Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?
Academics: junior academic researchers including phd students, postdocs and early career profs.
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 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.
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.
Not sure how repetable that is. I was lucky to get a h1b, and i was lucky picking a winner like Firebase early stage, but i genuinely beleived it was the future of development. So great move, and i think i could go back into academia if i wanted, so its left me in a stronger position.
What was your reasoning to join firebase in its initial days ?
I found out about it just by reading hacknews and noticed it seemed to be posting a lot and well.
I got a job offer becuase i wrote software to solve a particular issue with firebase at the time, and posted it to their user group, then they offered a guest blog post which i wrote here https://firebase.googleblog.com/2014/02/firesafe-add-complex... then i think i got the offer!
My academia background wasn’t in the CS field, so I am not sure how relevant my experience is. I did often need to look up and read CS papers to help with my job, obviously not the same way as in research. I hated paper reading in grad school but start to enjoy it now, one of the reasons is the interest and motivation are stronger and also the for-fun mindset. Strangely it came to me that maybe things would work out as well had I stayed in academia.
You're not alone! I found reading papers for the sake of reading them to be boring. I'm not smart enough to read papers for fun like that. I need motivation. As soon as I'm actually working on software, I can cut through relevant papers and documentation like butter. Anything that isn't relevant to a problem I've created for myself is very hard to get through.
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.
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 that I never advise my students who dislike teaching to even contemplate the academic job market and trying to get a faculty position. If you don't love teaching, go get actually paid elsewhere.
If you love teaching, then being a professor at a top tier CS program might not be the right choice.
Which tier one school does not expect and pay CS profs to teach?
The work I do now has nothing to do with neuroscience, but I have zero regrets about my PhD. It was a fascinating period for me and I view it as an adventure I did in my 20s. I loved the work I did and it didn’t need to lead into something else.
I decided to go back to academia (and stay in SF), primarily teaching Data Science. I realized that teaching is my passion. I took a pay cut, but it is more joyful for me. I can pick the courses I teach and get to mentor students. As I long I deliver, I can manage my time how I please. I still consult with tech companies.
I realized that I had to make my own way through my life. I found my niche which is 75% academic and 25% industry.
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I don't equate the way that academia is run with science (nor do I think they hold a monopoly on knowledge as people would rather believe and prostrate themselves for as if it were an altar), I don't think I could be friends with people who are that simple minded, probably why I don't have many friends in the first place lol
Maybe I got lucky and never saw any of the relationships I had with academia, corporate world, or society at large permanent or all that interesting in the first place… I tend towards aversion and skepticism, and it seems like every wants someone else to drink the kool-aid they made… best I could do take a sip from what would kill me the least before I piss it out and move on.
I dont find industry nearly as interesting subject wise, but pays way better than a research assistant with no degree. I worked remote (live in SE asia now, and traveling some from ME to Japan) for the past 3 years from one hedgefund to pharmaceutical data company (an arm of a hedgefund), and some random work. Now I algo trade my own funds and work on neuro related software/hardware side projects.
Only complaint is that too many employers still want people on site, but I dont care about it that much as I used to now that I’m doing my own thing and contract work if someone brings me something that interests me.
Don’t see myself going into academia again in the same way, not intersted in the lab politics nor grant-paper hamster wheel.
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.
My background is microelectronics, and in my experience there is still a big skills gap inside academia which I think only people from industry can really fill. There is no substitute for practical/applied engineering experience, and that experience goes a very long way in informing how realistic or implementable a piece of new research is.
If professors are insightful enough to see the skills which engineers from industry can offer academia, then it's a benefit to everyone.
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 :).
https://youtu.be/4-wNv9FHLqM?t=232 (timestamped to just before he starts speaking)
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.
Living in Sydney, Australia I am not finding much interest by potential employers in my knowledge and experience in the field of software engineering. From discussing the situation with people I meet at international conferences, it would appear that the employment opportunities vary greatly across Europe and USA.
