Welcome to another completely useless blog post that I need to do in order to progress with the learn.co material. In my previous blog post I complained about how nowadays is considered necessary to blog about any software project you may undertake. Again do not get me wrong, I understand that online schools need a way to keep you engaged with the activity so that you don’t drop out. This is also a very good way of letting off some steam after the daily frustrations of learning a new skill, especially if you are undergoing an immersive style course. Moreover, there is also the hope that you will make a good impression on your future potential employers, when they search for you online and find out how extremely interested you are in programming, since you are willing to sacrifice more of your personal time, not only to put those final touches on your project but also to blog and tell the world about it and your experiences throughout.
In order to turn this blog post into something that I believe may be of some use in the end, I want to share my experience on why I left academia after a not so great research degree (MPhil) experience about 15 years ago. I got my degree in the end and I also worked as a part time teaching / research assistant at my university department. Although when I started the program I was really willing to consider pursuing an academic career, by the time I had finished I did not want anything to do with academia anymore and the way academic research was conducted at that time and place that I happened to come in contact with it.
Some of you may already be familiar with the academic term ‘publish or perish’. Before I start though, let me set the context of the story first. There is me with a BSc in computer science from a decent UK university, (I will not give you the name, however suffice to say it has always been in the top 50 universities in the world whichever universities ranking list you may choose) having been offered an all fees paid scholarship from the university department to pursue academic research in the area of temporal data mining.
Everything was looking great. I took this opportunity really seriously, considering at the same time that I would convert my degree into a PhD if things went well. After the first few months I had ‘dived into’ the area as much as I could with the means that universities offered 15 years ago. I had decided on what I was going to do and the main research papers that I was going to base my research on. I was now proceeding into researching the specific part that I had chosen into a lot more depth and at the same time shaping the specifics of my idea and research work as I went along.
Back then the web was in its relatively early years, google was just becoming mainstream and I cannot remember using google scholar at the time. Most of the mainstream research and technology journals had already created internet paywalls, however not all of their content was readily available. It was the case that publications under the same organization were behind different paywall systems for various reasons. The university also offered their main gateway into research publications via their own systems and subscriptions, which was possible (at the time) not to contain the specific resource that you were after. However, there was a time consuming process in place so that you could request the specific resource to become available at the expense of the university of course.
There was this research paper that I was building my work upon, so any advances in that area, I was urgently interested in them. My in-depth research revealed that there were about 8 distinct publications (different scientific journals and different years in many cases) by the same authors with very slight variations on the title. All of them were behind paywalls and some of them I had to request from the university. The last one I paid for myself online (29.95, either us dollars or uk sterling I am not sure, but I do remember the price) as I found out about it at a later stage of my research and I just could not delay my work any further. I bet that most of you have already guessed correctly what I am going to say next.
All of them, I absolutely mean all 8 of them were essentially the same paper with some rearrangement of the various sections. The authors had started publishing this work a few years before I started my research and continued to do so for a few years onto different journals. There was nothing new there. They had not advanced their research in the slightest way, but kept publishing the material over and over again. Suffice to say that these were not the only authors that I found out were doing the same thing. Can you imagine my frustration and disappointment after all this? If you have academic experience then I know that this does not sound surprising to you at all. However, please consider that this was my first contact with academic research and how this is conducted. A discussion with my supervisor did not provide any further insights. I had just had to accept that this is the way things work. So I modelled this in my head as ‘noise’ that was being added onto the ‘signal’ and that it was my responsibility to develop appropriate ways to deal with this phenomenon. I finalized my work as quickly as possible (given my other commitments at the time) got my degree and left academia never looking back.
This is exactly why I am opposed to this blogging craze that the coding schools are imposing to their students. I honestly believe that given the lack of professional coding experience most of these people, most of the time, are just adding noise to the signal that all the rest of us would have to expend some of our resources (mainly time, our most valuable resource) to deal with. Hence, when you feel the urge to blog about your software project next time please consider whether you have something truly meaningful to say or if you are just doing it because you have been told to, or because your narcissistic traits need feeding (there is always facebook and instagram for the latter).
I should not forget to tell you about my rails app called MovieDB. It’s a web app for users to list and review movies, sort of a very low-fi, featureless IMDB clone. I had loads of fun coding it and learned also a ton! Thanks Flatiron School, for the lovely experience.