From: crawford@boole.mitre.org (Randy Crawford)
Subject: Re: Bleak news from the academic job market
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1992 07:45:16 GMT

In article <1992Nov7.030205.7095@netcom.com> vere@netcom.com (Steven Vere) writes:
>In article <1992Nov6.103301.3045@hellgate.utah.edu> tolman%asylum.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Kenneth Tolman) writes:
>>>I got a piece of mail from the computer science department of an Ivy
>>>League school the other day. The writer dropped a hint that there were
>>>400 applications for one Assistant Professor position.
>>>
>>>At this point, I would NOT advise anyone to get a Ph.D. in computer
>>>science, if they were doing it to work in academia.
>>
>>This is not necessarily THAT bad... consider there must be at a minimum
>>500 graduates from CS departments with PhD's every year.  Presumably
>>many of these will apply for an "Ivy League" position, so one would expect
>>a great number of applicants for that position.
>>
>>I do not know where you found out 20-30 open positions, or what type of
>>positions these are.  You could ALWAYS get a job at a lower tier school,
>>if you are willing to shift into 2 year schools. 
>>
>>I don't know why anyone would want to be in academia anyway... can't you
>>get research positions in industry . . .?
>
>   No!  There aren't any!  Computer science research openings in
>industry have dried up.  Research has gone out of fashion with Wall
>Street and corporate America, because it does not pay off quickly
>enough. 
[...]
>   So, Dr. Tolman, let's see a posting of all those industrial
>research labs you know about that have openings for computer science
>PhDs.  A list of the 20 or 30 labs with the largest number of current
>openings would be sufficient.  We would like to check the data on
>which your beliefs are based.

I see.  So to refute his claim, he has to provide gobs of counterexamples?

From what I've seen here at MITRE, on the Internet, and from headhunters, 
I'd say that Ken Tolman's points are at least partly correct.

1)  Available positions in industry (research or no) are a lot more numerous 
    right now than in academia.  They don't have to be wonderful in order to 
    beat the lousy prospects in academia.  They just have to be better than
    academia's ratio of 1/400.

2)  Many industry positions are mixtures of practice and research.  Few
    corporations have _ever_ offered significant numbers of purely research 
    positions.  It's true (in my experience) that industry has been shifting
    from purer to more applied research in the past few years as the economy
    has waned, but that can hardly be a surprise.  Everyone in the gov't
    or commercial sector must expect to follow the trends in their market.
    When funding for longer-term investments dries up, you have to be prepared
    to support shorter-term endeavors.

3)  Several specialties are suffering more than others right now for a number 
    of reasons, not all of which are economy-based.  As Dr. Vere knows, robotics
    work is in the toilet, _everywhere_.  Not much can be done to alleviate
    that unless roboticists are willing to seek employment which is a major 
    variation-on-that-theme (say AI planning or image processing) just to stay 
    in the business.  This is no different from the boom/bust cycles prevalent 
    in the aerospace industry throughout the 60s.  Individuals wanting to feed 
    their families via work in robotics, neural nets, natural language 
    processing, any form of CS theory, etc. have to expect phases in which 
    these longer-term fields will suffer and derivational employment may 
    become necessary.  Those who do not remain current with mainstream tools 
    and methods, even those outside their true vocation, invite the inability 
    to react easily to the hard times which in these fields is probably 
    inevitable.

However, I would disagree with Dr. Tolman in that I've heard little good about 
job prospects in _any_ schools, be they non-Ivy or even 2 year.  Since the 
economic slowdown, the vast surplus in academic applicants has overflowed well 
past the choice appointments into even the least attractive of schools.  I've 
seen the same trend evolve in CS that has existed in physics for some time, 
namely, recipients of PhDs from the best schools world-wide are gladly 
accepting positions in no-name colleges (and 2 year schools) offering minimal 
opportunities for research.  The PhD glut has far outstripped demand, I think
for years to come.

It may be that the heyday for CS in academia may not return for quite a while,
(although I think it will happen in CS long before it does in physics).

-- 

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