nerad@closus.DEC (04/03/84)
!libation to the net gods--this is a re-posting due to truncation on prev. try Harking back to previous discussions in various places, I am musing upon the difficulties a company in Cambridge is having finding training personnel. Lotus (of LOTUS-1-2-3) is trying to find people to do in-house training of engineers to both keep them up to date on growing technologies, and to bring new development staff up to speed very quickly--developing curricula and setting up seminars--considerably parallel to professorial positions, though not quite. I should imagine that a lot of academic environment people might leap at the opportunity--teaching at industry salary, for a good company, to highly motivated intelligent students. But how are these people going about the search for this position? They are working through headhunters! I don't think that they are going to get very many really good candidates quickly that way, though I can understand their reluctance to advertise in the general newspapers around here (Boston). They'd be inundated with unqualified applicants. But headhunters are unlikely to have contacts in the academic environments where the best candidates may well lie in wait. If you were in Lotus's position, how would you go about the search for candidates? Professional journals are a possibility, I suppose. How do you people in the academic environments hear about jobs like this? Do you have contacts with "headhunters?" I am curious, since I hear of academics moving into industry positions, how they find their jobs, or their jobs find them. Send me responses, and if enough interesting ones come in, I will digest them for the net. Shava Nerad Telematic Systems (currently assigned to DEC Ed. Svcs.) {decvax,allegra}!decwrl!rhea!closus!nerad
trb@masscomp.UUCP (Andy Tannenbaum) (04/04/84)
Shava Nerad of Telematic Systems/DEC writes: > I should imagine that a lot of academic environment people might leap at >the opportunity--teaching at industry salary, for a good company, to highly >motivated intelligent students. But how are these people going about the >search for this position? They are working through headhunters! It's evident that the typical CS professor doesn't stay at a university for the money. I don't think most academicians would find a "good company" like Lotus to have a good environment in comparison to that of their chosen university. It's also not clear that the folks who want to learn to use Lotus 1-2-3 are "highly motivated intelligent students" even when compared to the usual humdrum CS grad student fare. It's not clear that teaching Lotus 1-2-3 would be as intellectually gratifying as teaching CS at a university. Realize that a professor sacrifices quite a bit of freedom to go into fulltime industry. It's not every professor who wants to get dressed up in a spiffy suit and be bright and cheery in the morning. Industrial training may not afford time for research or consulting or long vacations. (Then again, it may, but typically, it doesn't.) Realize a fundamental difference between industrial training and university education: in training, the instructor is paid to make sure that the students walk away educated, after a few hours of class time. If students walk away confused, the instructor has failed. On the other hand, in the university environment, the burden lies with the student. If the student doesn't get it, the student flunks. Much less burden on the instructor. Where to advertise? Depends on who you want to hire. If you want to hire academic CS types, then the academic journals are a good idea, the ACM and IEEE journals. You want to hire professional training types? There are professional training organizations, like the National Society for Performance and Instruction. You don't want "training types?" I still need convincing that hackers and research academicians make better trainers than trainers. I'm not convinced that hackers and academicians make better tech writers than tech writers. If they want to steal hackers from industry, then indeed, headhunting is a tried and true approach, undeserving of the terminal exclamation mark which Shava gave it. I suspect that Lotus is having trouble finding good instructors for the same reasons that other dynamic systems experience apparent imbalances: they happen because the imbalances aren't as real as they at first seem. Andy Tannenbaum Masscomp Inc Westford MA (617) 692-6200 x274