Rumour mills

Listings (see also AAS list, SPIRES and rumour mills astro-wiki, hep).
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Anze Slosar
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Rumour mills

Post by Anze Slosar » November 26 2007

Following a discussion with my work colleagues I want to probe community's opinion towards job rumour mills. (Moderators are free to move this wherever they deem appropriate.)

A major argument in favour of those lists is that they encourage free flow of information and that this is never a bad idea. My personal feeling is that rumour-lists lead to an unnecessary positive feedback and tacticising from both employers' and applicants' sides that drive the system away from equilibrium and ultimately serve no one. More concretely, I think that they are bad because:

a) They lead to the institution of super-candidates. Suppose an institution has two candidates that it deems equally good and cannot decide between the two. It might go to the rumour mill and see that candidate A has got 2 offers so far, while candidate B has none. And so they give an offer to the candidate A, assuming it must be better. Consequently candidate A now has 3 offers while candidate B is still at zero. By the end of the season the candidate A will have many more offers than candidate B, even though they might be completely comparable.

b) In a different example, if University of Springfield East sees that candidate A has an offer from Harvard, they will not make her an offer on the basis that she will never accept it. However, this is fallacious. Presumably, candidate A would have already retracted her application if she really did not have any intention to come to the Springfield East. Moreover, in some situations candidate A might actually prefer USE over Harvard for personal reasons (the dreaded two/three body problem). USE could always enquire with the candidate A over the e-mail about her intentions.

c) Conversely, the candidate A is now also less likely to retract from applications that she will definitely not accept, hoping that more offers on the rumour mill might land her a job at Super Harvard or generally increase her standing as an astrophysicist. This leads to the offer at the University of the Better Springfield being wasted on candidate A and so UBS misses their second choice.

d) Finally, the entire enterprise makes the already stressful experience of job-hunting even more stressful for vast majority of applicants. Learning that this guy with blonde hair, beautiful wife, who wrote 5 books in his spare time and plays jazz with friends got all the offers is definitely not good news when you already feel depressed about yourself.

In short, I don't see a single scenario in which rumour mill would be beneficial. An honest two-way dialogue should always be preferable. And lying about your intentions to a potential employer is never a good idea.


p.s. I am not job hunting this year and so have no vested interests.

Alessandro Melchiorri
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Rumour mills

Post by Alessandro Melchiorri » November 26 2007

Hi Anze,

I guess rumour mills can be useful for the community for several
reasons. Here a possible one:
Everybody could check the list of candidates shortlisted and whom at the end
won between them (or who turned down the position).
With an easy cross check with the number of publications on SPIRES
(and other parameters as h, citations, authors etc etc) you can have an idea about how fair was the interview, if really the best candidate won, etc etc.


cheers
Ale

Thomas Dent
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Rumour mills

Post by Thomas Dent » November 27 2007

I think that if candidates and search committees are going to act 'unfairly' (whatever that might mean) they would not be stopped by the absence of a certain webpage. It is possible for example that a professor applies for a professorship somewhere else with the principal intention of raising his salary and position but *not* moving. But so what? The search committee knows that such things happen and if they are intelligent enough they can control for it. Likewise if such and such a committee finds it just too hard to make a decision that they just copy the lead of some other university, how much intelligence or leadership does that show? They will probably be disappointed in the end - the Super-Candidate's wavefunction is, after all, normalized.

Rumor mill is really a symptom of an open job market, such as exists in North America and certain European countries. (Has there ever been an Italian one?) As such it is to be welcomed. The alternative is more general ignorance about what goes on in faculty searches, which I don't think would be healthy.

The depressing aspect of the job market in certain areas is, of course, a separate issue...

Ben Gold
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Re: Rumour mills

Post by Ben Gold » November 27 2007

I don't feel particularly strongly either way about rumor mills, though I haven't followed them much for a while. Even as a fresh PhD looking for a postdoc I didn't take them all too seriously, since it was pretty clear that the information was quite incomplete, somewhat out-of-date, and sometimes just plain wrong. [Disclaimer: I am now a postdoc without need for an imminent job search]

But I don't find some of your arguments very convincing:
Anze Slosar wrote: a) They lead to the institution of super-candidates. Suppose an institution has two candidates that it deems equally good and cannot decide between the two. It might go to the rumour mill and see that candidate A has got 2 offers so far, while candidate B has none. And so they give an offer to the candidate A, assuming it must be better. Consequently candidate A now has 3 offers while candidate B is still at zero. By the end of the season the candidate A will have many more offers than candidate B, even though they might be completely comparable.
Why would any institution weight candidates based on rumor mill offers? And why wouldn't they be more likely to extend an offer to B, given that B doesn't have any (rumored) offers and thus might be more likely to accept? How often do institutions really have two candidates they deem equally good? Do you have some anecdote that the situation you described actually happened? It seems to me that, rumor mill page or not, giving serious weight to such a thing is just asking for trouble, and that the fault lies with the institution for having a poor decision-making process.

