Technical work, including indispensable scientific software development, tends to be considered of low academic value in academia. This is an ingrained attitude. I very recently left after having heard "oh, you're the technical guy" once too often from other academics.
Here's an example. The Globus Online grid ftp service web page intended for users adopts an overtly apologetic tone [1]. Users of this service are promised freedom from "low-value IT considerations and processes"--considerations and processes that the Globus Online team has humbly sought to undertake on their behalf. I have to laugh at the claim that there is "No need to involve your IT admin—all you need is Globus Online." The message is that information technology is of low academic value--unless you happen to have been one of the authors of publications that came out of the Globus Online project. If not, your career is sidelined.
Software development, system administration, network administration and desktop support have become somewhat specialized in the past 30 years, but in the minds of some principal investigators and academic administrators, these very different activities are conflated. An expert in numerical methods, computational fluid dynamics and dynamic downscaling methods for climate assessment models is a seasoned web developer with a portfolio, fluent in jQuery, underscore, backbone, responsive websites with bootstrap, CSS3, HTML5, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, the Google maps API, Cartodb visualizations, as well as an Android developer conversant with the SPen library for the Galaxy Note 10.1. It's as much effort to stay current technically as it is to keep up in the scientific literature.
There are faint signs of improvement. On January 14th, the NSF revised the biosketch format by changing the Publications section to Products [2]. "This change makes clear that products may include, but are not limited to, publications, data sets, software, patents, and copyrights." The previous biosketch format was awkward for software developers, inventors and producers of data sets.
Recently, a number of prominent computer scientists, and scientific software developers affiliated with the Climate Code Foundation [3], published a Science Code Manifesto [4]. The manifesto includes the recommendation that "software contributions must be included in systems of scientific assessment, credit, and recognition." Software developers in the digital humanities may wish to add their names to the list of signatories.
Whether these developments reflect a broader understanding that software developers ought to enjoy greater recognition and opportunity for advancement in academia that they do currently remains to be seen. Greater career advancement opportunity for software developers, inventors and data set producers working in academia might do something to address the Ph.D. overproduction problem.
But these developments were too little and too late for me. I left.
yup. science gets the software they deserve: industry not only (ime) pays somewhere between 2-3x as well, but companies like engineers and view it as prestigious instead of labs where you are viewed as the help. Even if the results coming out of the lab are completely dependent on very sophisticated computer programs to produce.
Also true, though it tends to be difficult to pin down what "business experience" means.
What I am confident about is that there's no such thing
as "business experience". Running a small business,
founding a new start-up, and being CEO of a major
corporation like Sprint are quite different
propositions, requiring different skill sets, and
calling for different decisions. Managing a gigantic
organization of thousands of employees in a
multi-billion dollar transnational is simply not at
all like bootstrapping a small venture with one or
two underpaid partners and a shoestring budget.
-- Zachary Ernst, Why I Jumped Off The Ivory Tower [1]
Suppose one had the ideal academic manager, fully cognizant of the specializations within the industry, with a 100% grant proposal acceptance rate, available when needed, incapable of assigning the wrong people to the wrong project, never overpromises funding agencies solutions to open problems in computer science, and so on. The opportunity for academic advancement for a scientific programmer will still depend on publications, and in the case of a scientific programmer, that would include publications about the software one has written.
To your last point, there's definitely no shortage of venues to publish and present when it comes to scientific software and development methodologies.
In my experience established PIs tend to delegate a healthy fraction of the responsibility for managing technical staff, mentoring students, and even acquiring funding to their postdocs. In turn, faculty search committees see this experience as crucial, and competition for academic jobs is strong enough (~100 applicants per position, last I heard) that I would imagine any new PI should have a fair amount of experience under their belt.
At the PhD level and above, academia seems to revolve around managing one's personal brand. Publishing a few good papers isn't enough, you have to be "THE guy/girl" in an in-demand specialty to get a job. Your observation that this requires a business/PR/advertising mentality in addition to the ability to do solid research is spot on, but I think the game changes long before professor-hood, and I think that anyone who successfully obtains an entry-level professorship has already demonstrated competence at playing it.
yes I started as a research assistant at a world ranked rnd organisation and we where paid peanuts about 1/3 of the civil service where paid for the same role.
Flipping a compiler flag gives completely different results! How can anyone trust this code, or any research made off of it regardless of their personal feelings about climate change?
