Conflict of Interest
Many would say that we are in an age of rapid discovery, that technology is moving and progressing faster than ever. Why then does it seem to me that we are at a crawl. A point of clarification before continuing, when I note 'the field' or 'industry' the definition would be modern software development organizations and when I note 'academia' the intension is research pertaining to computational sciences. Perhaps I am at an advantage point, having worked in the field and in academia in equal part over the last few years, experiencing the pros and cons of both methods of thinking, yet I can't help to wonder if I am the only one to notice the vastness of the gap between these two. Each side fights over their right to you, especially as a student, each attempting to entice you with rewards of money or the fame of discovery and innovation, yet each failing to realize or fix their own ghastly issues. In the field when a new hire is brought in with more than the standard amount of educational experience they are branded almost unanimously as an 'academic' and thought to be useless until being with the company for at least a year. The shocking fact is that this prejudice has found truth for every 'academic' I have seen hired by one of the companies I've worked for. People of this, let's say upbringing, seem to have the complete inability to produce working effective code within a deadline - but why is this? As I have found in academia deadlines are just as present as in the field and code is often neater and better documented, but I believe there lies the problem. Academics spend so much of their time writing their own way of doing things with the 'because my way is better' attitude (which it usually is) that they never seem to have the time to finish what their research was set out to do.The opposite affect plagues industry, everyone so focused on a deadline they will use any library they can get their hands on (no matter how horrible) to do the work for them or write a completely faulty or non-robust program because it works for the single case they need. Let's not even discuss documentation (primarily since there would be nothing to discuss). The problem that lies before us is how to bridge this gap - primarily since both areas have such distain for the other, neither wanting to admit that how they go about computer science may be faulty.
Chris,
ReplyDeleteBeing a computer science co-op student myself, I completely agree with your post. Very little within academia has prepared me for the two internships that I completed this past year. I noticed that employees at both jobs enthusiastically took the liberty to tell me how much you don’t learn in school. The “real world” was the only environment that could effectively teach true and valuable lessons.
At the same time, professors at school have commented that out in the “real world” people don’t always follow correct procedures or practices. As you mentioned, the financial and timely constraints of the work force don’t always allow for the best products to be implemented.
The main problem with this gap is that the industry is mainly focused on itself and how to forward themselves and their profits, while the academic institution is centered on expanding its own research and influence. Both fields have their own interests at heart and not each other’s. While we focus on these areas in reference to computer science, I imagine that the same problem affects most, if not all, fields of study. If we want to eliminate the disdain that industry and academia have for each other, we need to find a solution that both areas can benefit from.
The best way to implement this is to have professors studying certain subjects communicate with employees working in that respective subject so that they can learn of the newest research being worked on. This way, the company benefits from having faster and newer methods to complete their work and professors can use real world examples to teach students about these subjects. Furthermore, when students graduate with their degrees, they will already have experience of “real world” problems within their classroom studies.
Of course, this is just a brief, thrown-together idea on how to bridge a huge gap, but in the future, it might be something worth pursuing.