Why I chose OpenAI over academia
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> The reality is that building systems is really hard. It requires a lot of resources, and a lot of engineering. I think the incentive structures in academia aren't very suited for this kind of costly, risky systems-building research.
I think this is the key point. I've heard similar from friends in industry and academic positions.
The engineering resources are not though. The work has to either be done by the Phds themselves or by student workers. Phds don't have enough time and student workers have very little time and no expertise.
There are some limited SWE positions in support roles, but as you can expect the pay is not competitive.
For some reason even in academic departments where we can build billion euro clusters the people are still paid utter crap.
> For some reason even in academic departments where we can build billion euro clusters the people are still paid utter crap.
Billion euro clusters are one-time money; people expect benefits and durable employment.
Most comments note how the pay is less than FAANG; eg the top voted comments:
"Pay is pretty good by almost any standards except FAANG."
And elsewhere:
"The pay at a DOE lab is less than FAANG (PhD student interns might be around $80k/yr and starting staff scientists maybe $130k/yr), but the tradeoff for some people would be the research-flavor of the work, and the flexibility."
etc etc
I may not be a quality engineer, but I'd be interested. That's a long enough time frame for me.
But by what I hear from German academia the pay is bad, the environment is "meh" and the contracts have to be renewed in relatively short periods (yearly?). That makes an otherwise interesting field a hell of a lot harder to choose.
We are an academic group (sort of) that is looking to stand up a server or so for some public-facing apps and databases, but it's like no one has ever heard of such a thing. They keep giving me servers that are behind a firewall and only accessible on-campus.
We could maybe do AWS or Azure, but that is really expensive and not really covered by our (government) funding. Plus, any time you want to do something like that (particularly with a company the university doesn't have an existing contract with), you have to get several layers of bureaucracy (including lawyers sometimes) involved. We are a state school, so you can guess how fast that moves.
In general, it's easier to ask for a $500k instrument, or take $10k trips to conferences, than get $10/month subscription for some web hosting company. Academia can be really behind on this front.
(For me, academia is generally ok and fun in my current position, but this part is getting ridiculous)
Although to a lot of reviewers a server is a server. “You have a multi-million dollar compute cluster available, what do you need another server for?”
And tailscale can also give you a private access to any resources even if it's behind firewalls and all that (say you want to access the gpu cluster from your laptop at home).
And they can all run in user space without elevated privileges.
Had to fight to get paid most months; but the $2mil grant for a computing cluster went through and the Supervisor never had a problem getting their monthly trip to a conference through.
First, as you say the incentive structure is wrong: projects are led by researchers and the incentives for researchers are around publishing not around creating good software. There's virtually no credit for making software that is well-written, robust, has a great user interface etc.
Secondly, the funding structure for projects tends to be grant-based. It's extremely hard to get funding for general ongoing development. I saw lots of projects get initial funding for a couple of years, the funding stopped and then the project had no money even for the most basic support or server costs etc. Sometimes you could grant funding for new features and could funnel a bit of that into support but it did require a constant regular stream of grant applications, as often of course you don't get them.
My salary was certainly largely funded by grants - I had a permanent job and there was some allowance for gaps between funding to cover that and because of the type of work I was doing I could do some internal work too in those gaps. It's hard to manage funding that comes with short-term grants. You just can't recruit good people to short-term contracts that quickly before they are supposed to start, especially for what universities can pay (in the UK there are set pay scales, so if you don't manage anybody you basically can't be paid more than a certain amount, plus there are strict processes about recruiting, for good reasons, so it's hard to do quickly).
Funny enough it was the opposite in my niche, a few years ago I could not get any applied research published. The CS reviewers would write things like 'where's the novelty? there are no novel architectures here', the biology reviewers would write things like 'this is a neat tool but we have other solutions that work worse but are established', and the papers would die as preprints. Ah well, glad I'm out of that game.
Source: math academic of ten years.
Add to the fact that OpenAI is almost certainly going to be expanding wildly given that they have taken on a 10B investment, it seems like as good as a time as any.
Also doesn't hurt to reach out to potential managers as they'll be able to provide more direct feedback.
Why fight?
Answering that question may help you cope with not being the best at everything.. for example, I fight for my kids and employees and family. Not about me, it's about them. So what if I'm a mediocre programmer/person? To a few people I'm cool, and that's enough for me.
