The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

jay:
1. Decay of the Earth's magnetic field. If current rates are projected backwards, then by the time you get to 10,000 years ago the magnetic field would have been strong enough to have had effects that we should be able to observe today.

As has been pointed out, geomagnetic reversals are known occurrences that have been measured on Earth. Wikipedia has info on this.

4. "Evaporation" of comets. Every time a comet passes near the sun, some of its mass is lost as the solar wind exerts force on it. This is, of course, the cause of a comet's tail. At observed rates, all known comets would have completed disintegrated within a few million years, and yet they still exist.

I already explained that this is false. The Kuiper belt is observed, and it is observed to be stable long enough to survive for 4.5 billion years and it is a source of comets. Another source of comets is that there is no reason to believe that some comets cannot come from other solar systems (we have even observed comets in other solar systems, and we have observed comets escaping our solar system).

I am not familiar with your other two examples, but I'd certainly like to see a source for "[we] actually find in oil deposits is what you would expect after several hundred thousands years"

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

ExUniversityStaffMember:
It won't surprise you to know that the first thing they would buy was shiny toys for themselves. They would also buy very expensive very specialized equipment, BUT they would buy it first, and THEN they would figure out whether they needed it or not.
It was not uncommon to have some brand-new shiny still in the box expensive gizmo dropped on my desk. "We bought on of these. Make it work." "What do you need it for?" "We don't know yet." "Ah."

Fun. Fun. Fun. Well, that part was. This next part was not: When a research project came to an end, or certain people left, it was not uncommon to see the same equipment get turfed out with them, because no-one else knew how to work it.

Having immense trouble buying this. Maybe academics that work for the Department of Defense can do that, and possibly medical researchers, but nobody else can for sure.

I tried to get Saturday delivery with Amazon recently because I urgently needed a book that was holding up research. I wanted to take said $6 dollars (cost of delivery) from our grant. To take any money from your own grant, you must go through your university manager or business manager (same kind of thing for academics outside of the university). Those people get audited up the ass, at least I know this to be the case outside medical and DoD research. So when I asked for my $6, the response was that this is an unjustified burden on the tax-payer (and over a page of formal legalize with some very unpleasant things like how I should have had the foresight to order the book earlier and not waste tax payer money). Six dollars on a grant worth several hundred thousand. I am therefore having serious trouble swallowing your story.

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

PRMan:
chubertdev:
foo:
chubertdev:
Yeah, the whole "Man created the Bible, God created science" thing.
More like God created the universe(s?), the universe (evolution) created Man (and perhaps some alien species), Man created the Bible, science and a couple other things. Never understood what's the big deal about it.

Either/or, however you want to phrase it.

The fundamentalists that say that the Earth is thousands of years old and that dinosaurs and man lived together are the true funny ones.

There are a lot of dating methods showing a young earth as well as a young solar system. The fact that we even still have helium AT ALL is inexplicable in the model of evolution. It should all be gone already, and soon will be, and hard science has shown no method that creates more. The Oort Cloud only exists (as a complete fantasy with no evidence) because otherwise an old solar system would be falsified.

Also, dragons are documented (side by side with man) by every ancient culture. And scientists sitting in a room voting on whether the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid 65 million years ago isn't as hard of a science as you might think.

Be careful how much stock you put into fairy tales, even if they are told by scientists.

You are probably trolling, but wtf does the existance of helium have to do with the theory of evolution? That theory does not involve any particle physics. It's a theory on a much higher level about huge clumps of various molecules...

dkf · 2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Tomm:
dkf:
It's knowing that no matter how bad you are you'll still have a job that leads to the WTF flowering. (Well, assuming you avoid doing things that embarrass the Dean personally.)
... or the President's daughter.

Whether or not you keep tenure in that situation, you're likely to end up doing a long stretch of jail time for that sort of thing.