Comments
Technical work, including indispensable scientific software development, tends to be considered of low academic value in academia. This is an ingrained attitude. I very recently left after having heard "oh, you're the technical guy" once too often from other academics.
Here's an example. The Globus Online grid ftp service web page intended for users adopts an overtly apologetic tone [1]. Users of this service are promised freedom from "low-value IT considerations and processes"--considerations and processes that the Globus Online team has humbly sought to undertake on their behalf. I have to laugh at the claim that there is "No need to involve your IT admin—all you need is Globus Online." The message is that information technology is of low academic value--unless you happen to have been one of the authors of publications that came out of the Globus Online project. If not, your career is sidelined.
Software development, system administration, network administration and desktop support have become somewhat specialized in the past 30 years, but in the minds of some principal investigators and academic administrators, these very different activities are conflated. An expert in numerical methods, computational fluid dynamics and dynamic downscaling methods for climate assessment models is a seasoned web developer with a portfolio, fluent in jQuery, underscore, backbone, responsive websites with bootstrap, CSS3, HTML5, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, the Google maps API, Cartodb visualizations, as well as an Android developer conversant with the SPen library for the Galaxy Note 10.1. It's as much effort to stay current technically as it is to keep up in the scientific literature.
There are faint signs of improvement. On January 14th, the NSF revised the biosketch format by changing the Publications section to Products [2]. "This change makes clear that products may include, but are not limited to, publications, data sets, software, patents, and copyrights." The previous biosketch format was awkward for software developers, inventors and producers of data sets.
Recently, a number of prominent computer scientists, and scientific software developers affiliated with the Climate Code Foundation [3], published a Science Code Manifesto [4]. The manifesto includes the recommendation that "software contributions must be included in systems of scientific assessment, credit, and recognition." Software developers in the digital humanities may wish to add their names to the list of signatories.
Whether these developments reflect a broader understanding that software developers ought to enjoy greater recognition and opportunity for advancement in academia that they do currently remains to be seen. Greater career advancement opportunity for software developers, inventors and data set producers working in academia might do something to address the Ph.D. overproduction problem.
But these developments were too little and too late for me. I left.
[1] https://www.globusonline.org/forusers/
[2] http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2013/nsf13004/nsf13004.jsp
[3] http://climatecode.org/
[4] http://sciencecodemanifesto.org
yup. science gets the software they deserve: industry not only (ime) pays somewhere between 2-3x as well, but companies like engineers and view it as prestigious instead of labs where you are viewed as the help. Even if the results coming out of the lab are completely dependent on very sophisticated computer programs to produce.
[deleted]
Also true, though it tends to be difficult to pin down what "business experience" means.
Suppose one had the ideal academic manager, fully cognizant of the specializations within the industry, with a 100% grant proposal acceptance rate, available when needed, incapable of assigning the wrong people to the wrong project, never overpromises funding agencies solutions to open problems in computer science, and so on. The opportunity for academic advancement for a scientific programmer will still depend on publications, and in the case of a scientific programmer, that would include publications about the software one has written.[1] http://zacharyernst.blogspot.com/2013/10/why-i-jumped-out-of...
To your last point, there's definitely no shortage of venues to publish and present when it comes to scientific software and development methodologies.
Agreed, though my point was that publications about software are weighted somewhat more heavily than the software itself.
In my experience established PIs tend to delegate a healthy fraction of the responsibility for managing technical staff, mentoring students, and even acquiring funding to their postdocs. In turn, faculty search committees see this experience as crucial, and competition for academic jobs is strong enough (~100 applicants per position, last I heard) that I would imagine any new PI should have a fair amount of experience under their belt.
At the PhD level and above, academia seems to revolve around managing one's personal brand. Publishing a few good papers isn't enough, you have to be "THE guy/girl" in an in-demand specialty to get a job. Your observation that this requires a business/PR/advertising mentality in addition to the ability to do solid research is spot on, but I think the game changes long before professor-hood, and I think that anyone who successfully obtains an entry-level professorship has already demonstrated competence at playing it.
yes I started as a research assistant at a world ranked rnd organisation and we where paid peanuts about 1/3 of the civil service where paid for the same role.
Interesting you should mention climate stuff:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/27/another-uncertainty-fo...
Flipping a compiler flag gives completely different results! How can anyone trust this code, or any research made off of it regardless of their personal feelings about climate change?