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From: trb@masscomp.UUCP (Andy Tannenbaum)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: industry courts academia -- where does the dialogue start?
Message-ID: <239@masscomp.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 4-Apr-84 09:27:00 EST
Article-I.D.: masscomp.239
Posted: Wed Apr  4 09:27:00 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Apr-84 02:14:39 EST
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Organization: MASSCOMP, Littleton, MA
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Shava Nerad of Telematic Systems/DEC writes:
>    I should imagine that a lot of academic environment people might leap at 
>the opportunity--teaching at industry salary, for a good company, to highly 
>motivated intelligent students.  But how are these people going about the 
>search for this position?  They are working through headhunters!

It's evident that the typical CS professor doesn't stay at a university
for the money.   I don't think most academicians would find a "good
company" like Lotus to have a good environment in comparison to that of
their chosen university.  It's also not clear that the folks who want
to learn to use Lotus 1-2-3 are "highly motivated intelligent students"
even when compared to the usual humdrum CS grad student fare.  It's not
clear that teaching Lotus 1-2-3 would be as intellectually gratifying
as teaching CS at a university.

Realize that a professor sacrifices quite a bit of freedom to go into
fulltime industry.  It's not every professor who wants to get dressed
up in a spiffy suit and be bright and cheery in the morning.
Industrial training may not afford time for research or consulting or
long vacations.  (Then again, it may, but typically, it doesn't.)

Realize a fundamental difference between industrial training and
university education:  in training, the instructor is paid to make sure
that the students walk away educated, after a few hours of class time.
If students walk away confused, the instructor has failed.  On the
other hand, in the university environment, the burden lies with the
student.  If the student doesn't get it, the student flunks.  Much less
burden on the instructor.

Where to advertise?  Depends on who you want to hire.  If you want to
hire academic CS types, then the academic journals are a good idea, the
ACM and IEEE journals.  You want to hire professional training types?
There are professional training organizations, like the National
Society for Performance and Instruction.  You don't want "training
types?"  I still need convincing that hackers and research academicians
make better trainers than trainers.  I'm not convinced that hackers and
academicians make better tech writers than tech writers.  If they want
to steal hackers from industry, then indeed, headhunting is a tried
and true approach, undeserving of the terminal exclamation mark which
Shava gave it.

I suspect that Lotus is having trouble finding good instructors for
the same reasons that other dynamic systems experience apparent
imbalances: they happen because the imbalances aren't as real as they
at first seem.

	Andy Tannenbaum   Masscomp Inc  Westford MA   (617) 692-6200 x274