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

jay:
chubertdev:
foo:
chubertdev:
Yeah, the whole "Man created the Bible, God created science" thing.
More like God created the universe(s?), the universe (evolution) created Man (and perhaps some alien species), Man created the Bible, science and a couple other things. Never understood what's the big deal about it.

Either/or, however you want to phrase it.

The fundamentalists that say that the Earth is thousands of years old and that dinosaurs and man lived together are the true funny ones.

Please give me some examples of scientific evidence, i.e. experiments performed in the laboratory, or other direct observations of nature, that prove that those ideas are false.

The fact that you think that an idea is truly funny is not scientific evidence. Anybody can ridicule people who disagree with him. Providing evidence is somewhat more difficult.

That is not how scientific proof works. If you posit a hypothesis, you prove that its true, otherwise it's regarded as false. So, if you want to say that the earth is 10k years old, go ahead, knock yourself out. Until you have proof that support your claim, other than what some guy claimed (without proof) in a book 1500 years ago.

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Swedish tard:
jay:
chubertdev:
foo:
chubertdev:
Yeah, the whole "Man created the Bible, God created science" thing.
More like God created the universe(s?), the universe (evolution) created Man (and perhaps some alien species), Man created the Bible, science and a couple other things. Never understood what's the big deal about it.

Either/or, however you want to phrase it.

The fundamentalists that say that the Earth is thousands of years old and that dinosaurs and man lived together are the true funny ones.

Please give me some examples of scientific evidence, i.e. experiments performed in the laboratory, or other direct observations of nature, that prove that those ideas are false.

The fact that you think that an idea is truly funny is not scientific evidence. Anybody can ridicule people who disagree with him. Providing evidence is somewhat more difficult.

That is not how scientific proof works. If you posit a hypothesis, you prove that its true, otherwise it's regarded as false. So, if you want to say that the earth is 10k years old, go ahead, knock yourself out. Until you have proof that support your claim, other than what some guy claimed (without proof) in a book 1500 years ago.

Great, now we've just decided the world wasn't formed 6k years ago or 6 Bn years ago. In fact, we're having difficulty proving that it was formed at all.

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Peter:
Real scientists use LabView.
I's sagaciter!

Oh yeah, that's another WTF farm. I'm actually surprised we don't have LabView WTFs around here... I suppose it's because LabView is confined to certain application areas, so the WTFs can't really breed.

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Anon:
Seriously, I have an MS computer "scientist" working with me who asked me if "Java" and "Javascript" were the same thing.
What the fuck do they teach these people?

In my local university, Maths and how to do Hello World in a few obscure "teaching" languages. And entreprenuership classes, even worse.

rad131304 · 2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Bill C.:
rad131304:
Matlab does have an abstract "handle" class, which is essentially the object class, but you have to construct your own box/unbox functions before you can use it and then you end up littering your code with
if ~isa(foo, 'box') foo = box(foo); end
and
foo.value
statements.
The handle class doesn't work for booleans though. The only boolean value you can handle is FALSE.

If you're saying the classes aren't transparent, you're right - foo.value indicates this pretty explicitly. However, run the following code and see what you get:

obj.m:

classdef obj < handle
    properties (Access = protected)
        v
    end
    properties (Dependent)
        value
    end
    methods
        function value = get.value(this) 
            value = this.v;
        end
        function set.value(this, value)
            assert(class(this.v) == class(value), 'object:typeMismatch', '%s is not of type %s', inputname(2), class(this.v));
            this.v = value;
        end
        function this = obj(value)
            this.v = value;
        end
        function value = unbox(this)
            value = this.value;
        end
    end
end

script:

v = true;
o = obj(v);
newv = o.value;
class(newv)
assert(newv, 'You''re right');
assert(~newv, 'You''re an idiot');

FrostCat · 2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Valued Service:
Quote 3: You see, stupid Americans. You get this horrible (professors are awesome) scenario, when fundamentalists don't cow-tow to evolution because it's the only theory that can explain the universe if you immediately assume there's no God, because there can't be a God, because that offends me. And thus, America is stupid.

