That is an honest and good question. I won't say I am such a person, but perhaps I can shed some light.
Academia is an elite, powerful, and privileged institution. Of course it is not a monolithic institution, but a conglomeration of many individual institutions that share a common culture. Any cultural entity like this is going to attract deserved and undeserved criticism.
Any powerful cultural institution like this will fall into corruption (literally rotteness), again like every other big cultural institution. This is a charge that has been leveled against academia since universities first arose in the late middle ages. The chancellor of my university at my time went to prison for misappropriation of funds. Currently (and for years now) my alma mater (a public university) spends some amount of its resources on what some people might consider frivilous make-work (i.e. unneccesary jobs creation) while raising tuition as part of the general runaway education inflation, which is far higher that the core inflation rate. (No citation. I'll trust most readers will grant this asseertion.)
As part of the culture, academia is strongly associated with some political trends, and the status quo, and strongly opposed to others. Of course not everyone is going to like that fit.
At the highest levels elite academia is strongly associated with elite government, media, business, etc.
Professors are generally people who like to talk and tell stories. This rubs some people the wrong way, and not all professors are as smart and as good story tellers as Feynman, for instance.
Just some of the things that might trigger some people.
In my case it's related to the continual drumbeat of news stories that seems to show them being transformed from bastions of free inquiry into centers of political indoctrination. It's been reinforced in the last couple of years by a friend who sent his sweet, friendly, apolitical hard working daughter to a liberal arts college, and she returned as a politicized tattooed pierced foul mouthed social warrior who despises her family and home community. While that anecdote has applied for generations it seems to have become more rule than exception. There are an increasing number of parents who feel that sending their kids to college amounts to parental malpractice.
This "chip" may sound like a form of bigotry in that it paints many remaining fine scholars with the same broad brush, but you can't enroll in just that part of a school.
While the STEM fields that most publish in Elsevier are less affected by this trend they seem to be moving in that direction. Simply researching human intelligence, sexual dimorphism, heritability or a constantly shifting range of other topics has become career threatening. The idea that merit should play a predominant role in hiring is becoming scarce in faculty hiring committees.
I'm a product of a university but looking back I see that my degree did little for me in terms of either increased human capital or of signalling, in that I learned to code outside of class and my degree is of ever less value in getting hired. If I could go back and whisper in my high school ears while I was applying to college I might say "skip it". And that's separate from the ideological angle.
Meanwhile it has become much more expensive in the era of federal financing. Both sides of the cost benefit ratio are moving in the wrong direction.
The net result is that I've come to discount the value of universities. If they were all closed tomorrow it would be both a great loss and gain, and I'm not sure which would dominate.
I went to a rather liberal university recently and while the community and ideology you describe did exist, it always seemed to be on the fringe a bit (if very loud). For the most part, people were focused on working hard at school or sex and partying rather than engaging in fringe politics.
Some young people need to rebel for a bit. People's views usually moderate a bit a few years out, just with life experience.
The political and cultural role of universities has existed from the beginning, though it mostly serves to reinforce cultural hegemony, not challenge it. Universities are a part of that battleground though. John Stuart Mill commented on this in the 19th century:
For a recent example of this leaning the other direction, there is author T.J. Martinson being fired -- before he could begin teaching, from Olivet Nazarene University, over the contents of a book written outside his proffesorial duties, for including swearing, a lesbian protagonist, and a character choosing hope over prayer:
For a more substantive instance, there are the Lewis Powell memorandum and cooption of many university programmes (particularly economics departments) by right-wing libertarian ideologues:
Probably because of the growing student debt problem (which is spilling over into the rest of society and will probably be a factor in the next economic crisis), the tendency of some employers to demand college degrees for jobs that simply do not require them, and the feeling by many hackers who did not go to college that they are not receiving the respect people with their skills deserve (this may be a justified feeling).
College degrees might not be required in some contexts but are they predictive of some kind of job success? If so, then employers are just being rational in hiring strategy.
Part of the push for everyone to do college is also a lowering of standards, both for entry and for completion. So it's hard to know what today's degree predicts, regardless of the experience of degrees from years ago.
This may have been true when going to college was optional, but now as it's seen as requisite, it's no longer as effective a predictor as it was before, especially in careers where there's a mismatch between personal quality and deference to authority.
If I don't like academia, it's from my experience in academia. Doing good research won't guarantee you a position. On the contrary, what seems to matter is bringing in a lot of money via grants and publishing tons of papers in recognized journals. This better be done steadily too. I know one guy who didn't get tenure at my university, likely because he had a year or two without any publications. Personally, I think a year or two without publications might be necessary for some longer-term projects. So the system has a short-term bias built in too.
You can be a jerk to your students and thrive in this system. (I'm sure other grad students and former grad students can think of copious examples.)
