John Tang on review stress in a pandemic, community-level solutions and distributed work

John Tang is a Senior Researcher with Microsoft Research, joining in 2008 and having previously worked in other industrial research labs at Xerox PARC, Sun, and IBM. He has a PhD from the design division of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University. He is a deep expert distributed collaboration and in particular the use of video in this context, which is now highly relevant considering the increase in video conferencing in these pandemic times. He also serves in many senior editorial and papers chair roles managing the review process for papers.

In this conversation we reflect on the increasing amount of overwork and exhaustion we are seeing in the peer community and how this is playing out for the review process and also look at the broader implications. John describes it in terms of invisible disabilities and it being a community problem needing solutions at the community level. We also talk about the differential effect the pandemic is having, the particular challenges for more junior people and recognising his own privileged situation. He embodies a graciousness and generosity in how he approaches these challenges, including the impact on himself, that can serve as a role model for us all. He also reflects on the experiences of video connections in pandemic times.

“I’ve been a bit saddened by the amount of overwork and exhaustion out in our community, evidenced by the reasons why people aren’t available to do reviews. Illness, caregiving, childcare, all really good reasons that people are not available to do a review, and while it makes my job as an Editor/AC harder, my heart goes out even more to people who are dealing with daily stresses. All the more why I don’t want to needlessly add to the stress about a late review…" [email]

“It's just so common that it was so systemic that we just really needed to again, think about it as a community problem, not an individual problem and figure out how we can help each other work through this aspect of it.”

“The thing that surprised me … is that all this intentional remote connection is maintaining strong ties, but we're losing weak ties.”

“I'm super interested in how this global increase in video literacy and remote collaboration, what that's going to enable in the future”

Overview (times approximate): - see below for full Transcript

00:30 Preamble and introduction

05:10 Reviewing in a pandemic: John talks about how he thinks of the pandemic impacts (around reviewing) as invisible disability and the differential effects of the pandemic despite the supposed common experience, and how this impacts getting reviews done, how much people disclose, and the job of editors/chairs

10:25 Impacts: We discuss that reviewers, editors and authors all have impacts and the widening gap between junior and senior people and the temporal ripples of impacts.

17:25 Who has power to manage boundaries: We wonder about who is more able to say no to reviewing and how level of seniority can make a difference in how we manage work-life boundaries, and more particularly younger people trying to establish boundaries for the first time in the pandemic

23:00 Managing boundaries: We discuss the impacts of losing the office-home boundary with working from home and missing the commute and managing this.

28:35 Community issue: John talks about the challenges with reviews and reviewers as a community issue and we explore possible different ways of doing things, and a call to senior people here – a call to graciousness and generosity and how to foster that as a community on all sides and inviting senior people to step up more

39:35 Distributed work...