I love watching people tow cows.

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Pista:
Peter:
Real scientists use LabView.
I's sagaciter!

Oh yeah, that's another WTF farm. I'm actually surprised we don't have LabView WTFs around here... I suppose it's because LabView is confined to certain application areas, so the WTFs can't really breed.

I think this is simply because there are precious few people who would actually recognize a LabVIEW WTF for what it is...

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
I am not familiar with your other two examples, but I'd certainly like to see a source for "[we] actually find in oil deposits is what you would expect after several hundred thousands years"

He/she is literally copy-pasting arguments that were made in the '70s and have been debunked for nearly as long. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html#creadate

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
jay:
Please give me some examples of scientific evidence, i.e. experiments performed in the laboratory, or other direct observations of nature, that prove that those ideas are false.
The fact that you think that an idea is truly funny is not scientific evidence. Anybody can ridicule people who disagree with him. Providing evidence is somewhat more difficult.

Carbon dating.[/troll kill]

Umm, I think you have that backwards.

According to evolutionary theory, carbon dating tells us absolutely nothing about dinosaurs. Carbon dating only gives measurable results up to 50,000 to 100,000 years. As the dinosaurs are theorized to have all died out tens of millions of years ago, they should have no measurable amounts of C-14 remaining.

Surprisingly, though, many organic samples that are supposed to be tens of millions of years old DO have measurable amounts of C-14. Baumgardner et al published a paper on this. http://globalflood.org/papers/2003ICCc14.html

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

urza9814:
AC:
"Scientists can write code just as well as CS majors," I have a problem with that sentence: CS stands for "Computer Science", so aren't all CS majors, by definition, Scientists?
I have a degree in CS and I consider myself a Scientist.

I'm not familiar with how it works in the US, is it not the same?

At my university (Penn State), Computer Science was part of the College of Engineering. Which is where it belongs IMO. Unless you're researching new algorithms or something, you aren't a scientist. And even that would be more of a mathematician...maybe research on AI or something could be called science. But regular software development -- the stuff 99% of CS majors end up doing -- cannot, in any sense, be considered science. You aren't creating and testing hypotheses and doing research, you're just engineering.

This. Computer Science is not science, that's just a misnomer kept by tradition. Thankfully what we study in my country is named "computer engineering".

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
4. "Evaporation" of comets. Every time a comet passes near the sun, some of its mass is lost as the solar wind exerts force on it. This is, of course, the cause of a comet's tail. At observed rates, all known comets would have completed disintegrated within a few million years, and yet they still exist.
I already explained that this is false. The Kuiper belt is observed, and it is observed to be stable long enough to survive for 4.5 billion years and it is a source of comets. Another source of comets is that there is no reason to believe that some comets cannot come from other solar systems (we have even observed comets in other solar systems, and we have observed comets escaping our solar system).

Approximately 600 Trans-Neptunian Objects have been observed (as of a few years ago, last I heard). For a Kuiper Belt to serve as a sufficient source of comets on an on-going basis, to maintain a supply given the rapid rate of depletion of comets ("rapid" on evolutionary time-scales) it would have to have hundreds of millions of objects. The observed objects don't surprise people on either side: since the discovery of the asteroid belt in the early 1800's it's been well known that the solar system contains many small objects. Also, the observed TNOs are all much larger than comets -- 10 to 50 times larger. So it is not at all clear that the observed objects fit the requirements to form a Kuiper Belt.

One could speculate, of course, that there are many more objects out there that we haven't yet observed and that would be the right size and composition and occur in sufficient numbers to be "proto-comets". But that would be speculation, not observed evidence.

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

I do enjoy it when a discussion about bad software engineering includes highly relevant topics related to theology. Not only do I find it extremely relevant to the matter at hand, but also that the proponents of such arguments are both balanced and reasoned people, who aren't in the least bit tedious.

"And I think you will admit, boys and ladies and gentlemen, that that was telling [them]." - P. G. Wodehouse.

