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."

Comments

If they want to make money

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:If they want to make money

[alvinrod]

Professors in CS, engineering, and similar fields actually make reasonably good pay, such that it's not necessarily a matter of money. I suspect that any pay bump was only a small part of the reason why they went to work for Uber. I'm willing to bet Uber was offering boatloads of funding for whatever they wanted to work on without the hassle of having to deal with the usual university politics or bureaucracy to do the kind of research that they want.

And there's really no downside for them either as if they get tired of Uber they'll likely have no problem getting a new university position as they'll be bringing a lot of experience to the table, never mind potential connections to industry that can be beneficial to a university.

Re: If they want to make money

[ranton]

This wouldn't be a problem if enough public money was being put into basic research. I doubt 1960's NASA or the Manhatten Project had trouble keeping top talent. Increasing this funding also solves any public and private STEM shortages since kids will follow the money even without manipulative iniatives to get kids into science and programming.

Re: If they want to make money

[Hognoxious]

Right. Because there are elves that create lesson plans and homework marks itself.

Re:If they want to make money

[dgatwood]

I'm not sure I believe any of those numbers. A decade ago, I think I got $3k–$4k (I forget the exact number) for teaching a 10-week CS class as an adjunct. I think they're paying closer to $6k per quarter per class now. The only problem is, most folks only get to teach one class per quarter (at most), and you can't live on $18k per year in the Bay Area, so college adjunct faculty end up taking two or three jobs just to make ends meet. The problem isn't the pay per hour so much as the lack of sufficient hours. That and the fact that most classes involve spending lots of time outside of class grading papers, preparing lectures, etc. Three classes could easily be close to a full 40-hour work week, depending on the class. So even if you could manage three classes at $6k per class, you'd be working full-time for $54k per year (assuming you can't teach summer school). Again, you can't live on that out here.

As for your current salary, that isn't much higher than what I'm making at a startup, but I'm working roughly a 40-hour week, give or take. Where I work, we manage our project goals sensibly, we don't over-commit, and we deliver a quality product that is used by over a million people (and by about a quarter million in any given day). If you're really working 100 hours per week, your management is incompetent. No competent manager would work people 100 hours in a week, or even 60, because the productivity of programmers starts to diminish after barely twenty. By 60 hours, you're getting less done in a week than if you only worked 40 hours. By 100 hours, you'd get more work done by coming in for a single eight-hour day and spending the other four sitting around doing nothing.

You see, 100 hours per week, if it is a 5-day week, means that even if you have a cot to sleep on in the office, you're still getting less than 4 hours sleep. If it is a 7-day week, you would still have to live within a few blocks of the office to get eight hours of sleep, without doing anything else but working. Besides being very psychologically damaging, that is physically damaging, putting workers at dramatically elevated risk of premature death due to heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and pretty much every other disease you can think of. And on top of that, working so close to when you go to sleep would cause severe sleep disturbance, so even if everyone somehow managed to do that for more than two or three weeks without completely burning out and saying "screw this" and spending most of the day goofing off, they would still not be able to function at more than a fraction of their normal mental capacity.

Even menial jobs like factory work require better concentration than can reasonably be achieved with a 60-hour work week, much less a 100-hour work week. There's simply no way anyone remotely competent as a manager could ask for such things of employees, so if your management is doing so, you should start looking for another job right now. Because that's not the way the Silicon Valley normally works—not even at startups... except maybe game companies.

Re:If they want to make money

[Shados]

Then why do I keep reading here that they don't? Is somebody lying?

It's almost as if different universities have different standards. CMU doesn't pay world class robotic professors the same as the local community college pay the CS 101 teacher..

They'll start working on the next thing.

[0100010001010011]

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.

• Academia & purely theoretical, no reason other than 'because'. Companies used to have labs like this but since they weren't immediately profitable they killed them.
• Industry/Military. Someone figured out how to profit or kill people with it. No one knew what to do with the laser at first.
• Ubiquitousness. Then it's everywhere. I'm sure Marconi didn't plan on sending data to pocket computers. Someone else figured that out.

• 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.

Re:What's the big deal about universities?

[Anonymous Coward]

A university probably is involved in literally everything you mentioned. Especially curing your disease.

I get the concern, but ....

[King_TJ]

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.

Re:astroturfage

[phantomfive]

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.

Ordinarily, yes, it works out.

[golodh]

A researcher's "utility function" is usually something of a weighted sum of research opportunities, access to inspiring colleagues and talented students, academic freedom plus non-interference from outside the academy, and salary.

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.

That's the dumbest question I've ever read

[rsilvergun]

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...

Re:That's the dumbest question I've ever read

[phantomfive]

Einstein was a patent clerk for fucks sake.

That really wasn't his preferred employment situation.........but he made the best of it.

people who are that fucking smart are _not_ in it for the money.

People who are smart do smart things, even in bad situations. They make the best of their situation, but they would also prefer to have money. There were plenty of people at the Advanced Institute who went after money, and they were definitely smart.

Re:astroturfage

[geoskd]

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.

It's GREAT when research groups go make products..

[brianwski]

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.