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Max-Planck-Institutes are great places for research. (They also have great food btw.) But a large part of the actual work is still done by armies of PhD students.
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Apr 2, 2016 10:13
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Max-Planck-Institutes are great places for research. (They also have great food btw.) But a large part of the actual work is still done by armies of PhD students. Yeah. It's mostly director > long term group leaders > PhD students. Germany is bad at providing enough mid-level jobs in academia.
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Apr 2, 2016 10:14
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:...and people who in America or the UK might go find work with a university BSc in chemistry might have a Fachhochschul Yeah. blowfish posted:Yeah. It's mostly director > long term group leaders > PhD students. Germany is bad at providing enough mid-level jobs in academia. All the people with PhDs in my company are basically saying the same: Staying at the university would have been nice, but gently caress trying to win the lottery of getting a permanent position there.
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Apr 2, 2016 10:19
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:All the people with PhDs in my company are basically saying the same: Staying at the university would have been nice, but gently caress trying to win the lottery of getting a permanent position there.
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Apr 2, 2016 13:17
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ANIME AKBAR posted:If you don't mind a modest salary, Also no guarantee you won't have to use that modest salary to tide you over gaps between postdocs and moving all over the country (possibly abroad, on different continents) every 1-3 years
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Apr 2, 2016 16:49
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ANIME AKBAR posted:If you don't mind a modest salary, there's no reason you can't bounce between postdocs indefinitely. I think you can only do this for a total of 6 years in Germany. Also having to move every couple years or so sucks.
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Apr 2, 2016 17:32
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Also being a postdoc indefinitely is kind of like saying "I enjoy getting screwed indefinitely"
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Apr 2, 2016 18:01
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ANIME AKBAR posted:If you don't mind a modest salary, there's no reason you can't bounce between postdocs indefinitely. Yeah, it's not just a modest salary. It's having to pack up your lovely rental house every two years to go to another place you had no real choice in. "Come on kids, you'll love Idaho!"
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Apr 2, 2016 18:40
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ANIME AKBAR posted:If you don't mind a modest salary, there's no reason you can't bounce between postdocs indefinitely. There's a pretty hard limit after 5-6 years. Certainly at that point it becomes very difficult to obtain a permanent academic position, and no-one really wants to hire a 40 year old postdoc (especially not when there's a bunch of < 30 year old applicants without any family). If the LHC doesn't turn up anything new over the next couple of years the funding agencies might lose patience and scale back high energy physics research. A bunch of newly jobless physics PhDs combined with the tech bubble bursting could really hit bay area salaries. Although there might not be that much demand for former academics with mediocre programming skills and a tenuous grasp of statistics.
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Apr 2, 2016 18:58
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Nocturtle posted:There's a pretty hard limit after 5-6 years. Certainly at that point it becomes very difficult to obtain a permanent academic position, and no-one really wants to hire a 40 year old postdoc (especially not when there's a bunch of < 30 year old applicants without any family). Didn't they recently start finding evidence of stuff beyond the standard model? If no, there's still glorious Chinar building new and bigger particle accelerators with underpaid workers on cheap land.
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Apr 2, 2016 19:15
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To be fair to US grant funding agencies, the current policy problems they have are the result of 25 or so years of direct pressure from congress for all sorts of means and impact testing. Agencies are getting their research funding budgets cut, and their main defense to this has been to get researchers to demonstrate the (crazy, predetermined, rhetorically laden, economics-driven) impact of their research.
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Apr 2, 2016 19:26
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Nocturtle posted:A bunch of newly jobless physics PhDs combined with the tech bubble bursting could really hit bay area salaries. The physics world can't be that big to matter for that. Nocturtle posted:Although there might not be that much demand for former academics with mediocre programming skills and a tenuous grasp of statistics. Haha, if you listen to physicists describe their capabilities, you'll learn that actually, they are the best programmers, better than professional computer programmers, and also the best statisticians, better than people who actually study statistics. Although you should give them credit, they've got to be somewhat good at statistics because you kind of have to be to be able detect the extremely weak and esoteric effects that they spend their entire careers chasing after.
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Apr 2, 2016 20:07
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silence_kit posted:The physics world can't be that big to matter for that. Not even a little bit.
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Apr 2, 2016 20:32
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silence_kit posted:Haha, if you listen to physicists describe their capabilities, you'll learn that actually, they are the best programmers, better than professional computer programmers, and also the best statisticians, better than people who actually study statistics. Although you should give them credit, they've got to be somewhat good at statistics because you kind of have to be to be able detect the extremely weak and esoteric effects that they spend their entire careers chasing after. Particle physicists invented the internet with Al Gore, kicking off this whole unicorn-chasing tech bubble. The tech elite should remember this and show some respect. For reference the largest LHC paper to date had >5000 authors, which was a combined analysis by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations. Supporting technical + computing divisions at CERN and other institutions probably employ a similar number of people. So yes, the HEP bubble bursting would probably unleash only O(10000) desperate academics on the tech + financial job markets.
