As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by coldpie on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @09:07AM (#31752325)

> I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.

Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn't very interested, since I wanted to make things people will actually use. His response was there was a team in Utah that helped make part of the USB spec the decade previous. I was attending the University of Minnesota.

Yeah, no thanks.

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Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by feet on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @09:31AM (#31752606)

I think this is a short sighted perspective. Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app. Just because you don't see immediate impact doesn't mean it isn't there

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Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by arethuza on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @11:52AM (#31754860)

I'm not saying that people shouldn't do basic research, far from it, more that I learned that given the way basic research actually works then I had relatively little interest in actually doing it myself.

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Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by randomsearch on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @12:05PM (#31755094)

This is definitely false in many cases.

Source: I’ve worked on both.

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Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by coldpie on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @10:09AM (#31753141)

Sure, I'm glad people do that work. But it's not for me.

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Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by criddell on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @11:44AM (#31754750)

> Basic research is important and has farther reaching impacts than a CRUD web app.

Those aren't the only two options and even they were, it isn't always true.

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Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by ISL on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @09:54AM (#31752912)

That particular argument also falls flat, at least with the given information, since there have been plenty of industry partners in defining the USB specs.

My guess is that if you want to be paid full-time to work on USB, you'll probably find more (and better-paid) positions in industry.

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Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by the_only_law on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @11:18AM (#31754268)

Yeah, but outside a borderline prodigy or no lifing to get the knowlegde and experience or a lucky recruitment at some university event, I doubt the industry was letting fresh new grads work on something like the USB spec.

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Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by ghaff on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @11:38AM (#31754625)

There may have been junior people on the teams at the various companies like Intel that developed and implemented the spec. No, those junior people probably weren't really developing the spec. (The person at Intel who is most credited for the spec with his team was already pretty senior and later became an Intel Fellow.) I also sort of doubt a university group in Utah was a major contributor--although I could be wrong.

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Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by coldpie on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @01:46PM (#31756550)

I admit I might've got the details wrong. The gist of the anecdote is the best response he had to me wanting to do impactful work was, "some people who didn't even go to this school were a part of something you've heard of ten years ago," which I didn't find terribly compelling.

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