Can you rephrase your "why fight" answer to be for anyone else? Do you consider yourself narcissistic?
Thanks for sharing your heart, will probably help someone.
Edit: another thought is to picture yourself as this mega-nerd at the top of the food chain. How do you think they feel? Do they feel inadequate? Maybe they helped make ChatGPT in a big way, but have very little equity. Maybe they are short or balding or have a speech impediment.
I promise you if you live outside yourself and for other people, it will change you. I'm certain you can help thousands underneath you...
I ask myself that every time I've submitted a paper. It probably doesn't help that GPA is an easy surrogate for self-worth, which smoothly transformed into publishing for a self-worth measure. And the fact that I don't have particular research I want to do (just that I want to do research), is something I'll have to consider more-- probably a sign of bad foundational motives.
To rephrase the answer, I'll give some extra context. I was a SWE for 2 years before my PhD, and I was financially stable and content. The choice to give up that salary for science was not hard, but it was significant. Now that I've reached the end of my current science road, it would feel like giving up to go be a MLE/SWE. Obviously I could do a post-doc somewhere, but that kicks the can down the road again. I'm pretty sure I'm not a narcissist... I'll ask my friends hah.
I bet if you think a bit, you're very capable of an _insane_ amount of good. Imagine a 12 year old in your town whose single mom can't afford a laptop. Maybe he or she, this 12 year old, is more capable than even you.
You find that kid somehow, maybe they're your neighbor. Maybe with a gentle push like an old book and your old laptop... you create a great thing.
Maybe it only takes a compliment. Some dumb freshman you're TAing a class for has a rough time. You reach out, buy them lunch, talk about your struggles and success.. who knows, could really fire them up.
I bet the universe will show you a few opportunities in the next month. Don't ignore your purpose that's right in front of you, not to say you are ignoring it! Just trying to be encouraging.
Do you have a personal website with a C.V.?
I don't have any sense for what a hiring manager wants, it's especially hard with all the layoffs, I'm sure plenty of people are applying for the same research engineer positions. I certainly consider myself to be strong at coding. I've done a couple coding challenges on hackerrank that I do well on. But I have not been lucky at getting a phone interview yet. (I do have a personal website and CV)
It turned out he was completely unable to figure out how to run a python application with 2 dependencies on his machine.
He also didn't understand the HTTP protocol and kept insisting that for the users of our website to send us a request with some payload, they needed to sftp a file with the request, and then click on the website to process their file.
I kept telling him that since the server was mine, I wasn't going to open up ssh access to the world and a POST request had to do.
Of course he didn't know what a POST request is, and kept insisting on a loop that I had to enable sftp to upload files.
Ended up with me shouting, him doing absolutely nothing besides wasting time, and everybody seeing me as the bad guy for shouting.
In the end I stuck around long enough to deliver something and present it, and left immediately after; not staying to see if we had won something.
That was the last time I attended an hackaton.
As a result, I think when hiring I would be very very careful to select someone with a Phd in ML, as they might have done no programming whatsoever in their whole life.
I do care about how well you know the particular paper I a will look into prior to the interview, especially if it’s relevant to the position. People that can explain well do well. I also care about your github, if it’s well-organized and documented.
I have not put much effort into my GitHub (I only have the code for 1 of my 5 projects uploaded). I'll spend some time this week updating it, maybe that will help my woes.
Screw credentialism and paper publishing metrics.
Somehow the book survived the Second World War and Warsaw Uprising. As a kid, when I was visiting grandma I loved reading this book.
One of the jokes goes like this: Icek (short for Izaak) was praying every night to God to win on the lottery. Night after night he keep asking for this. Finally, one night God spoke to Icek - "Icek, please, please give me a chance, buy a lottery tikcet!" God said.
So, good luck with your application, you'll make it!
Lately I had two PhD students: one graduated with 4 papers in undisputably top-tier conferences (plus 2 in close-to-top-tier ones). The other, only with 1.
But you know what? The second student was better than the first (IMO, of course). The first got lucky hitting a research topic that proved to work very well and produced many results with relatively little effort once the basic framework was in place. The second explored more diverse research topics, and did exceptionally deep, high-quality research, but got bitten by reviewers (partly because the research had less "flashy" goals, was more niche and harder to understand, partly because of the massive random factors inherent to reviewing).