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Apr 2, 2016 21:07
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that's a lot of hep cats
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Apr 2, 2016 21:18
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Emacs Headroom posted:Yes, as I said, there is a cost to research, and not all of it bears fruit. We don't have time machines, so we don't know with absolute accuracy which projects will work or which labs will have the most useful results. I generally agree with this in principle (basic research has very clearly been shown to be cost-effective), but I don't believe for a second that the 20% and 1% are anywhere near as unknowable or unpredictable ahead of the fact as you present it here. I understand the (obvious) incentives in play here, but I also think there's a ton of room for optimization independent of whether overall funding levels go up, down, or remain the same. silence_kit posted:Haha, if you listen to physicists describe their capabilities, you'll learn that actually, they are the best programmers, better than professional computer programmers, and also the best statisticians, better than people who actually study statistics. Although you should give them credit, they've got to be somewhat good at statistics because you kind of have to be to be able detect the extremely weak and esoteric effects that they spend their entire careers chasing after. As a non-physicist with no skin in the game, I think that physicists are better suited for data science jobs than people from basically any other background. Software engineering jobs, not so much.
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Apr 3, 2016 01:02
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blah_blah posted:I generally agree with this in principle (basic research has very clearly been shown to be cost-effective), but I don't believe for a second that the 20% and 1% are anywhere near as unknowable or unpredictable ahead of the fact as you present it here. I understand the (obvious) incentives in play here, but I also think there's a ton of room for optimization independent of whether overall funding levels go up, down, or remain the same. This is just going from what program officers for the NIH are saying. A score of 98 and a score of 95 don't have any meaningful distinction, it's which reviewers got your grant or how tired they were when they saw it. You could argue that with a lot more effort we could get some more consistency from those scores, and sure, maybe, but I'm pretty bear-ish on our ability to really predict how beneficial or fruitful research is actually going to be for those grants in the 90+ score range. quote:As a non-physicist with no skin in the game, I think that physicists are better suited for data science jobs than people from basically any other background. Software engineering jobs, not so much. I agree; I like working with hard scientists like physicists and computational biologists as data scientists. I actually like working with data scientists with social science backgrounds too; I think social scientists and biologists are more in-tuned with the pitfalls of working in really messy areas, where physicists are trained to look for regularities they can exploit for solid theory. But yeah the physicists I've worked with and liked tended to be a bit more on the modest side, and understood that writing massive simulations in their optimized MPI c-code means they're smart but doesn't mean they're prepared to architect or write scalable, resilient back-ends or something like that.
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Apr 3, 2016 04:13
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Spazzle posted:It should be no suprise that we're selecting for researchers who are good at getting grants funded, not those who are necessary good at science. Which, to tie it into the topic, is how VC funding works as well. Take a thousand startups and 900 of them fail. Of the hundred remaining, 90 do mediocre and get bought without a big markup, but 10 do extremely well. Anything those 10 CEOs dream up from now on is getting funded.
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Apr 3, 2016 04:49
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Emacs Headroom posted:This is just going from what program officers for the NIH are saying. A score of 98 and a score of 95 don't have any meaningful distinction, it's which reviewers got your grant or how tired they were when they saw it. Grant review is a horrible and arbitrary process- for most agencies it's not even blinded. A variety of political issues, again primarily stemming from congressional oversight, have rendered agencies afraid to change/improve things. There's a whole line of research I can do on the subject...after I get tenure. 
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Apr 3, 2016 |
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Apr 3, 2016 05:02
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blah_blah posted:As a non-physicist with no skin in the game, I think that physicists are better suited for data science jobs than people from basically any other background. Software engineering jobs, not so much. Writing fart apps is not engineering. The guy writing control systems for aircraft can probably call himself an engineer. A node web developer calling himself an engineer is shameful.
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Apr 3, 2016 21:03
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Citizen Tayne posted:Writing fart apps is not engineering. And writing apps that millions of people use every day with near 100% uptime is a lot more complex than what most real 'engineers' do. Or maintaining an online ML model that is constantly updating itself on thousands of features and millions or billions of data points every single day (or less). Actual PEs are overwhelmingly doing mundane, insignificant things as well, credential or not. I guess the barriers to entry are slightly higher than your typical fart app creator, but that alone doesn't justify the degree of snobbery that you see from a lot of engineers around the engineer title. For that matter, my whole post reads exactly the same if you replace 'software engineering' with 'software development', so I'm not sure why you decided to fixate on that. e: Citizen Tayne posted:If they're an actual engineer and they hold a PE, you can assume that they're going to be thoroughly steeped in math to begin with. But actually, since you brought it up, most engineers only know a very basic amount of math aside from possibly electrical engineers. Civil or mechanical engineers are not 'thoroughly steeped in math' by any means. A high-end CS degree has a lot more math in it than most engineering degrees, especially now that basically all of those grads are now taking one or more ML course. If your objection is that there are a lot of bootcamp grads in the field that don't know the first thing about discrete math or algorithms, then that's one thing, but CS as a field definitely has very strong roots in math and most high-quality programs still have a very significant math component. I'm not sure where this weird fetishization of PEs is coming from, but (as someone with a math Ph.D who has taught and TAed at the university level) there is nothing particularly special about engineers relative to other STEM disciplines. blah_blah fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Apr 3, 2016 |
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Apr 3, 2016 21:44
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blah_blah posted:And writing apps that millions of people use every day with near 100% uptime is a lot more complex than what most real 'engineers' do.