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

jay:
chubertdev:
jay:
Please give me some examples of scientific evidence, i.e. experiments performed in the laboratory, or other direct observations of nature, that prove that those ideas are false.
The fact that you think that an idea is truly funny is not scientific evidence. Anybody can ridicule people who disagree with him. Providing evidence is somewhat more difficult.

Carbon dating.[/troll kill]

Umm, I think you have that backwards.

According to evolutionary theory, carbon dating tells us absolutely nothing about dinosaurs. Carbon dating only gives measurable results up to 50,000 to 100,000 years. As the dinosaurs are theorized to have all died out tens of millions of years ago, they should have no measurable amounts of C-14 remaining.

Surprisingly, though, many organic samples that are supposed to be tens of millions of years old DO have measurable amounts of C-14. Baumgardner et al published a paper on this. http://globalflood.org/papers/2003ICCc14.html

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD011.html Stop trolling.

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Yay, down with professors! hate hate hate

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Jay is right; there's clearly far too much helium in Earth's atmosphere for the mainstream "old earth" chronology to be true. I mean, it's not like there's any kind of non-supernatural mechanism for generating fresh helium under Earth-normal conditions, so what other explanation can there be than "God did it"? And when Jay talks about the impossibility of accommodating old-earth chronology with the empirically observed levels of various minerals which have accumulated in sea-water, he is, if anything, underestimating the magnitude of the challenge thereby posed to mainstream science.

captcha: nobis. "I nobis stuff inside and out."

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

rad131304:
Bill C.:
rad131304:
Matlab does have an abstract "handle" class, which is essentially the object class, but you have to construct your own box/unbox functions before you can use it and then you end up littering your code with
if ~isa(foo, 'box') foo = box(foo); end
and
foo.value
statements.
The handle class doesn't work for booleans though. The only boolean value you can handle is FALSE.
If you're saying the classes aren't transparent, you're right - foo.value indicates this pretty explicitly.

Hey, I know more explicitly than you do. But in a thread about the Mattrix, you should have known you can't handle the TRUE.

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

eVil:
I do enjoy it when a discussion about bad software engineering includes highly relevant topics related to theology.

Well look. The Mattlab program created a CSV file. Then it read it back in. How do you think the CSV file got there? It was created. It didn't evolve.[*] So this proves that bad software engineering is related to computer creation science not to computer evolution religion.

[* We're talking about the CSV file here, not the program.]

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

dkf:
Tomm:
dkf:
It's knowing that no matter how bad you are you'll still have a job that leads to the WTF flowering. (Well, assuming you avoid doing things that embarrass the Dean personally.)
... or the President's daughter.
Whether or not you keep tenure in that situation, you're likely to end up doing a long stretch of jail time for that sort of thing.

You'll survive impeachment, but you might find yourself at the wrong end of a shotgun being held by the president, if the president is a hypocrite about this kind of thing.

chubertdev · 2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Anonymous Coward:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD011.html Stop trolling.

Screw him and the dinosaur that he rode in on. :)

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Strictly speaking Naag refers to Cobra.

Scarlet Manuka · 2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Pista:
I'm actually surprised we don't have LabView WTFs around here...

Like this one, you mean?

2013-02-28 Reply Admin

MrBester:
"Scientists can write code just as well as CS majors" That at least is accurate, in that the quality of the code they produce is just as poor.

90 percent of everything is crap. 10% of scientists and 10% of programmers write good code. The rest write varying levels of crap. The difference is the scientists don't get fired as often for writing shit code.

rad131304 · 2013-02-28 Reply Admin

Bill C.:
rad131304:
Bill C.:
rad131304:
Matlab does have an abstract "handle" class, which is essentially the object class, but you have to construct your own box/unbox functions before you can use it and then you end up littering your code with
if ~isa(foo, 'box') foo = box(foo); end
and
foo.value
statements.
The handle class doesn't work for booleans though. The only boolean value you can handle is FALSE.
If you're saying the classes aren't transparent, you're right - foo.value indicates this pretty explicitly.
Hey, I know more explicitly than you do. But in a thread about the Mattrix, you should have known you can't handle the TRUE.

