Associated blog post date: 8th Oct. 2011, link: http://eklavyasai.blogspot.com/2011/10/cs-it-academia-phd-glass-ceiling.html , short link: http://bit.ly/phd-glass
When I moved to Academia, after 18 odd years of international software design & development experience to offer Free Service (Seva) in the area of teaching Lab. courses in academia, I was in for a lot of 'learning' about CS/IT academic system.
One of the first things I learned is that Academia is essentially a PhD club. I mean, if you do not have a PhD you are automatically considered to be a less intelligent form of life and there is a glass ceiling, or rather glass partition much lower than the ceiling, which you cannot cross if you do not have a PhD.
As I had come with the intention of serving society as a form of God, I felt I should be humble and take such attitudes in my stride. As I was an M.Sc. (Physics) drop-out, i.e. only a B.Sc., it was as if I should be thankful to have been offered a chance to teach. My 18 odd years of international software experience did not matter all that much except that it permitted me to be a teacher of 'Lab' courses only and also to help M.Tech. project students with their programming problems. I later learned that this attitude stems from AICTE/UGC norms for appointing CS/IT university teachers. So I understood this to be an academic administrative issue and did not hold anything against CS/IT academia. I was happy to share my knowledge, for free, with students and that was an excellent arrangement both for me, and I guess or hope, the students :).
I think the PhD glass ceiling is a systemic issue - I mean, the AICTE/UGC governed system expects you to prove your intellectual calibre by doing a PhD. Once you have crossed that bar - then you are into the academic club for life. If you hang around in academia without doing a PhD, the AICTE/UGC governed system presumes that you are not good enough to do higher things in academia - you can hang around as a junior teacher (Asst. Prof. provided you clear NET/SET/SLET or just T.A. otherwise) but really don't deserve to go up the ladder. How good a teacher you are does not really matter!!! For the system, what matters is whether you have a PhD. That's it.
And this then naturally shapes the mind-set of academicians. Students who go through the system - Bachelor's degree, Master's degree(s), PhD - grow in theory & research knowledge but without really having any real practical experience of CS/IT! And, once they get the PhD they become Dr-name-members of the academic club! That gives immense recognition in the academic system.
To acquire a CS/IT PhD you have no need to be exposed to CS/IT industry world. So most of the academic CS/IT PhD club guys have no idea about academic qualifications of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg and how it is their on-the-job study and work that allowed them to create great software products that have had such a significant impact on the world. Many would not even have heard of Mark Zuckerberg (though they would surely know about Facebook).
And most of the CS PhD guys generally are not that great in programming & design! Surprised and shocked, are you? Well, that's the reality. For research you need to break your head studying research papers and coming up with innovative approaches to your research problem. Of course you need an algorithm/programs to test your innovative approach to your research problem and get publishable results. But what matters is the result. How you get the results is not so important. You could use MATLAB scripts. You could write badly designed and unreadable C code but which somehow works and gets some results. That is perfectly fine. The paper that the PhD scholar sends to a journal does not include source code. Nobody who matters, cares about your source code - that is just menial-code - they care about the results that your code produced. That's it.
So the system has ABSOLUTELY NO INCENTIVE for a CS PhD guy to do design & programming part of his PhD work well. And then this is the guy who after getting his PhD, according to AICTE/UGC norms, is fit to be a teacher of design & programming as well as any other CS/IT subject under the sun to CS & IT students!
Okay, that's fine - that is the AICTE/UGC system. What can you do? They are the bosses who lay down the rules and academia has to follow them. Period.
But in the narrow world of CS/IT academia, some of these PhD qualified guys truly believe they know more than any of the CS/IT industry guys. They look down at industry as doing 'menial labour/coding' jobs. They use Google for their research, gmail for their mail, Microsoft Word for their documents and iPod/iPhone products as well but still look down at industry!!! And the poor industry experienced guy who does not have a PhD who tries to argue with them on teaching CS/IT stuff is treated with either disdain or with "he does not know academic issues" attitude. The knowledge level does not matter, what matters is whether you have a PhD - AICTE/UGC norms rule!
