What is wrong with this guy? Of course he knows where that will leave those students. Why did he even choose to be in the business of developing people? Nobody forced him. Anyway, the ladders were pulled up in 2020–2021.
The motivation to take on juniors to grow your long term capabilities equation is shifting, to the point where its harder to justify.
As a tax payer, I am very concerned if the people I fund with my taxes to do a job unilaterally declare they are no longer going to do the half of it.
[1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research...
UK universities do currently hire people to do research and teach. And tenure is based on research not teaching. Teaching is seen as something that funds the operation to an extent. Some are excellent teachers. Some merely provide the material.
It works as is because researchers are not meaningfully impacted by having to do a few hours a week. And student get access to people in touch with the field. But it is not optimal having people who often are not good at teaching and/or don't particularly want to do it, taking lectures and tutorials.
But I do agree that the ability to produce and procure research is not at all coupled with the ability to teach.
In a similar vein, it is recommended that if you are in a business meeting you hear what the junior positions have to say about something first and work your way up the chain of command rather than the other way around due to the junior positions being less familiar with internal processes and thus more likely to flag or suggest something completely out of left field that the higher ups might miss.
The problem is about the fresh talent pipeline for researchers (i.e. PhDs). In many ways, elementary school and a Master's degree are more alike than a Master's and a PhD in the sense that you're learning prior art with clearly defined exam/project assessments and no expectation of making something truly novel in both elementary school and the Master's, while a PhD is all about discovering something nobody uncovered before. So, calling this a problem of not wanting to teach isn't quite right.
IMO, the article is rather highlighting a different problem; the former problem in this area was that only a tiny sliver of the best engineering/CS undergrads wanted go into research given the far more lucrative industry careers, and now the supply part of that market is about to vanish too due to agentic AI. This will basically kill the concept of an academic career as we know it and the point of the article is that we need to find a different model of advancing and funding science.
At least for publicly funded work, it was always an assumption that you would need students to hit some goal; so by funding it you would get both the outcome, and more people skilled in that field. If the scope of what one team/senior can handle has grown with ai, we will either need explicit staff numbers as a requirement or bigger scope to the point where the ai can't handle it.
Or we find that AI can do so much the whole system implodes...
Even if all AI progress grinds to a permanent halt today, there's already enough utility in its current capability to force these questions. As a result, how we train and educate graduates and young people needs to change.
I have no doubt you need to have actual experience to be able to ensure AI output is at a production standard but if we accept that reality, then a shift in how we educate and train young people could make an enormous difference in ensuring employers still see value in hiring people with no real commercial work experience.
Even completely egoistically replacing students with AI is shooting yourself in the foot in the long term.
These institutions have a duty to educate humanity. PhDs are also supposed to be able to help the public understand complicated science. To guide ethical decisions.
But no, we measure the number papers, and not even their quality (very well).
It's all a matter of incentive alignment, what gets measured gets done. The state of academic science is sad in most places. This contemplation by OP being case and point.
This is why firms that do actual training have clauses written in the employment contract that says if you receive x months of training from them then you have to work for them for at least y number of years otherwise if you leave then you have to pay them for the cost of training you (which is written as a dollar amount in the contract).
Companies that don't have that kind of clause in the contract are going to get screwed over when their newly trained employees get poached by other firms.
The shortage of senior engineers will be even worse than it is today.
Not sure your argument really holds any water over a 10+ year period as I originally described.
I started my career with a graduate program from a larger company. I stuck around in that company for close to 5 years and would have liked to stay longer. My reason for leaving were the absence of a career progression. The first 3 years, the company had a great career progression path. Clear outlines what it needs for a promotion, fair and transparent pay, etc.
That changed and despite hitting/exceeding my goals, I was denied a promotion twice with no good reason. My boss, who is fantastic, told me that he cannot give me a good reason because he himself did not receive one. So I left.
Generally speaking, my cohort of the program was part of the company much longer than most employees. I don't think a single person left in the first 3 years. Attrition only started now that there was a general shift in the companies culture and communication.
> “The companies three to five years from now that are going to be the most successful are those companies that doubled down on entry-level hiring in this environment,” Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM’s chief human resources officer, said this week.
You may be able to go fast with AI, but you can only go far with humans.
[Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/o6hlry/statistic... ]
It doesn’t surprise me to see such articles coming from academia, in which juniors are treated like dirt to such an extreme that is unimaginable in any other industry, save for maybe Michelin star cuisine.
The article really is about "education seems directionless without economic goals", and again as comments have pointed out, it only seems so.
Apparently the same question is being asked at different levels and abstractions...
throwaw12•1h ago
Implementation can differ (e.g. ratio of interns vs total headcount and so on), but it is the time for governments to intervene and force corporations to train people, humans are resource for the government, they need to polish that resource to thrive.
nicman23•1h ago
throwaw12•1h ago
1. the wait time is too long for the company to fill a position, it is difficult to predict what happens in the next 4 years
2. difficult to match the students with companies. For example, you are interested in CS, but company wants specifically React developer (assuming there was no AI and there was still demand), would the student change all their courses based on the requirements and live like a robot who is forced to take courses they are not much interested in. Now imagine when gap is higher between topics (CS vs React is closer, compared to MBA vs procurement, both are somewhat subset of same topic)
muspimerol•1h ago
Gigachad•41m ago
nicman23•1m ago
meta_gunslinger•1h ago
mittensc•1h ago
The professor's jobs are to TEACH students.
Research grants are given by governments mainly to first TEACH students and secondly to get something useful.
If they are not doing their job they should be fired.
That's not DEI or anything of the sort. That's common sense.
They can do their research at private companies if it's worth it.
throwaw12•47m ago
Government's goal is obvious and correct, but if you have done a research and tried to get a grant you should know grants are very "political" as well, if you are researching a thing which is not trendy or takes another 10 years to yield results, but there is another lab who is telling we are researching LLM, it will be very difficult to get a grant even if you promise to TEACH/hire 20 students for that research.
Justifying long term benefits is difficult problem
AussieWog93•1h ago
Both avoids the tragedy of the commons (why would a corporation pay to train a junior when they can just let their competition do it then poach the experienced senior) and gives more opportunity to a new generation that are frankly getting economically screwed over enough as-is.