My post yesterday prompted many comments. This post attempts to address some of them.
I got a couple of people expressing the idea that my experiences with suboptimal systems are not unique to my institution. I appreciate your comments, especially those mentioning specific institutions, as they give a bit of insight into the scale of the problem. I find widespread problems that would be (relatively) simple to solve in a (relatively) general way incredibly irksome. I feel great desire to solve these problems and distribute the solutions to everyone. The way I feel is quite well described by the hacker ethic. I aim to do meaningful work, but many of the things I am forced to do at the university are menial work. It gives me little consolation that others are doing the same things. In fact, it makes it worse.
My boss chided me for putting the post online for everyone to see. His concern was for airing dirty laundry in public. I took the university’s name out of the post but I stand by what was said and I don’t think much is going to happen due to that rant one way or another, save perhaps serving as an aide memoire for the marking system ideas and a nucleation point for further discussion about it. The whole wikileaks furore was also being discussed copiously online at the time and I was struck by the urge for secrecy. I understand the need for privacy and feel the urge to confide in particular people myself, but I don’t feel quite the same way about organisations. I tend to feel they have a responsibility to be transparent. What is wrong with the idea that by talking openly about problems, you increase the likelihood of them being solved? Especially if many places are having the same problems?
Later that day I had a bit of back-and-forth on Twitter with a mate who worked in the lab with me several years ago. He asked what I had done about the problems and suggested that I develop a prototype of a system to show to admin. His posts hit a nerve, because this is exactly the attitude that I have had up to now (don’t complain – just fix it). In the years I have been at the university I have developed the following tools that led out from me suggesting that things could be done better (I list my estimated cumulative time investment into these systems and the number of years they have been in development in brackets):
- A static web page generator that we used to generate our departmental webpage for a couple of years before the new CMS was rolled out (100 hours, 4 years)
- A system that uses the above along with a Google Docs spreadsheet to collect information about the department’s publications and generates a cross-linked static website suitable for burning to CD (50 hours, 3 years)
- A project allocation system that uses GLPK to assign projects to students for our fourth-year project activity based on their preferences (150 hours, 3 years)
- Scripts for typesetting the timetables for the school of engineering based on a flat format spreadsheet generated from syllabus. (250 hours, 4 years)
- VBA code for use in Excel to calculate student number checksums and several shared calculations, including the supp calculation I mentioned in the previous post (10 hours, 2 years).
- Roll-out of a departmental Wiki to capture information about these and other projects along with other documentation (50 hours 3 years)
This list is not meant to sing my praises, but I suppose it serves to establish that I do not simply moan about things – I generally just say “that can be done better” and then move to do things better. The problem with this attitude is that these things are way outside even the most liberal reading of my job description, which means that all the time I spent on these projects is time that I could have (should have?) spent on my students, or developing better lectures or my PhD or any of the things that are actually expected of me.
I completely understand why no-one is doing these things: because it is no-one’s job. Now, I get a bit annoyed at the “fix it yourself” attitude because I encounter it most often when it has anything to do with computers. I am a relatively capable programmer, and often when I complain that I can’t find a particular tool or about how a particular tool works I get this glib answer that complaining doesn’t solve anything and I should do something about it myself or shut up.
Imagine a scenario: I post a tweet complaining that water is leaking from the ceiling of my office onto my keyboard. I decry the poor maintenance policies that led to the leak occurring and point out that a system should be in place which allows me to report such incidents and have them resolved in a timeous fashion. Would it be reasonable to ask me to develop a maintenance schedule for campus and perhaps implement a call-center? I think not, because such activities clearly belong with facilities management.
I can think of endless cases where I lack the skills or the time to fix things that bother me. I have already put in a lot of time developing half-baked solutions to problems that could be solved far better by people who are actually trained in this work. I am not a programmer, I am not a systems analyst.
Let’s say I want to build a house. I think it is reasonable to approach an architect with a functional spec (I want a nice kitchen, I want the house to be cool, I like this kind of design) and expect him to develop a detailed design rather than drawing up plans for the house myself. He is bound to do a much better job because this is what he is trained to do. I think it is similarly reasonable to point out the gaps in the admin system and expect them to either streamline the system themselves or at least bring in someone who can.
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