I would like to repeat that this PhD club mind-set problem among CS/IT academicians is not universal. But some, if not most, CS/IT academicians certainly have it in good measure.
I would like to clarify that what I have written above does not mean that I do not respect researchers! I certainly respect their endeavour to push the boundaries of knowledge in their chosen fields. Their life their choice! However CS/IT research does not appeal to me. What appeals to me is applying established technology to provide working software solutions that help society - a technologist's view perhaps as against a researcher's view. My life my choice! Both technologists and researchers are needed in society.
I respect researchers and I think it would be fair if researchers & academicians respect me and technologists like me, and don't look down at us because we don't have or are not bothered about acquiring a PhD! But if they don't respect me and other technologists - that's fine - it is a free world - they have the freedom to be arrogant - and I have the freedom to ignore them and steer clear from them. If, on the other hand, they respect technologists, I and other technologists, I am quite sure, would be happy to work with them so that we have some Research & Development (R&D) happening instead of only Research publications being produced from their work.
Unfortunately AICTE/UGC CS/IT policy makers are extremely pro-research & pro-PhD but do not provide enough encouragement for the technologist's view. That perhaps is the reason why we don't have any significant software to tackle country's problems being produced from CS/IT academia in the country. I mean CS/IT academia produces research publications - that really is it - and maybe there is some talk about some software but nothing really materializes and reaches the public.
Associated blog post date: 8th Oct. 2011, link: http://eklavyasai.blogspot.com/2011/10/cs-it-academia-bureaucratic-power.html , short link: http://bit.ly/bureaucratic
The POWER structure in CS & IT Academia is very different from the POWER structure in international software consultancy companies.
Academia has an essentially bureaucratic power structure. I think that must be flowing down from the Union Ministry of Human Resources & Development as they are the ultimate power centre for academia. They give out the Grant money that flows down to universities and they control government recognition via AICTE/UGC (& status/reputation via NAAC).
For an academician, the HOD is the KEY POWER CENTRE. Massive amount of power is concentrated in him/her. Of course, academia gives a lot of room for academicians to explore their varied interests. And most HODs having come from the academic setup do give that freedom to members working under them. But if, for some reason, one gets into a direct conflict with the HOD, life can become very tough. You have to either get an amicable resolution to your conflict with the HOD OR you have to quit and join CS department of another college/university! I mean, if one were a PhD in CS, one cannot shift from a CS department to Physics or Management, for a paid academician post (free service is different as there may be some common/related courses). And to join CS department of another university, there has to be a vacancy there! Universities & colleges are far fewer than software companies! And the university/college with a vacancy could be in a different city/region and so, if you were married with children, the whole family will have to consider moving to another place!
So most academicians are very reluctant to CROSS PATHS with the HOD. If the HOD blocks something, it stays blocked. Efforts in the department which do not have the blessing of the HOD will typically wither away and die.
There is no HR manager to go to for listing out your litany of woes, who, if you are a good performer, will do his utmost to resolve the problem. That is a key function of the HR manager in industry - the company does not want to lose good people to the competition. In academia, you can find some Sympathetic Listener (Agony Aunt type) and unburden yourself - that is the nice thing about academia - generally the teachers are nice people, so they will listen to you and give you some peaceful and gentle advice - and wish you well. But they cannot change the system - you should not have a serious conflict with the HOD - if you do, you will suffer. Fact of Academic Life! Period.
In tremendous contrast, the software industry is really cool on that front. If you are good and you get fed up with one manager, you look around and shift to another group in the same company (using HR manager's services at times) or get another job. Jobs are no problem for good guys - yes, the pay may differ here and there and working environment may be different. But at least you can get another job and earn enough to run your household. And in the same city, or same suburb or even same building - no kidding - I was working with a company on the 3rd floor of a building in SEEPZ, Mumbai, the original "IT park" of India - moved out of SEEPZ to try freelance training instructor work - came back after a few months to SEEPZ by joining a company on the 2nd floor of the same building as a 'consultant'! (For more on SEEPZ see footnotes).
