Daniela ... I think your onto something. I think I've seen a different sample set then you. The industry's I've typically been in are not 'exciting' for a person who has focused on PhD level topics, they are more pragmatic industries (Healthcare, Manufacturing, Mobile, Publishing, Advertising). Where the jobs are more engineering oriented so we didn't attract the theoretical types ... I think the only PhD's we attracted were people who stayed in school because they couldn't handle the thought of actually getting a job but eventually (in the US at least) once you get your PhD you either need to enter Academia as a profession or hit the streets ... we wouldn't be the first choice for anyone who had high goals of getting a research position.
Also as Mike points out (in a future email) I actually think the US and UK are more similar then he thinks in the regards as Academia mutually disrespecting industry. At least when I gradated 30 years ago. I was at a fairly prestigious university (Caltech) and even there was a schism. The Engineering dept was looked down on from the "Pure Science" departments (Physics, Math, Chemistry, Biology). At that point there was no CS dept at all (it was hidden in Engineering and Applied Scientists). The Pure Scientists (who self-selected themselves as being at the top of the intellectual tower) believed overall that if their work had any practical application then it wasn't worthy of study. The Engineers (even at the same school) were the bottom of the rung ... And below that (sadly) were the women. My girlfriend at the time (who was in Physics, much more brilliant then I) was *literally* told by her advisor that she was wasting the school's and donor's money by being there because once she graduated she'd just get married and raise a family and never put her skills to use to society. Anyway what an interesting (to me) digression. And I'm no closer to having any practical suggestions to your real question. How to get smart people interesting in doing real work in XML. I just dont see Academia as the path to that as others have said, its not at the early stages of innovation. So let's compare it to Engineering. Where do you get Engineers who come up with better ways to do things like say build cars or buildings ? Or even make better computers ? I see these advances coming mostly from Industry, and only occasionally from Academia. Once in a while you see an advance in Engineering come of a university then industry takes it up and turns it into something practical. But I'm sorry that doesn't help the young person in collage who needs to get research sanctioned in order to be able to spend time on it. ( any more then it helps me convince my boss to let me work 50% of my time on research instead of development - and still pay me. ). -David ---------------------------------------- David A. Lee [email protected] http://www.xmlsh.org -----Original Message----- From: Daniela Florescu [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 1:11 AM To: David Lee Cc: xquery-discuss Subject: Re: [xquery-talk] XML/XQuery academic conferences ? > > Few of the cs phds I've interviewed could do ANY of the tasks you > quote. None had to pass an exam in making programs that actually > worked David, I am not sure if this is the problem of the Phds, or merely the sample that came to you for interview. I had to pass such an exam. But: I swear. I've seen them. They do exist. They roam freely all over the Sillicon Valley. They are all over Google and Facebook. And they know how to do those things: automatic parallelization of functional languages, automatic detection of indexes, etc. **ALL** of that. Their problem is that they live in a world where working on XML is equated with having a lobotomy ("something REALLY bad must have happened to you...!"). Their peers and teachers, and all the other "stonebreakers" of the world, and all the other Stanford and Berkeley professors keep telling them them that XML is dead, and that if they work on XML they'll destroy their brilliant carriers. That's what happened to me. (I still have have a set of emails with such content, from "famous" experts in the database world, for the fun of others :-) Even at my (advanced..) age, it's not easy to take. But when you are 20-ish something, trying to figure out what to do with your carrier, that's really hard. And it's not their fault. It's because the "grown-ups" of this community don't care to make any compromises to explain to the rest of the world why the rest of the world should care about markup languages and functional programming as an information querying and processing paradigm. A world where the selfish: "keep it small -- aka, such that I can control it" is the king. That what my original email was about. Best regards Dana _______________________________________________ [email protected] http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk
