Middleware Matters

At the beginning of 2006 I vowed that this year I was going to avoid signing up for too many conference program committees (PCs), as has been my wont for the past 15 years or so. Over the years I've served on many PCs, probably about a dozen or so per year, and have been the program chair and general chair of several conferences, so I know the importance of getting good reviewers on the PC. As a result, I always like to help out when asked, and so this year, despite my vow, I wound up signing up for a bunch of PCs anyway. Unfortunately it seems like it always comes back to haunt me at just the wrong time.

The main issue is that when you're invited to join a PC, you sometimes don't have a clear idea what you'll be doing a few months down the road when you'll be expected to review a bunch of papers. For me, "sometimes" has now turned into "never." After a few years of travel and meetings, I'm thankfully now back to doing a ton of development and coding. But I tend to always be in "firefighter" mode, and I get shifted quickly from project to project. This means that when the deadline to do those reviews that I agreed to do 4 months ago is three days away, and I'm already working 12-15 hours per day on some project with a rapidly-looming deadline, I'm in trouble.

Getting the reviews done under the gun always means staying up even later than usual reading papers that can vary wildly in quality. This coming weekend, for example, I have 6 papers that I have to review by Monday morning -- sigh. This will be the 4th or 5th time this summer this has happened.

So, starting now, I do solemnly swear to greatly reduce my conference involvement, and I'm really gonna do it this time. If you email me to invite me to a PC, I will almost certainly decline. Don't take it personally. My workload, for now and for the foreseeable future, is such that I just can't put the necessary time into doing quality reviews.