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Apr 3, 2016 21:52
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Paolomania posted:Meh not when that uptime comes just by running thousands of instances in parallel and restarting ones that crash. Can't really run N versions of the same airline flight in parallel and call it a win if at least one makes it to the destination. Building appropriate levels of redundancy into a product, and implementing it in such a way that it has a minimal effect on the end-user, is basically a classical problem in engineering?
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Apr 3, 2016 21:59
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blah_blah posted:And writing apps that millions of people use every day with near 100% uptime is a lot more complex than what most real 'engineers' do. Or maintaining an online ML model that is constantly updating itself on thousands of features and millions or billions of data points every single day (or less). Call yourself a developer, then. "Engineer" is a legally-protected title in most places, and claiming to a title that you haven't earned is a shameful thing.
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Apr 3, 2016 22:10
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blah_blah posted:And writing apps that millions of people use every day with near 100% uptime is a lot more complex than what most real 'engineers' do. There are two factors to consider - the difficulty of accomplishing a task, and the consequences of failing the task.
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Apr 3, 2016 22:11
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Fart app fails: "Oh well, no fart noises for me" Bridge fails: "oh god look at all these dead people"
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Apr 3, 2016 22:13
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but what if the cops decide to warn people away from the broken bridge with his fart app???
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Apr 3, 2016 22:16
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I have a hard time thinking of where this inter-disciplinary dick-waving contest fits, but I'm pretty sure it's not this thread.
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Apr 3, 2016 22:16
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Citizen Tayne posted:Call yourself a developer, then. "Engineer" is a legally-protected title in most places, and claiming to a title that you haven't earned is a shameful thing. I'm not either variety of engineer, as I've already stated (I'm a data scientist). I'm not sure what you mean by 'most' places, as (for example) the US, Canada, and the UK all allow IT/tech workers to use the title 'software engineer' (or 'production engineer', 'sales engineer', 'systems engineer', etc) with few or zero restrictions. You can't call yourself a professional engineer or a mechanical engineer or whatever, but that's a separate issue. computer parts posted:There are two factors to consider - the difficulty of accomplishing a task, and the consequences of failing the task. Citizen Tayne posted:Fart app fails: "Oh well, no fart noises for me" Yes, and there are professional engineers who work on (say) consumer electronics or other products that are far from life-or-death. Conversely there are absolutely people who work on software products that can have life-or-death consequences as well.
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Apr 3, 2016 22:32
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I have a hard time thinking of where this inter-disciplinary dick-waving contest fits, but I'm pretty sure it's not this thread. I mean, it's some guy who is Really Angry that I used the incredibly standard term 'software engineering' instead of its synonym, 'software development', when the sentence reads exactly the same with either choice of wording.
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Apr 3, 2016 22:35
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blah_blah posted:I mean, it's some guy who is Really Angry that I used the incredibly standard term 'software engineering' instead of its synonym, 'software development', when the sentence reads exactly the same with either choice of wording. blah_blah posted:(I'm a data scientist). this just gets better and better
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Apr 3, 2016 22:38
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:this just gets better and better blah_blah doesn't spend all day in YOSPOS, but my impression is that he does know what he's doing. I think he's involved in developing new models and algorithms and making them into actual production code, not just vomiting out BI reports.
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Apr 4, 2016 02:03
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Emacs Headroom posted:blah_blah doesn't spend all day in YOSPOS, but my impression is that he does know what he's doing. lol, President Obama doesn't spend all day in Debate & Discussion, but my impression is that he knows what he's doing
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Apr 4, 2016 02:27
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Citizen Tayne posted:Call yourself a developer, then. "Engineer" is a legally-protected title in most places, and claiming to a title that you haven't earned is a shameful thing. Lots of engineers are not PEs, I'm an Electrical Engineer and I know a lot of other engineers and none of us are PEs. I'd only have to get it if I were going to work in the power distribution field or something. I agree that the whole PE fetishization thing is stupid, whether or not you're a PE is mostly dependent on what field or subfield you're in. MaxxBot fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Apr 4, 2016 |
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Apr 4, 2016 02:40
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A little googling suggests that the title"Software Engineer" is not as regulated as the other categories- there's evidence of a couple states where it's protected, but generally not.
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Apr 4, 2016 02:47
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The idea that a fart app can't be engineered because its a fart app is obviously stupid. Engineering is a discipline, not a specific medium, and clearly applies to a range of things including many stupid startup ideas.
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Apr 4, 2016 02:47
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Let's have a semantic argument guys.
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Apr 4, 2016 04:44
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Holy poo poo none of this has anything to do with unicorns.
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Apr 4, 2016 06:42
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uberr, an app that lets you hire programmers to make an uber knockoff for you on demand
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Apr 4, 2016 07:04
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corn in the bible posted:uberr, an app that lets you hire programmers to make an uber knockoff for you on demand
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Apr 4, 2016 07:07
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