> So, for example, a family would go to their local technology artisan to put together a smart home system tailored specifically to their needs.
I am a software developer and consultant and you do not figure how insanely expensive I am - when your family comes through the doors of my artisanal soldering boutique and demands a custom built home automation system, I would suggest them to invest the money in a long, long vacation with the whole family instead.
Sure but you wouldn't pay a chainsaw sculptor to cut down a tree, you'd pay a lumberjack. You can already go to a hackerspace and pay a guy a couple hundred bucks to build you something basic so long as it's mildly ineresting.
With kids growing up playing with Raspberry Pis, in 10-20 years I don't think your comment's parent is such a farfetched idea.
Unfortunately, that's also the story of how Internet of Things (well-known by other nouns) was born.
This works perfectly well for non-so-smart stuff (thermostats, automatic cat doors, etc etc) but when you increase complexity (smart home system) you need engineers with higher qualifications and better expertise. And that's expensive (unless someone volunteers and works for pennies, but that quickly gets stressful - literally not worth it).
(Not like off-the-shelf solutions are any better. They were also born that way - by lowest spending necessary.)
I am the proud owner of a Laptop, that I can enjoy for years to come, since I can upgrade and replace disks, RAM and battery (hint: it's the last Macbook Pro that allowed this).
Recently my smartphone battery died and I could order a new one for less than $10 and replace it in 20 seconds.
Both devices are more that four years old but I am not going to replace them with something, that does not have at least this amount of repairability.
Smartphones and laptops with soldered batteries, RAM or SSD? Come on, these things are not throwaway devices - even if this is what marketing wants you to believe.
Gini coefficient is the among the highest in Europe, about 0.76. About ten years ago, a neoliberal shift loosened labor laws and saved the overall economy by letting less skilled workers not get unemployed, just take a pay cut (what France is trying to push now against a lot of protests, since government realized, the global party is over).
Wages in Germany stagnated as well, domestic trade is dwarfed by export. Living has gotten much more expensive in the cities continuously moving the shrinking middle class further down.
Germany has a track record of being strong enough, so that revolutions seldom happen. But if they happen, the are almost guaranteed to be catastrophic.
In France it's not seen as an altruist idea but as a favor to the company heads, risking too many unhealthy balance in the employee / employer relationships. An opportunity for more wild Uber management scheme in a way. When Germans talk about this idea in their country, it seems a good idea that I would back right away. But somehow nobody trusts French CEOs not to profit too much from the new flexibility.
> Germany is becoming a low income country for a lot of jobs and the unions are doing nothing against it.
Yes, this is true. About 39% of the currently employed have so called atypical jobs [1] - some of which are actually subsidized by the state, because income is so low.
Germany is an austerity poster child - I wonder what will happen, if the export boom is over. Things might become much worse, once the debt-financed foreign purchases dry up for some reason.
> 23andME HAS handed your most personal data over to the authorities.
Now just wait for some strange shift in power. I hope I do not wake up in ten years, leave my house and am welcomed by the authorities (maybe the Evocops), because my subpar DNA didn't pass some unit test.
So if there are genetic roundups, why wouldn't they be accompanied by compulsory testing?
It's pretty much the same story with milder stuff like insurance. If companies can make money by offering discounts for people with genes they like, the insurance company not having your DNA isn't going to make your insurance any cheaper. Or employment, enough people will share their DNA that it becomes a necessary step towards getting the job.
The consequences all flow from allowing society to become hell, not from sharing the DNA.
> The amount of mindless, repetitive boilerplate one has to write because the language tries to be "simple" at the expense of abstraction, genericity and expressiveness looks intolerable to me.
After wasting half a day staring at a totally nonsense generic class definition in Java spanning more than ten lines of code (after having worked in with Java for many years) I do not want any programmer to be clever any more, except he or she has so much social (and code) proof, that I will be delighted to learn something in such an exercise.
For the rest - I might add as a hyperbole - even Golang is too expressive.
Thanks for this story. I believe a lot of people would love to work on some greater good. I, for one, would love to work for a aggressive non-profit, if there is such a thing. Software and automation is the way to the future - why let just a few profit from it?
I believe the tech sector is extremely prone to this: If you cannot climb out of a technical role, over time, you realize just how clueless most people are, especially those who imagine themselves of being "in control". Not just a bit uninformed, no: absolutely positively clueless[1].
