Comment by JCM9

Comment by JCM9 2 days ago

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When you see how badly most academics and academic administrators are at actually running things from a business standpoint it no surprise the academic sector is in such a mess at the moment. Sadly this whole mess is funded by debt handed out that’s not dischargeable in bankruptcy for degrees of highly questionable value. It’s really sad when you follow the money and think about who and how stuff like this is actually paid for.

The whole thing is kept alive by the student loan program. Modify that or take it away and academia in the US would implode.

PaulDavisThe1st 2 days ago

When you see how badly most business administrators are at actually running things from a business standpoint it no surprise the business sector is in such a mess at the moment.

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  • api 2 days ago

    If you've ever worked in a large corporation or government, you know that this is the norm. It's amazing that anything, anywhere, ever gets done at all in organizations larger than a few hundred people.

    We as humans are very bad at this.

    Companies like Oracle, Deloitte, McKinsey, etc. are experts at extracting large sums of money from large dysfunctional organizations.

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    • hmmm-i-wonder 2 days ago

      I've worked in academia. I've worked in small, medium and large private companies and fortune 50 companies, and I've worked for small and large govt.

      I have yet to see anything bigger than a small company run efficiently, and that's by necessity more than anything. The largest wastes of money I've seen were fortune 50/large enterprise companies yet people constantly point to gov and academia as the most wasteful.

      My current job is a cycle of hype waves the executives and ceo buy into and oversell to customers in impossible timelines, the inevitable smack of reality when neither CEO nor customers are happy with the over-promised and under-delivered results, and the move to the next wave to capture more customers to replace the ones attriting because the result doesn't match the requirements despite waht they were told.

      The actual users of our product seem to split fairly evenly on love or hate our products with good reasons while their executives and spending managers are almost comically willing to fork over more money over for little to no real benefits. There is very much "No one was fired for buying IBM" mentality in the corporate world, this seems like another example.

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    • nyarlathotep_ a day ago

      > Companies like Oracle, Deloitte, McKinsey, etc. are experts at extracting large sums of money from large dysfunctional organizations.

      And IBM and Accenture, and etc etc

      Feels like this entire sector *should be* ripe for disruption by a more skilled and far leaner organization for far cheaper, but my impression is that the majority of these contracts are some "business/partner" relationship things, and those that opt for these contracts are performing CYA by opting for these companies.

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    • whimsicalism 2 days ago

      I've worked in a large government organization (the IRS) and at a large tech company.

      I think it is fun to pretend like the issues in private industry vs public sector are similar in magnitude, but in reality it's not even close. I have never seen even remotely the level of dysfunction I saw in the public sphere in any private company.

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      • PaulDavisThe1st 2 days ago

        Based on your comment, you've worked in 1 public and 1 private organization. Not sure this is the basis for coming to such sweeping and drastic conclusions.

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    • m11a 2 days ago

      > Companies like Oracle, Deloitte, McKinsey, etc. are experts at extracting large sums of money from large dysfunctional organizations.

      I wonder, how do they do it? How do they sell sub-par products/services that a company arguably doesn't need at a premium price?

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      • Ekaros 2 days ago

        Lot of people don't care about spending someone else's money efficiently. And in some cases spending more will make them look better and lead to better opportunities. And this happens on every level, lot of employees just don't care. And those that might probably focus on wrong things.

        And no software people are no better, going for expensive tools, expensive cloud spending or just next shiny thing is often argued with some time to market or future scaling excuse. Or just wanting to do something different.

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    • jer0me 2 days ago

      Are they themselves large, dysfunctional organizations?

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  • johnnyanmac 2 days ago

    Why does no one on the inside even seem to acknoledge is publicly (I've seen enough internal discussions in the private sector to know they do complain on the inside)? Let alone try to fix the dysfunction? Does someone high up have perverse incentive or are simply too conservative to risk chipping away at the problem?

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  • whimsicalism 2 days ago

    I'm sorry but having worked in private and public sector, there just really isn't any competition in terms of incompetence.

    If you're not exposed to market forces....

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  • jajko 2 days ago

    Ineffective corporation will eventually be driven under the ground by various forces, protected businesses have 0 pressure for quality and effectiveness, so unsurprisingly there is little to none.

    Anybody who dealt with good amounts of state bureaucrats can see this rule in plain sight. Bonus points if you actually know some privately. Then they have the balls to want same lifestyle as somebody working hard on themselves and their careers, doing sacrifices they wouldn't even dream of accepting. Of course success never materializes, that evil capitalist world is against them.

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nfw2 2 days ago

I recently left a software dev job in academia, and the amount of inefficiency in the organization is insane.

As part of my off-boarding, the lead engineer mentioned she would ideally like to hire 5 more developers to the team. That would bring the team size up to 15 (8 devs, 2 devops, 2 Ux, 1 graphic designer, 1 pm, 1 eng manager). The team maintains two things:

- The static website for the library

- A pretty basic image server and viewer for the library and museum collections

Sure, the library needs a website, but that shouldn't require more than a person or two to maintain. The image viewer was only used by a handful of people.

