[mjburgess]

What amuses, and irritates, me is that academics frequently project this insanity onto Business or The Profit Motive.

Having close connections in academia, that world is the worst of what can be imagined. A highly competitive start-up, or scale-up, environment has a level of Reason and Merit imposed by the market which rationalises most everything (even the insane VC fantasyland headline-driven stuff is intelligible).

Academia is the worst combination of every imaginable macro force.

[quacked]

I don't know if I'd agree that Reason and Merit are always applied by the market, unless the market is referring to "whatever VCs can be convinced to give money to". However, the crux of what you're saying, which is that in academia Reason and Merit are thrown directly out of the window is completely true.

My favorite discrepancy is in hiring. In startups, you can win a $150k/year job in a ten minute conversation with the right person and be at work the following Monday, even that afternoon in some cases. This is especially true if your previous work is already known to the person doing the hiring.

In academia (and to a lesser extent government work) they're conducting 6-month searches and stringing along candidates for months at a time for $65k jobs with a fraction of the responsibility of the equivalent in the private industry.

[mjburgess]

In the medium term, on average, the market tends to kill-off sheer stupidity. It is kinda traumatic in the short-term to see how much stupidity is rewarded, of course. (And here, are VCs anything more than serial idiots?)

But if you really want to persue a basically competent merit-based path, there's usually one available. You can make 2x in a crypto conjob, or 1x on a gamble that someone needs a plausible value-adding service.

I just don't see this logic at work in academia. The only reason I care here is how often academics have a kind of superstition of 'business' which is nothing other than a description of their own situation. When, in reality, freedoom from these chronic stupidities lies in everything they claim to hate.

[StressedDev]

A VC which is a serial idiot will eventually run out of money. One thing to remember is that not all VCs are the same and there probably are some which are very good at what they do.

Another way of saying this is just because some VCs are not good at their job does not mean all VCs are not good at their job.

[tobyjsullivan]

> A VC which is a serial idiot will eventually run out of money.

This is not really true as VCs are not the sources of the money they invest. VCs raise money from their backers and there really is a (virtually) infinite amount of money available to raise, even for a repeatedly unsuccessful VC firm.

As with the startups themselves, the key skill is raising, not earning the actual ROI.

[BurningFrog]

I assume this is in part because the $150k startup hire can get fired just as fast if they don't impress, while the corresponding academia process takes months or years.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

There's also inmediate feedback

150k salary ships, sells, or is out of a job or the company goes bankrupt, whichever is 1st

The equvalent researcher, with almost all kinds of research, will always keep the same job for years, and the University is always going to be around regardless of the research being done

[Fomite]

Given very few tenure-track faculty are making $150K, it's more like "A 85K salary has a ticking clock - and considers themselves lucky to have it - wherein if they don't meet some fairly steep performance goals, they are automatically fired."

[ModernMech]

Startups work under the "fire fast" mentality, where if someone isn't working out, you axe them asap. For a professor, ramp-up period can be a couple semesters to over a year for them to experience all the seasons of faculty life. You want someone who will stick around for 3+ years. Firing fast is something you want to do under only as a last resort.

[Fomite]

It's also expensive, because lab start up costs money. The cost of a faculty recruitment in the sciences can be well into the hundreds of thousands.

[ModernMech]

Yeah, this is definitely another thing. It takes a couple years of ramping up a lab to recoup that. I've seen startup packages in the millions. It's getting crazy stupid lol. I guess they figured that particular researcher had such promising research it was a good investment.

[jltsiren]

Academic hiring processes are ridiculous. Not because anyone wants it that way but because citizens like to complain. They complain when they think tax/tuition money is being used for inapproriate or frivolous purposes. They complain when they see nepotism and corruption. They complain about perceived political biases and discrimination. And so on.

Every time something goes wrong badly enough to cause a scandal, new processes are put in place to prevent that specific harm in the future. On the other hand, nobody really cares about effective and efficient use of tax money. People surely complain about waste, but the complaints are rarely specific enough to have consequences. Given a choice between preventing a specific harm and using tax money better, people almost always choose preventing the specific harm.

The salaries are what they are, because universities can't afford to pay more. There is only so much tax/tuition money available to them. People like to complain about administrative bloat, but it's their fault really. Every time people complain about something specific in the academia, they are advocating for giving more money to the administration to fix that, and for giving less money to the people who teach and do research. That's just the way public management works.

Additionally, academic hiring processes are more involved than in the industry, because there is less responsibility. Not despite it. People are effectively given money to do things they would do anyway, and the employer often can't tell the difference between a good hire and a bad hire, except maybe much later. If you can't fix you mistakes in a timely manner, you'll probably want to think things through before making the decision.

[rmah]

Universities could afford to pay more if they redirect funds from paying for "administrator" to paying for instructors and researchers. Or diverting funds from beautification projects. Or from the mass of consulting firms they hire for various things. There is now an average of only 2.5 faculty per administrator at universities and many of the better research universities have ratios closer to 1:1. Really, it's a question of incentives and priorities.

[ModernMech]

> Universities could afford to pay more if they redirect funds from paying for "administrator" to paying for instructors and researchers.

Which administrators tho? There are about a dozen I rely on every day, and if you eliminate them, you'll be causing a lot more work for me, the researcher. Many admin positions are created after faculty complain their workload is getting too large. A lot of people seem to think they are just bloat, but they can actually be very helpful. To be constructive, you need to be more specific than parroting the "just get rid of admin" trope.

[Fomite]

This - my university is actually a fairly lean organization that's continually pushed more and more administrative burden onto faculty.

A lot of people like hand waving and saying "Administrators", but like the idea that most regulations are written in blood, there are tangible reasons for most administrative positions. Even the admins I don't like and I think are a waste of space are that way because of them, and I can envision a useful person being in their place.

[bluGill]

They can't do that though. All those administrators are preventing the faculty from abusing their position. Most of the abuse are the type of thing that someone has done in the past. What you really seem to be claiming is that the loss from faculty abuse is in general less than the costs of those administrators. I'm not sure if this is true or not - this is the real debate that we are not having. (I'm sure in some cases it is true, but in others it is not)

As for beautification projects: that projects often bring in big donars. It is hard to say if they are worth the costs or not, but we need to start by being clear. A ugly brutalist building would be a lot cheaper but probably is too far the other way.

[Fomite]

What amuses, and irritates, me is that industry frequently projects their own system onto academia.

They get incensed at the idea of overhead - but don't recognize that we're not legally allowed to have a profit margin.