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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."
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.
Exactly. Universities are already churning out more PhDs than there are teaching positions, so it's not like they are lacking a pool of scientists to choose from.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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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Well, it's like everything else in the US economy: the cream of the crop (real or apparent) get huge options and money, while the rest grovel and scrape for Door #2.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
If you were planning an economy, that's kind of what you'd want, right? The ones with most potential getting the most capability to use their potential?
It's not the concept that people have trouble with, its the particular gradient we have now that is the problem... Far too top heavy, with the bottom half actually seeing a significantly decreasing standard of living. On average, no part of society should have to live a decreasing standard of living so long as the aggregate wealth keeps on growing.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
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
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.
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.