Why do professors deplore enterprise? | Hacker News Reader

Why do professors deplore enterprise?

tigerhawk.blogspot.com

11 pointsmakimaki12 comments

The philosophies are very different. You have:

1. Low hanging fruit (business) vs. high hanging fruit (science). Businesses can not pursue leads which may only have long time payoffs.

2. Only leads with visible benefit are pursued by business. Whereas science believes that discoveries may have benefits far beyond any visible benefit.

Thus if a society ditches research without any immediate benefits academics believe society would advance much slower.

This is understandable of course. Go to any nonprofit or charity, and I'm sure that most workers there will justify their job choice as humanitarian, compared to for-profits. Academia is similar.

In reality though, many professors (particularly in engineering and CS) think highly of industry (most students end up there), and many professors have even started companies of their own.

To view students as impressionable is doing them a disservice. Students are free-thinking adults. To consider that "liberal" professors (whose political stance rarely if at all enters the classroom) could drastically affect their views is absurd.

I'm going through this crisis as we speak.

I was lured to IT during/after high school, and it seemed ridiculous to go to college at that time. Eventually I was persuaded to take classes after work, and managed to knock out most of the degree (PoliSci) alongside my full time job. I had an opportunity to do some consulting work for an NGO in Amsterdam while studying there, so I took it. Changed my life.

Now I'm finishing a Masters (back in Holland) and trying to decide what to do. IT work makes me happy in that I have a high sense of confidence about my work, and of course it pays well. But something's missing. A cushy IT manager position doesn't bother me... but remaining there in 20 years does.

Making the leap to some vague non-profit job is also scary as hell, but sexy from some sort of greater-good point of view. Unlike my IT capacities, the tools I gained from university are (mostly) soft skills that aren't directly applicable to specific job functions.

I've shared these thoughts with many professors and industry mentors, and one thing I will say is that many of them view the world as pretty polarized between "Enterprise" and "Altruism".

For my sake I'm hoping it isn't really so.

Try looking for a think tank (perhaps in the energy or environmental sector) with a technical emphasis (Rocky Mountain Institute springs to mind as an example) where you could combine your skills with your aspirations.

What an interesting question. Well, as the post mentions, we have three sectors: public (government), private (business), and social (non-profit).

Does a society need all three to thrive? Yes. Government is the entity entrusted with creating the currency. Private business is entrusted with assigning value to that currency, creating "wealth" through competition. Efficient enterprises create wealth better than inefficient ones.

And out of it all, the social sector is . . . well, I can't quite figure out what the social sector is supposed to accomplish, but people do like causes. Most "causes," if they're able to claim fulfillment of a goal that the public sector could but doesn't, seem to revel in the fact that they're doing for society what government could/should do, all the while claiming to lack the motivations of the private/business sectors.

I think the non-profit sector provides a relief valve and helps keep society honest. Non-profit like Open Source Software can channel peoples desire to fix problems without fighting the rest of society. Government has a lot of power, but it is highly susceptible to outside influences and everyone wants to spend other peoples money. At the same time they don't force the customers to pay for the service which limits how corporations could get involved.

PS: Consider the three types of news organizations and how they fit into our society. Or blood banks, you can't pay people for blood or you get diseased donors, you don't want to force people to donate and you don't need that much, so you just ask people to help and it works fairly well.

This article explains it: http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html

First of all, most of them don't. A lot of them consult or run businesses on the side.

Second, it's the moneymen in administration who decided to run academia as a business, destroying it. The moneymen in charge of the universities have managed to jack tuition up 7% per year while cutting tenure-track professorships to such a degree that academia is no longer a viable career.

In general, I think professors object to 1950s-style hierarchical corporations, which are inhospitable environments for intelligent, creative people. And they object to the moneymen who are ruining their lives, and gutting academia, for the very-short-term benefit of the university profit margins (never mind that they're supposed to be non-profit). I don't think, by and large, they have any opposition to their students going to work at startups.

Additionally, professor wages are among the most compressed. At my university, it is often cheaper to keep on professors who are old enough to retire, instead of hiring fresh talent.

I think there is also an incredible amount of competition for the junior faculty positions as well. One of my friends, who recently started a physics post-doc at Caltech is convinced that he will have to eventually go into the private sector to support his family, since there are so few faculty job possibilities and he can't be a post-doc forever. Luckily for him, he has computing and finance work experience from before he was in grad school.

Professors prefer

1. Distribution of Wealth rather than Creation of Wealth

2. Socialism aka Preventing Race to The Bottom

Well for starters you could at least use your buzzwords grammatically -- 'enterprise' as a singular, article-less noun makes no fucking sense. It's acceptable as an adjective, or as a mass noun if pluralized.

What should be the collective noun? How about an incompetence of enterprises?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com