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Comment by the_decider | Hacker News Reader

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 anything worthwhile. Switch to industry in order to work and projects that actually have some impact on the world. Only then will you be treated with respect.

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> 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 of development and no release still).

> 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.

As a PhD, that would be my preference as well.

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.

The German academic system is extremely hierarchical. So the head of the lab will be on all of the papers, in spite of having no academic input etc. Possibly the German PhDs you've met have inherited this toxic system as being the management style to aspire to.

Yes, extremely toxic an infuriating. Cliquish self-satisfied judgmental hard-heads.

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.

I'm sorry to hear that, I never had that experience in my post-doc phase. May I ask in what field/location that was?

Bionformatics in the Bay Area. Afterwards, I switched to Data Science and NLP. Many of my skills were extremely transferable.

It sounds so strange for a post-doc experience. What’s your field?

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.

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?

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 :)

My citation count went up 3x-fold

0 times 3 is still 0

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