Eloy.universities in the 1980s: writing the majority of internet standard RFCs and their implementations
universities now: moving away from Microsoft cloud is really hard okay? 🥺
Chris Siebenmann@eloy @gnomon Also universities in the 80s: one of the biggest places computer stuff was happening, especially Internet/networking stuff. Universities today: a lower-paid backwater for exciting Internet, networking, Unix etc stuff.
In the 70s and 80s, a university job looked like a decently paid place you could continue interesting work after a CS degree, and better than many outside computer programming jobs (hello IBM mainframes). Today, the exciting jobs are outside of academia.
@eloy @gnomon I came up through the CS to university sysadmin pipeline (and currently work at a CS department). Even back then I don't think it was a majority pipeline¹ and it kept shrinking over time as outside jobs got better (both pay and work). Today the university can't really compete; what highly technical new people we can recruit have to really, really like the environment.
¹ people might start as university sysadmins but they leaked out unless they liked the environment.
@eloy @gnomon I'm low key terrified of what's going to happen to my university over the next 10-15 years as an entire generation of highly technical sysadmins from the 80s and early 90s ages out and retires, with not very many replacements in the pipeline. We have so many home-built, inexpensive, bespoke systems that keep things going, but they really need programmer or system programmer level people around.
Garrett Wollman@wollman @eloy @gnomon The problem confronting the university is that it does not have 10x the money (and it can't get it). If you only have 1x the money and there are 10x the costs, you wind up with 1/10th of what you had and that will probably be disastrous. It will probably be especially disastrous if it comes with the related social attitudes towards service provision and network operation.
@cks Different pots of money, often enough. I can't speak to Toronto but at MIT the overhead rate on staff is very high compared to the same services provided by an outside contractor. Not ten times as high but enough to be a pretty significant incentive to outsource. That's especially the case if some significant portion of the outsourcing bill can be capitalized (e.g., one-time development and conversion costs).