Comment by BrandonM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BrandonM | Hacker News Reader

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I commented because I think academics may underestimate how much freedom there can be in industry. My experience has been that after establishing a baseline of trust (by delivering on goals, making good technical decisions, behaving honestly and ethically, etc.), my company and manager are happy to give me a lot of latitude to choose what I work on.

Being one of our founding engineers, I have several times identified a need and implemented a solution without "seeking permission" first. When I do want more formal company backing to pursue a project, a conversation with my manager or an email or a one-page Google Doc all sound easier than writing and submitting a grant proposal.

As our company has grown, I have seen my role change, and I have collaborated with my manager to determine a new direction and title for myself. Notably, I tried management for a while, and I ultimately decided to return to an individual contributor role (no direct reports). It didn't sound like Dr. Fratantonio had the option to stop mentoring other PhD candidates.

Freedom is not exclusive to founding engineers. Our company has a prioritized list of features available for development, and devs have a big role in choosing the next feature they work on, even when it's not a current area of expertise. Established engineers and new hires alike have a lot of latitude to pick technologies, architect a solution to a problem, implement a novel algorithm, etc. One relatively junior new hire is embarking on a project to rewrite much of our frontend code, with support from all of us.

Again, that's why I commented. Depending on what type of freedom you're seeking, industry may offer it and pay better and have better working conditions to boot.

Thanks!

I didn’t explain my opinion as strong as I could have. In academia, your biggest problem to do great research is "publish or perish", but in industry, as an employee, your biggest problem is your company's short goals. "They buy your freedom". You can't focus on a hard problem for ten years or do research on interesting theoretical problems in industry.

There are numerous counterexamples. AI/ML is huge in industry right now, but that’s just the most visible field. Hardware manufacturers certainly have employees pushing forward the state of the art. Google regularly publishes cited research papers. Microsoft and Oracle fund a lot of academic research—I have to assume they also employ internal researchers. Industry is on the forefront of the software engineering specialization of CS (my grad school focus). I’m sure you can find plenty more examples.

10 years of focus on the same problem is definitely possible in industry, and your salary will scale with your expertise. It sounds like you’re expected to produce results along the way even in academia, so there’s not a notable difference in that regard.

One other thing worth comparing is the administrative burden. Good engineering teams have a variety of support systems in place to keep high-value engineers as productive as possible (people managers, engineering coordinators, project managers, etc.). It sounds to me like profs end up personally doing a lot of legwork.

>You can't focus on a hard problem for ten years or do research on interesting theoretical problems in industry.

Sure you can. You simply spend a bit of time on farming out practical applications to other teams or filling patents or writing publications. Comes out to less overhead than in academia with grants, managing students, writing papers, etc. Sure, 99.99% of industry is applied however 0.01% of a massive thing is still very large so there's plenty of non-applied work being done.

Industry is massive and painting every little piece of it with the same brush is a very unjust way of looking at it. I'd recommend you actually learn about things and talk to people before making broad generalizations about them.

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