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Digesting Feedback #12

Open seneubert opened 9 years ago

seneubert commented 9 years ago

The proposal has been presented to the collaboration and a discussion has started. Let's gather some of the criticism here and discuss how to proceed.

seneubert commented 9 years ago

I was very surprised about the form of criticism that seems to be the most frequent one: that giving a prize to a few would take away from the rest, who consequently would feel jealous and unappreciated. If this would be true, the instrument of prices as an incentive would clearly fail in creating a community.

Frankly, I have not seen the prizes in such a light. I never have seen them as a carrot that is dangled in front of the masses to create a competition with winners and losers. Instead, I have thought about the prizes being a way of the collaboration to say thank you to teams and individuals who did something useful. It horrifies me to see the twisted picture we evoked in many.

I am asking myself, what is going on? Why are people perceiving the proposal from this perspective? Is it our wording, or is it something deeper?

Probably there is indeed a deeper problem. Can't it be possible to give special attention to a few people who did something praise- and thanks-worthy without causing jealousy? I dearly hope this is possible. But I also see a requirement: People who are starved of acknowledgment will have no choice but to become jealous. If there is not a base level of everyday respect and recognition of each others' contributions, then prices can only be seen as further opening the gap between "performers" and "non-performers".

The immediate feedback from the hardware-community (wanting prizes for hardware-tasks) is a testimony of this lack of mutual trust and hunger for recognition. The perception of the proposal as a competition points into the same direction. People seem to have too existential fears to be able to engage in a friendly sport, where everybody can heartily congratulate the "winner" of the prize.

As long as we have this situation I am now very pessimistic that the prizes are the right instrument to strengthen our community. I had not anticipated this. Maybe you guys are less downcast than I am, so please let me know your thoughts.

Sebastian

PS: It is interesting how language might play a role such discussions: The English word competition comes from latin "com-petire" -- to "search together" (for the best performance). In other languages, especially German, the translation has a completely different connotation, namely those of gamble and battle.

particleist commented 9 years ago

Hi Sebastian,

thanks a lot for starting this discussion! The fact that we are now openly discussing these things is in fact already a good outcome of the carrots.

I was also somewhat disappointed by the reaction, although I think for different reasons. We should bear in mind that the proposal actually has a lot of support, not least in the very diverse group of people signing the document. No proposal can please everyone, but this proposal (which is of course not perfect, nothing is) has already gathered more support than any comparable initiative in my 12 years on LHCb. So in some sense, I think there is also an onus on the people criticising to be constructive in their criticism, to recognize that this is a good faith attempt to solve a real problem, and to suggest better solutions if they have them. That was actually what disappointed me the most in the reaction : not the criticism, but the people who said "problem, what problem?".

Of course the prizes are not the whole answer (actually not even most of the answer) to building a community, but then our document says that quite clearly. And the criticism that rewarding some people makes others jealous is, I am afraid, the ostrich in the sand argument. Sneha said it best : everyone is being judged all the time already, and in fact all senior people have a little ranking in their heads for when they write references, push people for jobs, etc. It is not called prizes, but that just makes it insidious and unaccountable, it doesn't change the nature of the thing. I generally don't like keeping things in the dark. I especially hate keeping things in the dark when they actively harm our people applying for jobs, because you can't put "Marco Cattaneo thinks I rock" on your CV. So in this sense the prizes are just a first practical step in the right direction, and it is I think correct to take this practical step if only to help our people when applying for tenure-track jobs/grants against ATLAS/CMS/etc. applicants. Helping people who worked hard on software get jobs is of course not the whole story in strengthening the community, but it is a very important part of the story for me, especially in the current job market.

Finally, on the hardware side, Marc-Olivier does not necessarily represent all people working on hardware in LHCb, and I think he is also quantifiably and demonstrably wrong on the facts. I mean, we are scientists, and some of this stuff is just not a matter of opinion : when you apply for a permanent job or to start a new group, hardware skills are a clear plus, software is not. People who are good at, or worked a lot on, software are pushed to switch to hardware, never the other way around. You just have to look at the last batch of junior faculty on LHCb to see that this is true, and true across the different countries which make up LHCb. So that specific criticism is, I think, wrong. It may well be the case that having a hardware prize is anyway a good thing for the cohesion of the collaboration, but this is another discussion.

V

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 12:06 PM, Sebastian Neubert < notifications@github.com> wrote:

I was very surprised about the form of criticism that seems to be the most frequent one: that giving a prize to a few would take away from the rest, who consequently would feel jealous and unappreciated. If this would be true, the instrument of prices as an incentive would clearly fail in creating a community.

Frankly, I have not seen the prizes in such a light. I never have seen them as a carrot that is dangled in front of the masses to create a competition with winners and losers. Instead, I have thought about the prizes being a way of the collaboration to say thank you to teams and individuals who did something useful. It horrifies me to see the twisted picture we evoked in many.

I am asking myself, what is going on? Why are people perceiving the proposal from this perspective? Is it our wording, or is it something deeper?

Probably there is indeed a deeper problem. Can't it be possible to give special attention to a few people who did something praise- and thanks-worthy without causing jealousy? I dearly hope this is possible. But I also see a requirement: People who are starved of acknowledgment will have no choice but to become jealous. If there is not a base level of everyday respect and recognition of each others' contributions, then prices can only be seen as further opening the gap between "performers" and "non-performers".

The immediate feedback from the hardware-community (wanting prizes for hardware-tasks) is a testimony of this lack of mutual trust and hunger for recognition. The perception of the proposal as a competition points into the same direction. People seem to have too existential fears to be able to engage in a friendly sport, where everybody can heartily congratulate the "winner" of the prize.

As long as we have this situation I am now very pessimistic that the prizes are the right instrument to strengthen our community. I had not anticipated this. Maybe you guys are less downcast than I am, so please let me know your thoughts.

Sebastian

PS: It is interesting how language might play a role such discussions: The English word competition comes from latin "com-petire" -- to "search together" (for the best performance). In other languages, especially German, the translation has a completely different connotation, namely those of gamble and battle.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/particleist/inventingcarrots/issues/12#issuecomment-124028223 .