Tenured people carry it out, but in my experience, the goal tends to be for their students/subordinates/group colleagues/etc. to achieve tenure instead of others.
I've heard of an engineering faculty where there was basically a cold war between a few of the tenured profs. They would do everything they could to undercut or screw each other over. Pure spite-based politics. Toxic as hell and there was very little anyone could do about out.
i know of prestigious departments where after literally decades of political stalemate with colleagues (over things as petty as who gets what office) prestigious faculty finally managed to finagle a high-dollar offer from a lower tier institution and de-camped over the politics.
Well, I’m not sure I’ve seen that pattern quite so much, but if you’re seeing it, I would speculate survivor bias. The people who stay around are the ones who were good enough at the game to stay around.
the way i’ve generally understood the use of the word “vicious” in this context is in judging other academics’ work quality. which is also typically where i think most people from the outside perceive the stakes to be low: as in who cares whether one more journal article that no one will read gets published? but from the inside it can mean the difference between tenure and no tenure (for the young academic vying for it), respect and abject failure, money or no money.
Well sure but in this case the actual word was “viscous”, not “vicious”. Academic politics is thick, sticky, and insufficiently fluid and insufficiently solid at the same time. Okay it was probably a typo but it kind of works as an analogy.
sure, maybe it was intended as a novel coinage, but i assumed the “vicious” interpretation which is the more common one since the comment explicitly references Sayre's Law.
I was also wondering if it was a spelling mistake, a failure to know the difference between the two words, a legit description of academic politics as molasses-like, or a play on the user's own username. The layers of potential irony here are thick and viscous!
Especially when the position is filled by someone who couldn't earn half as much (in money, security, and prestige) if forced to compete on merit in the real world.
I think ideally academia needs to evolve to be open to everyone and worshiping of nobody. Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after. Repeat. University professors are rarely that innovative or good in their teaching methods, so that part could be to be taken up by teaching faculty instead.
Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after.
Nothing is stopping you. I've published papers and presented at academic conferences while working in industry. Both in collaboration with academics and without.
Well over half of college teaching is already done by "adjuncts" who are non tenure track teaching staff. The teachers are effectively unsupervised and do their best but have no incentive to improve other than self motivation.
Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester while I was between industry jobs.
The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability. One of the best lecturers I had at university was a postdoc who didn't get hired and ended up teaching at a 'third rate' university. One of the worst lecturers I had got head hunted by MIT.
>The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability.
Because they aren't intended to be educational. Universities (as they are run today) are primarily grant-revenue capture organizations, secondarily research organizations (at least to the degree necessary that grant money doesn't dry up because of fraudulent spending accusations), and finally after that, a begrudged effort is made at education for optics. If they could ditch the education angle entirely, they'd send the students home tomorrow.
That's not necessarily a problem. There are different options in the marketplace. If you attend an R1 research university then of course hiring decisions will heavily weight research productivity. But many other smaller schools absolutely do look at teaching ability.
i’m grateful to the author for making their work available online for free.
i once did an exercise like this myself (just the code not the book) for fun and found it extremely gratifying even though the code does not survive and never made it into any of my other projects as i had hoped at the outset.
mine got to be around 5 kloc with all the error handling but i wasn’t optimizing for keeping it short. i’m impressed by the many super brief ones that others with deeper understanding have built.
the point of view that this is really about learning C might have been buttressed further by starting with an existing super brief personal lisp and reading through that in a structured way; something that i personally would still like to do and that i semi-resorted to when debugging my way through the eval of the y-combinator which was one of the moments that exposed my poor design choices and the flaws i wasn’t cognizant of when doing simple expression evaluation. building a proper test harness was also a big deal as i went which seems like a highly relevant bit to highlight in a journey like this.
some references to existing high-quality short personal lisps and schemes might also be a welcome addition.
they are executive roles in the sense that you are required to profitably allocate a scarce perishable resource (gpu time) way more expensive than any regular engineer’s time.
Yeah, you could definitely look at it that way. They are IC roles in the sense that their job is to tell computer computers what to do but maybe that’s old-fashioned thinking at this point.
it is extremely hard to form a reasonable opinion of what is happening in gaza with the current level of vitriol online. i feel i’d have to do a substantial personal research project to see if i can believe the cumulative casualty numbers that are being bandied about. not to mention the numbers about deaths from starvation.
i wish institutions would do the work to publish their sources in a way that is clear complete and verifiable.
i would love to understand what others on hn do day-to-day other than takes cues from media they “trust”.
my wish would be for an article to have a section at the bottom explaining the source of the figures included in the body. for example they mention a number of dead but there’s no word about where it comes from.
i would personally like to see organizations of any scale self-publish metrics about their performance on their SLAs and at least trends on their unit efficiency (throughput latency and cost per main types of work items). for the state department time to issue a passport passports issued per unit time internal cost to issue a passport etc. for the irs corresponding metrics for processing a return or an audit. for id.me success in catching bad actors failures in incorrectly blocking legitimate users.
for university administrative departments , thoughtful corresponding things that capture what they do all day in understandable and defensible ways.
“After the spring
semester ended, her family moved from Davis
to Berkeley — her brother had decided to
transfer there — and Cairo finally felt able to settle in.”
fascinating that the family follows the kids’ educational steps.
my wife worked under this regime of we-pay-below-minimum and you make it up with tips, when she was a student. it’s illegal in multiple states. including the state where it was done to her. but if you need that sort of job you’re typically probably not in a position to go after your employer…
