Goodbye Academia

Or to be more precise, I don't need employees. I do work with other people, but they aren't my staff. I do some collaborative projects with colleagues, work with masters students doing their masters theses if they're interested (usually 3-5/semester are interested in working on either my projects, or projects I'm interested in), and also work with some people in industry.

Some kinds of research require an army of minions, but I don't really need employees to do mine. In fact generally I prefer having a smaller number of collaborators so I can really be a researcher doing research and writing papers myself, not a research manager, the kind of professor who's the last author on papers written by their students and postdocs. The institution I'm at doesn't expect American-R1-style large labs, so I can do that. Fortunately there are a pretty wide range of institutions with CS departments with different expectations, so there is quite a bit of choice.

It is true that young academics are not well paid, don't have good job security, and that the academic system is run from the top in the wrong way. Grant-chasing is a fact of life, and administration can distract you from your work.

However, being an academic can be great. I've worked in industry and academia, and I found academia to be less stressful, more rewarding, and more intellectually challenging.

Here are a few great things about academia:

* You get to work with really smart, creative, intellectual, people. Probably the smartest people you meet in your life will be colleagues. It's a very stimulating environment.

* You get to work with young and enthusiastic students and researchers, who constantly challenge you and bring new ideas to the table. It keeps you young.

* You see ideas and technologies that most people don't. For example, I recently saw a bunch of robots in development at another UK institution.

* It's an opportunity to continue learning, with access to great resources (huge libraries, experts on a wide variety of disciplines and sub disciplines down the hallway / across campus).

* You are not constrained to thinking about product development or the short-term. You can think on much greater timescales, and propose and investigate ideas with no direct application.

* When you make a real contribution, find a great result, or inspire other researchers, it's hugely rewarding.

* You're part of a machine that has generated enormous progress. Often people don't recognise it, particularly in Computer Science, because commercial companies appear to have "invented" things that they actually developed from work in academia. The most incredible discoveries and theories have come from academia.

* Every day can be different. You don't repeat the same research twice, so it's a constant progression. This can be really exciting and stimulating.

* You get to travel the world to collaborate, to attend conferences etc. Sometimes you can extend these trips to holidays; I've travelled more since I became an academic than anyone I know outside of academia. You have the opportunity to move overseas and work at foreign institutions.

* You have flexibility in terms of what you wear, how you work, where you work, who you work with -- you get to choose much of the time.

* You have an enormous amount of freedom to organise your time as you see fit. Your hours and holidays are incredibly flexible.

* The money, whilst not great, is enough to live on. If you progress up the ladder to be a senior lecturer or professor (UK), the money is good.

When I do produce code, I produce prototype code myself or working together with masters students. When the goal is to produce robust, end-user-ready software, I prefer one of two approaches: 1) work within an existing open-source codebase, contributing improvements upstream; or 2) collaborate with a company to turn a prototype into something polished and end-user-ready. Even if I had a bunch of funding, I don't think I'm in a good position to produce and maintain polished end-user-ready software. Academic software has a habit of going unmaintained when the PhD student graduates or the NSF/EU project ends, and research funding isn't really aligned with production needs. John Regehr talks a bit about that here: http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1058. So I tend to stick with either one-off prototypes, or find a way to collaborate with someone (open-source community, company) that is better positioned to maintain software.

Other decisions are also perfectly valid, just given resources and interests I don't see maintaining essentially a software-production company within academia, with paid staff, as feasible for me personally.

This is not necessarily true. At least in life sciences, there is a big element of pure, dumb luck. Biological systems are inherently noisy, and no matter how diligent we try to be about our processes and protocols, there is always luck.

I spent nearly two years of my life performing a single protocol (an endocytic receptor internallization assay) and the line between "good results" and "wasted a week" was incredibly thin. Some things just require luck to work out, no matter how careful you are.

I left academic biology because I didn't want luck playing into my career. In academic biology you must be incredibly smart, incredibly dedicated, willing to work long hours with little pay, AND be incredibly lucky.

I looked around at the post-docs in my department (at MIT, mind you) and saw brilliant people who would never produce a top-tier article, who had spent so long in their post-doc that they had no chance of ever becoming a professor. They would probably wash out to some industry job at Merck testing cholesterol drugs after wasting 10 years of their life pursuing some fictitious dream.

Truth be told, I wasn't as brilliant as most of the people around me, so I made a judgment call and left. It was the right decision, I'm happier than ever (and actually make money too).

although grad students get paid little, the total cost to a lab of a grad student is higher than a tech[nical assistant]. if there were less grad students, labs would hire more techs.