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I think you're quite wrong about these things.

"Only the very biggest of tech companies like Google, Palintir, Apple, Facebook, are able to tackle the really hard problem."

Wrong and wrong. First, all of those companies made concrete progress on hard problems when their size was less than 10 people. Woz pretty much singlehandedly designed the first PC for normal people. Zuckerberg built a pile of code that would become one of the largest social networks.

Let's talk about the "really hard problem". Let's talk about John Carmack, friend.

Made the first realtime 3D fps games, the networked dialup realtime 3D games, the first networked shooters over the internet, the first true commercial 3D engine, and is basically responsible for the fact we have GPUs in consumer desktops now. Dude only had two (2) semesters of college under his belt, and he runs rings around the academic CS wanks, because he fucking ships code that works. No cutesy benchmarks. No government funding. No papers, barring perhaps some stuff in Graphics Programming Black Book, none of that. All of that stuff running on consumer hardware without graphics accelerators.

There are plenty of hard problems being tackled by small teams, even on shoestring budgets. To say otherwise is magical thinking.

~

If you want to publish a paper, you don't have to actually be in academia. If you want to do research, you don't have to be in grad school. In fact, and hopefully more people will get in on this, you will probably do better work in a healthier environment.

What does academia get you? It seems in the vast majority of times, it gets you...

...an "advisor" who is more concerned with finding funding and keeping lab space than making progress.

...an "advisor" whose last original contribution to the field was, almost by definition, probably a decade ago.

...a chance to talk with world experts in your field--the same chance available to any schmuck with an email account.

...a chance to submit papers whose only circulation will be behind paywalls.

...a chance to be woefully underpaid for the above, because they know you are stupid and naive enough to take it.

Fuck that. The author was smart to get out while they were only slightly behind.

Being affiliated with a university or large tech company also gives you access to the literature locked behind those paywalls. Lack of access makes it really hard to publish a paper. A paper should describe how the work fits into previous work in the field and what's new about it. For example, if you publish on X it might turn out that someone else published on that topic two years previous, but in a journal you can't access.

In one project I worked on, I developed a new algorithm. Or so I thought. Then I went to the chemistry library about an hour away to read the papers they have on the shelves, available at no cost. Turns out the basic approach was done in the 1970s! Luckily, further reading showed how what I did really was something new.

In another project, I managed to dig up another paper from the 1970s which solved a problem I had been working on for a couple of years.

I am self-employed, and don't have the $30/paper just to find out that it's worthless for what I'm doing.

It also gives you cheaper rates for conferences. As a "commercial" attendee, I pay a lot more than academics, even though I make less than most academics.

In many cases it also gives you physical access to those world experts, who may visit your institution because of your advisor.

> If you are in it for fame and fortune, you are a fool.

I think that sums up why so many people hate being in academia. They go into it for the wrong reasons. I've seen many people make this mistake.

To be fair, I doubt most people are in it for "fame and fortune." That being said, most of us interested in such matters need to balance the need to eat and lead a reasonably normal material life with our interests in ideas, research, and teaching. Desiring a reasonably normal material life is not unreasonable.

If you go into contemporary academia with the expectation that you will not get a TT job, or a TT job in a desirable place to live, at the end, then perhaps you are doing it right.

Right now there are simply far more PhDs than TT jobs. That means a large number of PhDs cannot get the jobs for which they are being trained. People entering should know that. Knowing that is not equivalent to pursuing academia for "fame and fortune."

I wrote about this in a humanities context here: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor...

Desiring a reasonably normal material life is not unreasonable.

Amen. It's kind of amazing what academics put up with.

Take relocation. I'm 31 and while I'm at the top in terms of talent, I've made some mistakes and I'm probably only upper-middle in terms of tech career success, and I would simply not take a job, with a cross-country move, that didn't offer a full relocation package. Yet academics who are at much higher quantiles of success in their industry (just to have a TT job is 85th or higher, these days) are happy just to have a salary, because their low self-confidence ("impostor syndrome") is used against them to the point where they think it's egregious just to ask for basically decent treatment.

>People entering should know that. Knowing that is not equivalent to pursuing academia for "fame and fortune."

A lot of the PhD's in pure sciences in the US are from foreign countries, especially India and China. Actually, foreign students dominate in most engineering/natural science departments of US universities. So, I guess most American kids do realize that its not a valuable decision to pursue a PhD.

