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From an op-ed at Harvard Crimson (via Marginal Revolution):
[snip]
I enjoyed reading the article, and as someone not at all affiliated with Harvard I am happy to argue against some of the ideas the author expressed.
Firstly, a quibble about facts:
Yes, the sticker-prize tuition at Harvard has grown, as it has at other private colleges. But the question ought to be: do students actually pay more? According to College Scorecard, students [1] pay on average just under $14,000 per year--for everything, including living expenses. I don't have comparable data for 1986, but that's lower than the median for 4-year US colleges (which is around $19,500).
One may argue that all US colleges have bloated administration and thus increased cost, and I am sympathetic to that argument. But at least let's acknowledge that, regarding actual cost of attendance, Harvard seems to be doing better when compared not just to its peers but the set of all accredited US 4-year institutions.
Now, for the challenge that the author kindly provides:
I don't know any actual specifics, but I am willing to bet (a modest amount) that at some point in the past decade there were student protests at Harvard regarding the choice of art on display. Probably the protests involved non-white students, or people speaking on behalf of non-white students, and their main objection was something like: people of color don't feel welcome at this institution because all the prominently-displayed portraits are of white people. Likely some professors were part of the protesters.
Whatever your opinions are as to the validity of the protesters' claim that the choice of art affects non-white students, the protests themselves would be disruptive and/or stimulating to the educational experience. The president's response to create the task-force on the issue has calmed the protests (taking away the disruptive aspect ) while taking seriously the vocal minority's concerns. For those who found the protests stimulating to the educational experience (which includes acquisition and polish of social norms, and not merely subject matter studied in one's classes), the president's response models how one goes about addressing strongly-expressed concerns over some issue of institutional inertia.
It's still reasonable to ask: was the process that the president cost-effective in achieving its objectives? I would love to see someone try to analyze that! In my experience, service on such committees isn't directly compensated, though it does suck up substantial time. Like, did those six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators have better things to do? They were either on that committee because they were deeply interested in the issue (the students and faculty), or because they were the nine administrators. Did those administrators have languishing tasks which would have actually been more important to address than calming down vocal protesters current and future? Will that new administrative post be filled by an already-existing Harvard employee, or are they actually hiring a brand-new administrator?
Inquiring minds kinda want to know.
[1] At least, students who filled out FAFSA and received any federal financial aid.
It's worth pointing out that Twitter is still fully operational two weeks after losing some huge percentage of its staff.
People on this very board were calling for near-certain failure due to key staff leaving. And while it's too early to say definitely, I think it's not too early to start updating in the direction that no, these staff were not in fact necessary to the continued operation of Twitter.
I'd imagine that the administrators of a university are even more unnecessary.
I agree that every one of these administrators aren't vital to the school's success. However, I think Twitter is the exception rather than the rule. You also have to consider that Twitter's changes are very recent and also came with a change in direction. Among other things, old Twitter valued content moderation while new Twitter does not. This wouldn't have any effect of Twitter being operational since that division didn't affect the online availability of Twitter.
This isn't true. People still get banned. The people who got fired were those who formed committees that decided on strategic bans. Here's a web of twitter we don't like, let's ban the biggest nodes to shut it down.
Harvard could easily cut 90% of its staff, as could any of these places where there aren't any physical goods and a surplus of cash.
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Software is fundamentally no different than other kinds of industrial endeavor when it comes to the infrastructure. It's fundamentally a blue-collar profession for people who desperately want to pretend it isn't. Pays the same, too (boom towns skew this average though).
In both industries, it takes an order of magnitude more people to construct something than it does to maintain it, but the people who maintain it are a trade unto themselves. The software industry calls them "developer operators" (to be fair, in most companies there's nothing "developer" about them... but the corruption of the term doesn't dismiss what it was fundamentally made to describe); the real world calls them "millwrights".
The bottleneck in development is ultimately how parallelizable the work is, which is why software companies that employ a lot of developers have to grow breadth-first (it's very difficult to justify throwing 10 people at a simple API; you need 10 "areas of concern" and they all need to be slowly growing). The developer's favorite line is "like asking 9 women to make a baby in one month" for this exact reason.
