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Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#42Matt Welch has written extensively about switching from tenured Professor at Harvard to Software Engineer at Google: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/ , with the initial post http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar... Matt's blog is great because (a) he writes it, (b) he's still connected to academia via program committees and (c) you can see how his thinking has evolved over the last 8 years. And…
Given that he put "teaching" in with "overhead", there's no shock that he left. The precise reason I chose to push to continue into a professor position was my love of teaching, and my willingness to sacrifice lucrative pay and work-life balance for it.
To me, hearing this is like an architect talking about loving the job, but not caring for all the designing buildings it seems to entail. And it's part of the reason that I never advise my students who dislike teaching to even contemplate the academic job market and trying to get a faculty position. If you don't love teaching, go get actually paid elsewhere.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#43One of the things that really struck me is that after you drop out of academia to go into industry there is really no going back. I hadn't expected that; I thought I'd just give industry a shot since I can always go back to academia if I don't like it. Not so. The people hiring for academic roles see it as an act of high treason punishable by lifelong exile.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#44One of the things that really struck me is that after you drop out of academia to go into industry there is really no going back. I hadn't expected that; I thought I'd just give industry a shot since I can always go back to academia if I don't like it. Not so. The people hiring for academic roles see it as an act of high treason punishable by lifelong exile.
I don't think that is universally the case. I transitioned back into academia after being in industry. Admittedly, I was only out in industry a couple of years and I've not found academia to my liking.
My background is microelectronics, and in my experience there is still a big skills gap inside academia which I think only people from industry can really fill. There is no substitute for practical/applied engineering experience, and that experience goes a very long way in informing how realistic or implementable a piece of new research is.
If professors are insightful enough to see the skills which engineers from industry can offer academia, then it's a benefit to everyone.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#45One of the things that really struck me is that after you drop out of academia to go into industry there is really no going back. I hadn't expected that; I thought I'd just give industry a shot since I can always go back to academia if I don't like it. Not so. The people hiring for academic roles see it as an act of high treason punishable by lifelong exile.
I don't think that is universally the case. I transitioned back into academia after being in industry. Admittedly, I was only out in industry a couple of years and I've not found academia to my liking. My background is microelectronics, and in my experience there is still a big skills gap inside academia which I think only people from industry can really fill. There is no substitute for practical/applied engineering…
Did you get hired in a proper research and/or teaching role though in the subject area that you previously worked in when you were in academia? Or did they just pay you out of a research grant for a role as a technician of some kind? Big difference there, as the latter are, in my experience, treated as a "lower caste" and get paid neither as much as other academics nor as much as they would get paid in industry.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#46I left a research lab, started a BE company, failed, started a dev shop, which has had some success. I am glad I left, but there is very little opportunity to do research, or work on anything related to my phd. In retrospect, my opinion is academia is a toxic, low productivity environment that punishes ambition.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the Profs treated me with a combination with disrespect and contempt (when they were not outright ignoring me). That's my experience of working with PhDs in software development (Germany). Yes, you are very smart Mr. Dr. Whatever. No, your PhD doesn't give you authority on picking the building blocks for the front-end and devops stacks. Now chill and bugger off, go back to the C++ image processing ML models (1 year…
> No, your PhD doesn't give you authority on picking the building blocks for the front-end and devops stacks. Now chill and bugger off, go back to the C++ image processing ML models (1 year of development and no release still). There is a pretty big gap between a computer science PhD and software engineering in general. I'd rather have someone that did 4 years of software engineering pick the tech stack than someone…
As a PhD, that would be my preference as well.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#48Matt Welch has written extensively about switching from tenured Professor at Harvard to Software Engineer at Google: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/ , with the initial post http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar... Matt's blog is great because (a) he writes it, (b) he's still connected to academia via program committees and (c) you can see how his thinking has evolved over the last 8 years. And…
Isn’t Craig chambers PL? So is Jeff Dean (Craig’s student).
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#49Matt Welch has written extensively about switching from tenured Professor at Harvard to Software Engineer at Google: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/ , with the initial post http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar... Matt's blog is great because (a) he writes it, (b) he's still connected to academia via program committees and (c) you can see how his thinking has evolved over the last 8 years. And…
Given that he put "teaching" in with "overhead", there's no shock that he left. The precise reason I chose to push to continue into a professor position was my love of teaching, and my willingness to sacrifice lucrative pay and work-life balance for it. To me, hearing this is like an architect talking about loving the job, but not caring for all the designing buildings it seems to entail. And it's part of the reason…
At a tier one, you are paid to do research, not teach, unless you are a clinical or adjunct. So it’s not just the professor binning teaching as overhead, but the universities as well.
If you love teaching, then being a professor at a top tier CS program might not be the right choice.
Re: Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
#50There's a few options in between, namely the "industry professor" and the "industrial researcher". Many universities will hire someone with suitable industry experience who has previously adjuncted to teach classes and occasionally do research as a "Visiting professor" (but you have to be good at both sides, think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarne_Stroustrup).
There are also numerous roles in industry which do research (even Oracle has a research lab!). This is probably the easier route, especially if you're not as keen on teaching, and more and more companies are open to people doing speculative work and publishing papers (note that i'm making the assumption we're generally talking about software development, ML, hardware development, etc).