But it doesn't matter. The team gets funded because the students will keep paying their tuition. The engineers can keep sitting around watching youtube all day and the world keeps turning.

Perhaps most egregious example was in my first 1:1 -- my manager said, "Don't expect much output from [SENIOR ENGINEER X]. He isn't a good engineer." The organization isn't willing to fire anyone. As a result, the people in charge are the ones who have been around the longest.

That said, it's risky to fire anybody because hiring is so difficult. The salary bands are set at the university level for all employees, which means the maximum a software engineer can make is much lower than market rate. To make matters worse, working "in person" is mandated by the library dean, and the university is in a college town in the middle of nowhere. The interview process also includes NO coding sessions although I'm not sure whether that's due to some corporate process or just incompetence.

To be fair, these sorts of issues aren't exclusive to academia, and I've seen similar issues in large organizations. Somewhat paradoxically, the more bullet-proof the business-model is, the more potential there is for rot to grow in a company.

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  • nyarlathotep_ a day ago

    > Perhaps most egregious example was in my first 1:1 -- my manager said, "Don't expect much output from [SENIOR ENGINEER X]. He isn't a good engineer." The organization isn't willing to fire anyone. As a result, the people in charge are the ones who have been around the longest.

    Kidding aside, where can I find one of these jobs? I'm burnt the hell out and would love to lick my proverbial wounds for a year or so doing this.

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  • loopdoend 2 days ago

    I'd love to get a job like this seems amazing. Imagine all the gold plating you'd get to do. All the experiments and optimizations. You'd have the best library website ever.

    Imagine the job security.

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    • nfw2 2 days ago

      When you're on a team with 15 people, that means a lot of process to push through to get anything done. One of the other engineers was the owner for analytics, and as a result we had basically no analytics. Furthermore, the team lead would often say things like "developers aren't designers and shouldn't be thinking about the product". I wanted to implement a basic semantic search to help people find the resources they were looking for (#1 pain point from talking to people), but that was shut down at every turn.

      There actually was talk of firing someone once, but the reason was he didn't always arrive at the office at 9am sharp, and wasn't in any way related to his output.

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panzagl 2 days ago

This doesn't sound like the academics', or even administrators' fault- this is being imposed by the state university system. Reading between the lines the change is a response to political pressure to reduce costs and impose restrictions on curricula.

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  • phkahler 2 days ago

    >> Reading between the lines the change is a response to political pressure to reduce costs and impose restrictions on curricula.

    Reduce costs by spending huge amounts of money to lose capability? This smells like someone got an "incentive" to spend public (govt) money on some corporate project. Not sure why anyone wants to impose restrictions on curricula, but that'd be a kind of separate thing.

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    • johnnyanmac 2 days ago

      >Not sure why anyone wants to impose restrictions on curricula

      I won't get too political, but that's the one part of this story that only got worse and more blatant over the decade since this posting.

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  • kkylin 2 days ago

    I'm an academic at a large state university (not SUNY). Faculty, staff, and students generally have very little direct say in IT-related matters. These decisions often come down from central admin, through a process that is just as mysterious (and sometimes infuriating) to us.

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    • Loughla 2 days ago

      I will also chime in. Having contracted with multiple large, state universities, this is the norm. Staff and faculty have little, if any, input into the systems the university uses, and are often just as confused as the rest of us.

      Every institution I've worked for had a check-off for IT and central admin if software purchases were requested. These are well-known to be poison to most initiatives without a Dean level or above pushing for it.

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    • bachmeier 2 days ago

      I don't think people that criticize non-admin university employees have any idea how these things work. Not only do they not talk to the people that do the work to find out what they need, they're not open to feedback on the garbage they've cobbled together after they put it in production, and every decision is made assuming faculty, staff, and students are always wrong and they're always right. I could write a book about the things I've seen.

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    • itishappy 2 days ago

      Nit: SUNY and CUNY are surprisingly unrelated.

      I had to look it up, and I live upstate.

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lostlogin 2 days ago

The university I was at had this amazing process for internal billing. Everything cost heaps and required entry in an arcane system. If you could do something inhouse, you were supposed to, either though the cost was astronomical. A $100k bit of software from an extra vendor was definitely $200k+ once the various IT departments (there were at least 4) had done their bit. There were managers all the way down and all were very important.

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etempleton 2 days ago

I have found that most academics have zero interest in how the sausage is made. In fact, I would say there is a willful ignorance to understanding the intricacies and complexities of what it takes to run a University system and the precarious financial realities of most colleges and universities.

However, every once in a while an academic decides to take on administrative responsibilities to fix all of the things they perceive as broken or to show everyone how smart / right they are. Usually the first year for them is incredibly difficult for them and everyone around them and they make a true and terrible mess of it. At this point, after a full year, they usually know just enough to realize how little they know about running a college, managing people, or generally being a leader. They then react in one of three ways:

1. Resign from their admin job and go back to just teaching as if nothing happened

2. Become humble and begin actually collaborating with people and not blaming everyone for every thing that isn’t as they see it.

3. Double down and truly blow everything up until they are either fired or whatever it is they are running collapses in on itself.

This isn’t everyone. The faculty who transition best to leadership tend to be pretty humble to begin with.

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