However, software is unique in that the operators of the system work remotely for free. So you actually can fire every single one of your local operations staff that aren't relevant to the fundamental operation of the system and still make just as much money in a pinch; yeah, you run the risk of losing institutional knowledge when it comes to improving or modifying the system... but Twitter (nor any company in dire financial straits) doesn't need to do that, so it's the first thing to go (after the sinecures).
I take a different opinion of this: the sinecure positions are there because they're important to fundraising. If some Blue-leaning rich dude wants to change the world, well, "change the world" is what the university is selling. But they're not very good at changing the world because R&D is hard, and all the things that could make a real difference are banned, so the only thing they even have to sell is social change. And "if you can help pay our admin's salary, we'll help shape our graduates in the political direction of your choosing" is something that will get people to open their wallets.
Besides, what else are the rich going to do? Venture capital? That's risky and has the same problems. By contrast, paying people with the power to fail the next generation if they refuse to DIE has a demonstrably positive return on investment.
I believe that when you, @curious_straight_ca, and now me talk about developer operators/devops/sre, we're all talking about different things. From talking with people, this part of the industry seems to be undergoing a complete headfuck of an identity crisis.
Many companies simply changed labels from "sysadmin" or "operations" to "devops" or "sre" and called it a day, with the people doing what they always did: maintaining hardware, producing an endless stream of small automation (bash scripts, yay), and managing LDAP/other access (your next post seems to describe this group). Some companies created a true group of automation developers--tool and systems makers. Yet others have formed groups inspired by manufacturing that are using statistical modeling methods to design and maintain systems.
What I think this points to is that the industry is struggling with the problem of reliability, specifically, reliable product delivery (availability, durability, latency, etc). Up until fairly recently, no one from the industry spent time to devise a production process(1) to produce reliable software, so it's pretty much a wild west composed of at least two dozen or more different groups trying to figure it out (or make money and disappear), all of them using the same two labels.
I'm urging caution because it seems there's a strong disconnect between map (job titles) and territory (job responsibilities) to the point where two people with the same title probably can't even communicate because they do vastly different things.
(1): I'm not counting tools like formal verification or Erlang ("nine nines")--I'm thinking of the whole process including people, skillsets, organization, etc.
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sre and blue-collar maintenance are different. one requires coding, understanding the design of complex systems. the other requires relatively simple manual labor.
elon wants to make large-scale changes to twitter to make it profitable. "X: the everything app", "payments", long-form video, long-form tweets, new verified system, etc. he does need to 'improve and modify' the system.
Yes, that's the millwright job (if you can't handle the math to reason about them you don't get the ticket to practice it). The style of programming "language" they tend to use is also one not many conventional developers even know exists.
By contrast, Devops is generally a simple position- generally alternating between "fix the hardware and the racks", complaining that the software running on said racks isn't their department, and claiming that they don't have time to grant access to the resources development needs to do its job any time this year because reasons. (Apologies to you if that's your trade; I'm sure you're one of the good ones.)
Most software engineering for that matter is also relatively simple labor- the thing that makes it engineering is that you have to do the design work too, and make sure every component interoperates (and is even fit for the task in the first place), and if it doesn't work (or stops working) they're ultimately in charge of modifying it so it does, and the list goes on. Sure, it can be a bit trickier because everything's virtual, but the upside is that all the error messages are generally in plain-ish English rather than "it makes a weird grinding sound but only below 2/3rds power".
It's depth that's not necessarily obvious unless you've actually seen it, but you do actually need a decent amount of brains and general systems knowledge to do either job well. It's like saying "yeah, anyone could do software development because 99% of it is just implementing CRUD over and over again"; it's technically true but an over-simplification.
I'll accept much of devops like that, but twitter really does have 100Ms of users, global scale, and a realtime timeline, search, ads, replies, etc system, that have to be understood, monitored, designed to operate fail in recoverable ways despite very complex interactions of all the systems even when being actively changed. Many of the SREs elon fired weren't just rack swappers, they were coders who designed systems to preemptively avoid complex failure cases. According to him, his job started as you say, but that changed -
And then
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The actual error is sadly only rarely actually pointed out by the error message. Compiler errors are straightforward, runtime errors are not, and runtime errors in complex interconnected systems may as well be Kafka's Prozess.
And the largest category of errors doesn't even have messages.
Fully agreed on DevOps though.
True, that's why it's plainish English.