I didn't realize I'd stumbled into "a few good matrici" .... I think I'd rather have the blue pill so I can forget all of this.

2013-02-28 Reply Admin

postdocs pay 60K/year around here (compare this to a SW developer with 5 years experience, who makes 80K)

SW developers as they get older, their value diminishes (like vinegar). The problem is the "new tech" - very difficult to keep up. Even if you do keep up, old devs are looked upon as "outdated", easily replaceable by fresh cannon-fodder.

So, he'll make 80K a year after the first 5 yrs experience, then 60K the next 5 years, then 40K the next batch... you get the idea. If he wants to keep his salary growing, then no choice but go climb the management ladder, i.e. to from coder to team leader, then Architard ANALyst, then some Agile fking-master, then ...WHATEVER. At the end of his career he don't code anymore.

Not everyone has the right skills to become a manager; you're a techy, after all.

Now, having a PhD means (normally) that you've got a very strong basis in your field. You've got knowledge that doesn't fade away with time as fast as that of a SQ dev. You transcend the "hype of the jour" tech. The more time passes, the more valuable you get (like wine); and no need to shift you career towards a "manager" type.

And nobody stops you from doing commercial work. I don't see how PhD and commercial are mutually exclusive. I've heard that Google has lots of PhDs.

--My thoughts--

2013-02-28 Reply Admin

So by definition, any language which non-computer scientists cannot use as well as computer scientists is either not mature or not well-documented.

(Also, there are no languages which are mature and well-documented.)

2013-02-28 Reply Admin

At 40 years of age (and still going strong!), I think it's safe to say that C is mature.

2013-02-28 Reply Admin

Gibbon1:
90 percent of everything is crap. 10% of scientists and 10% of programmers write good code.

90 percent of code written by good programmers is crap. The other 10 percent are actual true exceptions.

90% of deposits in urinals ... oops ... 90 percent of comments about Sturgeon's law are crap.

2013-03-01 Reply Admin

@SunTzuWarmaster: Although I agree with your overall premise (professors are not drains on taxpayers), I have a more balanced opinion.

[i]Some[i] professors are drains on taxpayers; some are a huge bargain.

Bargain:

medical research professors

Drains:

philosophy professors
ancient Greek literature professors

That medical research professor is searching for cures for your kids' leukemia, and his/her inventions will be a huge boon for all taxpayers (and some enterprising companies that buy the patents).

Not so much for those other professors...

2013-03-01 Reply Admin

[q] He didn’t know which was worse: the constant stream of puns he would have to endure, or that a group of scientists thought they could reinvent virtual memory in a fourth-generation language. [/q]

So... he is hired to fix the code written by people who don't know how to code properly, and his contributions are appreciated. What's there to complain about?

2013-03-01 Reply Admin

The Alchemist:
Bargain: - medical research professors
Drains:

philosophy professors

ancient Greek literature professors

That medical research professor is searching for cures for your kids' leukemia, and his/her inventions will be a huge boon for all taxpayers (and some enterprising companies that buy the patents).

Not so much for those other professors...

This is bullshit. Humanities professors help to hold our culture together, help us understand our ancestors and take a broader view on the world.

Disclaimer: I am a physicist by training.

2013-03-02 Reply Admin

dgvid:
The first sentence of the story almost gave me a brain aneurysm. I see stuff like that on regular basis. It's a WTF, but not rare or exceptional.
And don't even think that MATLAB is the worst of it. Allowing a scientist to code in C++ is like giving an espresso and a loaded gun to a 10-year-old.

Most physicist are quite happy sticking to FORTRAN.