So if you are an industry guy and if you have a rosy, rosy picture of academia and have visions of, at some point in your life, sharing your knowledge with young students in academia and, perhaps, becoming a respected & revered CS/IT Professor, be aware that there are many thorns too. I am not saying that CS/IT Academia is all bad - no, not at all. One of the great joys of being in Academia is the joy of imparting knowledge to eager, and many times, grateful young students. That is a very satisfying experience. Industry may not be able to provide much opportunities for such kind of joy. The fellow teachers are also usually a very nice & friendly lot. There is a lot of respect from society too. And one works in a far more relaxed environment as compared to the typical industry environment. But academia certainly has its bureaucratic power structure and you have to fit into that very-different-from-software-industry power structure.
Notes:
Here are a couple of links on SEEPZ, Mumbai: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEEPZ, http://www.seepz.gov.in/ - For most of my software industry career, from 1984 to 2002, I was based in SEEPZ - 4 different companies but all in SEEPZ. During the initial years of the software export boom, SEEPZ, Mumbai was where a lot of the ACTION was happening.
A wiki page states:
India's IT Services industry was born in Mumbai in 1967 with the establishment of Tata Group in partnership with Burroughs. The first software export zone SEEPZ was set up here way back in 1973, the old avatar of the modern day IT park. More than 80 percent of the country's software exports happened out of SEEPZ, Mumbai in 80s. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology_in_India.
Wiki References: 6. "Special Economic Zones: Profits At Any Cost". Doccentre.net. Archived from the original on 7 September 2010. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
7. "Top 50 Emerging Global Outsourcing Cities" (PDF). www.itida.gov.eg. Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 September 2018. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
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Given below is a comment from blog post associated with this article.
Ravi S. Iyer wrote on December 30, 2012 at 2:14 PM:
Here's an interesting article about vast difference between Western universities & Indian ones, Comparing Harvard apples with JNU oranges, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/comparing-harvard-apples-with-jnu-oranges/article4242153.ece.
A point which fits in very well with my experience of Indian CS academia is the following: "In fact, anything new is looked at sceptically, and often succumbs to the tyranny of age. Age-related hierarchy is perhaps the worst in the Indian university system and the least-debated sacred cow."
Associated blog post date: 21st Apr. 2014, link: http://eklavyasai.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-very-strange-case-of-20th-century.html , short link: http://bit.ly/the-very
I think the importance of computers in today's early 21st century world is unquestioned by any realistic individuals anywhere in the world. However it is very strange that some Indian academic Computer Science departments (at least one that I am aware of) continue to live in a 20th century era. Specifically:
a) They combine Mathematics and Computer Science as a single department - Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Surely, in the early 21st century computer and Internet age, Indian universities should have a separate Computer Science department instead of combining it with Mathematics! I know of one such combined CS and Mathematics department case for sure. I do not know whether that is an exception with no other Indian university today having a combined Mathematics and Computer Science department.
b) They do not offer undergraduate and immediate post-graduate degrees in Computer Science or Computer Science & Engineering. Instead students who are interested to acquire a computer science qualification from that university have to, in the normal case, first do B.Sc. (Mathematics), a 3 year programme (done after 12th grade), followed by M.Sc. (Mathematics), a 2 year programme, and then take up M.Tech. (Computer Science), a 2 year programme (a total of 7 years after 12th grade to get the CS qualification)! [The exception case is doing undergraduate Computer Science degree elsewhere and then trying to join the M.Tech. (CS) programme in this university after clearing their entrance exam & interview.] In today's age where students are ambitious, most students who want (or are constrained in some way like financially) to do Computer Science in a science, commerce and arts (UGC) university (as against an engineering or technology university) will pursue B.Sc. (Computer Science), a 3 year programme, I presume like other science degree programmes, immediately after 12th grade, and optionally follow it up with M.Sc. (Computer Science), a 2 year programme. [In engineering/technology (AICTE) universities such students will pursue B.Tech. (Computer Science & Engineering) or B.E. (Computer Science & Engineering), a 4 year programme (done after 12th grade), followed optionally by M.Tech. (Computer Science & Engineering) or M.E. (Computer Science & Engineering), a 2 year programme.]
Please note that I am discussing only Computer Science and Computer Science & Engineering branches in this post and not Information Technology or Computer Applications branches.