The author of this piece didn't ignore this point, though. He commented on how even if you're in it for the intellectual gratification you're still very limited:

> If I'm not going to grad school because of job opportunities, what other reasons are there? Pursuing my interests? As a PhD student you get to choose some interesting problem and work on that, right? That's what I naively imagined before I started at the institute. Some day at lunch I told my supervisor about this idea I had. We could take his fluid simulation method from computer graphics and apply it to a problem related to molten polymers. There was this experiment by a group of applied physicists that would fit nicely. He asked me how many people would be interested in the problem. Maybe a handful, I said. And then I realized that there was no way I could work on that problem. Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives. What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience? To be successful you need to target a large audience, and not just pursue whatever obscure problem takes your fancy.

If you aren't paid well, and you're not well respected, and there is no great job waiting for you at the end of the tunnel, and you can't even work on what you're most interested in, I can't really blame anybody for leaving.

I wouldn’t call anybody a fool, but I think you’re right about the temperament of people who leave. I think it's attributable to a number of parallel factors: 20-something unemployment in the United States, popularization of science (e.g. a Cosmos reboot produced by Seth MacFarlane), longstanding belief that attributes more education to more success, et al.

There is nothing wrong with presenting science in a format with populist appeal. It helps raise the general level of knowledge in society, counteracting the types that want to believe people walked with dinosaurs 10000 years ago. The problem is lying to young people that they have any real opportunity to work in fields with such limited employment prospects.

To be sure, mostly none of the popular science ever proposes that pursuing science will make you gainfully employed. When choosing major in College, I had to choose between Physics, which I absolutely loved and had got the highest grades in first year of college, and computer science, which I knew absolutely nothing about. However, I did know 2 things: 1) There were a lot more jobs in CS than Physics and 2) Since I knew absolutely nothing about computers (I never owned a personal computer), studying them in college would be possibly the best way to genuinely understand them. Coming from a lower middle-class family, 1) was extremely important. I chose CS, and have never regretted it.

I hope more kids in College and high school realize that a) working physics professionally is very different from what is portrayed in popular science and b) you really have to spend a lot of time thinking about the future in these kind of things.

That said, I still love popular science: interstellar made me want to study Relativity again :).

Google ($358B), Palantir($??), Apple ($676B), Facebook ($213B), can someone fill me in?

Academia and industry seem to have different problems but they're actually the same root illness.

My impression of industry so far: they don't get progress. They don't get innovation. They have problems, but they they don't understand them and are unable to commit resources to the procedures that are needed to solve them.

Academia, too, has a lot of problems. I left because of the publish or perish mentality. I liked to work on hard problems, and had some successes, but overall it is the numbers that matter not the difficulty. There are an equal number of politics in academia as in industry, though they are different in academia.

In industry, politics often involves a lot of incompetent people in high places following paper work procedures that do not support their supposed cause, while in academia it is more a lot of infighting over government grants and insultingly simple metrics like the number of papers published.

Academia and industry both have the same root problem and it's this: Those Who Can, Do; Those Who Can't, Evaluate. We see them as different cultures with separate sets of values, but the fact is that people who are good at office politics tend not to be good at anything else, so Decisions get made by incompetents. I don't think there's a scalable organizational antidote, because people who are politically adept and competent are incredibly rare.

I think that the power players in academia are even more egregiously incompetent. They often lack basic social and leadership skills. Academia has been dying for 35+ years because its leadership is completely inept at fighting for its people against the cost-cutting mediocrities. Say what you will about MBAs, but I'd rather have one fighting against HR for my budget than an ex-academic. However, the professors are high-IQ incompetents-- though often not that smart, even still-- which makes the cerebral narcissist in all of us a little bit more sympathetic to them.

> its leadership is completely inept at fighting for its people against the cost-cutting mediocrities

The worst thing about the "cost-cutting mediocrities" is the cost-cutting doesn't extend to themselves:

"Forty years ago, America’s colleges employed more professors than administrators. The efforts of 446,830 professors were supported by 268,952 administrators and staffers. Over the past four decades, though, the number of full-time professors or “full-time equivalents”—that is, slots filled by two or more part-time faculty members whose combined hours equal those of a full-timer—increased slightly more than 50 percent. That percentage is comparable to the growth in student enrollments during the same time period. But the number of administrators and administrative staffers employed by those schools increased by an astonishing 85 percent and 240 percent, respectively."[1]

[1] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...