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Comment by ptero | Hacker News Reader

This is a hard question to answer, but here are a few thoughts:

1. Resigning from a tenured position likely means taking a one-way street. The exception is a well-known scientist that can easily switch tenure to 2-3 other school today. In many fields competition for tenure is brutal and once you leave you may have some disadvantages in re-entry against a bunch of post-docs. "Only losers leave academia" is still a widely held mindset. All this does not mean not to resign; just be aware.

2. Do you still need money? The fact that the company is not ramen profitable in 7 years (including last 3 years of dedicated effort) means it may not be a source of income for a while. If you are not set for life, how long can you afford to not work? Will you be OK in industry (some professors thrive there some are completely miserable with a manager who tells them what to do and imposes deadlines)?

Unless you are set for life I would seriously consider your 50% option -- you get another year to fully dedicate to your startup without teaching a single day and still maintain tenure. In a year, re-evaluate. My 2c.

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> 1. (OP here) I doubt I could easily get a tenured position somewhere else today, because I have not published much in the last few years, due to focusing on CoCalc. I also I have a 2-body problem (my wife is an academic), which would make getting another position in academia that much harder.

> 2. Do you still need money?

Yes. In fact, I didn't save enough as a college math professor to retire while living in Seattle (an expensive place)!

> The fact that the company is not ramen profitable in 7 years

The company is not profitable, but it is "ramen profitable" according to http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html. Without getting into details, the bank balance goes down a little each month since we pay hosting and for four fulltime employees (we have about 2 years of runway). However, we're close to profitable. If we instead had only three employees (or paid ourselves less), then we would be profitable. If we had just one employee (me), then I would be making a LOT more money than I made working at UW, though I would likely be much less happy (the other three people working on CoCalc are fantastic!).

Do not leave that tenured position!! The market has been pumped up so hard that you should be making stability-reinforcing life choices. There’s also just nothing comparable to the benefits of being a tenured professor in the modern labor market short of winning the lottery. Find a way to make it work with fewer people or look for other ways to increase your revenue/demand.

> There’s also just nothing comparable to the benefits of being a tenured professor in the modern labor market short of winning the lottery.

Having a few million dollars in the bank is comparable to being a tenured professor, at least in terms of guaranteed income. (Of course, I don't have millions of dollars in the bank.) Maybe that's what you meant by "winning the lottery", e.g., that phrase is sometimes used to refer to startup founders who sell their company.

No I mean the modern labor market is horrible outside of the very hard to get positions at the FANGs. Have you researched what working and work culture are like? Read some of the Rachel by the bay blogs. You have a quality of life as a tenured professor that you simply won’t anywhere else. Especially as a “startup founder”. There’s a reason the valley takes them straight out of college graduation.

Do Not Leave Your Professorship.

You will regret it.

This seems like a very warped view of the world. The US economy is doing pretty well. The main worry people have is that it is doing too well and will lead to a crash at some point. Unemployment is basically non-existent in many parts of the country. Wages are finally starting to go up, after being stagnant since 2008.

Putting up with poor working conditions is mostly poor decision making, especially in tech.

Inverted yield curve

Decreasing job creation numbers

Looming Brexit

Recent Fed decisions to raise rates and more recently leave them unchanged.

Investment choices, “beta”, should reflect a heightened risk aversion for people later in their careers. That’s just standard financial planning.

I could even make a case for stagnant wages suddenly increasing indicating irregularities necessitating caution in financial and career decisions.

>The company is not profitable, but it is "ramen profitable" according to http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html. Without getting into details, the bank balance goes down a little each month since we pay hosting and for four fulltime employees (we have about 2 years of runway). However, we're close to profitable.

Are you drawing a salary out of this?

> Are you drawing a salary out of this?

Yes, though it is currently significantly less than UW paid me.

I'm a proud UW CS graduate so this story is thrilling.

It was mentioned at times in your article that you used your network to seek advice on the next steps for the business.

