Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?

I completed a Ph. D. in software engineering between 1998 and 2003. I started out in Sweden (Blekinge Institute of Technology) and finished it in Groningen (NL). After that I continued as a post doc and then decided to quit the academic world.

My main reason for this was that the paths to success in academia are basically to be a glorified manager (aka. a professor) or a teacher. Doing research seems to be mostly not on the table for either path as that is outsourced to Ph. D. students and post docs on temporary contracts. The path to professorship is long and hard and involves dealing with organizational politics to establish slow progress via post doc positions, an eventual tenure track position to maybe a professorship. Over the course of this career you have progressively less time to do research and you get bogged down in bureaucracy, budgets, and other management stuff.

The alternate track of becoming a teacher seems reserved for those that fail the first path. This has always felt a bit wrong to me as an important function of a university is teaching. But the reality is that as a teacher, you do no research and you report to professors that are mostly interested in doing research and regard you as a second rate citizen. This seems to be more true in Europe than in the US where quality teaching is key to university revenue and thus your career.

I was well on track with the research path having a steady stream of publications and options for continuing. But neither path appealed to me and I found the prospect of dealing with university politics, funding, and publications for the next forty years to be unappealing. Teaching could have been appealing to me but not as outlined above where you are essentially treated like a career failure.

So I left university to work for a small software company (for the first time practicing what I had been preaching) and later rebooted my academic career for a few more years in industry by joining Nokia Research in Helsinki. In there I found myself doing a lot of the same things as a post doc but with a decent salary and career options. I had a lot of fun and worked with some smart people on some cool projects. Unfortunately Nokia did not last and I transferred out into the maps unit in Berlin. After a few years, just before it turned into here.com, I joined the startup scene and have also done some freelancing.

I haven't really looked back. I enjoy building software and learning new things while doing that. I'm currently in a CTO type role and I haven't published anything this decade. So, my academic career at this point is pretty much over. I don't miss it but it is definitely been educational and formative. IMHO the most important function of a academic education is learning to think for yourself and the ability to learn new things. That doesn't really stop when you leave academia and they don't have a monopoly on this. Especially for computer science related fields, a lot of the progress is actually made in industry, not academia.

In the US. Undergrad degree included CS. Spent a few years in software engineering industry. Left industry to pursue a PhD in computational science. Returned to industry right after completing the degree. At a hedge fund for 4+ years now. Dunno if that counts as "switching". Anyway...

I love it. Interesting problems with demonstrable business impact when you find a good solution. Software in an environment where robustness can be critical but, too, overpolishing work can be full of opportunity cost. A chance to keep reading/using academic literature. I hit a conference about once a year. Great coworkers from a myriad of backgrounds. I can afford to have a family, to spend time with that family, to give them a nice quality of life, and to save for the future. I have been lucky/blessed/etc.

When I was a developer at a well-respected company, the managers treated me with a combination with disrespect and contempt (when they were not outright ignoring me). I switched to academia, government and the non-profit sector; my pay went up 3X-fold, and my talented colleagues praised those problem-solving abilities that I developed over the course of my commercial career. My advice to you; f*ck industry! Its a petty pointless prison where you’ll never do anything worthwhile. Switch to academia, government or non-profits in order to work and projects that actually have some positive impact on the world. Only then will you be treated with respect.

Matt 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 there are of course a number of other former faculty there too, but none that I know of who've blogged as much as Matt. In the systems space, off the top of my head: Amin Vahdat, Mike Dahlin, Steve Gribble, Craig Chambers, David Patterson, David Wetherall, Eric Brewer.

Personally, I've had way more impact (and fun!) building Compute Engine and Kubernetes than I had in academia. If in doubt, try industry for a summer or a year -- nothing we write can replace personal experience.

I think that's generally called financial independence in English.