Rambles around computer science
Diverting trains of thought, wasting precious time
Wed, 13 Oct 2021
No more Dr Nice Guy
[I wrote this back in April, at a point when
my time at Kent was drawing to a close and
the overload factor had been high for a long time.
My current situation at King's is radically different!
Whether that will last is less clear.]
As a graph theorist might put it, my in-degree is too high.
My time and (especially) head-space are scarce resources.
Access to me needs to be limited.
Ironically, it requires a certain amount of big-headedness to say this.
Big-headed it may be,
but failing to attend to this has proven bad for my health.
Every incoming request contributes to a sense of being under attack.
Avoiding this is difficult when you're a nice person,
working within a culture of niceness
and an institution
with financial incentives to be nice to (especially) students.
From now on, I have to make an effort to
put up a protective veneer of non-niceness.
Here I am writing some ground rules to and for myself.
It will be tough to keep to them, but as I now know,
it will be impossible to do my job if I don't.
-
All contact with taught students will occur only during defined hours.
Hopefully I'll be able to set my “office hours” again
(technically a faux pas at Kent, or at least in the School of Computing,
but I did it anyway).
Students who deserve attention will make the effort
and accept the bargain.
-
The same goes for e-mail contact.
E-mails from students must be directed into a per-module inbox
or at least be somehow syntactically differentiable (hence filterable)
from other institutional mail.
I attend to students during certain times only.
Student messages that imply “didn't read instructions”
will be bounced.
-
(There's a real danger of running out of scheduled time here.
In that case, there will always be a temptation to
overrun.
If I do this right, I will react by scheduling more time.
That will help keep track of how much time I'm actually
spending on this stuff,
and will perhaps create backpressure.
At Kent, in modules with inadequate TA coverage, which includes
all three I'm teaching on this year,
teaching degrades into large amounts of one-on-one
contact between lecturer and student.
This can be assuaged partly by shared Q&A
pages, but there's still a lot of individualised contact.
That is good for the students, but it scales very poorly
when you have dozens of students, never mind hundreds.)
-
[I was intrigued
to learn about
Karl Friston's practice of
never meeting people individually,
because meeting in a group is more productive for everyone.]
-
I won't chase students who have gone AWOL and not met the
requirements for submitting, registering or whatever the task.
If there's a pastoral issue, I'll get involved if I have tutorial
responsibility, not otherwise.
-
Extra IT “facilities” will be used for assistance,
but not to create obligations.
To pick a recent example:
just because Teams is provided
doesn't create any obligation on me to monitor or be contactable
via Teams.
If there is to be such an obligation, it needs to come about by
an explicit policy about how communication is done
(and hopefully via discussion and consensus, rather than by executive fiat).
-
I won't engage with funders about invoicing or other administrivia.
We have support staff who deal with this.
If the funder thinks I'm the contact, something has gone very wrong.
-
I won't do trivial teaching-related admin,
like “send us this spreadsheet with 10 deducted from
the following cells”. That is for support staff.
-
I won't sign my name where it's not meaningful.
If admin processes demand my signature on
things I can give no meaningful response to,
I will ask to change the process rather than
spend my time on being a human rubber stamp.
-
I don't do IT-related busy-work unless
I'm given a good reason why it's a temporary workaround that is
practically necessary.
Example: “you must download your lecture videos
and manually re-upload in this other place.”
[We were supposed to do this,
and for some reason nobody complained strongly enough
that it was stupid—not even me. But I also never did it...
the videos stayed in their original student-accessible location.]
-
I won't submit to monitoring of “working hours”
or “leave” that contractually (and for good reason)
I don't have.
I won't stand for breaches of my contract by my employer.
[There were two Kafkaesque episodes around this issue
during my time at Kent.]
-
Reviewing: I will undertake no more than twice the amount
of reviewing work that I generate.
The ratio for somewhat-experienced people
should clearly be greater than one, but I've been doing too much.
If I submit one full-length and one workshop paper per year
under my sole authorship,
that will generate about four long and four short reviews.
I will do no more than eight of each over the year,
or twelve full-length reviews, pro rata if my submission rate differs.
With the move by many SIGPLAN venues to larger review committees,
that basically means at most one major RC per year,
plus maybe one lower-intensity venue.
(It's April and I'm at 13 full-length reviews already,
against zero submissions.)
-
I won't agree to opt-in institutional duties for which I'm the wrong person.
The emotional drain factor of ”duties mismatch”
shouldn't be underestimated.
[At Kent] I felt forced into taking on a Schools Liaison role
despite my lack of interest and suitability; Dr Not-Nice
would rightly have said no.
[If I'm honest, this was a small but significant contributor to my
increasingly negative feelings towards my Kent job.]
-
The same goes in the research community.
For example, something I've learned is that
I hate organising conferences, whereas some people seem to love it.
It's true there's a deficit of people keen to serve in these roles, but
the negatives of the experience have proven especially bad.
I was a nervous wreck during much of SPLASH 2020,
and being rubbed up the wrong way by
well-intentioned but abrasive or oblivious co-organisers
leaving me a grumpy and less-than-positive contributor to the
whole affair.
I'm happy to serve the community in other ways
(see “Reviewing” above),
ones that I'm actually good at and aren't likely to
endanger my friendly working relationships with colleagues.
[/highered]
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