The OP is right to raise questions about this in academics.
The problem is that all sorts of things happens in academics:
The grad student is first author and the professor is last author, and people see the credit that way.
The grad student is first author and the professor is last, but people see the prof as the "real" first author. Look at citation formats and explain why the last author is kept on lengthy author lists in many. It's because last author doesn't mean least work anymore. I know a colleague who quietly started jockeying to be last author on papers because he knew it was almost as/more prestigious than first.
The grad student is first and the professor is anywhere else but people assume that it's the profs work because "grad students are just learning" or some such thing.
The grad student deserves the credit but is second or third or something else because of power differentials involving all the other authors.
The grad student should be sole author because they're the one with the idea and the one who did the work but profs expect credit because they read a draft and offered some minor feedback.
A coauthor formulating and doing the analyses, without whom the paper could not exist because they were the ones translating the theories into quantifiable testable models, are left off the paper because "analyses don't deserve credit" or something.
Really, anything and everything goes in academics. It's broken. I realize that there are people/groups who practice with integrity but this is not something you can assume everywhere. Even when people are trying to have integrity, weird scenarios develop that have no good solutions.
I think this issue with art technicians vs artists is really a model of many problems with income inequality in society. The implementation matters. The people who bring it to fruition matter. They deserve credit and compensation. Ideas without execution are just ideas. I honestly can't believe we even entertain the idea that execution is valueless, or that we have discussions where people fetishize Steve Jobs so much that he's treated as the sole creator behind the iphone, as if he caused it to materialize out of thin air, and the previous phones by LG, and the engineers, and designers, and everyone else are just stupid uncreative hacks who were just following Job's orders down to the microcircuitry on the chips.
Its fraud and it's rampant in society today. For some reason we're uncomfortable with the messy reality that almost every innovation or product is the result of some distributed, collaborative effort, and often really involves many people making small contributions.
> The grad student should be sole author because they're the one with the idea and the one who did the work but profs expect credit because they read a draft and offered some minor feedback.
> For some reason we're uncomfortable with the messy reality that almost every innovation or product is the result of some distributed, collaborative effort, and often really involves many people making small contributions.
These two points seem at odds to each other, why should the professor be given no credit?
Not disagreeing with you, as everyone has different workflows etc. but my experience is really different. I've found LibreOffice entirely suitable for heavy duty work, completely fine.
Microsoft products crash inexplicably on our systems too, and in fact, we have much weirder problems with corrupted instances and things than we've ever had when using LibreOffice. I also have serious problems with the Office UI, basically that the ribbon UI as it's implemented is inconsistent and incoherent, which is frustrating as hell. If you're going to have a ribbon/tab UI, make it consistent throughout, and don't have special exceptions for some functions.
Having said that, I do think LibreOffice loses to Microsoft's edge in some areas of polish, like in implementing equations, and in drawing figures. Some of the UI with the drawing actions are much more intuitive in Office.
The problem is that all sorts of things happens in academics:
The grad student is first author and the professor is last author, and people see the credit that way.
The grad student is first author and the professor is last, but people see the prof as the "real" first author. Look at citation formats and explain why the last author is kept on lengthy author lists in many. It's because last author doesn't mean least work anymore. I know a colleague who quietly started jockeying to be last author on papers because he knew it was almost as/more prestigious than first.
The grad student is first and the professor is anywhere else but people assume that it's the profs work because "grad students are just learning" or some such thing.
The grad student deserves the credit but is second or third or something else because of power differentials involving all the other authors.
The grad student should be sole author because they're the one with the idea and the one who did the work but profs expect credit because they read a draft and offered some minor feedback.
A coauthor formulating and doing the analyses, without whom the paper could not exist because they were the ones translating the theories into quantifiable testable models, are left off the paper because "analyses don't deserve credit" or something.
Really, anything and everything goes in academics. It's broken. I realize that there are people/groups who practice with integrity but this is not something you can assume everywhere. Even when people are trying to have integrity, weird scenarios develop that have no good solutions.
I think this issue with art technicians vs artists is really a model of many problems with income inequality in society. The implementation matters. The people who bring it to fruition matter. They deserve credit and compensation. Ideas without execution are just ideas. I honestly can't believe we even entertain the idea that execution is valueless, or that we have discussions where people fetishize Steve Jobs so much that he's treated as the sole creator behind the iphone, as if he caused it to materialize out of thin air, and the previous phones by LG, and the engineers, and designers, and everyone else are just stupid uncreative hacks who were just following Job's orders down to the microcircuitry on the chips.
Its fraud and it's rampant in society today. For some reason we're uncomfortable with the messy reality that almost every innovation or product is the result of some distributed, collaborative effort, and often really involves many people making small contributions.
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2017/09/07/the-great-man-parado...