Meanwhile I'm being paid obscene amounts of money to center divs and type @Autowired and @Component for projects that never end up launching anyway. It's all so badly badly flawed.
I’m a teacher. I’ve never seen any evidence teachers are undervalued. Teachers don’t get paid more when they leave teaching for other jobs. Difficulties in hiring can be fully explained by having the same pay scale for those teaching subjects in demand in the outside world like Computer Science or Mathematics and those with either less demand or greater supply like Physical Education or English. Paying primary school teachers and secondary school teachers on the same scale is distortionary in the same manner.
Teachers in the government sector get very, very good job security and benefits for doing a hard job but plenty of people do hard jobs for much poorer compensation. And teachers aren’t magic. They come in a very distant third in their effects on student achievement behind student characteristics and family characteristics.
> By almost all objective measures, teachers don’t actually seem to be underpaid in the traditional sense. “Nationwide, the average teacher salary was $60,477 during the 2017–18 school year.” And teachers work around 2 hours less a week than the average profession (“ 40.6 hours during the work week, compared to 42.4 hours for private-sector professionals”). BLS Occupational Information Network studies found that teaching isn’t a particularly stressful job relative to other professions, and teachers typically have pretty solid relative job security. In addition to all of this, teachers don’t make a lot when they leave teaching and education majors have the lowest standardized test scores of any major. Although teachers have extraordinarily high social prestige, it looks like we are paid close to what we are worth on the actual job market.
https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-e...
I'm asking because based on my country, I think there literally is no solution and we just have to live with the fact that CS education cannot be good (it might also happen to some other fields over time).
Paying CS teachers more than PE or English teachers is not politically viable as teachers and their unions wouldn't accept it, and paying all teachers a salary based on the market value of the most in-demand field is too expensive, bound to be unacceptable to taxpayers (who are already jealous of the incredible benefits and job security teachers have), and creates unacceptable incentives in education choices (ie even more people will try to become English teachers because the demand is the same, but the salaries are increased, so the oversupply of labor in those fields would increase even further, and the labor supply in in-demand fields would actually go down, because even though they also now get paid more for teaching positions, their relative attractiveness actually went down).
So is it even possible to solve this problem?
It looks like you have already identified your problem. You could give CS teachers double appointments with the IT department if you have absolutely no wiggling space on money/conditions. Or maybe you could gather some programmers who are eager to reach out to kids and let them work part-time as teachers after they obtain the necessary qualifications.
I think this depends highly on the subject of the teacher and private v. public schools. My SO was a public school teacher in a STEM discipline and at the very top of the district payscale. My SO now makes three times as much in industry. And we have much better healthcare.
This is untrue for teachers who left teaching job I know. They all get paid more.
In all seriousness, if teaching is such a great job, why does average teacher leave so quickly instead of staying for long years?
* Administration overload (government compliance type stuff)
* Developing brains aren't always fun to be around
* Parents expect to outsource child rearing to the school and want to be catered to in their unique sensibilities while the teacher wants to focus on what's best for the kid and the class
* Even here in Europe, an increasingly litigious attitude, where any school decision you disagree with is escalated and finally prosecuted. This increases the box-ticking, cover-your-ass sort of administration
This has some of the classic ingredients for cooking up a burnout:
* Investing emotionally in your work
* Feeling like you're letting people down constantly
* Being expected to do things that go against your personal ethics
* Spending a lot of time on things you consider are wasting your time
Most of the interesting things in our field can be done with passing json objects around a network and persisting them in whatever way is durable, a bit secure and easy to develop.
What we really need to see is the advancement of computer vision, robotics, and dynamic, goal-based software decision making capabilities. And I suppose battery technology and radio networking too, but that's more about electricity and physics than software.
When that comes, you will see many mundane human tasks go straight to the robots, and hopefully every family will be permitted to own one (politics is all about limiting people from doing things for sane prices, right?)
If a family's robot could till the land, grow food, cook it, synthesize medicines, build a home, serve as physical security and defence, play games for entertainment, transport the family from place to place, etc etc... then quickly the only world industry still in existence would be semiconductor manufacturers :)
The "no-code" environments from yesteryear were really, really good, and motivated "non-coders" accomplished amazing things with them. Hypercard, for example.
But even with Hypercard, at some point you needed to write code if you wanted to go beyond the happy path envisioned by the tool developer. And I imagine the new "no-code" tools will have similar limitations. And then when the "no-code coders" get bored of playing with those toys, will hand it off to the programmers to extend and maintain.