If you go the management route, you often give up, what got you started with all this is the first place: curiosity and exploration, creation and progress. It becomes: handling paperwork, keeping the clients' bad ideas in check, motivating those on the payroll, who wait for your instructions to act. It must be nightmare.
Where is the exit?
[1] Update: I believe this is what is called the nerd/nerd-exploiter dilemma.
Your comment made me think of a book that I read recently, Developer Hegemony[1]. It explores how the modern corporate forces us into three roles: pragmatists who opt out of the game and find their identity elsewhere ("I'd rather be fishing"), idealist middle management who sacrifice perspective and work twice as long for 10% more plus the illusion that one day they'll be recognised for their hard work (they won't), and opportunists who realise that the game is about perception management and are willing to sacrifice ethics for their place in the upper echelons.
I found myself pretty depressed after the first few chapters. The author even takes shots at the software development as a craft narrative, which is fascinating because my bubble is filled with people who devote their lives to this idea. Ultimately he outlines a vision where software people take advantage of the huge gains that a business can make through automation to carve out a comfortable niche outside of the corporate rat race. But it requires understanding business and marketing and not "being paid to practice your hobby" (which he reckons is the reality of most software jobs).
When I was younger, I was learning non-stop. I kept changing companies/industries every year because I was relentless and very curious.
This actually kept me going for maybe 12 years - It's fun so long as you keep learning new stuff... But eventually there comes a point when the day-job doesn't teach you anything new anymore (at least anything non-tedious) - At that point, your only remaining avenues for learning are open source work or going back to university.
But even if you start doing challenging open source work (in order to keep satisfying your craving for learning), you still have to go back to your tedious job every day. Unfortunately, there aren't enough challenging jobs for engineers these days - It's like a lottery; if you don't happen to have the right social connections, you will be limited to tedious jobs regardless of how skilled you are.
If you're the kind of person who has an insatiable passion for solving difficult problems but you are forced to solve tedious problems every day; it's mental torture.
Glad to hear jumping ship every year did not impede your progress. Someone at a BigCorp once told me that it's good to stay in one place for 5 years - otherwise you'll be seen as a 'leaver'.
One person's job hopper is another person's seasoned veteran of many battles. Who I want to hire depends on what job I need filled. The job hopper might be the perfect hire for someone who has learned from job hopping.
It's true, some companies (particularly big ones) will label you as a leaver if you behave like I did (so they know that they can't really exploit you) but those are not the kind of companies I would want to work for anyway.
I'm 40 and I've found out the hard way that 90% people under 35 adopt absolute statements for everything, as if they think they already know how the life, the world and the universe work. Good luck.
If you meant 90% of successful people's way is paved by those things, I don't agree: It is very easy to discount hard work and forgive our own laziness by zeroing in on 'bad' stuff.
If you meant 90% of the successful people got there by those things - then I would want to understand your definition of success. The folks I consider successful have always used their opportunities well, not just rode out the luck.
We all have low points in life where everything feels unfair. I am not going to tell you to shake it off because you have to find your way out yourself. I can indeed tell you that doesn't last long - It's a cycle. If you find a way to cherish the happier moments and remind yourself of them often enough, the bad ones don't feel long either. Keep that chin up!
I think it depends a lot on the field and where you work, and how you define "success".
I used to think the way you're describing until I got where I am and saw just how dysfunctional the system is in my field--the corruption and sheer luck. It gets worse the higher up you go.
I think there's also problem with these types of discussions because of survivorship bias, which is rampant in contemporary society. That is, the experience of individuals who either benefit from, or who are shielded from, these types of problems, aren't aware of them, and therefore have a different view. This isn't to imply that if you don't agree, you're corrupt, but I think some individuals by virtue of certain attributes aren't aware of the problems that ensue--notice that the OP included charisma in the list, which isn't an ethical problem among the charismatic necessarily but is one that creates ethical problems for those who are not.
I guess what I'm saying is that I appreciate your encouragement, but you have to keep in mind that things worked out for you. If they didn't, you might be offering a different explanation.
I think we tell ourselves that meritocracy works because the alternative is much darker and harder for us to wrestle with, because it invokes a feeling of moral obligation to do something to fix it.
In my field as I go up, what I see are people succeeding on the basis of popularity, which is not necessarily the same as contributions. For some, this is because of outright corruption. For others it's because of something many would consider ethically problematic, even if unintentional. In still other cases I think there's just basically luck, in the sense that they applied for jobs at the right time and where they ended up just happened to be exactly the right fit, which was not what happened to others who then languished.
