge kids get by going to uni but rather they are using unis as weed out programs because they got tired of hiring people who will say anything to get a job. Yes, the sainted proles also bear some responsibility for the effect you see.
What a terrible problem: your organization dedicated to furthering human knowledge was too successful and now has to train a new crop of employees.
Just to be really clear, places like Carnegie Mellon are not education focused institutions, they're research focused. We are absolutely not talking about people with a passion for classroom work. In the early 1990s, the federal government removed the requirements and incentives for contractors to dedicate significant budget to basic research. In many cases, new funding for research would only be available to universities. The idea was to shift all basic research to the univerisities. The people we're talking about are the folks who would have been employed at a large company doing government funded R&D in the 1980s. Now, they're doing government funded R&D at universities. For about 5-6 years in the late 90s, that worked well. Since the dot com bust, it has not...
The amount of spending on academic basic research in the US exceeded the total amount spent on startup companies in the US every year from 2000 to 2013. That's a horrible inversion of capital that implied the university-first research system was failing. It's about time we saw some of this work turn the corner into commercialization, along with a restoration of economic sanity to R&D.
Examples like this show that our new system may be viable long term.
Kids, please hold this up as an example as some dumb shit that sucked the corporate cock a little too often and contracted Stockholm syndrome as a result.
Never listen to retards like this. Unchecked corporations will ruin your freedom as surely as any government.
Ignore this advice at your own peril.
From time to time, a group of researchers split off and make products that are useful right away (as opposed to research focused maybe 5 years or further out), and I think that's AWESOME. Why wouldn't it be great?
Look at some examples from Stanford University: SUN Microsystems was founded in 1982 as "Stanford University Network" created by Andy Bechtolsheim as a graduate student at Stanford. SUN productized RISC systems, NFS, Unix, etc. Really great stuff. This didn't bother or hurt Stanford one bit, just made it a more attractive place for future entrepreneurs to attend/work for a while.
In the same 1982, Jim Clark was an (associate?) professor at Stanford doing research in 3D graphics, and he split off Stanford and formed Silicon Graphics with his graduate student team (Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes, Kurt Akeley, etc) that they basically had created without taking any personal risk while working at Stanford. Nothing but great news for Stanford, people FLOCKED to join the university that produced that talented team.
A couple years later in 1984, Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner were running the Stanford University computer systems and they split off forming Cisco.
A few years later in 1998 Stanford professor Mendel Rosenblum, with his Stanford grad student Ed Bugnion, and some others spun up VMware.
The list goes on and on for Stanford alone.
All these really awesome people came up with solid ideas in academia that were applicable in the next few years as viable products, then these people stepped up to form companies and make products I buy and use every day (or I use their descendant products) and these people formed companies that employed a lot of good people (I worked at Silicon Graphics for four really fun years), putting out solid products and making enough money to let some of us save up and do our own startups in time.
Seriously, this is really positive stuff. Why is anybody afraid of a team stepping up and out of academia? Usually it just means the possibility of a product that will make my life better. Heck, succeed or fail, I've seen some of those early guys back in the University system helping out again and finishing their PhDs they started years earlier when they got distracted (Rocky Rhodes, Ed Bugnion, etc). And there always seems to be a flood of new blood feeding up into the University, earlier successes CONTRIBUTE to recruitment to these Universities, it is a selling point that Stanford has produced some great companies.
If Uber grabs up a lot of great people from Carnegie Mellon, a flood of 18 and 22 year olds will flow in to replace them and get trained up. And I say good for EVERYBODY.
I find this a nonsensical question. Aren't most people basically at the end of their Academic career once they get their PhD? That means grant money ran out, so they need to look for a post-doc or a teaching position. Since there is only one professor or a few per research group, that just leaves no options for the others, even very bright ones once they reach 30-35 years of age.
If a deep pockets company buys out the whole research group, that's something else. But even University research teams are smart enough to patent their own technology. And that's how Academia works, you build your research on top of that of others.
Well, except that if you are half-way through graduate school, you might have just been torpedoed and suffer a multi-year setback. If I recall correctly, CMU had something on the order of US$19M in robotics research grants from various organizations. (19M might not be the right number, but it was around that, or somewhere in the 20's, my memory is fuzzy.) That's funding for a lot of graduate students. Uber hired away PI's representing something like 40% of that. So, you lose your principal investigator, your thesis advisor, your RA stipend, probably most of your committee, and oh by the way: you need to start over at ground zero on a new topic, too, once you find another advisor. Good luck with that, since everybody you know is going to be scrambling for what ever scraps are left.
But, hey, you still get to live in Pittsburgh.
Actually, it's no "fault" at all. A four year college education may only be the equivalent of a few weeks of on-the-job training, but it's a few weeks that the employer doesn't have to pay for, given all the public subsidies of college educations.
Ask anyone trying to get any academic position at a top tier university, the competition is fierce. At best, the universities are losing established talent only temporarily. The people who left will return, and with their newly acquired industry experience and networks, they will make academic positions even harder to get.
tl;dr - the universities aren't the victims here, new grads and prospective academics are.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Its not uncommon for over a hundred qualified PhDs to apply for a tenure track professorship at even mid level state universities, much less the Stanfords and CMUs. By staying on for PhD the person has already expressed a commitment to the academic side, forgoing up to a million dollars in salary during a 5-8 year PHD period.
For supporting first class industrial research. Older scientists remember when Bell Labs, IBM, Xerox, Exxon etc did world class R&D. They still do, but on a much reduced scale after the financial restructurings of the 1990s. The new guys with huge piles of cash have stepped in to do some of this.
The universities are pretty big on pushing the idea that a university degree is part of the path of landing a good paying job. This resulted in lots of people going to university, flooding the market with people holding degrees. The end result being that businesses started requiring degrees for positions that didn't really need one, pretty much because they could. Even with this, there's still lots of people with degrees who couldn't land a job with it.
This is actually coming back to bit the universities in the ass a bit, because now the expectation is that the university's purpose is to provide job training, a 4 year vocational school instead of university. A lot of the more traditional studies are starting to suffer like pure science, research, arts, philosophy, literature, history, etc. because these degrees don't typically translate directly into a job nowadays so people consider them worthless. Of course, as long as the money keeps pouring in most universities don't care though.