Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google) | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

127 pointsleibniz38 comments

He's describing something that was the biggest factor for me not deciding to go back to school. I came to Google and started working on search engine spam. I also periodically read papers on "Adversarial Information Retrieval" as it is called in the literature. Only a handful of the papers I read had useful ideas, and I don't think there's anything that can really be done to improve the situation. There are certain things you can't really research without access to the real thing. Information Retrieval is one of them, and I'd be equally skeptical of parallel computing research unless the university has a 1000 node cluster to work with.

This sucks for the world, because the research in these things that Google does doesn't really escape to advance the state of the art elsewhere.

Minor picky point, but universities have access to such computing power via time-sharing at national labs if it is not available from their own department.

And I do think that a lot of good parallel computing research gets done. It's just a lot harder.

Sadly, most academics realize that they're data-starved, but industry isn't able to/doesn't want to work with academia to help gain access to that data. Even if you do get access, you're NDA'd so hard that publishing useful papers is a challenge.

It's a shame, because universities are essentially free labor, just on much longer timeframes and lower probability of immediate success. I understand why things are the way they are, but I'd love to find some way of reconciling this issue. It's already killed a research project of mine before it started.

Google realizes this too, and there are a lot of people here that would like to help. There are a few huge issues that always come up.

1. Paranoia about giving competitors the edge they need.

2. Paranoia about giving spammers the edge they need.

3. Privacy. It's nigh impossible to anonymize user data enough to release and still have it in a useful form. The AOL logs debacle hurt everyone.

One of my friends had a really interesting take on this. His belief essentially was that the industry advances when people switch companies and (legal or not) take their institutional knowledge with them. Unfortunately, academia is hard to transfer into.

<quote>His belief essentially was that the industry advances when people switch companies and (legal or not) take their institutional knowledge with them.</quote>

This is why it's so important that in California the law protects employees leaving companies to work for other companies -- this is legal there. You can't take code, data, hardware designs, or other concrete intellectual property -- that's forbidden by the agreements every tech company requires employees to sign. But if you couldn't take institutional knowledge with you, you couldn't work at a new company at all. (How could an ex-Googler unlearn how web-scale systems are built of many disposable pieces?) And if an agreement purports to restrict you from switching jobs, then California law repudiates that restriction.

Unfortunately some other states have no such law, and cheerfully enforce non-competes against engineers trying to switch companies. And guess what? The industry doesn't move as fast in Massachusetts as in California.

If I could point to one thing other states could do to improve their economy, it would be adopt the exact language of California's anti-non-compete and the "you own your own ideas, unless developed as part of your work" law.

Not that this is going to single handedly grow a silicon valley in Montana overnight, but it has so little downside. The reason for the exact language is because if they use the exact language consciously, they effectively import the case law surrounding those laws.

Actually, I know of no other state that has such a law (although the Michigan legislature accidentally zapped their's for a fairly long period and research has been done on this).

I've never lived/worked in California/SV, but based on what I've read about it (e.g. Shockley -> Fairchild -> many companies is the golden example) etc. and how I've experienced on the East Coast (Boston and D.C. areas) a number of failures to even get started-up due to non-completes, I'm convinced that this one and only unique to California feature is the #1 secret behind Silicon Valley's long term success, its crushing of Route 128, etc.

Georgia was one until two weeks ago, at least de facto. The language wasn't quite as clear as California's, but it was essentially impossible to enforce non-competes. A bunch of big companies managed to get an initiative on the Nov. 3 ballot to overturn that, though, and it passed, partly due to misleading language that's currently being litigated. The ballot question read, Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended so as to make Georgia more economically competitive by authorizing legislation to uphold reasonable competitive agreements?, which is a bit, uh, indirect about the fact that its main impact will be to legalize noncompetes in GA.

It caused a bit of ruckus within libertarian-leaning circles in Georgia, with some people lining up on the pro side, arguing freedom of contract, and other people lining up on the anti side, arguing right-to-work. It was probably the only major issue where progressive groups and tea-party groups actually had the same position (against), but they were both greatly outspent by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and business-Republican groups.

Are you sure about that? I didn't study the issue at all, just read one or two items, but what I understood was that it closed a severability "loophole" that sounded like a very thin reed to depend on.

The very possibility of a lawsuit, even if you eventually won due to the strictness imposed on enforcement, is quite enough to quash a lot of startups. Sure, you can win, after N months and M thousand dollars spent not paying full attention to your startup (assuming you don't get TROed in the beginning). I'm also told that being the subject of a lawsuit is incredibility draining.

In California as I understand it your opponent won't even get to first base.

So, let me put it this way: in all the discussions of California's no non-compete regime, if Georgia was so good why did no ever say anything about it, as compared to e.g. Michigan? People have been pushing Atlanta as a potentially good startup area, why not advertise this advantage?

Ah yeah, for startups I can buy that. Since Georgia's isn't/wasn't nearly as clear-cut as California's, it's much harder to get the lawsuit summarily thrown out, so it's a big drain for startups. The "de-facto impossible to enforce" part is more that as case law developed and somewhat expanded the "loophole", it became difficult for an employer to actually win a suit for violating a noncompete clause. But they could certainly drag it on for a while.

Ah, yes.

And I can't believe that I forgot to mention how crippling this is when you try to raise capital, especially at the angel level. People want to invest in businesses, not lawsuit defenses, and these are high risk and hopefully high gain ventures. They don't want run an even higher risk that if you're indeed successful, your former employer will go after you with a rusty knife.

It's that risk to the high gain that's the real killer, e.g. look at all the people who've come out of the woodwork going after Facebook, some of them clearly weasels (and some not). They would have never bothered if Facebook was a "modest" success instead of a deci-billion dollar blowout, the next Google in terms of being the next big business high tech company.