I have very close friends who I would consider as successful as they possibly could be in their field, but not once would I ever say they are really deserving of that success more than many others. My convictions over time have only hardened, because I've seen their reversals switch due to natural experiments of sorts, where they are repositioned for reasons outside their control.
Maybe someday I will end up seeing things as you're suggesting, and I'm just in a dark period of my life, but the way it seems to me, it's like a curtain was lifted and there is a very sinister wizard behind it.
Very possible and true in general that successful people attribute success to hard work (who wouldn't). I have had trust fund folks defend their situation similarly as well.
But my point is to take the focus away from them and their life and point it at self. It has always helped me to assume that the world is a place where hard work wins against all odds because then my search is for hard work rather than luck.
I don't have much other than internet encouragement :), So good luck. I really hope you turn it around!
What do you think about the idea of just actualizing your own potential one step at a time, rather than comparing to other "successful" people and what they do?
I think that is cynical, but people have to realize "Intelligence" itself is not enough. You can either work on your soft-skills or you can put together a well rounded team working for you. For a small up-start relying on a friend or family with good soft-skills is a good start.
I was recently tapped for a VP position at a bank and out of curiosity I checked it out. An initial meeting later I could see I wasn't a good fit.
I think there is a fundamental difference between myself and the people who are successful in such environments and I've been trying to figure it out. They all seem very confident, polished, with expensive clothes, but is there something deeper there involving people handling and politics that I just seem incapable of understanding or emulating?
20 years on, working mostly for startups and basically avoiding politics for the most part, I wonder if I've actually neglected a key component of my on the job learning by not exercising the soft skills more.
Really recommend Peter Drucker's books. It's not about Alpha at all, it's about effectiveness which also doesn't come naturally but can be habitually trained.
I don't think it's that bad. Most of the successful people I've meant were actually brilliant and deserved their success. There are exceptions of course.
Only bad managers forego creativity and progress. Don't blame the role for the mediocrity of some people who play it.
Strangely, people don't hold the same view of conductors, even if they don't play the instruments. Or directors, even though they don't do the acting. Or football coaches, even if they aren't the playing game.
Hell, there's management simulator games out there that people love.
But software management? Well that must be exactly like Office Space.
Consider the following: maybe some management sucks and gets away with it because pop culture has taught us to expect it to.
I don't think you know what that fallacy is, or alternatively didn't actually read my comment.
That fallacy would apply if I was claiming bad managers aren't managers.
I'm not claiming that.
I'm saying not all managers are bad and the job does not inherently mean a lack of creativity or skill.
As for you cynical follow up question: Shareholders benefit from low turnover and high productivity in an environment that rewards creativity and risk taking. Building that kind of environment requires substantial management talent. Again, the coach metaphor is very apt, here.
As an aside: cynicism and nihilism might be fashionable but it's shallow and lazy.
The research system is kind of ill[1] and this illness (ratings, prestige, grants, publications, metrics) is very much in line with the interest of publishers. So both the researcher and the business man have a shared interest - and this is why it is hard for universities or other public entities to compete.
Best of luck. Elsevier and other giants are putting significant resources in mimicking free and open structures in their portfolio to hide the infamy of their business model (selling a few bytes of publicly funded research over and over again).
To the average decision maker these "new models" will sound perfectly fine. The EU want to make all research public by 2020? Elsevier and other have very deep pockets, so my guess would be 2025 at the earliest.
And since we are in guessing mode, here is another one: In a few years we will have multiple sci-hubs and pirate edu sites so by the time the public arrives at completely free research, it won't even be a victory any more - just a symbol of the wretchedness of their fight - which, by then, will make everybody wonder, why it took so long.
While SciHub etc. will help to liberate research for individuals, it won't stop university libraries from spending a lot of money on legacy journal subscriptions just yet.
> Gowers hopes that German negotiators and Elsevier will both ‘refuse to budge’ and that contract talks break with no agreement. Under such a scenario he believes it will become clear that Germany’s researchers have not suffered any serious inconvenience. ‘This, I believe, is what would truly embolden other countries and lead to a collapse of the current system.’
> Elsevier and other giants are putting significant resources in mimicking free and open structures in their portfolio to hide the infamy of their business model (selling a few bytes of publicly funded research over and over again)
This is the key aspect here which everyone needs to address. Just moving from a subscription model to "open access" where you still pay 2000$ per article won't solve or alleviate the problem.