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 meaning [1]. Prove me wrong, please.
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.
- State funded sea pirates, esp. during the 17th and 18th centuries
- In motorsports, a team which is funded by a private individual or group instead of a public corporation
"Financial independance" is the correct modern term.
So I decided to quit and found a new job at a small start up that is developing and providing consultancy for a CAE software. It was the best decision I ever made. I also did simulations during my academic life, but the pace has picked up significantly. I'm still at the forefront of research, but instead of pondering forever over minuscule details I'm now making stuff work. While the pay has not increased a lot, it's still better and I don't have to worry about getting funding, even though we do some research project, but if we don't get them it's not a huge issue. I have quite a diverse range of responsibilities including some managerial duties and I have grown and learned a lot in the past two years.
To sum up, it was great to leave and I wouldn't return unless I would be offered a professorship. I was extremely lucky with the company I work at and I think being in a small company allows to not just be another number in the system but actually contribute in many different ways. Obviously you need to have the right kind of people (incl. bosses) for that to be possible. Clearly, in a small company the human component is a crucial one.
I know a few people who quit business schools to join industry. Their reasons were mostly personal (spouse didn't get any job or the weather was terrible). They joined different companies in the Bay area. One of them said he is very happy with the transition in terms of money and dynamism but he rarely sees his kids now!
There are also numerous roles in industry which do research (even Oracle has a research lab!). This is probably the easier route, especially if you're not as keen on teaching, and more and more companies are open to people doing speculative work and publishing papers (note that i'm making the assumption we're generally talking about software development, ML, hardware development, etc).
In my view moving to industry was one of the best decisions I made in my life. Much(!!) better salary, much easier to find jobs, lots of choices of where to live, and better work/life balance. Having a decent salary and job choices also helped to stabilize my personal life as well.
The big reasons for leaving academia were job and money. Some of the brightest people I knew were fighting to get $40K postdocs jobs in high cost of living cities. Others were taking adjunct professor jobs in towns they didn't want to live in. All of it to hopefully one day have a tenure track job. One of the research jobs I was a finalist for had a terrible salary in NYC, but they provided subsidized housing in what was basically student housing for faculty. Not getting that job was one of the last rejections before I gave up academia.
The small reasons were all around being disillusioned with academia, both with research and teaching. The more honest professors would tell students to explore life outside academia. The ego-manics would boast about how they had a great tenure process and great retirement benefits, but all that was gone for new graduates. Some of the best and worst human beings I've met in life were in academia.
I was lucky that before my PhD I was a developer. So I had a some credibility when I applied for roles in software companies.
Just for a different viewpoint, it's really hard to evaluate the life you didn't live. When I looked at my PhD cohort 1-5 years after graduation it looked liked academia was a terrible decision. 5-10 years out the folks who wanted to stay in academia are doing well and the ones who left are also doing well. By well I mean with life, not just money. So maybe in the long run things work out, but the first few years after graduating can be awful.
I switched to industry while in 3rd tenure-track year and moved back to Europe, though the topic is the same (nonlinear discrete optimization). Most of the work is software development.
Enjoying a better paycheck and working 9to5 Mon-Fri (rarely had a non-work evening/weekend while in academia) but the research is still great and I get to publish articles and go to conferences. Miss teaching a lot and clearly I can't pick my own research topics, but the switch was definitely worth it.
My experience in grad school wasn’t bad and I think it only benefited me when transitioning to industry. At my job, I thoroughly enjoy my work and team (it’s important you find your fit). The compensation bump was also nice compared to a PhD student stipend.
It's okay to leave a few edge-cases out if it simplifies the solution drastically and doesn't lift the error rate too much.
For example in my case, I did a PhD and then went into embedded industry. We did better engineering in some research projects than in the industry project I'm currently in. In both cases the projects are not representative though.
In general, I can only say that I enjoy building stuff which gets actually used. The chance for that is much higher in industry.
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.