Why I'm staying at Harvard | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm staying at Harvard

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

46 pointsrxin9 comments

I once had a dream of being an academic, because my perception was that you got to teach people, think smart thoughts, and get paid for it. My idealism got burned very badly after working on research with my profs, thankfully prior to getting too invested in advanced degrees.

It turns out that there are a lot of careers where you get paid to think smart thoughts. Running a small business is one of them. You can still teach, lecture, and even publish in academic journals. (I'm inflicting a paper on the unsuspecting readers of one fairly soon, at the urging of the editors. The institutional affiliation section promises to be a barrel of laughs.)

I tend to be the card carrying non-academic in my circles, but there are certain problems you cannot solve outside of academia, and to this day, much of the approach I take to solve business problems draws upon lessons learned at that time (when you are resource constrained you can get really creative).

> I tend to be the card carrying non-academic in my circles

I am unfamiliar with your slang. Can you elaborate please?

I'm not the parent, but:

card-carrying means "thorough" or "avidly devoted to a group", so I take this phrase to mean that he is very non-academic, especially compared to those in his social group, who are relatively much more academic than he is.

Thanks. That is correct. Most of my "network" are researchers in various universities and academic institutions. I went straight from graduate school to a startup, which is not the norm in my circles.

"circles" above is mostly the life science modeling, simulation and informatics community

The title should note this is a guest post by someone else in the Harvard CS department, Michael Mitzenmacher. (Once upon a time, Google itself was running "Come Work For Google" AdWords triggered on Mitzenmacher's name.)

There's also a nice comment by Sam Madden (professor at MIT, teaches classes on databases) below. It is a nice response to the person who essentially said "Mike is in theory, Matt is in systems so their experiences are not comparable.

The comment in question:

I'm in systems just down the road from Matt and Mike. I don't think I could have better said why academia appeals to me than Mike. Fundamentally, it's just very hard to find a job with more flexibility and freedom to do what you want than academia. I'm my own boss -- besides 3 hours of teaching a week (9 months out of the year, and 7 years out of 6!) my schedule is completely under my own control.

I will add that I thing one thing neither Matt nor Mike pointed out is the opportunity that academia provides for commercializing your own technology. Most universities are extremely supportive of their faculty starting companies, and these days it is very common for faculty at universities in startup-friendly towns to spend a significant portion of their time at a startup. Matt complains about not being able to have impact or get your ideas accepted in a company. What better way to do it than to found the next VMWare or Akamai? Sure, you can go to Google, and make money for someone else and work on their vision for the future, or you can make your own way! Starting a company as a grad student is certainly possible as well (witness Google, Yahoo, etc) but having a tenured job to return to when your startup doesn't quite work out as planned sure is nice...

"In the old days, I wrote a blog." It's official: we're living in the future.

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