Doesn't "open access" usual mean free-of-charge access the articles (but perhaps at the expense of an open access, publishing fee to the author)? If not, in what sense are they using the term "open access"?
Could you link to an example of what you or the parent commenter are referring to?
Correct. The publisher in this case may have been misrepresenting a paid-access journal as open access, or the journal may have offered open access only to certain articles and presented this policy in a confusing way. I have certainly seen the latter before.
I see. So rather than providing open access papers in the sense of the common understanding of the term, they're providing them in a "free drink with purchase of two entrées" sense.
Not that I'm defending the current, broken system becuase it really doesn't provide either of these benefits, but the idea is that the cost of (coordinating) peer-review (as the reviewers are often unpaid) and actual editing cost money. If services like that were actually provided, some fee would be understandable.
One of the reasons the figures end up higher than you may expect is that only the successfully published papers are paid for (usually). So depending on the rejection rate, which I think is ~95% in the case of Nature, you're paying for those other 19 papers to be checked.
PLOS for example is non-profit and charges up to $2900.
> So depending on the rejection rate, which I think is ~95% in the case of Nature, you're paying for those other 19 papers to be checked.
Yes, the other 95% need to be checked, but reviewers are recruited from academics and typically do this task for free. The contribution that the publisher does at the stage of manuscript evaluation is marginal.
It'll go through the editors first, in the case of Nature these are paid positions. There's a paid "Associate Editor" position at PLOS too, responsible for "Assessing new submissions and guiding manuscripts through the review process" and more.
A submitted paper does not simply turn up in reviewers inboxes, there are steps in between.
I think people pick a few elements of the whole process and then say everything else is negligible. If paid, the academic editors and reviewers may well end up costing a huge amount compared to the spend elsewhere, but that's not the same thing as saying those other costs are small. The proportion here is largely irrelevant.
The associate editor position on glassdoor is about £40k/year, which is £45k including tax costs. Let's say that's £47k including pension contributions as it works out neatly. In the UK there are 47 working weeks, roughly so that's £1k employment cost per week purely on that one employee. That's £25/hour. At an 80% rejection rate that's actually £125/hour, at 90% it's £250/hour and 95% that's £500/hour on accepted papers (not quite, but useful for the comparison). For only a single employee, and only their direct salary.
Of course now we need to add things like the HR costs, hiring costs, building rent, computer equipment, management, etc. Double? How much time of their day actually goes to the core task and not other meetings/etc. All these things multiply up and I'm really not that surprised that the costs go up to these amounts.
I have absolutely no doubt that if the other editors were paid and the reviewers were paid then this would go up dramatically, but that's a different issue.
What exactly do the editors do? I have published more than a dozen papers across different publications like ACM and Springer. I edit the article, I am the one who provides in the format as the conferences/journals - the journals just "print". The reviewers don't charge - I know, I have been a reviewer for Elsevier too. What exactly do the editors do?
> I think is ~95% in the case of Nature, you're paying for those other 19 papers to be checked.
All those 95% of papers checked are done by reviewers for free. I don't see any reviewers being paid. I know because I have reviewed papers across multiple conferences and journals.
The free reviewer work is not really relevant for this calculation though, unless there is no work done by the journal for those papers. Since papers are not submitted directly to the peer reviewers, there is at least some work happening.
Free peer review mostly only tells us that the total cost could go up significantly if they were paid.
Maybe. As someone who has done quite a bit of editing of relatively technical material and coordinated review and rework cycles, I wouldn't be surprised if you're looking at a couple of days of work for a paper. Certainly a lot more than for a quick copyedit of an online article. So you're into the more than $1K range pretty quickly.
Advocates of the existing system say that they provide a) the good name of their journal which stems from b) the selection that they're doing, i.e. prestigious papers pride themselves with only publishing the best works of their field.
EDIT: If I had to build a publishing system for research papers, I'd probably have something like Arxiv as a basis, i.e. a site with huge storage capacity where everyone can upload papers given that some basic quality criteria are met (formatting etc.). Then, the role of journals would be performed by reviewers that curate a collection of interesting papers for their readers. It could be integrated right into the same site, similar to how reviewers work e.g. on Steam.
>Then, the role of journals would be performed by reviewers that curate a collection of interesting papers for their readers.