Have you used the UW network to seek business advice from people not in academia and not in the math field?

If you are supporting four people, not all of whom are developers, that's an amazing place to be, imho. If you are supporting four developers, it's even more admirable AND probably time to involve someone who can think exclusively about how to grow the business and does not think about engineering tasks. There is a huge network of former UW people involved in the software industry in Seattle who would help if you are at that moment to consider it.

Maybe you've already done this, your article makes it sound like you have been very thorough in investigating how to take this to the next level, but it wasn't mentioned explicitly.

I know some people like this, reach out to me if you want connections to them.

Here's to your future success!

As a former tenured professor who recently left their position, I wish you the best of luck. It's a difficult decision, especially these days. My situation was different in a lot of ways, but overlapped in others.

I don't think there's a right or wrong decision in situations such as yours.

Your startup seems to be doing pretty well (I would call it "profitable-able in a pinch") and you have a mini safety net with your wife's academic employment should provide health insurance indefinitely if you do take the jump. Also, with your experience you will also likely find job in industry if your startup folds, so you have fallback options, assuming you are OK with working for a corporation.

That said, I would personally still take your "one more year" option as it gives you an extra year to get your startup to profit without officially resigning. This seems to be a very valuable freebie. Did I misread your web post about this option or are you reluctant to take this for other reasons?

And finally, on your startup -- I would steer it to become profitable ASAP; for example if and when you are deciding between hiring a fifth employee (to grow faster) or getting profitable sooner I would take the second path. My 2c. And good luck whichever option you choose!

Presumably revenue is trending upward? If so, when do you expect your costs to be covered (such that the bank balance stops going down each month)?

Are you spending anything on marketing?

> The fact that the company is not ramen profitable in 7 years (including last 3 years of dedicated effort) means it may not be a source of income for a while.

This is always a flag for me for something that needs to be investigated. Personally I think the idea the guy took to stick with CoCalc was interesting but at the same time he should really really consider hiring a CFO, someone who really understands where the money comes in and how it goes out.

Such a person could tell him exactly how much "lifetime value" is needed from each customer in order to make the company a going concern. Sometimes that number is "impossible" in that it is way more than one believes they could get for the product. When that happens, you have to take a serious look at whether or not you're looking at a hobby or a business.

It is always difficult to see these sorts of discussions after they have been had, especially when there was information that could have been developed earlier on that would have informed the decision, but it is not uncommon.

From what I have gathered from mathematician friends, they are catching on to CoCalc. I for one think it has promise. Especially with the dominance of Python in CS department intro classes, a Sage-based math environment for math classes (e.g. abstract algebra / group theory) seems sensible. Once those programmes start adopting it, you are good to go.

But how much are they willing to pay?

(I'm the OP.) Quick answer: "about $15/student". Our pricing page is here https://cocalc.com/policies/pricing.html, and people and institutions do regularly sign up for all the subscriptions and packages listed there. They were all created based on demand from users. We get a handful of new courses each week, and few individual subscriptions each day, though volume depends a lot on the academic cycle. One of the reasons I'm confident to resign from my UW job is that the business aspects of CoCalc are definitely working.

I don’t see income figures for you from this. But a general rule is your salary is only a fraction of the total cost of your position to the organization after all the overhead costs are included. We’re talking 3x-7x your yearly salary. So ask yourself whether getting 7x your income is what you’re getting from this the year after you resign. And because you’re tenured, that needs to be a long term demand that won’t go away.

Edit-I don’t see any of the above in your product/write up. Further, I used the high end of the coverage range as professor positions usually have good benefits. Stuff is expensive individually.

I agree with hiring a CFO. It’ll cost more in the short term but could pay off in the medium to long term like you say.

That said, even if it fails the next stop would be FAANG and that's where talented programmers are that are impossible to find in academia.

A few years later, richer than academia could ever provide (I left academia and did not regret it)

He is probably too old for a faang.

> He is probably too old for a faang.

[many expletives later]

Really? REALLY?

