[xquery-talk] XML/XQuery academic conferences ?

[Michael Kay]

On 13/10/2011 00:51, David Lee wrote:
> Perhaps the us and uk differ substantially in academic philosophy
>
>
Yes, perhaps. Certainly the UK and Germany differ greatly. In Germany, 
from what I've seen, you need to have academic qualifications to be a 
manager in a technology company; when I worked in Software AG most of 
the senior technical people and managers had doctorates. In the UK, it's 
quite common for the management to feel threatened by, and avoid 
employing, people who are smarter than they are. I think software 
companies in the US put much more effort into hiring high-flyers than 
those in the UK, but in both countries academic qualifications count for 
little.

One traditional difference between the UK and the US, which has been 
diluted but still exists, is that academia in the UK traditionally 
thinks of commerce as rather grubby and undignified, which means that 
the cultural distrust between academia and industry actually applies on 
both sides. There's not nearly enough cross-fertilization. There are 
also far too many people teaching computing in our universities who have 
no industrial experience at all.

Michael Kay
Saxonica