Category: 3. Academia

  • The State of Digitization in the State of Digitization

    Some impressions from today’s home office work (for the state).

  • Price for Value, not for Costs

    If there is one thing I wished more of my fellow academic peers would understand when working with industry, it is this: You should Price for value created, not for costs incurred. Many professors, when asked about the price of some proposed work, will calculate the direct labor costs needed for the project, add some…

  • The Place of Professional Certificates and the Significance of an Academic Degree

    My Twitter feed is alight with comments on Google’s six-month “career” certificate, which, according to this SVP, Google will treat as equivalent to a four-year Bachelor’s degree. Predictably, a large number of comments are from students who conclude from their own disappointed experience that all college programs are crap. They cheer on Google. Also predictably,…

  • The Three Hats of a Professor in Germany

    There are lots of infographics on the web of how a professor spends their time, and they mostly miss the point. At the core, and after ten years of living it, I feel confident to say that it really is three roles that a professor in Germany has to play to be successful. I also…

  • Hiring Machine Learning Professors Fast to Catch-up Short-Term Will Make You Fall Behind Long-Term

    From current observations, I would like to suggest a new law of hiring professors: Hiring professors fast to catch-up short-term will make you fall behind long-term. The reason why I’m writing this are the large amounts of money being made available to German universities to hire new machine learning professors (think “1000 professor program” and…

  • How Software Engineering Teaching and the Legal Department Collide

    Any non-trivial university has a legal department, often several (at least one for matters of teaching and one for matters of fundraising). The legal department concerned with teaching has to protect the university from lawsuits by students. By extension, this department protects students from professors who ask too much of them. Often, there may be…