Donald B. Gillies Lecture: Dr. Michael Stonebraker

What people said

mpweiher · 2024-04 · Strong recommendation

Yes, this is a development that has happened over time and has become pretty severe. Michael Stonebraker has written/talked about this in the context of DBMS research, but to me the same issues are applicable to other fields as well. Slides: [LINK] Talk: [VIDEO] In short, the incentives/requirements in academia have changed so that producing working software is no longer feasible. He says he got his PhD with exactly 0 publications, became a professor with 5. Nowadays, you have to have 5 publications to get your PhD and god knows how many to become professor. That means 1 paper successfully published per year if you want to get your PhD in 5 years. Doing software is not possible, it is too risky and just takes too long. There's a lot more, I highly recommend the talk!

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psychomugs · 2021-05 · Recommendation

I often go back to this talk from Michael Stonebraker about, in his terms, the diarrhea of papers [1]. It's difficult to justify time towards anything that doesn't lead to a near-term publication or another line on your CV. [1] [VIDEO]

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mpweiher · 2018-09 · Recommendation

> academia’s ideal role is to simply advance human understanding in interesting ways Yes and no. This is an engineering science. In a pure science, the world is out there to explore and find out about, constraining what you do. An engineering science is very much about useful things we can build and how we can get better at doing that. Buildings that stay up and house people/things, planes that can fly, ships that float, that sort of thing. Without a world to find out about and without being constrained by stuff to build, things get a bit arbitrary. At that point, it's really more pure art than anything else. Math is sort of the exception where we allow that kind of freedom. Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math is a reminder of the dangers of applying that approach to other disciplines. Anyway, I think it is actually wrong to pin academia's irrelevance to this fundamental divide. The problems in industry aren't too easy / boring to be of interest to academics. They are too hard to be solvable by anyone with the current insane level of publication requirements. Michael Stonebraker talked about this in detail: [VIDEO] It's a great talk.

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