Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1385

I've tried to address this problem in situations where there was a certainty of good will and good faith on both sides. The cultural gap is extremely deep. Some of it comes from the academic environment where credentials and reputation carry an inordinate amount of weight.

Another part of the gap comes from communication dysfunctions. The practicing professionals can relate to dynamics that cannot be easily communicated to listeners who lack the experiential background that forms the context of the discussion among the pracbreastioners.

And finally, a lot of the abstract issues get watered by the experiential background of the pracbreastioners. Their tendency is to validate what they hear against their experiential background, which may not be relevant to the issue under discussion due to factors that are not evident from the discussion. This tendency is very quiet. It takes a lot of digging to find out why people won't accept certain abstractions, even for the limited purposes of discussion and elaboration.

The conclusion we reached is that pracbreastioners tend to lack the width of curiosity of the academics and the academics tend to lack the experience of commitment that distinguishes the pracbreastioners.

The width of curiosity is an expensive luxury in a production environment, so it tends to get selected out of the professional pool. And the academic luxury of entertaining many formulations of a problem inhibits the commitment necessary to pick a solution and focus on it narrowly enough to actually get something done that someone else wants badly enough to pay for.

These two aspects of the domain appear to me to be in permanent conflict in the sense that it is hard for one person to excel in both width of curiosity and depth of commitment. Good teams need both. But integrating them is extremely difficult.

Fair warning: analogy ahead. Herding academics is like herding cats -- their contrariness is legendary. Leading professionals is like leading a pack of dogs -- get out in front and yell "follow me!". Managing a hybrid team is like herding a combined pack of cats and dogs. They tend to be more interested in snarling at (or chewing on) each other. And if you get too emphatic about suppressing that tendency they tend to want to chew on you. ;-)

I've developed a theory that pracbreastioners should teach because teaching requires command of the material, and trying to formulate the material for the various kinds of students forces the instructor to consider aspects of the material that he would not otherwise experience. It's not easy.

OTOH, educators should get a part-time job (part time because it has to last several years) and postpone income therefrom until the project they are working on is a success. They have to experience the risk that comes with making decisions based on imperfect information and understanding. That's not easy either.

tj3