This seems to be because most people, even other researchers, can't evaluate the quality of work in other fields. I'd go farther than that and say that most researchers don't even know what good quality work should look like in their own fields. So instead they look for proxies like the sheer number of papers published, amount of money brought in, impact factor of the journals published in, how a researcher follows trends, etc. But these are weak proxies at best, maybe even anti-correlated with good research.
I'm sure that tenure track positions are great once you have tenure, but it's a lottery at best, and I think the processes of getting a PhD and tenure select for people who are unlikely to take risks, or teach them to avoid riskier research. So if you have tenure, you're less likely to do the sort of bold research I think is so valuable. I would hesitate to call most research even "incremental" as most researchers do a shallow review of their field, so they can't really build on anything. More like "spinning your wheels". If I became a professor and got tenure I'd probably never advance from associate to full professor, as I'd immediately switch my research strategy from "safe" research before tenure to higher impact research after tenure.
Good points. I agree that industry isn't perfect, though I'm looking more at that today than academia. Long-term I'm leaning towards becoming an independent researcher as it seems to be the easiest path to doing actually valuable research today. But I first need to save up enough money to do that.
Thanks for sharing this. I think it is a very good summary from a PhD student perspective. Now let me give you some more information :)
Academia wants to do research - and not pay minimum wage (not even to Tenured Full Professors - ask them how much they make from their grant during the months they are paid). Professors have figured out how to screw PhD students, and their own peers, thanks to competition.
If you look at any PhD student in a stream/major that has a value proposition, chances are - the student is imported. And in these streams (which matter?), research is value-less. Because there is no incentive to do any valuable work. Unfortunately, universities get lucky still - once in a while. Thankfully, this is beginning to end. Perhaps someone can quantitatively study this.
Interesting times - But first - in the US - health care needs a reboot ;-)
Smart people who don't like arbitrary authority (But seem perfectly happy to be paid $300,000/year to build CRUD apps for some product manager at Amafacegoog) often butt heads with educators, be it in school, or university.
Couple that with a disdain that some technocrats have for unquantifiable, soft social sciences, or the politics shared by most people studying them.
Now, couple that with the various well-documented, objective problems that academia has.
Shake it with ice, and you get the comments that you are calling out.
Probably because in the USA higher education is an objectively bad move for most of the people that undertake it. Combine that with the fact that they’ve been told forever it’s a good/necessary thing and you can see bitterness start to creep in.
It's somewhat disappointing because academic research is a /very/ different beast from attending University for an undergraduate degree... they serve very different roles.
Honest answer: it wasn’t meant to be an attack or some form of resentful comment but a comment about the business model. I worked for half my career in a worldwide top tier academic institution (non-US) before all of these political issues. Even the institutions themselves know the current model is failing.
Another possibility I didn’t see below: a higher than average number of HN readers appear to have gone to grad school. My (admittedly jaded) view says that grad school produces one of two outcomes: people disgusted by academia, and people with Stockholm syndrome.
My guess is programming is one of the rare white-collar jobs where a non-negligible amount of people don't have college degrees. So there's some resentment/contempt/regrets from seeing people who spent massive amounts of money and four years of their lives end up doing the same quality work as highschool drop-outs.
I mean as far as I can tell the resentment could come from both those who went to and didn't go to college. Those who didn't go would feel resentment towards peers who are valued more due to what they perceive as signalling while those who did go would feel resentment towards peers who they perceive as lacking foundation or towards colleges themselves for ostensively making them spend time and money for skills their peers gained for free.
10 years is more than enough time to learn all the CS you missed out on in school, and then some. And architecure is learned more on the job than in school anyway.
I went to a bootcamp and it doesn't seem to be holding me back too much. Still moving up the ranks in FANG just like everyone else. I don't feel academically inferior to my colleagues, most of them have gradually forgotten most of what they learned in college anyway. And teaching yourself computer science is challenging but it can be done.
(Incidentally I do have a degree, but I didn't study CS.)
> After 10 years experience gained in the field would vastly surpass any differences in fundamentals in my experience.
Yes and no.
If your colleagues are Peter Norvig and Richard Gabriel and you are programming editors and compilers, then you will probably get a Masters (and more useful than most) in CS simply by talking to them on a daily basis and coding your ass off inside a codebase that they're working on, too.
The problem is that very few companies have people that good or problems that challenging. If you go to work for an insurance company after a bootcamp, are you going to learn how to build a compiler? (And, call that esoteric and scoff if you will, but I have built a "compiler" several times in my career because it was the best way to transition from a legacy system.)
Now, to be fair, maybe nobody cares. If you're rewriting a CRUD app for the umpteenth time in "YetAnotherFrameworkItsBetterThisTimeWePromiseHaHaHa", then it's not going to matter. Knowledge about the current system and all its tendrils is far more valuable than pedantic graph theory.
However, that's local system knowledge and has no value outside your current company. The only knowledge that has value to your next employer is domain knowledge--at that includes your baseline CS and programming skill.
