Academia used to offer smart people the promise of tenure and interesting work. Now they offer eternal postdocs and publish or perish. Is it any wonder they can't retain good people?
This is talking mostly about perceived "stars" in academia, who already do have tenured or tenure-track positions (or offers of them), but leave for industry instead. So I think it's a different issue than the one you're talking about.
For those people, one thing that's changed is that academia, in STEM at least, has grown into having a big management component. You're expected to run a significantly sized lab, and to continually bring in enough grants to pay for it. Professors at top universities spend a large amount of their time writing grants, hiring people, and networking with potential funding sources, and it's no longer really optional. There is a certain style of researcher who actually excels in this kind of position, managing a medium-sized research enterprise, and advancing a field by putting together good teams, providing high-level direction, and mentorship. It's like running a startup in some ways (obv. different in other ways). But not every researcher is good at or interested in that, and some would rather opt out and find a job that lets them focus more on their individual research.
Another thing that's changed is pay. Academic salaries in CS have gone up significantly, to the point where $100k+ is common, and $150k+ for big names is also getting common, whereas professor jobs were traditionally more lower/mid-middle-class than upper-middle-class (more like "$75k+" than "$150k+"). But salaries at tech companies have gone up even faster. If a big name in deep learning gets offered $300k base plus a big stock package, the university's retention counteroffer isn't likely to come very close.
Also, specifically in AI (which this article focuses on), data access and engineering/infrastructure support are other lures of industry. If you do machine translation, for example, moving to Google will solve many of your dataset problems. If you need a distributed cluster, there's expert IT staff working on it; if you do autonomous vehicles, there's expert engineering staff supporting your "demo platform". In academia you rarely can afford that kind of infrastructure or engineering support, so there's a lot more of grad students cobbling together DIY demos, and the postdoc hired mainly for his/her mathematics knowledge also moonlighting as the cluster admin.
I think academia has a long way to go to reduce costs. I'm willing to cut services that universities offer if that means lower costs.
Remove the nice dorms, cafeteria, and fitness centers. Remove the community outreach programs that isn't really the job of a university. And yes increase the number of introductory level classes taught by graduate students and post docs.
I'm not worried about people moving from academia to industry. My hope is as we increase the rate at which people finish high school and go to college, we will have enough people for industry and academia. It is tempting to say we need to offer better wages and benefits for teachers but we can't digress. Cost containment should be our first priority.
I think it is possible if we understand and agree with the compromises we will need to make.
Postdocs aren't that common in computer science. They exist, for sure, but most of the recently hired CS professors I know came straight from their PhDs.
Postdocs especially multi-year postdocs are very rare in Computer Science. I have personally known several students get hired directly or after a one year post-docs. Multi-year postdocs are common in fields (Biology in particular) where job prospects offered by industry are comparable in salary and future opportunities to what postdocs offer.
Can confirm almost all Computer Vision professors I know work or have worked at Google/Facebook/their own startup at some point of time. Also these Professors have tenures (currently on sabbatical etc.). This is actually a great thing for graduate students too. Internships pay very well and can even extend beyond summers as part-time contractor positions. Another common method as highlighted in the article is to convert research group into a startup which gets acqui-hired by Google etc. E.g. Geometric Intelligence would be a good example.
Maybe universities should consider paying more to compete with the tech companies. It's a free market and whatnot. If the price goes up, you gotta pay more. Complaining about the price going up isn't exactly productive.
I doubt universities can come close to affording it. My CV wouldn't have gotten me a tenure-track position at a top school, but my income in industry is much higher than even the best paid professors at my alma mater (ignoring profs' consulting income, of course).
To be honest I wonder if the academics that are still there just don't realize how lucrative industry is...
They are trying to close the gap, but it's a huge gap. I was told by a professor at my Alma Mater that PhD students get a 40k stipend (in St. Louis). Contrast that to most other programs where it might be closer to 20k, and to the industry where an intern can easily make 80k per year, and a graduating senior qualified for grad school can pull 6 figures from many places.
For stars and talents, academia provides something the private sector can never provide: freedom.
Established professors can dictate their own rhythm. They can work hard all year long, or they can slack for some months and concentrate on their families more. They can change sub-fields of interest as they see fit, and work on problems they want to solve. Also, they get to teach which is by far the biggest privilege one could ever achieve.