2013-03-02 Reply Admin

It's possible that this code was original written so that multiple compute nodes could consume the data files in parallel. I've seen stuff like this many times in scientific computing where the original code made sense, but another lab rewrote it to do something slightly different, but didn't take the time to completely understand the original code, and ended up with a bunch of wtfs.

2013-03-02 Reply Admin

SunTzuWarmaster:
dkf:
Jack:
In academia, you can make a career of nothing but hubris, because the taxpayers are an unlimited trough that can be drained forever.
Only if you have tenure, and not all tenured positions are paid for by government; private largesse can lead to professors that are equally disconnected from reality. It's knowing that no matter how bad you are you'll still have a job that leads to the WTF flowering. (Well, assuming you avoid doing things that embarrass the Dean personally.)

Other than the fact that tenured professors have to go up for review every five years to retain it, you're right!

I am considering a position in academia, and was shocked at what it really is (still considering though). Just to let you know, the following is the academic path: 1 - BS, MS, PhD (generally, work like hell, publish or perish, 40 hrs/week for the BS, 60 hrs/week for the PhD) 2 - PostDoc (work like hell, prove you can publish really good things, 60 hrs/week) 3 - Tenure Track (work 60+ hour weeks between Teaching/Service/Research) 4 - The golden Tenure (after minimum 8 years of degree, 2 years of postdoc'ing, and 6 years of tenure track, you age 34, minimum, having spent almost half of your 18-55 working 'career')

Note that "tenure" does not mean "research funding", you have to get that yourself through proposal/grant writing. Also note that tenure only applies to the university where you get it. If you have to move, you may have to start all over again. If that weren't enough, you go up for "Tenure Review" to see if you keep it every 5 years for about the next 20 years, when you get Full Professorship (age 50ish). Also note that even Full Professors work 50-55 hours weeks.

For anyone that thinks that professors are a drain on the taxpayer, please consider: 1 - they are paid virtually nothing during the PhD process (20K/year for only the last MS/PhD portion of the degree) 2 - postdocs pay 60K/year around here (compare this to a SW developer with 5 years experience, who makes 80K) 3 - they have to find money to fund their activities (grants/contracts) 4 - between 30-50% of their time spent working is unpaid 5 - true tenure protection (no further tenure review) is not available until near retirement

Professors are frequently disconnected from the 'business' world (where you have to sell products to make money), but frequently are a bargain for the taxpayer. They have exceptional expertise, available at discounted rates. They frequently negotiate payments poorly, as a byproduct of do doing it infrequently. The delegate work to grad students (who are even more of a bargain). Poor professors (or ones who work <50 hours/week) are replaced with younger/hungrier ones.

Indeed. And let's not forget the actual output academia produces: high quality research which benefits everybody.

For example, the full implications of the relationship between business and risk were discovered in the 1950s. The business world was revolutionized. What had previously been rules of thumb had in principle been turned into algorithmic processes and policies, via the standard theorems of probability. This, together with the semiconductor, directly lead to the post-Industrial revolution.

And what of the semiconductor? The first transistor was made by Bell Labs, but would it have been possible without the team training in physics? All four members of the team were doctors.

And while many doctors focus on a single subject, there are many interdisciplinary doctors out there too.

Academia is an investment that has paid off in trillions of dollars of value.

2013-03-03 Reply Admin

jay:

Approximately 600 Trans-Neptunian Objects have been observed (as of a few years ago, last I heard). For a Kuiper Belt to serve as a sufficient source of comets on an on-going basis, to maintain a supply given the rapid rate of depletion of comets ("rapid" on evolutionary time-scales) it would have to have hundreds of millions of objects. The observed objects don't surprise people on either side: since the discovery of the asteroid belt in the early 1800's it's been well known that the solar system contains many small objects. Also, the observed TNOs are all much larger than comets -- 10 to 50 times larger. So it is not at all clear that the observed objects fit the requirements to form a Kuiper Belt.

One could speculate, of course, that there are many more objects out there that we haven't yet observed and that would be the right size and composition and occur in sufficient numbers to be "proto-comets". But that would be speculation, not observed evidence.