You're skipping a step. The journals' editorial staff performs a quality filter on the submissions before any reviewers/referees even see it. E.g. see the process of a prestigious journal like Nature.[1]
With your proposal, the reviewers with specialized knowledge (e.g. theoretical physicist that understands the bleeding edge of string theory) would have to wade through 1000 papers about "aliens from outer space prove that flat Earth is real." Or mathematicians would waste time with endless crackpot papers that supposedly proved "P=NP".
Since no rational referee with limited time would suffer through that for free, the platform would inevitably require a filter of some sort. Since it's human nature to not want to do something for free ... voila ... you end up recreating another "Elsevier" as middleman again. If an intermediary becomes good at filtering papers for referees and sets a consistent quality bar for readers (subscribers), its human nature to want to be paid for that effort.
Some people wonder why journals exist. They exist because people want them to exist even though they don't realize it. The accumulation of prestige and reputation for curating quality is not free.
Instead of questioning the legitimacy of intermediaries, it's more productive to accept them as a natural emergence of humans' finite time that prevents both reviewers & readers from slogging through an infinite sea of worthless material.
If we acknowledge that something like Elsevier must exist in some form, this lets us concentrate on the recreating the curation platform in a more cost-efficient manner. (You can't do it for free... because charging $0 will not work for the reviewers nor the readers -- even though some in this thread think it does.
Sturgeon's Law is applicable here.[2])
Either the meme that Elsevier employees "do nothing but spell-check LaTeX markup files" is wrong ... or ... it depends on the particular journals in question. For the job listing examples above, one of the job duties is curation of content (e.g. "assessing submitted research papers") and not just copy-editing. So for that Elsevier imprint (Cell Reports), if you submit a paper about "GMO foods proves Darwin Theory of Evolution is Wrong", their unpaid reviewers won't even see it. One of Elsevier's editorial functions is to filter that crap out.
Just because there is a job listing doesn't mean they do the filtering. I've served on several Computer Science conference reviewer committees and I have seen no filtering done whatsoever.
>Computer Science conference reviewer committees and I have seen no filtering done whatsoever.
The published collection of papers from a conference are more like a anthology of the talks given (Springer is common example publisher) rather than a quality curation via rigorous peer-review. A bunch of experts wasting time with unfiltered crap is probably the norm. Virtually none of those conference papers collections have reputations to accumulate "impact".
The prestigious journals like "Cell", "Lancet", or "Journal of the American College of Cardiology" do not forward unfiltered junk papers to reviewers.
Your experience with conferences is a different situation.
Right. We can have a much finer granularity now than "accepted/not accepted". With modern tagging and rating systems, you can have different levels of filtering and store papers at many different stages while preserving your ability to sift through junk.
Of course, no private journal wants to be just a signed tag in some broader system...
I'm guessing GP meant the publishing fees to the author (which some, not all, open access journals have). The prestigious PLOS STEM journals have fees ranging from $1495-$2900:
I happen to be investigating how best to transition to Open Access, and coincidentally just today concerned myself with potential business models that does not involve individual authors paying thousands of dollars to publish. If anyone reading this has ideas or remarks, I'd love to hear them: https://medium.com/flockademic/towards-sustainable-funding-f...
That's the next stage in the war. First we need to prevent Elsevier etc from extorting readers. So that forces them to extort authors. And it's authors who can choose where to publish. Eventually, Elsevier etc will be forced out of the academic publishing sector. And good riddance to them!
I have considerable experience with this issue. For large requests, the granting entity will send a team. They check out the facilities, interview staff, and interactively dig through budgets. I suspect that there will be pushback about paying inflated amounts to publishers. Maybe the amounts are relatively small, but wouldn't PIs rather spend $50K or whatever on productive resources?
I don't presume to be aware of all the implementation details, but in the abstract, is this not a pretty excellent use of tax payer money? To support universal access to research, data, and educational materials?
Yes, but as others have said, professional advancement typically depends on publishing in the expensive journals. And that's no accident, in that predatory for-profit publishers have targeted prestigious journals for acquisition. It's the same game that drug makers play with top-selling drugs.
Eventually, authors will migrate to the not-for-profit open access journals and platforms. But that will take time. Top-ranked PIs must lead the way, given that their reputations are well established, and they have tenure.
I am a software developer and consultant and you do not figure how insanely expensive I am - when your family comes through the doors of my artisanal soldering boutique and demands a custom built home automation system, I would suggest them to invest the money in a long, long vacation with the whole family instead.