Of course private research provides very interesting deals, but most stars and talents are exactly that because they had the freedom of doing things as they see fit. Putting them in a company structure with quirky rules is not their natural habitat.
In short, in academia you are bound by hierarchy, local politics, grants and bureaucracy, 1-2 year lag in anything. As a freelancer I have enough $$$ I am free to pursue my intellectual interests (any side projects, teaching students topics of my choosing, etc). And when it comes to teaching - I get _only_ students that are interested, not - diluted by the crowd who just wants to fulfill the curriculum.
> They can work hard all year long, or they can slack for some months and concentrate on their families more
Yeah, that's kinda not true. In academia, you have the freedom to work whichever 60-80 hours a week you want, but no one becomes a "star" (or even an "associate professor") by slacking for months at a time.
> Also, they get to teach which is by far the biggest privilege one could ever achieve.
do you have any experience with academia? it is very much not free in spirit. even getting a ph.d. these days requires more exercise in tedium and logistics than creative thought.
Top talent has been fleeing academia for a while now. Lower pay, limited job security (unless you manage to win a few rounds of the the publish or peril game), limited freedom to do what you want (in large part due to games around funding and publish or peril).
The private sector now offers top talent what they used to go to universities for in terms of access to the best resources, freedom of exploration, a great talent pool of co-workers and decent working environment. Therefore is it any surprise people leave academia?
and being successful at one time does not necessarily guarantee later success. Mozart died alone and with no money. Turing killed himself at the age of 41. It's not hard to look for more recent examples.
Seems so; become a grunt programmer/admin and hope you don't get automated away too quickly (with my current academic performance I count myself to that group of people).
As for the second point: Depends on how you define success in life. If life's a paycheck maximization game to you, many science superstars weren't very successful...
What's wrong with this? Right now universities produce far more Phds than tenure track positions. If the free market is providing jobs for many of them, all the better.
The head of the CS dept of my undergrad once said to a corporate recruiter, "You can hire our undergrads, but we exist to turn them into Phds"
I started out college wanting to be a professor. That was fleeting, once I saw what my most respected professors and advisors were up against, grinding out papers, looking exhausted and subtly hinting that I should pursue anything but my initial goal.
When I started college, for some reason, I also thought the most interesting work was being done in academia, without exception. Now, a few years out, it is clear that the most interesting work is done at a crossroads - between top CS and engineering universities and industry. I do think it is getting harder to resist the lure of industry (based on the experience of my friends with PhDs), mainly because of comparable pay and far fewer peripheral responsibilities like managing labs, advising students, etc.
Modern AI is closer to math than the ad-hoc but often creative solutions of AI in the 70s/80s. This is a very good sign, but it brings AI closer to the kind of work that engineers do with MATLAB. I personally prefer it that way, but it's definitely quite different to other types of programming.
[+] [-] jordanb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|10 years ago|reply
For those people, one thing that's changed is that academia, in STEM at least, has grown into having a big management component. You're expected to run a significantly sized lab, and to continually bring in enough grants to pay for it. Professors at top universities spend a large amount of their time writing grants, hiring people, and networking with potential funding sources, and it's no longer really optional. There is a certain style of researcher who actually excels in this kind of position, managing a medium-sized research enterprise, and advancing a field by putting together good teams, providing high-level direction, and mentorship. It's like running a startup in some ways (obv. different in other ways). But not every researcher is good at or interested in that, and some would rather opt out and find a job that lets them focus more on their individual research.
Another thing that's changed is pay. Academic salaries in CS have gone up significantly, to the point where $100k+ is common, and $150k+ for big names is also getting common, whereas professor jobs were traditionally more lower/mid-middle-class than upper-middle-class (more like "$75k+" than "$150k+"). But salaries at tech companies have gone up even faster. If a big name in deep learning gets offered $300k base plus a big stock package, the university's retention counteroffer isn't likely to come very close.
Also, specifically in AI (which this article focuses on), data access and engineering/infrastructure support are other lures of industry. If you do machine translation, for example, moving to Google will solve many of your dataset problems. If you need a distributed cluster, there's expert IT staff working on it; if you do autonomous vehicles, there's expert engineering staff supporting your "demo platform". In academia you rarely can afford that kind of infrastructure or engineering support, so there's a lot more of grad students cobbling together DIY demos, and the postdoc hired mainly for his/her mathematics knowledge also moonlighting as the cluster admin.