Both found jobs where they are satisfied AFAIK. The second student may not have had the best publication record, but from what I know (from being asked to give references, etc.) they found places where they went beyond mere counting and appreciated the quality of their research when making hiring decisions.
Neither university prestige, nor number of papers, are as important (or indicative of real skill) as you think (although of course they help). The world is much more complex than that.
yeup. nobody talks about this but its one of the most important things you will ever have to decide in life.
Think carefully how you start your career in your 20s.
You can’t afford to have parents nearby unless they already are (as these folks have)
Everything related to families is a cash grab and a SFH in Palo Alto, Peninsula or Cupertino means throwing any hope of early financial freedom. A FAANG job will pay more but for how you can live almost anywhere else in the country, a remote job at 2/3 the salary is much much better.
Having family around to help take care of the kids makes a HUGE difference (and not just financially), particularly with two working parents. It's obviously doable without it, but if you have the option, I would strongly advise at least considering moving somewhere close to family who can help out.
By the time you are in your late 20s/ early 30s, you need to decide where you would settle down. Your parent is in their late 50s, they aren’t moving anywhere and still be happy. So you have to make a choice to either live near them or not.
your family, if you have one.
You can't move around kids the same way you do with your backpack.
Also: aging parents and family relatives that matter to you, you don't want to be 14 hours by plane away if something happens to them.
disclaimer: I don't have kids, but may nephews
> You can't move around kids the same way you do with your backpack.
As you may have noticed, I exist . By the time I was 18 I had lived in five countries across three different continents. I consider myself blessed to now have long childhood friends from all over the world, and familiarity with a variety of mindsets, languages, and cultures.
> Also: aging parents and family relatives that matter to you, you don't want to be 14 hours by plane away if something happens to them.
There are durable social apparatuses that do not hinge on close blood relations for the elderly to be supported.
You are not a data point though.
You think your experience is universal, it is not, people don't like to take kids around the 5 continents and see them losing all their friends everytime, change school everytime, be away from their family etc. etc.
It's very stressful for every family, especially for kids.
My nephew would be inconsolable if she was separated from her grandparents.
I bet your dad works in the military, there's a reason why not many people want to do that job.
I also bet your mother stayed home.
I am not saying kids cannot survive it, there are kids who survived alone in the jungle, I am saying that it's something people do consider as a reason to settle down.
Because people usually make choices based on what is best for their families, when they have one, and usually the most important part is not putting kids through something they are unprepared for if it's not an absolute necessity.
Doesn't mean it never happens, it means it usually doesn't.
Imagine that one of the main theories on why hunter gatherers settled down and started farming is that by settling down they could involve elders and children in food production. Because kids and elders cannot go hunting or walk for tens of kms to gather food. It basically bootstrapped civilizations as we know them.
It's something we've been doing for tens of thousands of years, it's not new.
Also, we're not talking about "digital nomads" that is just a fancy term to describe "rich westerners constantly on holiday on their very expensive van"
> and familiarity with a variety of mindsets, languages, and cultures.
that does not involve moving constantly.
I too have family and friends all over the World, nothing special about that in 2023.
> There are durable social apparatuses that do not hinge on close blood relations for the elderly to be supported.
You mean I should not care about people who cared about me and loved me when I was a kid?
I am not a monster.
Do you know that when he was a kid Hitler too moved a lot, because his dad didn't care much about his well being?
An a priori programming that implies inevitability?
It depends on your family.
I think the author is right here. Being a professor is more like being a startup founder than being an employee.
> Prestige and money
I don’t think the author touches on some of the most important differences in this section. First, most academic faculty jobs are 9 months. This leaves a lot of time for other endeavors. Professors can make bank doing independent consulting work on the side, which is something frowned upon typically for employees.
The other thing is, there’s a lot of agency as a professor. Your day-to-day are managed by you. If you want to cancel a class, that’s your prerogative. What you teach in the classroom is yours as well, and the content you create (lecture slides, teaching materials, assignments, exams) is owned by you, not the school. Admin sets your teaching schedule but otherwise your days are yours to manage. I work 3 days a week at home. One week I went to a conference in Greece and taught from the hotel.
> Job security
Its true that it’s harder to switch jobs than a tech worker in SF. But at the same time, that every city has an academic sector means you aren’t locked into living in a tech hub.
Also, while most academic roles are hard to come by, CS positions are routinely open; many departments have been hiring continuously for years.