Hell, even the compiler errors aren't straightforward the less structured the language gets; it's even better when said compiler does shit like "you meant for that object to not have its keys named the same thing, right? I'll just do it automatically because... fuck you, I guess".
It's a mess I'm not convinced even AI tools will be able to solve, so maybe I should just be thankful for the job security.
In what language do compilers do that? The horror!
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And that's why the claims about Twitter going down just made no sense to me. If the engineers were good and they made a stable system, they would not be necessary for the continued stability of that system. If the engineers were bad and made an unstable system, then good riddance surely.
However, on the issue of improvements, I'd also like to note that, as a Twitter user, the rate of improvements to the system has actually increased since Musk took over. What I'm not seeing is a lot of people updating their priors based on Musk's success. Perhaps it's natural to stick one's heads in the sand and think "not me - I am necessary".
this is just wrong. one of the big reasons why is scaling and new features are very significant changes to the system. twitter would need much less reliability work if there wasn't any new code being deployed, or anything being scaled up. but neither of those are true.
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They all have financial (a business' bad heuristics as to your necessity is to your advantage) or political (wokes mad their jannies aren't in charge no more) to pretend they don't know (or exaggerate/lie if they do).
Why would they speak out to their detriment?
(Meanwhile, the people taking advantage of this information are not posting about it, either because they're preparing layoffs of their own, because they're trying to acquire labor at a relative discount, or because they're too busy otherwise.)
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I'd say it's even worse if the tax payer is mostly paying for a bunch of administrators who provide little public return on the student education (the ostensible point of the subsidies). If people want to spend their own money on something I think wasteful that's their business, when most of the money is coming from the public purse, that's getting much closer to theft.
I of course agree that using tax dollars poorly is to be avoided. But I think the OP was making a bigger point: how can you possibly quantify value in this instance? What are the requirements for a school admin to be "fiscally efficient"? Who decides that? More importantly, if we could somehow determine this, would Harvard be the worst offender?
I think this is much more complicated than it appears.
It's an institution of higher learning, does it improve test scores, student knowledge retention, and from the perspective of federal aid, does it improve the economic prospects of those who didn't go to university, are graduates starting more businesses that employ more people; is the research producing more patents, incubated businesses or public goods in proportion to the administration growth?
Harvard as the premier university in the nation is important because it's setting standards that many other universities will try to imitate, so even if they aren't the worst offender in nation, they should be the focus due to their position as a vanguard. With great power comes great responsibility.
Agreed. Going by your assessment, Harvard passes that test with flying colors.
It's not does Harvard excel at this, it's is Harvard with more administrators doing proportionally more of all of that stuff than they were with fewer administrations, the competition is previous Harvard not third tier land grant university.
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The problem with questions like this when it comes to social issues is the vague nature of the costs or benefits. I would imagine it’s very hard to quantify the disruptive effect that student protests have, and even more difficult to quantify whether or not they are quelled.
However, it’s much easier to simply point at the new positions and committees, tally their costs, and say it’s a huge waste of money. I tend to agree with you that Harvard is spending money to solve a real problem. But that begs the question: if appeasing woke students create such a cost, why don’t they select against it?
To my mind, the answer is that the faculty is complicit and instrumental in student sentiment and student protests. These committees not only keep students from doing anything too radical, they also give faculty members a way to accumulate social status, and take and/or pass off sinecures to political allies. Especially if the faculty member or student in question really cares about the social status, this can be a very cost effective sort of spoils system.
At the end of the day it’s not like the faculty actually has the bear any of the cost for increasing the pointless burn of money on the institutional level.
Tell the student if they continue to disrupt, they will be expelled. If they continue to disrupt, expel them and then call the police to have them removed.
There are thousands (if not tens of thousands) of qualified students ready to take the rabble rousers place.
And this is completely reasonable, but it’s not what Harvard is about.
Harvard is about granting membership in the elites to people the elites think should be there, but aren’t. And little aristocrats don’t get dragged out for minor civil disobedience, unless they want to be. Yes, if they try this at northwest Iowa tech podunk campus, they should get beaten and dragged out by the police because northwest Iowa tech podunk campus exists to give the degrees we have arbitrarily decided are necessary to have a good job with a minimum of disruption. That they aren’t is a reasonable criticism of the northwest Iowa tech system. But Harvard is a different kind of institution.
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