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Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

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Re: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)

#21

Post by moultano »

Lewisham wrote: post #9
snowmaker wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I had him as well and he was a big inspiration. Perhaps the beginning of a broader shift in industry vs. academia?

I think the pull is that Google is a very academic place (based on visits and talking to people who work there), and if Google's interests align with yours, you're basically doing the research you would have already done PLUS you get paid better PLUS you don't have to fight for funding on an almost daily basis PLUS you actually have data. Google is a fabulous, exciting, wonderland place for lots of software engineeri…

Thankfully for their job security though, research projects at Google regularly launch as parts of major products.

Re: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)

#23

Post by moultano »

kermit_de_fro wrote: post #19
moultano wrote: post #16

He's describing something that was the biggest factor for me not deciding to go back to school. I came to Google and started working on search engine spam. I also periodically read papers on "Adversarial Information Retrieval" as it is called in the literature. Only a handful of the papers I read had useful ideas, and I don't think there's anything that can really be done to improve the situation. There are certain t…

Minor picky point, but universities have access to such computing power via time-sharing at national labs if it is not available from their own department.

And I do think that a lot of good parallel computing research gets done. It's just a lot harder.

Re: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)

#24

Post by Lewisham »

moultano wrote: post #16

He's describing something that was the biggest factor for me not deciding to go back to school. I came to Google and started working on search engine spam. I also periodically read papers on "Adversarial Information Retrieval" as it is called in the literature. Only a handful of the papers I read had useful ideas, and I don't think there's anything that can really be done to improve the situation. There are certain t…

Sadly, most academics realize that they're data-starved, but industry isn't able to/doesn't want to work with academia to help gain access to that data. Even if you do get access, you're NDA'd so hard that publishing useful papers is a challenge.

It's a shame, because universities are essentially free labor, just on much longer timeframes and lower probability of immediate success. I understand why things are the way they are, but I'd love to find some way of reconciling this issue. It's already killed a research project of mine before it started.

Re: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)

#25

Post by moultano »

Lewisham wrote: post #24
moultano wrote: post #16

He's describing something that was the biggest factor for me not deciding to go back to school. I came to Google and started working on search engine spam. I also periodically read papers on "Adversarial Information Retrieval" as it is called in the literature. Only a handful of the papers I read had useful ideas, and I don't think there's anything that can really be done to improve the situation. There are certain t…

Sadly, most academics realize that they're data-starved, but industry isn't able to/doesn't want to work with academia to help gain access to that data. Even if you do get access, you're NDA'd so hard that publishing useful papers is a challenge. It's a shame, because universities are essentially free labor, just on much longer timeframes and lower probability of immediate success. I understand why things are the way…

Google realizes this too, and there are a lot of people here that would like to help. There are a few huge issues that always come up.

1. Paranoia about giving competitors the edge they need.

2. Paranoia about giving spammers the edge they need.

3. Privacy. It's nigh impossible to anonymize user data enough to release and still have it in a useful form. The AOL logs debacle hurt everyone.

One of my friends had a really interesting take on this. His belief essentially was that the industry advances when people switch companies and (legal or not) take their institutional knowledge with them. Unfortunately, academia is hard to transfer into.

Re: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)

#26

Post by robryan »

Smerity wrote: post #18
anrope wrote: post #13

"...overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.)..." I feel like a professor shouldn't consider teaching "overhead". If you're teaching classes, you should be putting at least as much effort into research as teaching. Prof != post-doc. If your passion is in research, then a move to industry (or post-doc) sounds like a good choice.

He may be complaining about all the overhead that goes with teaching rather than the teaching itself. I'm tutoring this semester for a Data Structures course and a painfully large portion of the time is spent dealing with things that really aren't teaching. Trying to deal with plagiarism (which even goes as far as assignments posted on RentACoder), using ancient marking systems (WebCT is well and truly evil), handlin…

You would be stupid to post an assignment on something as well known as rentacoder. I've ad professors who have mentioned finding their assignments on there so they are well aware.