Why don't we have a library stack where I can define some datatypes and get database migrations, CRUD REST endpoints, and a basic editing web UI, in a maintainable language where I can understand where all that's coming from and incrementally start customizing? I'm pretty sure I've implemented all the pieces you'd need, scattered between the codebases of my last three or four employers: in a language with a decent record system it should be a one-liner to build a set of HTTP routes for a given datatype, not through invisible magic but through a function call that works by plain code.
But it's in no-one's interest to package that up to release it. A traditional business doesn't produce new systems often enough to make a general toolkit. A consultancy does new systems but has no need to make them maintainable (thus Rails, which does all the automatic spinning up but doesn't have the comprehensibility to be reliable). And there's no money in selling libraries to developers, partly because developers would rather do it themselves but mostly because a library you have to buy will never be popular enough to get talented developers using it. Occasionally a huge corporation decides it's worth making a framework for their in-house applications, and even more occasionally they find it worth publishing to the outside world, which is an astonishingly inefficient process for our whole industry to depend on.
This sounds like Django (models+migrations, views for CRUD/REST (maybe with another library for automatic generation from models), admin pages for editing, and in python).
And, one can annotate Python3 to make it typed, so things might improve.
This is why no-code solutions have never become popular.
It's win-win BS. That's why it keeps going. The reality of its economy comes in delay long enough (e.g. 5 years with no profit, keep funding) that every body is detached from economic principle. With printed money lately .. oh the collapse might not come at all, you can be alive in coma for a decade as long as oxygen keeps pumping into your dead body.
This is not a trivial field, contrary to what some are trying to claim.
This is a completely absurd comment and notion. There’s talented people all over the world who don’t need $200k salaries and also simply get things accomplished without whining about not being able to use whatever tech is popular on HN at the moment.
Umm, no.
The reality is that research type jobs are not that numerous for a reason.
That reason being we just don't need that many of them.
The reason why industry pays more is because that is what society needs.
Ok... And almost by definition, that means that industry (and therefore industry jobs) is more useful to society. Because it is generating more wealth.
I feel that this is a rather narrow view, since there are a lot of companies who generate wealth by being detrimental to society at large (usually those who are just rent-seeking instead of continuously creating value).
That's clearly false. Industry/capitalism/profit-seeking by definition makes it incredibly difficult to do things where there isn't a large expected monetary return. But profitability is a poor proxy for whether a thing is useful to do or not.
For example, there are quite a few diseases/conditions that affect a decent number of people, but we don't find cures because the return on that investment would be too low, or often negative.
Capitalism suggests that the only thing that matters is having more money; I believe what truly matters is having better lives for everyone.
I don't think that's unique to capitalism. The Soviets were building spacecraft and nuclear weapons while people went without food.
Curing an extremely rare disease is valuable, we all value human life. But say there are tens of thousands of uncured diseases and more coming every year. Then let's say there is a finite number of people capable of working on them, how do you decide which cure we're going to target. The tradeoffs are a consequence of limited resources, not the system.
Market based health care does make me uncomfortable though, mainly because the incentives aren't in curing but in perpetual treatment to generate an income stream.
I think this is incorrect.
I think economic (and political) behaviour suggests rather strongly that we don't much value most other human life, nor value curing most extremely rare diseases.
> Then let's say there is a finite number of people capable of working on them, how do you decide which cure we're going to target. The tradeoffs are a consequence of limited resources, not the system.
That comes next, after there's a collective commitment to resource that finite number of people to work on uncured diseases of some kind.
At the moment, I think we're showing that the collective commitment is not in that direction.
We're doing other things instead, that you can certainly argue are of value, but given the large proportion of "earned income" most people and businesses have to spend on somebody else's "unearned income", I have to wonder if money flow is a good indicator of value.
But maybe this is not what scientific advancement takes. All you might need is randomly choose someone passionate about it, and just give them free reign without condition, no time limits, no stress, to just express their passion.
Another problem is that academics is full of dead ends, and it has to be if it's being done right. But no one likes that either. So rather than working on changing expectations, we do the opposite and bean count.
