Day in the life of a Googler (Matt Welsh)
matt-welsh.blogspot.com
matt-welsh.blogspot.com
"How long will you need to find your truest, most productive niche? This I cannot predict, for, sadly, access to a podium confers no gift of prophecy. But I can say that however long it takes, it will be time well spent. I am reminded of a friend from the early 1970s, Edward Witten. I liked Ed, but felt sorry for him, too, because, for all his potential, he lacked focus. He had been a history major in college, and a linguistics minor. On graduating, though, he concluded that, as rewarding as these fields had been, he was not really cut out to make a living at them. He decided that what he was really meant to do was study economics. And so, he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at the University of Wisconsin. And, after only a semester, he dropped out of the program. Not for him. So, history was out; linguistics, out; economics, out. What to do? This was a time of widespread political activism, and Ed became an aide to Senator George McGovern, then running for the presidency on an anti-war platform. He also wrote articles for political journals like the Nation and the New Republic. After some months, Ed realized that politics was not for him, because, in his words, it demanded qualities he did not have, foremost among them common sense. All right, then: history, linguistics, economics, politics, were all out as career choices. What to do? Ed suddenly realized that he was really suited to study mathematics. So he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at Princeton. I met him midway through his first year there--just after he had dropped out of the mathematics department. He realized, he said, that what he was really meant to do was study physics; he applied to the physics department, and was accepted.
I was happy for him. But I lamented all the false starts he had made, and how his career opportunities appeared to be passing him by. Many years later, in 1987, I was reading the New York Times magazine and saw a full-page picture akin to a mug shot, of a thin man with a large head staring out of thick glasses. It was Ed Witten! I was stunned. What was he doing in the Times magazine? Well, he was being profiled as the Einstein of his age, a pioneer of a revolution in physics called "String Theory." Colleagues at Harvard and Princeton, who marvelled at his use of bizarre mathematics to solve physics problems, claimed that his ideas, popularly called a "theory of everything," might at last explain the origins and nature of the cosmos. Ed said modestly of his theories that it was really much easier to solve problems when you analyzed them in at least ten dimensions. Perhaps. Much clearer to me was an observation Ed made that appeared near the end of this article: every one of us has talent; the great challenge in life is finding an outlet to express it. I thought, he has truly earned the right to say that. And I realized that, for all my earlier concerns that he had squandered his time, in fact his entire career path--the ventures in history, linguistics, economics, politics, math, as well as physics--had been rewarding: a time of hard work, self-discovery, and new insight into his potential based on growing experience."
- In 'fat' mode, the video color is bad, and the person is frowning, sad.
- In 'skinny' mode, the video color is clear, the person is smiling, and their complexion is better.
This gives the illusion that there's a dramatic change in the person's weight, when often they've only lost 10 pounds (which is great, just not dramatic). In the same way, there doesn't seem too big a change in Matt's schedule, there's just a shift in attitude. It probably wasn't a requirement to "Groan at the amount of work I have to do before the onslaught of meetings in the afternoon", or to "spend next 45 minutes reading Engadget, Hacker News, and Facebook". In the end, he had about 3 hours to work at Harvard, and did about 4 hours of work at Google.
It's interesting to dig into what's actually changed between jobs, because you might not completely know what you want in a work environment.
With respect to what has changed, one of the things that comes through is that his day at Google is more self-directed and less interrupt driven. Fewer meetings, no petitioning others for grants or industrial money, no need to get up in front of a class, and no meetings with students. Instead there are three or four projects that need to make progress, but how exactly that happens is up to him.
It just seems weird that he would compare schedules to make the point that he likes the kind of work he does better at Google. Lectures and office hours are a productive part of being a professor. He had some meetings about grants, but it was not much longer than his meetings at Google.
Most of this work is spent in polishing the grant and figuring out how to best present your research agenda. This is not writing code, so if you'd rather be writing code, this isn't really a good fit for you.
It is like raising VC capital: an agency is likely to be more friendly, if it sees another take some of the initial funding risk. So you sell your idea, and manage the project -- not unlike a feudalistic landlord.
Many people who are good at whatever activity the grant is supposed to support are terrible writers or at least terrible grant writers (which isn't surprising because grant writing can often be extraordinary boring).
From what I can gather, most scientists in the sense of working at universities as profs aren't selected for their ability as writers until they actually become profs, or at least post-docs. Which means that many will be something like 30 before they realize writing grants is important, but that they may not be well-suited to doing so, since few people are.
My family's consulting business does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (you can read more about this at http://blog.seliger.com if you're curious), and many of our clients hire us precisely because they're not good at grant writing but are often good at providing whatever service they're providing. We mostly write human services grants but sometimes do technical work. I'm actually surprised that more profs don't find ways to outsource or partially outsource grant writing; they could do for in the neighborhood of $5 – $10K / proposal, which is relatively small relative to the value of their time.