[+] [-] newjersey|10 years ago|reply
Remove the nice dorms, cafeteria, and fitness centers. Remove the community outreach programs that isn't really the job of a university. And yes increase the number of introductory level classes taught by graduate students and post docs.
I'm not worried about people moving from academia to industry. My hope is as we increase the rate at which people finish high school and go to college, we will have enough people for industry and academia. It is tempting to say we need to offer better wages and benefits for teachers but we can't digress. Cost containment should be our first priority.
I think it is possible if we understand and agree with the compromises we will need to make.
[+] [-] unignorant|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aub3bhat|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fullshark|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aub3bhat|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akhilcacharya|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RUBwkVjwLsDKgPw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertr4nd|10 years ago|reply
To be honest I wonder if the academics that are still there just don't realize how lucrative industry is...
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tdeck|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eridrus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sktrdie|10 years ago|reply
Established professors can dictate their own rhythm. They can work hard all year long, or they can slack for some months and concentrate on their families more. They can change sub-fields of interest as they see fit, and work on problems they want to solve. Also, they get to teach which is by far the biggest privilege one could ever achieve.
Of course private research provides very interesting deals, but most stars and talents are exactly that because they had the freedom of doing things as they see fit. Putting them in a company structure with quirky rules is not their natural habitat.
[+] [-] stared|10 years ago|reply
In short, in academia you are bound by hierarchy, local politics, grants and bureaucracy, 1-2 year lag in anything. As a freelancer I have enough $$$ I am free to pursue my intellectual interests (any side projects, teaching students topics of my choosing, etc). And when it comes to teaching - I get _only_ students that are interested, not - diluted by the crowd who just wants to fulfill the curriculum.
[+] [-] grayclhn|10 years ago|reply
Yeah, that's kinda not true. In academia, you have the freedom to work whichever 60-80 hours a week you want, but no one becomes a "star" (or even an "associate professor") by slacking for months at a time.
> Also, they get to teach which is by far the biggest privilege one could ever achieve.
lol.
[+] [-] nikofeyn|10 years ago|reply
do you have any experience with academia? it is very much not free in spirit. even getting a ph.d. these days requires more exercise in tedium and logistics than creative thought.
[+] [-] swingbridge|10 years ago|reply
The private sector now offers top talent what they used to go to universities for in terms of access to the best resources, freedom of exploration, a great talent pool of co-workers and decent working environment. Therefore is it any surprise people leave academia?
[+] [-] pkaye|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dublinben|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrcactu5|10 years ago|reply
and being successful at one time does not necessarily guarantee later success. Mozart died alone and with no money. Turing killed himself at the age of 41. It's not hard to look for more recent examples.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] RGamma|10 years ago|reply
As for the second point: Depends on how you define success in life. If life's a paycheck maximization game to you, many science superstars weren't very successful...
[+] [-] mathattack|10 years ago|reply
The head of the CS dept of my undergrad once said to a corporate recruiter, "You can hire our undergrads, but we exist to turn them into Phds"
[+] [-] altotrees|10 years ago|reply
When I started college, for some reason, I also thought the most interesting work was being done in academia, without exception. Now, a few years out, it is clear that the most interesting work is done at a crossroads - between top CS and engineering universities and industry. I do think it is getting harder to resist the lure of industry (based on the experience of my friends with PhDs), mainly because of comparable pay and far fewer peripheral responsibilities like managing labs, advising students, etc.
[+] [-] siscia|10 years ago|reply
Maybe it is just me, but I have a lot of interests in a lot of different areas, but AI just isn't one of those areas.
Maybe I simply didn't study it enough, but I can't see in AI the challenges that makes interesting programming.
There is some resources I should explore before to say that I simply don't find AI interesting?
[+] [-] llamaz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
1. You have to wait long for your results to come out.
2. You have little clue about what you are doing, but if you just do what everybody else is doing, then you'll probably be ok.
3. You never get the results you really wanted.
4. When something goes wrong, you can't explain it.
[+] [-] jasonjei|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehudla|10 years ago|reply