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

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

#31

Post by djrobstep »

NewsAware wrote: post #26
djrobstep wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pet…

Can believe everything but the 3x salary increase

It's true tho. When I moved from the private sector to working at a university, I doubled my salary. When I moved from there to working at the government, I tripled my pay from the uni job (moved from perm to contracting, however).

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

#32

Post by rawland »

kaybe wrote: post #29
rawland wrote: post #20

The answers to this question will be as spread as possible, as a PhD is hardly comparable to another PhD. Academic experience varies as much as the experience of working as a toilet cleaner compared to a man of independent means (= someone who stopped working for his/her money) - had to look this up (German: Privatier). It seems to me that there is no word for this in the English language which transports the true me…

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

Thanks, kaybe.

After discussions with my SO she suggested to checkout wikipedia, and guess what we found:

  Privatier ([pʀiˈvaˈtjeː], also spelled Privatus, with the feminine forms
  Privata or Privatière, meaning "private person") is a French word that
  was used from the 19th century in Germany and some other countries as
  a title by members of bourgeois families of substantial financial means
  in lieu of another professional title. Much like rentier, it denoted
  someone who did not have to work to make a living, and who lived off
  their assets of some size, e.g. interest, profits from investments, real
  estate and current assets.
sources: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatier [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rentier

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

#33

Post by danmaz74 »

djrobstep wrote: post #31
NewsAware wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can believe everything but the 3x salary increase

It's true tho. When I moved from the private sector to working at a university, I doubled my salary. When I moved from there to working at the government, I tripled my pay from the uni job (moved from perm to contracting, however).

Out of curiosity, where was this?

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

#34

Post by david-gpu »

expertentipp wrote: post #18
the_decider wrote: post #8

When I was post-doc at a well-respected university, the Profs treated me with a combination with disrespect and contempt (when they were not outright ignoring me). I switched to industry; my pay went up 3X-fold, and my talented colleagues praised those problem-solving abilities that I developed over the course of my academic career. My advice to you; f*ck academia! Its a petty pointless prison where you’ll never do a…

> 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…

I've had many coworkers and several bosses with PhDs and I've not seen any negative attitude from them.

In the past I did work with a couple of guys from academia who had little interest in building stuff we could commercialize and that was challenging in the context of a for-profit company.

Still, that was the exception and not the rule.

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

#35

Post by boulos »

I'm a PhD dropout, but I did do lots of (somewhat poor) research leading up to that. For me, I was always a practical type, which made me less good as a researcher and more focused on engineering. Throughout my time in school though, I'd worked on the side (first commercializing our raytracing work, then consulting for Sony Pictures Imageworks).

I still stay involved in research, as I attend SIGGRAPH every year and often go to HPG. But, fundamentally, I'm sort of bad at imagining what will be a problem several years from now, and much better at solving something that's right in front of me. That led me to doing fairly systems-ey hardly research work, and then doing that as a full-time job :).

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

#36

Post by hnuser355 »

NewsAware wrote: post #26
djrobstep wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pet…

Can believe everything but the 3x salary increase

My citation count went up 3x-fold

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

#37

Post by djrobstep »

danmaz74 wrote: post #33
djrobstep wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true tho. When I moved from the private sector to working at a university, I doubled my salary. When I moved from there to working at the government, I tripled my pay from the uni job (moved from perm to contracting, however).

Out of curiosity, where was this?

New Zealand, followed by Australia for the government contracting. The town I initially lived in in NZ had a very poorly paid range of jobs going, at least at the time. However, I was trapped there, predominantly due to lack of money.

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

#38

Post by danmaz74 »

djrobstep wrote: post #37
danmaz74 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, where was this?

New Zealand, followed by Australia for the government contracting. The town I initially lived in in NZ had a very poorly paid range of jobs going, at least at the time. However, I was trapped there, predominantly due to lack of money.

Makes sense. It's not typical though :)

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

#39

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

rawland wrote: post #20

The answers to this question will be as spread as possible, as a PhD is hardly comparable to another PhD. Academic experience varies as much as the experience of working as a toilet cleaner compared to a man of independent means (= someone who stopped working for his/her money) - had to look this up (German: Privatier). It seems to me that there is no word for this in the English language which transports the true me…

"A gentleman of means" is a somewhat antique term in British English. I don't think there's an equivalent expression for ladies- "A lady of means" sounds a bit strange.

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

#40

Post by suprfnk »

expertentipp wrote: post #18
the_decider wrote: post #8

When I was post-doc at a well-respected university, the Profs treated me with a combination with disrespect and contempt (when they were not outright ignoring me). I switched to industry; my pay went up 3X-fold, and my talented colleagues praised those problem-solving abilities that I developed over the course of my academic career. My advice to you; f*ck academia! Its a petty pointless prison where you’ll never do a…

> 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 that did 4 years doing a computer science PhD.

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