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Comment by alex-mohr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

Nor did I claim as such. It is just often considered necessary overhead.

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.

Carnegie Mellon has no problem with you not teaching anything but grad courses if you bring in enough grant money to cover your salary and I’m not sure they care if you teach grad courses either.

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.

Isn’t Craig chambers PL? So is Jeff Dean (Craig’s student).

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