We have observed comets that came from the Kuiper belt, so I have no idea why you are suggesting we don't know if even have any. We have also observed objects that came from the Oort cloud.. hell, ISON, all over the news now, is almost certainly from the Oort cloud (or if the cloud doesn't exist as you propose, it has passed through where the Oort cloud is thought to be located.

Your idea that anything we cannot see directly right now is therefore "speculation" is absurd. You throw out 50% of science this way. There are multiple lines of evidence to suggest the Oort cloud's existence. Even if it doesn't exist, there are other sources for comets as I've explained (say from other solar systems, where we have observed them and we know they can leave solar systems since we have observed them leaving ours). The fact that the Kuiper belt exists and is stable enough to survive 4.5 billion years (even if its actual age were 6000 years old or however many you think it is) also suggests that there is absolutely no reason to believe another object like it cannot exist. In short, even if the Oort cloud was completely fictional, there is still no problem with having the comets we see.

2013-03-04 Reply Admin

SunTzuWarmaster:
dkf:
Jack:
In academia, you can make a career of nothing but hubris, because the taxpayers are an unlimited trough that can be drained forever.
Only if you have tenure, and not all tenured positions are paid for by government; private largesse can lead to professors that are equally disconnected from reality. It's knowing that no matter how bad you are you'll still have a job that leads to the WTF flowering. (Well, assuming you avoid doing things that embarrass the Dean personally.)

Other than the fact that tenured professors have to go up for review every five years to retain it, you're right!

I am considering a position in academia, and was shocked at what it really is (still considering though). Just to let you know, the following is the academic path: 1 - BS, MS, PhD (generally, work like hell, publish or perish, 40 hrs/week for the BS, 60 hrs/week for the PhD) 2 - PostDoc (work like hell, prove you can publish really good things, 60 hrs/week) 3 - Tenure Track (work 60+ hour weeks between Teaching/Service/Research) 4 - The golden Tenure (after minimum 8 years of degree, 2 years of postdoc'ing, and 6 years of tenure track, you age 34, minimum, having spent almost half of your 18-55 working 'career')

Note that "tenure" does not mean "research funding", you have to get that yourself through proposal/grant writing. Also note that tenure only applies to the university where you get it. If you have to move, you may have to start all over again. If that weren't enough, you go up for "Tenure Review" to see if you keep it every 5 years for about the next 20 years, when you get Full Professorship (age 50ish). Also note that even Full Professors work 50-55 hours weeks.

For anyone that thinks that professors are a drain on the taxpayer, please consider: 1 - they are paid virtually nothing during the PhD process (20K/year for only the last MS/PhD portion of the degree) 2 - postdocs pay 60K/year around here (compare this to a SW developer with 5 years experience, who makes 80K) 3 - they have to find money to fund their activities (grants/contracts) 4 - between 30-50% of their time spent working is unpaid 5 - true tenure protection (no further tenure review) is not available until near retirement

Professors are frequently disconnected from the 'business' world (where you have to sell products to make money), but frequently are a bargain for the taxpayer. They have exceptional expertise, available at discounted rates. They frequently negotiate payments poorly, as a byproduct of do doing it infrequently. The delegate work to grad students (who are even more of a bargain). Poor professors (or ones who work <50 hours/week) are replaced with younger/hungrier ones.

Where do I have to live and apply to make 80 grand a year as a developer with 5 year experience?

2013-03-04 Reply Admin

I'd go so far as to say he won't survive in most places of employment. I mean really, the reason he resigned is quite petty in the big scheme of things. Yeah, those things might be a bit annoying, but so what? Buck up, bucko.

2013-03-04 Reply Admin

AetherMcLoud:
SunTzuWarmaster:
...
Where do I have to live and apply to make 80 grand a year as a developer with 5 year experience?