Seven of 18 largest tech companies have a median employee age of 30 or younger.

Which means that 11 of 18 do not.

Thank you for pointing this out.

The average age at google is 41.

But the average age hired is lower than 30. The whiteboard /stanford/group hire filters helps ensure only the best past a certain age has a chance.

"Only the best past a certain age"?

Google's own research shows no correlation between "elite school" or "grade average" filters and job performance. Their hiring comittees (from which the hiring manager is excluded) also make decisions while blinded to factors such as age, race, and gender.

If the comment had been about discriminatory hiring practices, or even just generally about ageism in the industry, I would have nodded, and probably upvoted.

But he phrased it as the OP being "too old for a FAANG", which centers the fault on the OP.

Besides which, in whichever sense it was meant, the comment was almost certainly factually incorrect. A math PhD with significant software engineering and engineering management experience isn't someone that gets turned away that easily.

I'm the OP, and I do wonder if I would be too old for a FAANG, with the fault being on me. Building a company as an entrepreneur at age 45 (my age) feels very reasonable, and I've seen research that suggests that my age is perhaps even a sweet spot for building a company. In contrast, I think I would find it difficult to work as an employee at a FAANG company, since it's very different than everything I have done so far in life, and most other employees would be younger than me (informal observation based on having lunch at Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook regularly).

More importantly, joining a FAANG company would mean completely giving up on my longterm goal to massively fund Sage development, and that would be very hard for me to do.

Please don't buy into the industry's ageism.

While most other employees at any tech company would be younger than you, is having lunch at AmaFaceGoogSoft really so different from having lunch in a university campus cafeteria?

I am not trying to change your decision, BTW. Your long-term goal is an admirable one and I think achievable, whether CoCalc remains a private company, goes public, or is acquired.

According to the Stack Overflow survey, the median age of a professional developer is 30.

The tech industry has been growing rapidly, so a low median age isn't evidence of age discrimination (I'm not claiming there isn't any - just pointing out that a low median age is what you'd expect to see even in the absence of discrimination).

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#key-results

This is totally not true. I'm 41, work at Google and doing pretty OK. As long as you are willing to keep learning and can use your experience constructively I don't think age is a problem here at all.

I was 62 when I worked at Google. I never felt any age discrimination there. It was a nice experience, not my best job ever, but nice.

I definitely don't currently intend to work at a large tech company. However, I live in Seattle (where there are a few), and most of the Ph.D. students I've had over the years do work at such companies, so I at least visit them regularly. Indeed, basically all people you see when you go to lunch there are way younger than me (I'm 45 years old).

Since CoCalc doesn't have any VC investment, and does have a solid and diverse base of customers, it's basically designed so that it is unlikely to fail unless I do something really risky. An example of something very risky would be raising venture capital or getting acquired -- we won't do that, since we have explicitly stated we won't to our customers and on our website, because some customers have been reluctant to consider using cocalc if we do take VC. In the worst case, CoCalc would be what some people call a "zombie startup" or "lifestyle business"... i.e., not growing much, and just marching on. However, I love working on CoCalc, and our customers love using it, so even that situation wouldn't be failure...

I'm 41 and work at Google, and I don't think age is a problem at all. As long as you don't expect to get better treatment because of your age, promotions will and salary will go to the best person not the older person.

FAANG in general are also pretty good about work-life balance which is good for us older people :-)

> In many fields competition for tenure is brutal

Why so? There are so many people who would like to study but can't get into an university. There (as you say) are so many professors who would like to teach but also get into brutal competition. Why not just build more universities? Also why not start a private education company that probably wouldn't be eligible to issue government-accredited degrees (who but medical doctors and lawyers needs them anyway?) yet would provide university-level education quality and compete the free-market way?

Not many companies are going to hire an engineer from a non-accredited university. Sometimes it is specifically called out in the job posting. Accreditation is there for a reason, otherwise you end up with a bunch of people with degrees from diploma mills and ITT-like organizations applying for jobs they have no business being in.