I'm sure there's a little hyperbole but this was outlining a typical day? It's not a surprise the students would be perplexed or bored if taught by someone whose passion wasn't for education. Some colleges get this right; many get it wrong. While it's good to have experts in your faculty, you need good educators first.
Many colleges seem only too happy to coerce expert non-educators into giving lectures against their will, but it makes as little sense as pushing good educators into doing large research projects..
For a very smart guy like Matt, chances are boredom will set in after a while... it will really be a test of Google to see if it can capture his imagination for 7 hours a day after he's worked there 6-9 months and all the novelty is gone.
One hypothesis is that since there is so much competition to become a faculty member at Harvard, there is very little support b/c someone else will be ready to step in and take the job.
1. Interacting with people who are interested in commercial viability of his research ideas
2. Interacting with students, interested in pursuing research careers and seeking guidance
3. Teaching. Forming concepts in otherwise uninformed minds
4. Coaching grad students who mostly will get inspiration from him to pursue reasearch careers
5. Preparing for talks.
I think the author is under-estimating his contributions back in college.
While he laments the student whose minds are un-prepared, he likes to debug/test the code which too in the same analogy is going thorough curative process.
IMHO, if you compare the long term outputs (ROI), his work in college would far exceed that his does in private enterprise. Hope at some time, he could return back to campus re-invigorated.
Even if he wasn't, he gave up his tenured faculty position to hack full time at Google (IIRC, less than a year after getting tenure). See http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar... for some background.
At least one person thought he was good (though the lack of more than one review may be a sign).
Chosen at random, his 2009 CS61 class has generally very positive reviews (see: http://imgur.com/cSWsq.png).
Papers have nothing to do with it. Really few papers are read these days. I would guess, that an average IEEE author _writes_ the same number or more papers than reads (write-only memory doesn't make sense).
Even less papers have an actual academic impact in CS in the age of the internet, where bits come at the price of caffeine and inspirations of ideas of somebody from a blog/news site (peer review comes in the comments). Not much old-school papers, journals or libraries. As always, there are few exceptions, but you are certainly better off playing the lottery.
Non-virtualizable science is a different matter (wet lab, electronics, physical experiments etc.) But bureaucrats prefer in silico, because it is cheaper.
I don't know any university where papers (and more especially their impact, as measure by h index and co) do not matter a lot when getting tenure (or any kind of post PhD position, really).
All I am saying is, that I do no longer take for granted the paper/IF (& other Thomson ISI Corp.) science metrics as the golden standard, because it is being actively abused (clique self-referencing, grant business etc.). This is not a new controversy, and I think it is much like the RIAA/MP3 shift, which is not only taking place in publishing (web daily news, kindle etc), but also in scientific publication (NIH publication policy etc).
arxiv.org seems to be one of the best technical compromises, but unfortunately, it doesn't fit very well in the establishment's established authoritative scheme (IEEE, ACM etc), which is a racket by anyone's standards. And it can be misleading too (there was an ARS report on this, about the level of trust in the result being published).
Long story short: I, for one (and I think you too) are very unlikely to get tenure based on papers on arxiv.org about volcanoes, transportation, urbanization and JIT. No matter how good we are in Linux sysadmin an distributed systems.
Though back on topic, publication per se is what early stage training is about (and not PhD), in my experience. Of course, one can always ''downgrade'' an EST to a PhD, but then one has to go through all the post-docs, to get to be staff again. Short of luck, of course. For those with tenure, it is very rare to actually write papers to publish (though it does exist) -- that is what students, assistants and fellows are kept around for.
Otherwise, I agree almost entirely with you - I myself left academia mostly for those reasons. Whether tenure professors do write papers depend quite a bit on the field, though - I know many professors in statistics who still contribute significantly to papers written by co-authors (mostly grad students, post docs), for example.
But he remains silent on the BS part, which I guess he got bored with. I think he got disgusted the day he realized, that writing ''scientific'' papers about virtual economies and pseudo-medical sensor devices and about volcanoes -- as serious they might sound to an administrative bureaucrat handing out pennies for the researchers -- it is just plain BS, even if he may have some facts right. It is making life worse, by diluting the cool stuff with useless junk (fail often mantra, but for its on sake).
If one stops admiring the Emperor's new clothes and breaks ranks on BS groupthink, there is no surprise in exclusion and ostracism. It is a no brainer necessity to leave.
And even [one might even cynically write especially] Harvard is certainly no stranger to ''Scientific misconduct'' -- just a recent example: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/education/21harvard.html
Get some tea instead, you can drink hot tea, cold tea, you can add lemon or sugar, and it's much better than ewhhh - diet coke.
I also have a procastination and web-surfing ( hackernews :) ) problem with a job that doesn't motivate me.
A guy who got a PhD, a tenure and then a job at Google had the same problem. I feel a bit better.