Yet another problem is the classic fan fiction / fan community issue: if you get into enough expertise, the experts have to become the audience, because no one else understands it, but then that leads to increasingly narrow fields of view because of increasingly narrow interests. You could broaden the audience, which is increasingly a demand, but that has downsides too, because often what's really the way forward is incomprehensible and boring to the average person. People love their iphones; not so much all the incremental computer science, physics, and engineering that went into every little part.
Something I think this essay maybe misses is that there are a lot of senior academics who would say publishing doesn't matter, that a paper is a dime a dozen, and what does matter are grants, and lots of them. This is how this dynamic has shifted in a lot of places, from the science -> publishing -> money. You might argue that this is better but it has its own set of incentive problems.
There have been quite obviously individually remarkable people that stand head and shoulders above everyone else, and don't think that's changed.
Nikola Tesla, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Isaac Newton, and many more.
Feats of greatness may come from collaborating but there are often great leaders and minds at the centre of it.
What should it be based on? Should academics be judged on performance? If so, how?
Essentially, I would break apart the monolithic idea of academia. There's too many inefficiencies, we waste away the talent of very smart people working on incomprehensible details that only a handful of people care about, and they write papers no one will read, only to then go to finance or tech where they'll wonder what was the point of grad school since a small percentage of their skills/specialized knowledge is necessary to make a living. We're creating all these PhDs and we don't know what to do with them. We need to foster a more entrepreneurial path in these people, they're stuck thinking that they only have two choices: academia or industry.
For the humanities, yeah I have no idea. I didn't specify but I meant the science and engineering parts of academia. I think math doesn't have a reproducibility crisis since it should be all logical proofs that don't require infrastructure, so I guess math is fine as it is.
Math does have a problem because proofs are very complex to actually check and few people have the time to do so. Subtle errors can creep in very easily.
Thank for the question. It is, indeed, easier to criticize rather than offer constructive suggestions.
Here are my thoughts on the reward system:
- I would like to see published conclusions challenged (if conclusions are based on data observations or empirical evidence). And if the challenge is clean and results are fair, then:
(1) The challenger gets a credit (regardless if the paper they challenged withstood the challenge or not)
(2) The original authors of the paper get credit if the paper withstood the challenge(s).
In other words, I would much prefer that our academic discoveries are encouraged to build consumable implementations (unlike US Patent law that does not require an implementation of an invention).
-if an published paper or a conference presentation was incorporated by the same team into a patent, I would remove any academic credits received by the team's researches. In other words, I would prevent double-dipping, if I may call it that. If the given paper is incorporated into a utility patent by completely different people (and it withstood the USPTO scrutiny), then that's ok.
- if a specific field of study is theoretical in nature (eg mathematics, may be theoretical physics). I would specifically reward joint publications, discoveries where the theoretical subject matter is incorporated into applied field.
- I would include into the reward system books, blogs and article posts that further public understanding of complex science topics (I would apply it for STEM subjects only). Such that online video lectures, and other forms of free/unpaid public education are specifically encouraged. I am not sure how exactly to measure effectiveness of this, but I am sure minds, brighter than mine, could come up with a fair, automatically-correcting model.
After reading that I'm wondering, what is the reward?
Think of it like getting a Nature or Science paper, or something in Phys Rev, or Cell. It's about prestige.
The real issue is conferences taking the place of academic journals. In most fields conferences are laid back places to share your WIP. In CS, conferences require full papers which means many ML researchers (for example) structure their whole year around meeting the NeurIPS and ICML/ICLR deadlines. It's a bit broken because those conferences have limited capacity and it can be a lottery if you get in. Journals don't have the same restriction and don't have deadlines unless you're going for a special issue, so you can actually take the time to polish before submitting.
This is true, but I think for many researchers the main motivation is self-esteem. It's the way they are ranked among their peers. In other circles, it may be your bonus, or how fast you run a marathon. It may be seem silly but this is what drives many researchers.
There are really no built-in checks and balances, unless commercial interests care for it to do a 'check', that benefit that commercial interest.
Adding to that, a now well known, built-in corruption of student acceptance and grading, it is impressive that we get any forward movement at all in applied sciences.
>".. . Now, in general, negative results may have value, and it may be worth sharing them. You could write a negative result paper (I think they are valuable). But wait, most conferences don't like those! Shit. So what do you do? You could write a blog post — as detailed as you want, no page limits, etc. you are the boss! — and move on with life with something better? But wait, blog posts "don't count" (more on this later). And in many environments, "no paper" == "I completely lost my time from the eyes of the public"... "