Perhaps but a particular private company can establish reputation that would ensure whoever graduates from it actually has acquired the knowledge and skills listed.

In fact I even believe that teaching and skill/knowledge-certifying companies should be separated entirely. A person should be able to acquire knowledge whatever way they find comfortable (e.g. choose a company that would teach them or study entirely on themselves if they are sufficiently resourceful) then go to a reputable institution that would test them and issue a diploma.

Who is going to want to attend a school with zero reputation

When its job is to teach rather than to issue a diploma which other parties would recognize, attending a couple of lectures would be enough for me to see how well do they teach if it's worth my money. There should also be money-back warranty for those unsatisfied with the quality of teaching. At some point, if I were satisfied, I would also recommend it to people I know and such a recommendation would be enough for me to give it a try if I were them.

Measuring such a subject by thyself may seem like a fallacy as many people obviously don't think like I do but I believe there are many (a number sufficient to sustain a business) who do think the same way in such a big country.

Government jobs in particular often require degree (not university) accreditation for real engineering degrees. They generally don't require the same for CS though, so there are plenty of tech jobs that don't need accreditation at all. I'm a government contractor working as a software engineer with a non-accredited CS degree from a UC school. If I had a degree in engineering, it would absolutely need to be accredited (and my university's engineering degrees are).

Some government jobs do want the accreditation--you need it to become a patent agent, for example--though others don't. I think it might be related to whether it's officially an "engineering" or "science" job.

It's a little aggravating though, since many good programs (e.g., Stanford) don't bother with the ABET stuff for computer science.

I mean many companies don't care if you have a degree at all, let alone where that degree comes from.

The barriers (at least in the US) to university study are seldom admission. There already exist many accredited institutions that admit essentially all applicants with a high school degree or equivalent. The things that stop people who would like to get a college degree are more often money and time. Incidentally, these are the same things keeping would-be professors from tenured positions. Someone has to pay the professors, after all.

I think OP was getting at "valued" degrees, eg: A degree from a name brand institution, where a good chunk of employers will recognize the name of said university.

Degrees from non-name brand institutions (eg: all the community colleges/2nd tier colleges like Western Washington University) are for checking off the requirement of having a degree. Its a serious put down, but the name brands thrive on being "selective" yet bribe-able.

There is quite a bit more value to be had at the latter group of institutions, tuition is ~$500 a class or ~$1500 a quarter at community colleges and of a similar caliber in quality, much more reasonable than the $1500+ charged per 5 credits at name brand colleges.

In the US it is very easy to get into a university. It is not so easy to get into a good university.

> Why not just build more universities?

Because enrollment and the numbers of students who can pay are dwindling [1].

> Also why not start a private education company that probably wouldn't be eligible to issue government-accredited degrees (who but medical doctors and lawyers needs them anyway?)

The main reason anyone in the US goes to college these days is to get a degree, not to receive education related to any specific job. They want to get a degree because most employers still require a degree either for consideration or for promotion. The employers require this because they see it (fairly or unfairly) as an easy way to weed out those who would be unqualified. Any employer that would accept a non-accredited degree from a private education company that could easily just be selling certificates (which already happens anyway) probably wouldn't even care if you had a degree in the first place.

> yet would provide university-level education quality and compete the free-market way

I just don't see there being a significant market of people willing to pay full tuition for a non-accredited institution, to the extent that it could afford to hire good professors away from existing universities and be a better option for them than pursuing tenured positions elsewhere.

Compounded with the unlikelihood that students would be able to get reasonable loans to attend a school that could very well be a scam, this seems completely untenable. Students get into enough debt as it is going to accredited institutions with government loans.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-disappearing-private-c...

> In the US it is very easy to get into a university. It is not so easy to get into a good university.

Because the academic job market is so tight, many of the professors at obscure poorly ranked universities are amazing teachers who do solid (but perhaps not famous or well promoted) research.

