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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Not to pick on your girlfriend but I've seen a variant of this phrase so often that I'm kind of baffled:

"the lack of clear policies and regulations governing academia is one of its greatest advantages, because it gives your mind space to explore, and expands creative freedom."

Are the folks in academia so creatively stunted that they can't find freedom outside of the ivory tower?

It seems like such a silly argument.

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well you could go work at google, amazon, facebook, or microsoft if you felt like writing an unending stream of javascript to better serve people ads. there are researchy parts of those companies but getting a job there is a lot like getting any other academic job in terms of competition and number of applicants, so it's effectively academia.

what wondrous land do you propose that will support researchers and their desire for a few months out of the year to think about stuff? at most companies, you won't get a few minutes out of the day to do anything other than pack numbers tightly into excel or go to your next standup.

I'm just curious, but your comment suggests to me that it is easy to switch from an academic program to working at google, amazon, facebook, or microsoft. Those jobs require training and experience that academia does not provide. Writing javascript and researching, as an example, topology are very different things. I also have a hard time believing that research at a corporation is effectively academia just because they share a competitive environment. Could you explain further?

well, if you're in a good PhD program for computer science, you probably have a really good BS in CS from somewhere with a high GPA and demonstrated work experience in the form of research, which was probably programming. your research probably involves developing some kind of software, if yours doesn't you as a student probably do programming for some other system that is someone else's research. you also work with other people and have deadlines and so on, so a lot of CS "research" is basically a job writing code for money.

my impression of research at facebook/google/microsoft is that they generally hire phds and they generally take phd students as interns, so if you drop out of a phd program, you're not working there (in a research role at least). so you have to finish your phd, then compete with everyone else for those jobs, just like postdocs and professor positions. once there, you have to justify your existence / funding the same way that you do as a professor (go ask people at MSR how this is going for them lately).

I've worked at a few companies. My work rarely involved Javascript and never ads; I've not packed anything into excel and I had plenty of time to think about stuff. So please don't paint things black and white.

It's still harder to get a good academic job than a decent job in industry. I left a PhD program when I realized just how bad academia is, in comparison. Sure, you have to be good at politics to get a great corporate AI job, but you need political skill to get through academia as well. Politics is just a necessary evil; so just learn it so you can get things done and get back to more interesting stuff. It's not hard compared to category theory.

In the corporate world, the failure mode is a crappy job that still pays as well as the AI gig; it's just not as sexy. Then you can slack, learn the skills for your next gig (it's not like you need to be in academe to read papers) and get something better. In academia, the failure mode is being dumped with no money and no reputation in some godforsaken No Country for Old Men reach, being 35 and trying to get an entry-level gig in something.

I'll second this--again, it's not like every second of your 9-5 is micromanaged: in fact, any shop like that is probably run by people that are easy to game with just a little application of intellect.

I wholeheartedly support the concept of slackademia...using idle cycles at work to learn about new, exciting things.

there's a big difference between "if I clock out an hour early, I can read some wikipedia pages before I commute home" and "take the next three weeks and read these 20 papers"

Stop strawmanning.

It's entirely possible to leave a paper up in a tab, read it over lunch or just when taking a break from your work, and continue.

This isn't rocket science--nobody is >80% all day erry day in their time usage, regardless of what they claim.

I don't think it's a strawman. A lot of academic work is much like creative work. You can't quite plan it in an hour over lunch. I've gone from academia to a very 'free' corporate environment, and in that context I found it hard to do the 'academic' things. To me, it feels much like creative work, where I might need a few days of nothing (leaving whatever it is I'm doing in the back of my head) before i can produce anything. It's really difficult to cram that into an hour here or there, or an evening after spending an entire day at work.

So, I think there is kind of a core disagreement here: either you believe that you can do creative work with your idle cycles, or you believe that you require large blocks of unfettered time to do it.

I suggest that both are true, though one or the other may be a bit more efficient for a given situation.

What I dislike is this semi-unspoken assertion by academics that, unless you have the long hours of "freedom" provided only within the ivory tower, people in industry cannot be creative or do useful research. It's insulting to everyone who has made continual progress for mankind while working normal jobs.

Academics in many fields are very strongly socialized into the belief that nothing outside of academia is worthwhile. It isn't about creativity, it's about culture. They simply can't believe that there is a life worth living outside of the charmed circle.

Having moved from academia to industry, industry is everything academics think it is.

A lot of arrogant people, a lot of incompetent people, equal or more politics, very few "hard" problems where hard is defined as "I'm not sure if there is a solution to this, or if there is I have no idea when we will be able to find it, if ever."

It's not about culture, it's about priorities. Academics are interested in solving hard problems or advancing our collective knowledge, not making a bank account higher, not serving ads, and not entertaining people.

Sure, in any large group, there are standout counter examples, but they are the exception, not the rule.

There are many problems that are known to be solvable in principle (because there's a paper) but in practice are not solved because production-worthy code isn't widely available.

For example, the existence of the Paxos paper didn't mean that most organizations could actually use distributed state machines in real life.

So how about "write the definitive library for X so that nobody needs to write this code again?" That ought to count for something. If you want to see problems solved for real (not just in principle), maybe you're better off in industry.

>So how about "write the definitive library for X so that nobody needs to write this code again?" That ought to count for something.

That sounds like a job for the open-source world.

Surely there are opportunities outside of academia that do not restrict you to the 9-5 grind or subject you solely to the whims of "the man." But academia is one of the only options where that kind of freedom comes safely packaged and institutionalized. You get the advantages of prestige without the risk of something like entrepreneurship, which may be another option for finding creative freedom.

Agreed. Academics put up with a lot of crap because they're extremely risk adverse.

Very true. The twisted irony is that the long term risks of academia are devastating. We have a lot more short term job volatility in software, but unless we work for some outlier asshole who torches our reputations, we can usually get new jobs. Academics almost never get fired except at legible points (e.g. tenure review) but when they do, it ruins their lives in a way that most of us have never experienced.

>You get the advantages of prestige without the risk of something like entrepreneurship, which may be another option for finding creative freedom.

Entrepreneurs have to make a profit within 3-5 years. Research almost never will -- but when it does, holy crap!

You do not have the luxury of doing serious research in a startup. At best you can do some applied research with a high probability of success. Mostly you just apply research to a given problem area.

I left academia because of the politics involved, and opted for a freelancer existence instead. It works very well for me, as I have plenty of time to pursue 'academic' interests. But I do realized I'm very privileged as a developer, where I don't have to spend much time looking for clients and worrying about money.

But for those who yearn for freedom, are capable of building websites or web apps, freelancing might be the path you're looking for (at least, for now).

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