Hasnain says:

This was an interesting read. While I don't fully agree with the conclusion and some of the details, I do agree with the central point - teams need people with a wide variety of skills and backgrounds.

"This post spawned a lively discussion on HackerNews. One interesting facet that escaped me so far is the extent to which certain research groups are exploiting Ph.D. students for tasks that should rightfully be handled by a person specifically trained for the job. That’s something I can wholeheartedly advocate for—I think most labs benefit immensely from an on-call sysadmin, developer, etc. The point I am making in this article is that, at least in ML research, it is hard to pin down what ‘doing only research’ means. If we only measure the value of a budding Ph.D. student by the number of papers on their CV, we miss out on candidates that can introduce better coding practices into a lab, for instance. Of course, they should not be hired primarily because of this, but why not recognise and reward skills that are clearly there and relevant for doing research and facilitating the research of others?"

Posted on 2022-01-17T20:29:32+0000