amazing what got you a job and tenure 15-20 years ago. they were so lucky.
looking at CVs of full professors is depressing.
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It is true. The CVs of people who got jobs in the early 2000s are much less competitive than now. Someone should run the numbers to prove it, but it seems obvious.
This is not true. You?d have to go back 40 years or more. Even then.What does this mean ‘less competitive’ and how can you judge it from looking at cvs of profs? You would need to know the comparative numbers for applicants vs job openings and cvs of people who did not get jobs in both eras
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People get the counterfactual wrong in all kinds of ways. In addition to the job market structure stuff already mentioned, you’d need to ask how today’s hot candidates would fare if they had to work with c.2000s data availability, coding tools, and postal service turnaround times, or conversely if c.2000s stars would somehow fail to take advantage of what’s available if they were magically transported to the present. Productivity expectations have gone up as the labor market has tightened, sure. But that’s not all that’s changed.
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People get the counterfactual wrong in all kinds of ways. In addition to the job market structure stuff already mentioned, you�d need to ask how today�s hot candidates would fare if they had to work with c.2000s data availability, coding tools, and postal service turnaround times, or conversely if c.2000s stars would somehow fail to take advantage of what�s available if they were magically transported to the present. Productivity expectations have gone up as the labor market has tightened, sure. But that�s not all that�s changed.
U sound like a lil khunt
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Imagine a time when you have to find and print sources on microfiche, and wait hours for your regression results to process.
By 2000 we had some print sources on CD-ROM — if you were at a HRM R1. We also had PCs with stats programs by then, although I recall running some IPUMS models that took all night to converge.
But when I started college in 1992, we had none of that. Just to get GSS loaded into the single Unix server on campus that had SPSS installed required the services of two paraprofessionals—one librarian and one tech guy.
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It's more political. Look at the topics we are allowed to study these days. It's a joke because we are slowly being pushed into applied stats. Also, the more = better logic may work in demography, but it makes it hard for junior faculty to do theory or historical soc research that may take a decade for hard hitting tomb.
The field these days is all low hanging fruit because people do risky work at their peril.
Sociology can't be being "du/mbed down" with so many impressive CVs these days.
Some people blame aff/irmative action and they are wrong. It's just much more competitive for everyone. -
It's more political. Look at the topics we are allowed to study these days. It's a joke because we are slowly being pushed into applied stats. Also, the more = better logic may work in demography, but it makes it hard for junior faculty to do theory or historical soc research that may take a decade for hard hitting tomb.
The field these days is all low hanging fruit because people do risky work at their peril.Historical sociology people are still getting promoted to full with CVs that include a couple good books and a handful of articles. They also still get hired without a bunch of quant articles. The issue there is less with the promotion standards and more that field itself dying and few lines are opened up for people who do that work.
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But when I started college in 1992, we had none of that. Just to get GSS loaded into the single Unix server on campus that had SPSS installed required the services of two paraprofessionals�one librarian and one tech guy.
And needless to say, we had no point-and-click GUI back then. You had to hand code and debug your models on the Unix terminal line on a little green screen.
I recall one of our older profs regaling us about how they used to do regressions when she was in grad school back in the 1950s: a bunch of RAs sitting in a room together at the same time, each one with a mechanical adding machine, each calculating a small part of the overall model. Then they'd put the bits together.
And then the middle-aged profs would tell us how they did it in the 60s and 70s: You had to code on punch cards, then drop them off at the computing office and wait a few days for the guys to run your model. If you had made a mistake in punching, the debugging was tedious. God forbid you should drop the box of punch cards and they get out of order.
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Not sure what departments you are talking about - the standards haven't changed all that much since the mid-2000s in the departments I've seen. Except that right now there's huge demand for certain types of candidates, and if you are in that group you can get hired with a CV that would not have gotten you an invitation back then. (If you aren't in that group, it seems almost impossible to get traction. But hopefully that's not true everywhere.)