[anrope]

"...overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.)..."

I feel like a professor shouldn't consider teaching "overhead". If you're teaching classes, you should be putting at least as much effort into research as teaching. Prof != post-doc.

If your passion is in research, then a move to industry (or post-doc) sounds like a good choice.

[Smerity]

He may be complaining about all the overhead that goes with teaching rather than the teaching itself. I'm tutoring this semester for a Data Structures course and a painfully large portion of the time is spent dealing with things that really aren't teaching.

Trying to deal with plagiarism (which even goes as far as assignments posted on RentACoder), using ancient marking systems (WebCT is well and truly evil), handling students who obviously don't care at all but feel entitled and so on.

[anrope]

That's fair.

Still, in my experience (which is nothing special, 4 years undergrad, in second year of masters) there are definitely professors who consider teaching an unfortunate side-requirement of their research. And I don't think it's unique to my school. I think this sucks.

I have been working as a teacher's assistant for a few semesters now, and I hear what you're saying about students who really don't care. I think especially in engineering, you get students who chose the major just because they got good grades in math and science and heard engineering pays well. Then those students complain when you ask them to work hard (or even just work).

Sidenote: WebCT :( haha. My school paid (and will continue to pay) a ridiculous amount for some enterprise course scheduling/billing/etc. software that would have been a great project in software engineering (e.g. large project management). All while we're having major budget issues.

[price]

No, Matt is very clear:

"the amount of overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.) you have to do apart from the interesting technical work severely limits your ability to actually [have a practical impact via your research.]"

Teaching is part of the overhead if your goal is to do research, or in his case more precisely to build great systems. A lot of professors feel that way.

To Matt's credit, by all accounts he put plenty of effort into his classes and they were excellent, even though it wasn't what he really most wanted to do. But other professors who feel that way and, I suppose, have a weaker sense of duty end up as the bad teachers that students hate, because they just don't care.

[robryan]

You would be stupid to post an assignment on something as well known as rentacoder. I've ad professors who have mentioned finding their assignments on there so they are well aware.

[hga]

But there are people that stupid and the need to check such sites is just one more bit of overhead.

Hmmm, I suppose it's unfortunate that a final exam does not lend itself to requiring the use of a computer to demonstrate that you truly can program your way out of a paper bag.

[rguzman]

I agree that teaching should not be perceived as "overhead".

However, the best place to do research is within academia (large research universities), where there is a very complete and strong infrastructure to do research. Yes, the system is broken in many ways, but it is still the best.

People who really have a strong passion for teaching and not as much interest in research go teach at universities that specialize in teaching more than in research e.g. Reed College.

Last, at a sufficiently advanced level teaching and research are indistinguishable.

[Goladus]

It's clear from the article he doesn't consider teaching to be "overhead" in any sense except specifically in relation to research, and designing and building systems. In fact he writes that teaching was his favorite part of the job. Nevertheless, based on the established context, teaching is overhead, no matter what feelings may be.