14 May
2025
14 May
'25
2:54 p.m.
On Wed, May 14, 2025 at 09:33:36AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
It's a lot more than that, though. I was at IBM
at that time, and at
IBM, right about then the bonus for getting for getting published at a
conference had gotten eliminated. It was very clear that as far as
IBM management was concerned, conference publication didn't matter.
If you filed a patent, you would get paid a cash bonus. If you submit
to any conference --- you wouldn't.
That's wild. To the best of my knowledge, Sun didn't give you a bonus
for either a paper or a patent, it was just part of the job. I certainly
never got a bonus for that stuff. They did pay expenses for conferences
but that was it.
I personally viewed publishing as part of my resume. I didn't publish
very often but when I did, I had something to say. I put a lot of hard
work into each paper, I knew if my brain felt sort of constipated but
I was still making the words come out, yeah, that was likely to be a
good paper.
I'd much rather you formed an opinion of my from my papers than my resume.
The papers were hard, but that made them more significant than a listing
of whatever projects I had worked on.
If I were writing papers for a bonus, I dunno, seems like it cheapens
the whole idea.
I may have a different outlook as my family was pretty academic,
Dad was a Rhodes scholar and went to get a physics PhD from Cornell,
my brother got a PhD from Cornell, I was the black sheep of the family
with a lowly Masters from UW Madison. I had PhD envy and part of the
reason I published was to let people know I had something to say.
Everyone is different I guess.
--lm