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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?

#51

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

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 worked with lots of PhDs from all over the world, and I've seen something similar from the Germans among them. Trying to assign menial tasks to their "lesser" colleagues; trying to meddle in their work and impose arbitrary decisions on them. In fact, I've seen them do it among themselves and not just to the non-PhDs.

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

#52

Post by dekhn »

I was an academic on track to being a professor at a second-level university, or a principal investigator at a National Lab. Moving to industry was a great move- I didn't realize how badly compensated I was (2-3X income), had much more support and freedom for exploratory research, and people paid much more attention to my work (granted, I worked at Google, not all industry gives you this level of freedom). I also learned a ton of better software engineering and how to generally spend less effort to get better results.

If I had stayed in academia, I'd be spending all my time writing grants and papers and getting scooped by less scrupulous but more fecund authors.

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

#53

Post by Aeolun »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #49
wanderfowl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that he put "teaching" in with "overhead", there's no shock that he left. The precise reason I chose to push to continue into a professor position was my love of teaching, and my willingness to sacrifice lucrative pay and work-life balance for it. To me, hearing this is like an architect talking about loving the job, but not caring for all the designing buildings it seems to entail. And it's part of the reason…

At a tier one, you are paid to do research, not teach, unless you are a clinical or adjunct. So it’s not just the professor binning teaching as overhead, but the universities as well. If you love teaching, then being a professor at a top tier CS program might not be the right choice.

Who teaches if not the professors? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any academic position without teaching responsibilities.

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

#54

Post by kevinventullo »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #39
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.

In Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year", he references "blue-blooded girls of independent means."

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

#56

Post by robotresearcher »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #49
wanderfowl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that he put "teaching" in with "overhead", there's no shock that he left. The precise reason I chose to push to continue into a professor position was my love of teaching, and my willingness to sacrifice lucrative pay and work-life balance for it. To me, hearing this is like an architect talking about loving the job, but not caring for all the designing buildings it seems to entail. And it's part of the reason…

At a tier one, you are paid to do research, not teach, unless you are a clinical or adjunct. So it’s not just the professor binning teaching as overhead, but the universities as well. If you love teaching, then being a professor at a top tier CS program might not be the right choice.

Teaching, research and service is the traditional job description for tenure-track professors.

Which tier one school does not expect and pay CS profs to teach?

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

#57

Post by bachmeier »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #49
wanderfowl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that he put "teaching" in with "overhead", there's no shock that he left. The precise reason I chose to push to continue into a professor position was my love of teaching, and my willingness to sacrifice lucrative pay and work-life balance for it. To me, hearing this is like an architect talking about loving the job, but not caring for all the designing buildings it seems to entail. And it's part of the reason…

At a tier one, you are paid to do research, not teach, unless you are a clinical or adjunct. So it’s not just the professor binning teaching as overhead, but the universities as well. If you love teaching, then being a professor at a top tier CS program might not be the right choice.

This is true for grant fields. Teaching really is irrelevant if you're bringing in big grants. In non-grant fields, however, you do have to teach at an acceptable level, even at good research universities.

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

#58

Post by seanmcdirmid »

bachmeier wrote: post #57
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a tier one, you are paid to do research, not teach, unless you are a clinical or adjunct. So it’s not just the professor binning teaching as overhead, but the universities as well. If you love teaching, then being a professor at a top tier CS program might not be the right choice.

This is true for grant fields. Teaching really is irrelevant if you're bringing in big grants. In non-grant fields, however, you do have to teach at an acceptable level, even at good research universities.

All of the researchers I know take teaching very seriously and do a good job at it. Some of them even kind of like it, but their tenure case depends on their research output, and that is their primary job and usually passion.

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

#59

Post by [deleted] »

stakhanov wrote: post #43

One of the things that really struck me is that after you drop out of academia to go into industry there is really no going back. I hadn't expected that; I thought I'd just give industry a shot since I can always go back to academia if I don't like it. Not so. The people hiring for academic roles see it as an act of high treason punishable by lifelong exile.

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by seanmcdirmid »

robotresearcher wrote: post #56
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a tier one, you are paid to do research, not teach, unless you are a clinical or adjunct. So it’s not just the professor binning teaching as overhead, but the universities as well. If you love teaching, then being a professor at a top tier CS program might not be the right choice.

Teaching, research and service is the traditional job description for tenure-track professors. Which tier one school does not expect and pay CS profs to teach?

UW CSE requires (or required when I was there?) their faculty to teach 2 courses every 3 quarters. So they got paid to teach, but they didn't have to teach very much.
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