Academics: junior academic researchers including phd students, postdocs and early career profs.
Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
1–10 of 77 posts
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#2I did my PhD in physics, and worked as a SWE right after graduation. Halfway through grad school, I started to feel academia is not my thing, but I cannot quit for all sorts of reasons (at least if thought so at the time). I used Matlab/FORTRAN/python for data analysis in my research work and intentionally looked into CS stuff along the way. I loved it, took a lot of MOOC and managed to eventually get a job in the industry. I loved it in the beginning, spent a lot of personal time doing work and had no complaints. The industry has amazing stride of coming up new technology/ideas, there is always something I can learn which never makes me bored. Most of the people seem generally smart and love their job. Over time I start to realize work is work and there are many factors in the play. I have to find a balance among interesting work, nice colleagues and good pay, but it is not too hard given the amount of opportunities the industry offers. Overall I am happy I made the move.
My academia background wasn’t in the CS field, so I am not sure how relevant my experience is. I did often need to look up and read CS papers to help with my job, obviously not the same way as in research. I hated paper reading in grad school but start to enjoy it now, one of the reasons is the interest and motivation are stronger and also the for-fun mindset. Strangely it came to me that maybe things would work out as well had I stayed in academia.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#3This is a great question. Would be helpful if respondents could at least indicate the city/country of their experiences.
Living in Sydney, Australia I am not finding much interest by potential employers in my knowledge and experience in the field of software engineering. From discussing the situation with people I meet at international conferences, it would appear that the employment opportunities vary greatly across Europe and USA.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#4I left academia in the UK as a postdoc in robotics, joined Firebase via H1B visa to San Fransisco, got aquired by Google, worked for 4 years.
I found working for Google stressful, but lucrative and so it was the best decision i made. It totally change the course of my life for the better. I learnt so much about building teams, scaling impact, productionizing software, dealing with public. I missed academic problems, they are fun, but knowing your software has millions of users feels better and its nice having family vaguely recognize what you do.
The medical and financial stability let me start a family without fear, not having to stress about money is a huge weight off my shoulders. I feel very lucky.
Not sure how repetable that is. I was lucky to get a h1b, and i was lucky picking a winner like Firebase early stage, but i genuinely beleived it was the future of development. So great move, and i think i could go back into academia if i wanted, so its left me in a stronger position.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#5No degree, worked in lab for 1.5 years writing software for neuralfeedback and data analysis for eeg/fmri systems in the NE area using a variety of programming languages/hardware. 1 co-authorship for a paper and 1 acknowledgement in another.
I dont find industry nearly as interesting subject wise, but pays way better than a research assistant with no degree. I worked remote (live in SE asia now, and traveling some from ME to Japan) for the past 3 years from one hedgefund to pharmaceutical data company (an arm of a hedgefund), and some random work. Now I algo trade my own funds and work on neuro related software/hardware side projects.
Only complaint is that too many employers still want people on site, but I dont care about it that much as I used to now that I’m doing my own thing and contract work if someone brings me something that interests me.
Don’t see myself going into academia again in the same way, not intersted in the lab politics nor grant-paper hamster wheel.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#6A former co-worker of mine gave a lecture about what it was like to go from academia (Ph.D. in Classical Literature) to working in the tech/creative industry.
https://youtu.be/4-wNv9FHLqM?t=232 (timestamped to just before he starts speaking)
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#7I left academia in the UK as a postdoc in robotics, joined Firebase via H1B visa to San Fransisco, got aquired by Google, worked for 4 years. I found working for Google stressful, but lucrative and so it was the best decision i made. It totally change the course of my life for the better. I learnt so much about building teams, scaling impact, productionizing software, dealing with public. I missed academic problems,…
Firebase is good platform and loved by many now.
What was your reasoning to join firebase in its initial days ?
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#8When I was post-doc at a well-respected university, the Profs treated me with a combination with disrespect and contempt (when they were not outright ignoring me). I switched to industry; my pay went up 3X-fold, and my talented colleagues praised those problem-solving abilities that I developed over the course of my academic career. My advice to you; f*ck academia! Its a petty pointless prison where you’ll never do anything worthwhile. Switch to industry in order to work and projects that actually have some impact on the world. Only then will you be treated with respect.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#9I did my PhD in physics, and worked as a SWE right after graduation. Halfway through grad school, I started to feel academia is not my thing, but I cannot quit for all sorts of reasons (at least if thought so at the time). I used Matlab/FORTRAN/python for data analysis in my research work and intentionally looked into CS stuff along the way. I loved it, took a lot of MOOC and managed to eventually get a job in the in…
> I hated paper reading in grad school but start to enjoy it now, one of the reasons is the interest and motivation are stronger and also the for-fun mindset.
You're not alone! I found reading papers for the sake of reading them to be boring. I'm not smart enough to read papers for fun like that. I need motivation. As soon as I'm actually working on software, I can cut through relevant papers and documentation like butter. Anything that isn't relevant to a problem I've created for myself is very hard to get through.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#10I left academia in the UK as a postdoc in robotics, joined Firebase via H1B visa to San Fransisco, got aquired by Google, worked for 4 years. I found working for Google stressful, but lucrative and so it was the best decision i made. It totally change the course of my life for the better. I learnt so much about building teams, scaling impact, productionizing software, dealing with public. I missed academic problems,…
Firebase is good platform and loved by many now. What was your reasoning to join firebase in its initial days ?
I had failed to make a multiplayer computer game with traditional approach and realized firebase solved all my concurrency and push problems in a much neater way, and the security language didnt compromise too much expressivity unlike many other SaaS dbs. So i saw it solved a real problem in a simple way, way better with better ergonomics than i could do myself
I found out about it just by reading hacknews and noticed it seemed to be posting a lot and well.