universities in the 1980s: writing the majority of internet standard RFCs and their implementations

[cks@mastodon.social]

@maswan @eloy @gnomon My view is that management is somewhat forced by what staff they can recruit and what that staff can operate (which at a large scale is forced by budget, which is forced by politics¹). Increasingly I think universities (and lots of other places) will be forced to rely on existing solutions instead of building their own.

¹ as mainstream tech salaries get ever higher it becomes ever-harder for 'second tier' organizations like universities to pay competitively.

[maswan@mastodon.acc.sunet.se]

@cks
@eloy @gnomon Yeah, but this is also a geographical issue. While we can't match US tech giant salaries, we're not far behind the local IT sector (but with some better benefits like 7 instead of 5 weeks vacation etc).

The bigger challenge for us lately is how to sell the position, gotta call it devops and not sysadmin, and stuff like that. Operations seem to be very low-valued in the modern world.

[frederik@ohai.social]

@eloy Also universities in the 1980s: We're training the best & brightest, we offer them permanent contracts e.g. in the IT department and try to hold them.

Also universities now: Get your degree and get lost! Why can't we find good staff? 🥺

[jvanvinkenroye@higher-edu.social]

@eloy Moving away?

[brouhaha@mastodon.social]

@eloy
And can we go back to submitting papers for publication using LaTeX rather than Microsoft Word? Please?

[cr1901@mastodon.social]

RE: https://hsnl.social/@eloy/116003176888188762

To be clear, I HATE the current state of things, but there's a hint of truth to this.

I don't have the blog post handy, but someone tried to roll their own alternative to TCP, UDP, etc for fun recently. They discovered that carriers will refuse to reliably route anything that's doesn't set the IP proto to TCP/UDP.

So even if Unis wanted to create a new proto, it _sounds_ like the social aspect of getting non-Uni middlemen to play nice is a lot more difficult.

[wolf480pl@mstdn.io]

@eloy
I'm under the impression that it was,easier back then because there was less stuff in that area that was already built and that people relied on.

[eloy@hsnl.social]

@wolf480pl absolutely, and protocol ossification is a thing

[forestcat@social.nekover.se]

@eloy i get what you mean but the internet and the world in general had changed a lot since then

[wolf480pl@mstdn.io]

@eloy
that being said, it'd still be nice if universities could pay their graduates to work on new protocols that might not have immediate use

[unicandun@retro.pizza]

@eloy This makes me so sad... My uni has completely given up on IT development

[mighty_orbot@retro.pizza]

@eloy It was much easier to refine the technologies underpinning the Internet when the English department wasn’t using it to store all its ungraded essays.

[taschenorakel@mastodon.green]

@eloy Universities just also suffer from neoliberal brain rot. Neoliberal austerity is the cancer.

[unlofl@mstdn.social]

@taschenorakel @eloy
"Can I get some real-world experience doing a student job with the IT/Networking department?"
"We slashed their budget and fired most of them, but you might be able to get an unpaid internship with some SaaS company"

[pa28@social.vivaldi.net]

@sidereal @eloy This is what happens when you let business factors drive your tech department. When I was in college, a bit more than 20 years ago, (a tiny rural community college) we had an a Computer Department with an IBM 1132 and a lab with a handful of DEC PDP 8s. I got a part time job assisting Sociology students with their statistical analysis. Great time, and the school consistently punched above its weight.

[wollman@mastodon.social]

@cks @eloy @gnomon The administration will replace them with an outsourced service that costs ten times as much, like all the B-school-brained finance people have been advising for a decade.

[cks@mastodon.social]

@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.

[wollman@mastodon.social]

@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).

[lonm@social.vivaldi.net]

@eloy There used to be just a CS / Engineering department. There was no university IT. So it was far easier to make decisions.

Now there has to be a uni-wide IT team, with business goals, compliance, etc, often competing for resources with department specific IT groups. That's not necessarily a problem but makes it much harder to build and deploy new stuff if it always needs approval from higher up.

The worst though is when individual departments IT get folded into to main uni IT, then it's impossible to trial any innovations.

[natex@systerserver.town]

@eloy hey eloy, can i include a screenshot of your post in an article for a culture machine special issue on 'university as infrastructure'?