I really enjoyed this episode of #nlphighlights with @earnmyturns. It is about managing industry research teams, but also generally about incentives in research and the need for intellectual diversity.
soundcloud.com/nlp-highlights…
A few highlights from the highlights: /1
soundcloud.com/nlp-highlights…
A few highlights from the highlights: /1
If hiring decisions are guided by the number of ACL/NeurIPS papers, you will hire essentially the same person over and over again: probably CS background, from a top US school, white, male, with the means to ignore everything for the sake of *ACL deadlines for a few years. /2
With more of the same kind of people, you will be doing incremental improvements to the same thing you're already doing - instead of trying to do smth radically better. That would requires intellectual diversity, so hiring managers should be casting their net wider. /3
In the context of search engine development, @earnmyturns mentions the value of linguistic skills for dialects, code-switching, multilinguality etc. Such people may not know everything about sorting algorithms, but you likely already have enough people who do. /4
This resonates a lot. Personally, as a linguist & self-taught coder, I was skeptical about going into industry, because it sounded like even *research* jobs in top labs expected much leetcoding for the interviews. I wanted to focus on the actual research. /5
I hope more recruiters start sharing Fernando's philosophy, and be open to people with non-traditional career paths. A tech company has the resources to train ppl with linguistics/psychology/social science degrees to code better, but not to teach any of that to the engineers. /6
@earnmyturns also mentions the problem with junior researchers being literally unable to *afford* to do good research, because they know hiring committees are likely going to just count papers and citations. /7
It struck me that this situation makes thoughtful, potentially groundbreaking research a privilege, a prerogative for really senior people. Which kinda prevents young minds from doing the best thinking while they still can 😢 /8
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