goodbye albatross; hello mountains

[Gary_Yngve]

I had been stuck on a bug in my code (actually interfacing with some Fortran code) for the past three weeks.

I found it and fixed it last night (experiencing a very similar feeling to taking a much needed dump), so now I get to go play in the mountains!!!

[lummox]

i am sorry to read that your life sucks most of the time. fuck the deskjob brah.

[Gary_Yngve]

It's actually not so bad. About twice a year a nasty bug comes along that takes more than a week to figure out. I love doing research, but coding is the part I like the least. Coming up with ideas, reading literature, generating results, writing papers... that's the fun part to me. The only problem is I have to wait till I'm a prof for when I can ditch the coding to my army of grad student minions.

[lummox]

The only problem is I have to wait till I'm a prof for when I can ditch the coding to my army of grad student minions.

you can stop the cycle of exploitation.

[foraker]

this is one of the reasons why i got out of academe. so you're going to generate a string of grad students, most of whom will have no hope of getting an academic job because the market is saturated? bully for you! i hope you find absolutely NO joy in writing an endless stream of grant proposals in order to keep your academic sweat shop running

[Gary_Yngve]

Honestly I'd prefer a professorship where tenure is determined more by how good of a teacher you are rather than how many papers can you churn out and how much grant money can you bring in.

 

I don't want to be a professor who enslaves his grad students. But having grad students is very empowering. You can pursue multiple ideas at once. Hell, I have a couple side-projects now that are getting basically zero attention. The ideas are all there -- just no time to implement.

[arlen]

Tenure committees don't care about publishing. You have to publish to impress grant committees, in order to get projects funded so you can hire GAs, so you can have time to serve on faculty committees. That's what earns you tenure. If you're discreet, you can look at pictures of the mountains on your PDA during the meetings.

 

Community colleges reward good teaching, and you can actually leave work at work. Not much prestige in that racket, though.

[cj001f]

Tenure committees don't care about publishing. You have to publish to impress grant committees, in order to get projects funded so you can hire GAs, so you can have time to serve on faculty committees. That's what earns you tenure. If you're discreet, you can look at pictures of the mountains on your PDA during the meetings.

But then there are the Nations Research Labs. Where boss's search regularly to find out how many papers their minions have published. Where postgrad exploitation is the norm. Oh, and they have the wonderful thing known as the "CRADA" (Cooperative Research And Development Agreement), yet another Reagonian bit of corporate welfare. "Here's the labor of a grad student for a year, with all of our facilities, plus oversight, for...$100k"