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Comment by dominostars | Hacker News Reader

This article reminds me of those weight loss infomercials:

- 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.

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Nitpick: Matt was at Harvard, not Stanford.

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.

Nitpick noted, and duly edited!

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.

Grant writing is stressful and has an impact beyond just the meetings directly discussing the grant. I haven't had the pleasure of writing them myself, but I know several people who do. There is intense pressure because the grants pay the stipends and tuition for your students and postdocs. If the grant does not succeed, you can't support them. In some cases you need grants to pay your summer salary, as well (rules here are complicated). Add this to low acceptance rates from most major funding agencies and long lead times between submission and the decision, and you have a pretty stressful situation.

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.

In other words, being a professor has far more sales and management responsibilities than the average software developer's gig.

Yes. It is all about writing business plans in advance: i.e. have the poker-face to promise in advance to the funding agencies' excel-wrangling paper-tossers, that you will make that given discovery [WTF!].

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.

Grant writing is stressful and has an impact beyond just the meetings directly discussing the grant. I haven't had the pleasure of writing them myself, but I know several people who do.

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.

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