I make about $63K a year with 4 years of experience (and a 37.5 hour week) out of Cleveland. I'd expect at least $80K if I were in a pricier city (NYC, Chicago, LA, etc.), assuming the same level of responsibility as my current position (and a 40+ hour week instead of 37.5).

2013-03-05 Reply Admin

AC:
"Scientists can write code just as well as CS majors," I have a problem with that sentence: CS stands for "Computer Science", so aren't all CS majors, by definition, Scientists?
I have a degree in CS and I consider myself a Scientist.

I'm not familiar with how it works in the US, is it not the same?

Having a science degree does not automatically make you a scientist. I'm not from the US, and to me a scientist is someone who does research as a profession.

2013-03-12 Reply Admin

Submitter here. The code is real and (after refactoring to remove the WTF) is still in use. The story is... literary embellishment. Scientists, as a rule, aren't THAT good at puns- most of our humour is completely incomprehensible to anyone outside that specific field.

2013-03-20 Reply Admin

That sounds HORRIBLE! Why do it? I believe the entire University system is broken. How is it possible that an education is as expensive as it is considering how many people pay?

To think that professors make so little makes no sense. Someone is getting rich off of the system. Makes me think that trade schools are a better approach.

2013-06-19 Reply Admin

SunTzuWarmaster:
dkf:
Jack:
In academia, you can make a career of nothing but hubris, because the taxpayers are an unlimited trough that can be drained forever.
Only if you have tenure, and not all tenured positions are paid for by government; private largesse can lead to professors that are equally disconnected from reality. It's knowing that no matter how bad you are you'll still have a job that leads to the WTF flowering. (Well, assuming you avoid doing things that embarrass the Dean personally.)

Other than the fact that tenured professors have to go up for review every five years to retain it, you're right!

I am considering a position in academia, and was shocked at what it really is (still considering though). Just to let you know, the following is the academic path: 1 - BS, MS, PhD (generally, work like hell, publish or perish, 40 hrs/week for the BS, 60 hrs/week for the PhD) 2 - PostDoc (work like hell, prove you can publish really good things, 60 hrs/week) 3 - Tenure Track (work 60+ hour weeks between Teaching/Service/Research) 4 - The golden Tenure (after minimum 8 years of degree, 2 years of postdoc'ing, and 6 years of tenure track, you age 34, minimum, having spent almost half of your 18-55 working 'career')

Note that "tenure" does not mean "research funding", you have to get that yourself through proposal/grant writing. Also note that tenure only applies to the university where you get it. If you have to move, you may have to start all over again. If that weren't enough, you go up for "Tenure Review" to see if you keep it every 5 years for about the next 20 years, when you get Full Professorship (age 50ish). Also note that even Full Professors work 50-55 hours weeks.

For anyone that thinks that professors are a drain on the taxpayer, please consider: 1 - they are paid virtually nothing during the PhD process (20K/year for only the last MS/PhD portion of the degree) 2 - postdocs pay 60K/year around here (compare this to a SW developer with 5 years experience, who makes 80K) 3 - they have to find money to fund their activities (grants/contracts) 4 - between 30-50% of their time spent working is unpaid 5 - true tenure protection (no further tenure review) is not available until near retirement

Professors are frequently disconnected from the 'business' world (where you have to sell products to make money), but frequently are a bargain for the taxpayer. They have exceptional expertise, available at discounted rates. They frequently negotiate payments poorly, as a byproduct of do doing it infrequently. The delegate work to grad students (who are even more of a bargain). Poor professors (or ones who work <50 hours/week) are replaced with younger/hungrier ones.

I'm sorry but Professors are frequently disconnected from the 'business' world (where you have to sell products to make money), but "a bargain for the taxpayer"? The only expertise they have is the expertise they demonstrated 20, 30, sometimes 40 years ago. In any field except carpentry (and even then), that's seriously dated. In business? That's not just useless, it's deadly. There's no bargain when the information is pointless to man or beast.

A CSV is as Good as RAM, Right?

Leave a comment on “A CSV is as Good as RAM, Right?”