> Freedom
I think academia still comes ahead here. Beyond freedom, even more important is control. The administration can’t yank you off a project. If you change institutions, you can take your project and funding with you. That kind of control can’t be found in corporations.
More worryingly, many tech companies include clauses in their contracts which try to claim intellectual ownership over all ideas generated by their employees, even in their spare time. I don’t know if OpenAI does, but that kind of contract language is toxic to me.
In all, I don’t think the “industry employee”/“academic professor” dichotomy is valid. As I mentioned, the for-profit equivalent of a research lab would be a tech startup. If you don’t think you’d be happy as a startup founder, you won’t be happy as a PI of a research lab. The main allure of going the academic route is that it’s the proven way to work on an idea long term without having to worry about pesky things like profitability and product market fit.
The better comparison is academic research scientist, which is more like a staff role. There, you don’t have the breadth of scope a professor does, but you still get to work on a cool project. You don’t have full control over it, but you also are insulated more from it going sideways.
The AI sneaking up behind you to take your job?
Remember to work hard to please your advisor. But don't forget you get barely no raises. No RSUs/Stock Options. Benefits? What are those?
Oh cool, now you have a PhD. Tenure? Best we can do is a 2yr contract...
Your advisor is there to help you, you don't work for them as a slave. Not all people want a carrot that is designed to make them work hard, RSUs/Stock options ? No thanks I will take money and continue having fun without thinking much about accountants stuff such as the company profits.
But I agree, some places do not offer great salaries and permanent contracts and it's a big issue.
Working on things that improve society and discovery doesn't have to be done in academic contexts, quite the contrary. A lot of times with more freedom and less BS
These are the companies that will work you *literally* to death’s door to get their perceived money’s worth (despite being unable to objectively measure, not for lack of trying on my part). Then when you are too sick to work they will toss you aside like used trash. They will fight tooth and nail to keep the official headcount just under the limit of having to adhere to labor regulations like providing medical leave of absence. Maybe it’s just the wrong product space or something.
If you leave a job that's it, but leaving a PhD feels like a defeat
This is the equivalent of the ping pong and fussball tables in startups.
If you plot all the Ph.D level tech jobs on a map, and then plot all the academia jobs on a map - do you think the latter is way more spread and diverse? I would imagine that for the former, those jobs are heavily clustered on each of the coasts, along with some smaller clusters here and there in "emerging" cities.
Not everyone wants to live in SF/NYC/Boston, and for most people, where you live is a pretty damn non-trivial point.
Second - if you get tenure in academia, you have a pretty safe position. For many it does mean work for life, good pay, and high-risk/high-reward research. If you chose to work in the industry, you are exposed to market movements. They can promise you the moon, but can still go straight out the window every 5-10-15 years.
Some enjoy academia, others enjoy the industry. If your dream goal is to live in SF or NYC and make $500k / year for the next N years, by all means purse industry. If you enjoy the thought of making $100k - $150k wherever, with minimal teaching, long vacations, and selective research - do pursue tenure.
The caveat is obviously that it is hard to get tenure, statistically speaking you have a 1 in 5 shot - but then again, landing a top research position in the industry is probably even more unlikely.
Does anyone else see something similar? Is this effect common through post-processing or compression on a certain type of phone or something?
Couldn't zoom in on the picture until I switched to the "force desktop view" option.
I work in industry and can echo this. Industry is HAPPENING for research. I am TRUSTED to do research in my company and drive research directions. My time as a research scientist is RESPECTED and I am not asked to do things that would WASTE my time. When I am interacting with my colleagues everyone is INTERESTED in the topic and not their EGOS. It is incredibly rewarding to show up at work and everyone is interested and engaged. Projects are funded either through customers or internally but we all feel like a team.
In addition to this industry work, I have a grant through a university that hasn't started yet (!) and I have spent approximately 4 weeks of full-time work doing paperwork related to the grant. This doesn't include any of the effort to write the grant. This full-time work includes: sitting in meetings with the university budget people not understanding their own spreadsheets, writing prestigious letters for prestigious people to sign welcoming me to their own prestigious institutions, defining the specific dates I will take a month long travel to visit a colleague 3 years from now, a back and forth email exchange that took all day to identify the correct date format to be used in a web form (it was unclear the date format was the issue until the end), vainly explaining to university administration that project A and project B are not the same project nor funded the same way despite that I work on both. Also I live in a country that decided to blow up their funding agency because a new party took over the government and that postponed my grant by 1.5 years.
