Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

My (European) experience is that academia provides a great work environment. If you have tenure, you're free to work on whatever you want, you have very low pressure (beside the pressure you decide to inflict on yourself), you're basically paid to learn new things and teach them to others. You can easily visit other institutes abroad. You get to meet interesting people. Age discrimination isn't an issue. The salary isn't on par with what you could make working for a company but it's enough. If you're ambitious and talented you can easily earn money on the side (consulting, starting your own company, taking a leave) and you can have the best of both worlds.

As a current grad studrnt, I'm calling BS. We (meaning academics, even the ones gaming the system) _know_ what strong, reproducible, well-designed research projects look like. It doesn't take a genius to develop an experiment, run it, document what happened, and publish _all_ of the results. Hell, you learned the basics in middle school -- pick an independent variable, tweak it, then see what happens to the dependent variables.

Now it's obviously not that simple -- isolating just one independent variable is practically impossible much of the time -- but the concept of documenting EVERYTHING that you tried should be obvious. There's absolutely zero impetus to share all of that information, however, especially when you only have 12 pages in a conference paper to write up everything. So instead you go fishing, and you run a boatload of tests, and you see which ones "solve" the problem, and you write up just those tests, ignoring all the failures and the false starts.

It pisses me off, to be honest, and it's just one of the many reasons I'm trying to get out of here as soon as I can.

>You get to meet interesting people.

I want to stress that part because I don't feel it does the environment justice. You get to meet fantastic and very intelligent people from all countries in the world. During gathering events, meetings, parties, etc. I've been to, it's not rare to see eight different nationalities out of eight people around a dining table. You talk about science at first but very quickly discussions derail into comparisons between such and such country's perspective, differences in culture, jokes about the language, and so on. And it happens every time. Not all environments provide this.

Of course, you may argue that this diversity of culture and insights is counterbalanced by the community's homogeneity in many other aspects (e.g. the overwhelming majority of scientists are very liberal, even by European standards), and it's pretty obvious that your view of, say, Iranian or Russian people is going to be skewed if the only ones you've talked to are very educated and liberal 20- or 30-somethings working as expats. Scientists are known for their insularity, and while they're a demographic that's among the most susceptible to date outside their country, they're also very prone to date inside the community. The 'ivory tower' stereotype is not completely wrong.