> It will be near impossible to get tenure if one develops T-shaped qualities.
That's completely true in my experience, and not only because of the "lack of depth". Interdisciplinary work is simply not rewarded, because your papers are only partially recognized in the department you apply to. I worked in a cog.sci/comp.sci mixture with the focus on language (which adds linguistics), but the psychology departments didn't accept CS conference publications. That my principal paper got a pretty decent citation score for that field, and that some of the follow-up papers including experiments didn't do bad either, didn't mean anything to the CS department: they simply don't care about the topic, and nor "Cognition," nor "Cerebral Cortex" featured on their impact lists.
That said, I think the article's examples (setting up a build system, designing nice mock-ups or logos, creating animations or graphics for presentations) are not T-shaped academic skills, at all. Creating presentations is something everyone has to learn, the rest is offloading support work on PhDs. I've got an idea: perhaps they can do the teaching as well. That's a good T-skill. And do lab support. And get coffee, because you know, so much breadth. No, that's pure exploitation of, exactly as you call it:
> valuable, lowly-paid and highly motivated people that they made a bad career choice by starting a PhD.
PhD programs should only be allowed when there's a guarantee of a worthy curriculum, and sufficient supervision, and support. There'll be less PhDs, but that might even be beneficial.
Author here---I agree with you in that interdisciplinary research is not rewarded. I want to stress that I am not proposing to exploit PhDs by making them do support work. If anything, I am saying: when hiring them, consider rewarding the support that they might have already done instead of just looking at 'no. of papers in high-impact venues.'
> PhD programs should only be allowed when there's a guarantee of a worthy curriculum, and sufficient supervision, and support. There'll be less PhDs, but that might even be beneficial.
That's completely true in my experience, and not only because of the "lack of depth". Interdisciplinary work is simply not rewarded, because your papers are only partially recognized in the department you apply to. I worked in a cog.sci/comp.sci mixture with the focus on language (which adds linguistics), but the psychology departments didn't accept CS conference publications. That my principal paper got a pretty decent citation score for that field, and that some of the follow-up papers including experiments didn't do bad either, didn't mean anything to the CS department: they simply don't care about the topic, and nor "Cognition," nor "Cerebral Cortex" featured on their impact lists.
That said, I think the article's examples (setting up a build system, designing nice mock-ups or logos, creating animations or graphics for presentations) are not T-shaped academic skills, at all. Creating presentations is something everyone has to learn, the rest is offloading support work on PhDs. I've got an idea: perhaps they can do the teaching as well. That's a good T-skill. And do lab support. And get coffee, because you know, so much breadth. No, that's pure exploitation of, exactly as you call it:
> valuable, lowly-paid and highly motivated people that they made a bad career choice by starting a PhD.
PhD programs should only be allowed when there's a guarantee of a worthy curriculum, and sufficient supervision, and support. There'll be less PhDs, but that might even be beneficial.