Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring
I am currently pursuing a second master&#x27;s degree (in management), some of my personal experience in academia:<p>1) Publish or perish is a real thing. Citation ratings and measuring affects many of the academics I have encountered. This contributes to boring papers.<p>2) Mentioning the replication crisis in social science gets a lot of the social science academics observably upset and defensive. They have to take care of 1)!<p>Compare this to the exemplary stance in CS, as demonstrated by researchers criticizing Google for not backing magic AI claims. [  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41586-020-2766-y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41586-020-2766-y</a> ]
This vigorous scientific stance is almost impossible to imagine in social science outside of Critical Management Studies.<p>3) I have enjoyed my time spent with CS academics a lot more, luckily have some interaction even now - the ones I have spoken to seem to lack the self-criticism blind spots the social scientists exhibited. The CS group seems to have a lot more fun with their research.<p>It was also interesting to observe that for term papers, many CS professors wanted to see a report with <i>working software</i> and a well-thought-out story of what challenges one encountered and how they were overcome. Not one paper was returned because of improper styling nor citing.
They appeared to enjoy the battle stories of trouble-shooting and finding solutions to assignment challenges. They even read the sources I linked to, commenting on what they thought was a good find.<p>From that experience (and others), CS sure feels like more of a meritocracy.<p>In opposition, some social science professors were obsessed with proper APA or Harvard styling and citing &quot;the right thinkers&quot;. Circular citation is a real thing. Perhaps since they can&#x27;t prove anything, establishing credibility via cliques, mutual citation and signaling may be their academic survival strategy.<p>It does feel like management and CS are orthogonal, and this has motivated me to direct my research towards a hard realism approach to facilitating communication between developers and value driven management.<p>I.e. I have observed that even when a manager or leader wants to hire developers, social science damaged managers and HR will actively sabotage these efforts because they are still, fundamentally, driven by Taylorist, control fetish concepts (which they refuse to accept). The SS victims seem to wish to push their personal struggle on developers. &quot;I suffered through school, you must show a diploma as well&quot;. Some even demand transcripts!<p>When I consulted a company that was complaining about how hard it was to recruit developers, I looked at their application process. They demanded college transcripts even before the review of applicants began. I hope you are laughing with me at the entitled absurdity of this. Oh you want a personal letter as well?<p>Bitter HR person, do you fail to understand that you are competing in your recruitment against multiple actors actively scraping through code repositories and blogs to find and contact devs? Or does accepting that a developer is incomparably more competitive on the job market than you and has multiple offers of employment at any time just hurt too much?<p>One of my favorite quotes from a researcher (well cited) about managing developers includes a rant on how creative, industry competitive (can get another job) and financially stable developers are &quot;hard to manage&quot;.<p>This may be how many incompetent managers feel, deeply.<p>If I can facilitate getting these emotionally insecure individuals out of recruitment and management, assisting developers and managers that want to produce <i>value</i> to find each other, it would be in opposition to many well peer-reviewed publications. Boring publications.