I have noticed the phenomenon of "super-candidates", but they seem invariably to be people quite prominent in their field and I never thought the rumor mill had anything to do with it. They're just obviously good candidates.
b) In a different example, if University of Springfield East sees that candidate A has an offer from Harvard, they will not make her an offer on the basis that she will never accept it. However, this is fallacious. Presumably, candidate A would have already retracted her application if she really did not have any intention to come to the Springfield East. Moreover, in some situations candidate A might actually prefer USE over Harvard for personal reasons (the dreaded two/three body problem). USE could always enquire with the candidate A over the e-mail about her intentions.
By your own argument, USE would be pretty stupid to not make an offer, and can always just talk to the candidate through email. I don't see how the rumor mill has much to do with this. People who get offers from Harvard are usually pretty obviously good candidates, and I'm sure USE already knows that they'll need to bring something special.
c) Conversely, the candidate A is now also less likely to retract from applications that she will definitely not accept, hoping that more offers on the rumour mill might land her a job at Super Harvard or generally increase her standing as an astrophysicist. This leads to the offer at the University of the Better Springfield being wasted on candidate A and so UBS misses their second choice.
It sounds like the real problem is candidate A applying for positions she will definitely not accept in the first place. In practice, I doubt A really would bother (apps are a lot of work). She might have less desirable offers, which she may hold out on until she hears from her first choice. But this happens regardless of the existence of a rumor mill.
d) Finally, the entire enterprise makes the already stressful experience of job-hunting even more stressful for vast majority of applicants. Learning that this guy with blonde hair, beautiful wife, who wrote 5 books in his spare time and plays jazz with friends got all the offers is definitely not good news when you already feel depressed about yourself.
Well, or it might be a healthy dose of realism. :)
In short, I don't see a single scenario in which rumour mill would be beneficial. An honest two-way dialogue should always be preferable. And lying about your intentions to a potential employer is never a good idea.
I certainly agree honesty and dialogue are best in the job process. I think, in fact, this is how the rumor mill can be beneficial. Your concern seems to be about applicants gaming the institutions. Honestly, it's the institutions that have most of the power in this process, and some very definitely do withhold information to try and gain an advantage over a negotiating candidate. Of your scenarios, two are beneficial... to candidate A!

At the very least, I do remember some positions where I found out from the rumor mill that the position had been filled long before I got the rejection letter. In some cases I'm not sure I ever received rejection letters. So at the very least, the rumor mill kept me from wasting my time and energy holding out hope for those positions.

I'd also suggest that the rumor mill's benefit might be more prior to the actual offer; it's often very informative to applicants to have even a rough idea of who's on what short list where. Often this is (more or less) public information anyway, which the rumor mill page simply serves as a convenient summary of.

Alessandro Melchiorri
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Re: Rumour mills

Post by Alessandro Melchiorri » November 27 2007

Thomas Dent wrote: Rumor mill is really a symptom of an open job market, such as exists in North America and certain European countries. (Has there ever been an Italian one?) As such it is to be welcomed. The alternative is more general ignorance about what goes on in faculty searches, which I don't think would be healthy.
Certainly the American system is by far more open than what we have in Italy and in other european countries. Actually in Italy we don't have openings for permanent positions since one year so it is definitly the most closed of the markets! Fortunately, many of the best young italian cosmologists got positions in France that is perhaps the most european
of the countries when it gets to permanent positions.

By far I prefer an open market than any other current system (even if some of its aspect can be highly criticized). However sometimes the system does'nt work and sometimes the best candidate (according to SPIRES) does'nt win.
There may be plenty of good reasons...but for me it is useful to see this in the rumour mill and see what other universities do and compare with
what we have in Italy.
In few words, I think that the rumour mill may also play a role in making the market more "open" and fair.

Anais Rassat
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Rumour mills

Post by Anais Rassat » November 28 2007

From the point of view of a fresh postdoc, I think the rumour mill has two advantages:

- A large proportion of students leave astronomy after their PhD. Seeing their name pop up on the rumour mill is a good way of knowing they are still in the field.

- As Ben Gold said earlier, it serves as a reality check! Good to know very early on how much moving and job searching is necessary to survive in astronomy, whether you are a super-candidate or not.

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