> His belief essentially was that the industry advances when people switch companies and (legal or not) take their institutional knowledge with them.

Ah, so pay $3.5MM to retain those people ;)

While I do agree, it's important to note that the state of collaboration between American universities and industry is far greater than any other country and has helped both grow. It's one of the problems in places like India, where there isn't much collaboration between private institutions and industry.

Of course things could always be better, but it could also be worse.

"...overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.)..."

I feel like a professor shouldn't consider teaching "overhead". If you're teaching classes, you should be putting at least as much effort into research as teaching. Prof != post-doc.

If your passion is in research, then a move to industry (or post-doc) sounds like a good choice.

I agree that teaching should not be perceived as "overhead".

However, the best place to do research is within academia (large research universities), where there is a very complete and strong infrastructure to do research. Yes, the system is broken in many ways, but it is still the best.

People who really have a strong passion for teaching and not as much interest in research go teach at universities that specialize in teaching more than in research e.g. Reed College.

Last, at a sufficiently advanced level teaching and research are indistinguishable.

He may be complaining about all the overhead that goes with teaching rather than the teaching itself. I'm tutoring this semester for a Data Structures course and a painfully large portion of the time is spent dealing with things that really aren't teaching.

Trying to deal with plagiarism (which even goes as far as assignments posted on RentACoder), using ancient marking systems (WebCT is well and truly evil), handling students who obviously don't care at all but feel entitled and so on.

That's fair.

Still, in my experience (which is nothing special, 4 years undergrad, in second year of masters) there are definitely professors who consider teaching an unfortunate side-requirement of their research. And I don't think it's unique to my school. I think this sucks.

I have been working as a teacher's assistant for a few semesters now, and I hear what you're saying about students who really don't care. I think especially in engineering, you get students who chose the major just because they got good grades in math and science and heard engineering pays well. Then those students complain when you ask them to work hard (or even just work).

Sidenote: WebCT :( haha. My school paid (and will continue to pay) a ridiculous amount for some enterprise course scheduling/billing/etc. software that would have been a great project in software engineering (e.g. large project management). All while we're having major budget issues.

You would be stupid to post an assignment on something as well known as rentacoder. I've ad professors who have mentioned finding their assignments on there so they are well aware.

But there are people that stupid and the need to check such sites is just one more bit of overhead.

Hmmm, I suppose it's unfortunate that a final exam does not lend itself to requiring the use of a computer to demonstrate that you truly can program your way out of a paper bag.

No, Matt is very clear:

"the amount of overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.) you have to do apart from the interesting technical work severely limits your ability to actually [have a practical impact via your research.]"

Teaching is part of the overhead if your goal is to do research, or in his case more precisely to build great systems. A lot of professors feel that way.

To Matt's credit, by all accounts he put plenty of effort into his classes and they were excellent, even though it wasn't what he really most wanted to do. But other professors who feel that way and, I suppose, have a weaker sense of duty end up as the bad teachers that students hate, because they just don't care.

It's clear from the article he doesn't consider teaching to be "overhead" in any sense except specifically in relation to research, and designing and building systems. In fact he writes that teaching was his favorite part of the job. Nevertheless, based on the established context, teaching is overhead, no matter what feelings may be.

Short version: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google) is because I want to be an engineer and not an academic.

s/engineer/researcher/

Matt: what will happen to your graduate students?

My name is Matt, so I feel qualified to reply.

My first joke thought was: "I bet Google will be happy to hire them too."

A moment later I realized it's probably true.

You probably would have gotten positive points for this if you'd left off the extra "My name is Matt" joke.

Big loss for Harvard. Matt Welsh is a fantastic teacher.

Agreed, I had him as well and he was a big inspiration. Perhaps the beginning of a broader shift in industry vs. academia?

Or rather, a shift back to industry funded research a-la Xerox Parc and Bell Labs, among others.

I think the pull is that Google is a very academic place (based on visits and talking to people who work there), and if Google's interests align with yours, you're basically doing the research you would have already done PLUS you get paid better PLUS you don't have to fight for funding on an almost daily basis PLUS you actually have data. Google is a fabulous, exciting, wonderland place for lots of software engineering professors/students.

The question is whether Google is a career. Places like Google, Microsoft Research (and, perhaps Facebook) allow for the freedom that academics crave, but that's only three places. If research-style engineering goes out of fashion in favor of enterprise middle-management hell, you're going to be left high and dry if you don't have a publishing record to fall back on when you try going back to the Ivory Tower.

Fortunately, those places have enough cachet that you can say "I worked at Google" and no publishing record for those years are forgiven, but if you don't have one (say, you went half way through your PhD), coming back is going to be hard. That's why the decision is so difficult: you're taking a bet on whether the benefits taken for granted in academia are going to continue in industry. A broader shift would have to show more companies than those three, in order to provide (for want of a better word) "safety" that your worklife goals aren't in jeopardy.

Thankfully for their job security though, research projects at Google regularly launch as parts of major products.

They're not new though, just the next generation. The previous one had places like IBM and AT&T employing researchers in this manner.

That shift happened back in the .com boom of the late 90s. It has never really reverted back. It's still the case that top-flight PhDs are going to work as developers at companies (versus academic or industry researchers).

I think it is a testament to how interesting the work in our field is.

Yep, definitely my favorite professor. Too bad to see him go, but it sounds like Google's a great fit for what he wants to do.

A previous hint of the pull of Google for Welch was:

http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/10/computing-at-scale-or...

Matt made assembly language and multithreading entertaining to learn and accessible for undergrads, which was no small feat. So those of you bashing his teaching need to step off

Someone has to say it:

   So he can leave google for facebook

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