You should probably replace “good” in your sentence with “prestigious” or the like.

> many of the professors at obscure unrecognized universities are amazing teachers who do solid (but perhaps not famous or well promoted) research.

If I were choosing who is going to teach me I wouldn't really care about what research do they do, I would care about how good they are at teaching.

If you are the university dean or administrator who hires the professors, you maybe prefer the hot-shot professor who brings in a boatload of research grant money over the professor who gets the best teacher ratings.

The university gets a cut of the grant money and gains a bunch of reputation points for putting out cutting edge research. High teacher ratings are great, but the big universities care less about these and more about the number of Science and Nature papers a professor produces.

Unfortunately students aren't involved in hiring decisions. Everything I've ever heard suggests that faculty at prestigious universities are universally there thanks to their research credentials, not their teaching credentials. This was certainly true of the school I went to.

> Because enrollment and the numbers of students who can pay are dwindling > I just don't see there being a significant market of people willing to pay full tuition for a non-accredited institution

Aren't US tuition fees already bloated?

> afford to hire good professors away from existing universities

Why not hire the professors that are still good yet not perfect enough to get through the brutal competition mentioned above?

> The employers require this because they see it (fairly or unfairly) as an easy way to weed out those who would be unqualified.

Why is it not possible for a private non-accredited college to establish an industry-recognized degree of reputation?

> Why is it not possible for a private non-accredited college to establish an industry-recognized degree of reputation?

You're absolutley right! This is very possible.

In practice, the process you describe is both more difficult than accreditation (because it's undefined) and less trusted by industry (because there's nobody trusted validating it).

Not always. Think programming language certification. If the company who created x offers certificate in x trust can be there. An exam is dufferent to a degree but it could work if say Apple or Microsoft started to offer a university and focus on tech like ai, etc. New York times offering an English degree. Scotland yard - security.

>Why is it not possible for a private non-accredited college to establish an industry-recognized degree of reputation?

It is absolutely possible. In fact, it doesn't even have to be a private institution. I have a CS degree from a public California university. The university itself is accredited, but my particular degree is not. There is no outside body that says that I learned anything at all about CS, just that I learned the bare minimum to get a bachelors degree from a UC school. The weight of the universities name is more than sufficient on its own to answer any question of whether my degree is worth anything.

Of course I suspect that it is in fact much easier to go down this path if you're already a globally recognized research university than if you're "Joe Schmoe's Computer Science Degree Emporium".

You know that unaccredited private universities (besides the phoney diploma mills) do exist, right?[0] The discussion shouldn't be about whether they can exist, but rather how much recognition they can garner across how broad of a spectrum of disciplines -- which goes up and down over time. I think we (as a civilization) are about to lose faith in academia, and I expect more opportunities in this space to open up, but I could be totally wrong.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unaccredited_instituti...

Edit: s/rime/time

> Why not just build more universities?

Because universities are fortresses designed to protect the weirdos who can't survive in the real world. We're passing through this awesome enlightenment phase where there's room for everyone. But you can't just throw one up on a thursday afternoon. Universities need a kind of social contract. (i realize the one true scotsman weakness here, but i think the point holds)

Universities are where you stick the rich kid that's not strong enough to run the family business. Sometimes, you don't even have to be rich.

The thing that's neat is sometimes an idea pops out of a university that's pretty good. Newtonian physics and evolution spring to mind. i'm obviously nuts.

i would encourage you to read [1]. I'm not exactly making an appeal to authority, it's more of a here's a much better, less cynical interpretation of what i'm trying to say.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/dijkstra.html

Universities in the US are no longer institutions of higher learning; they are hedge funds with affiliated football and basketball teams. Because of this, universities have decided to drastically cut costs by replacing tenure-track positions with adjuncts. About 58% of faculty at American universities are non-tenure track, and that number is likely to increase over the coming decade as tenured professors retire [1].

[1] https://www.aaup.org/report/status-non-tenure-track-faculty

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