Re: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)

#27

Post by edge17 »

Lewisham wrote: post #24
moultano wrote: post #16

He's describing something that was the biggest factor for me not deciding to go back to school. I came to Google and started working on search engine spam. I also periodically read papers on "Adversarial Information Retrieval" as it is called in the literature. Only a handful of the papers I read had useful ideas, and I don't think there's anything that can really be done to improve the situation. There are certain t…

Sadly, most academics realize that they're data-starved, but industry isn't able to/doesn't want to work with academia to help gain access to that data. Even if you do get access, you're NDA'd so hard that publishing useful papers is a challenge. It's a shame, because universities are essentially free labor, just on much longer timeframes and lower probability of immediate success. I understand why things are the way…

While I do agree, it's important to note that the state of collaboration between American universities and industry is far greater than any other country and has helped both grow. It's one of the problems in places like India, where there isn't much collaboration between private institutions and industry.

Of course things could always be better, but it could also be worse.

Re: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)

#28

Post by price »

moultano wrote: post #25
Lewisham wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, most academics realize that they're data-starved, but industry isn't able to/doesn't want to work with academia to help gain access to that data. Even if you do get access, you're NDA'd so hard that publishing useful papers is a challenge. It's a shame, because universities are essentially free labor, just on much longer timeframes and lower probability of immediate success. I understand why things are the way…

Google realizes this too, and there are a lot of people here that would like to help. There are a few huge issues that always come up. 1. Paranoia about giving competitors the edge they need. 2. Paranoia about giving spammers the edge they need. 3. Privacy. It's nigh impossible to anonymize user data enough to release and still have it in a useful form. The AOL logs debacle hurt everyone. One of my friends had a real…

His belief essentially was that the industry advances when people switch companies and (legal or not) take their institutional knowledge with them.

This is why it's so important that in California the law protects employees leaving companies to work for other companies -- this is legal there. You can't take code, data, hardware designs, or other concrete intellectual property -- that's forbidden by the agreements every tech company requires employees to sign. But if you couldn't take institutional knowledge with you, you couldn't work at a new company at all. (How could an ex-Googler unlearn how web-scale systems are built of many disposable pieces?) And if an agreement purports to restrict you from switching jobs, then California law repudiates that restriction.

Unfortunately some other states have no such law, and cheerfully enforce non-competes against engineers trying to switch companies. And guess what? The industry doesn't move as fast in Massachusetts as in California.

Re: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)

#29

Post by price »

Smerity wrote: post #18
anrope wrote: post #13

"...overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.)..." I feel like a professor shouldn't consider teaching "overhead". If you're teaching classes, you should be putting at least as much effort into research as teaching. Prof != post-doc. If your passion is in research, then a move to industry (or post-doc) sounds like a good choice.

He may be complaining about all the overhead that goes with teaching rather than the teaching itself. I'm tutoring this semester for a Data Structures course and a painfully large portion of the time is spent dealing with things that really aren't teaching. Trying to deal with plagiarism (which even goes as far as assignments posted on RentACoder), using ancient marking systems (WebCT is well and truly evil), handlin…

No, Matt is very clear:

"the amount of overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.) you have to do apart from the interesting technical work severely limits your ability to actually [have a practical impact via your research.]"

Teaching is part of the overhead if your goal is to do research, or in his case more precisely to build great systems. A lot of professors feel that way.

To Matt's credit, by all accounts he put plenty of effort into his classes and they were excellent, even though it wasn't what he really most wanted to do. But other professors who feel that way and, I suppose, have a weaker sense of duty end up as the bad teachers that students hate, because they just don't care.

Re: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)

#30

Post by kingkilr »

Lewisham wrote: post #9
snowmaker wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I had him as well and he was a big inspiration. Perhaps the beginning of a broader shift in industry vs. academia?

I think the pull is that Google is a very academic place (based on visits and talking to people who work there), and if Google's interests align with yours, you're basically doing the research you would have already done PLUS you get paid better PLUS you don't have to fight for funding on an almost daily basis PLUS you actually have data. Google is a fabulous, exciting, wonderland place for lots of software engineeri…

They're not new though, just the next generation. The previous one had places like IBM and AT&T employing researchers in this manner.
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