Like the author, I loved being a PhD student. I loved doing a postdoc. I love being a scientist. I love the idea of sitting around and thinking about things and building models to test out ideas and creating new knowledge. But working in academia is a no-go because of the amount of nonsense you put up with. This is compounded when you are actively interacting with university administrators who have permanent jobs (funded by the overhead from your grants) while you do not. And likely they have higher salaries then you and your phd students and postdocs. Meanwhile there is little to any support in most places for workers (thankfully, I have a union in the country I work in).
I strongly recommend anyone pursuing a phd or postdoc to do whatever they want, but don't buy into the egoist bullshit of academia. Industry is where its at. Sure it has it's problems, not every industry job is like mine. But it is better. And it's not about the pay (even though that is nice). It's about how much I love to show up to work every day compared to the bullshit of academia.
Note: I don't know why i was capitalizing words, I suppose I just feel strongly about things.
1. Can you start your own project?
2. If so, how do you get funding and build a team for it?
3. If you start a project and move to another company, can you take your funding and project and team with you?
4. If you leave your job, are you able to take a position at a company that competes with your old company?
5. Do you decide your work schedule? How many days a week do you work?
6. Do you own what you create on company time? Does your company own what you create on your time?
The answers to these questions were my biggest concern in making the choice. The most important one is the last one, where I found clauses in my industry employment contracts purporting to own all of my thoughts. Such terms were set in stone; either sign or the offer would be rescinded. I’m wondering if similar contracts are found in your country.
1. Yes. When I started at the company I proposed a project and the company decided to fund it internally. There are other people in the company with internal projects (like there is a nuclear medicine group) as well but I guess most people work for customers. But this is definitely possible. Since we are a consulting group, internal projects don't often pay as well as customer projects, but people are motivated for different reasons.
2. The CEO and CSO (chief science officer) met and decided on a budget for me. That budget includes money for buying my hours for the project and travel, visiting colleagues, and conferences. Since it funds me, basically, and I am working on a team with people outside of the company, I didn't need to build a team for it. However, building teams internally like this would be expected in the future based on conversations with the CSO. Also I really am looking forward to building internal teams in the future so I hope it will happen.
3. I cannot take internally funded projects and the team with me unless the new company decided that they were going to buy the hours of the team I guess. That being said see the comment about FOSS in answer 6.
4. I didn't sign a non-compete anything, so I would assume there is no issue here.
5. Yes, my work schedule is completely decided by me except for team meetings, etc. I work 5 days a week but I don't always work 5 days a week. The company encourages this and we have ski and climbing slack channels for people to plan stuff like that before, during, or after normal working hours.
6. I think it depends on what I am creating. Our company believes in FOSS, so everyone who is building software internally does so with that in mind. Not all customers believe that though. If I am producing research, I am allowed and expected to publish it in journals which means, essentially, I own the research in the sense that it would matter to an academic. If I produce a result so profound that we could develop a product around it and bring it to market to all become rather wealthy, then we would do so and perhaps embargo results in a paper until the product is released. I'm not sure that would really matter that much in my case.
I think the company does own some of what I do and think about. It's only fair that if I come up with an idea under company time they get first dibs. Even Woz had to ask Hewlett-Packard if they wanted the Apple ii before he could sell it himself.
Happy to answer more questions if you have them.
This seems accurate.
It’s a shame that this is lost on academic library weenies roleplaying as engineers. A prominent figure in my research area diagnosed the problems of incentivizing “minimal-publishable units” and that if these researchers were working on home computing, they would’ve just run circles around microproblems like whether the more verbose “remove_directory” is more usable than “rmdir,” and no one would’ve bothered with the unpublishable plumbing of building mice and browsers and interfaces.
I suspect a lot of published research is just basically that. But more papers are more better and means more money for next year so people do that
I guess we're lucky that research labs like SRI (mouse and direct manipulation), Xerox PARC (WYSIWYG, GUI, Ethernet, laser printers, etc.), CERN and NCSA (web, browsers) had better systems researchers than the ones your friend is complaining about.
Regarding "remove_directory", Multics had user-friendly verbose names in addition to cryptic (but easy to type) abbreviations. Seems like another good idea that was lost in the transition to Unix.