>What about negative anecdotes? Has anyone here regretted his or her decision to leave academia? Particularly, have you found the work less rewarding or interesting?
I left academia after undergrad, despite applying and getting into graduate school. My degree is in Computer Science, my specialty track was Programming Languages and Compilers, and my senior thesis was in Systems Programming Languages.
I had job offers and eventually took one. What I found was that industry is smug, deceptive, fad-driven, cares nothing for fundamental problem-solving until you pay them for it, and (of course) near-fatally infected with live-to-work-ism and the Californian Ideology.
* Smug: despite many of them having MSc degrees or being PhD drop-outs, most of the professional programmers I've met deride research itself as essentially pointless. Someone once asked me point-blank at lunch why I wanted to publish an invention/discovery of mine in a research paper, why I didn't just go found a start-up based on it. My discovery is in type theory: not exactly the most amenable field for using Ruby on Rails to pump out a "minimum viable product". Further: type-theory results are mathematical rather than empirical, the proofs have to be checked. Peer review has its just place in the world, and thus so does Research Science.
* Deceptive: many of the people I met did not know or care whether their software served its intended purpose well, or whether that purpose was a good purpose, or whether (provided it was a good purpose, which I shall note that, say, investment banking isn't) it can be served well. The hiring binge I saw was completely uncorrelated to having an actual workload for the people they wanted to hire. The idea seems to have been to hire everyone's Hackathon friends.
* Fad-driven: look at the ads for hiring "rock-stars" and "ninjas", and then realize that most of these people earning six-figure salaries just build web-sites or silly mobile applications. Who thought Groupon was a good idea (I'll note that I never did)? Why should everything be an ad-based web application to the point that things other than ad-based web applications simply don't get built that often anymore?
* Cares nothing for fundamental problem-solving: Industry is infected with marketer-thinking (trying to please a perceived primary market of investors and secondary market of customers) rather than fundamental business-thinking (building cars instead of faster horses). The industrial programmers who can possess substantial skill in fundamental Computer Science, or who solve problems in Computer Science, are a vocal but still small minority. Think of Steve Yegge and his "cat-picture problems," and remember that Steve Yegge is talking about major companies like Google and Facebook spending their energy on cat-picture problems.
* Live-to-workism and California Ideology: I was astounded and offended to find myself hearing hour-long talks between otherwise intelligent, humane and respectful coworkers on libertarianism and Austrian economics. Further, the software industry is powered by "passion" (a component of the Californian Ideology), which has mostly just become an excuse for long, unbroken workdays, fanboyish loyalty to employers/companies, and programming-centered social events outside work. The programming profession expects you to love your job, no matter what it is. Not enjoy, not like, not perform competently, love. The assumption is that if you didn't love what you were doing, you would leave. Never mind real life, where the state of one's bank account is more than just a way of keeping score, programming jobs are clustered in some of the world's most expensive metro-areas, people have families, and they may have moved to enter their programming job.
I'm not quite back in academia yet (only admitted to one graduate school so far, with non-guaranteed funding, two other applications still pending), but I'll be damned happier when I get back there. And of course, unbias this anecdote by accounting for its kvetchiness and negativity, because you asked for a negative opinion about industry.
Not sure where the edit-button went, but here's a reminder:
I WROTE THIS WITH A DELIBERATE NEGATIVE BENT. I often perceive industrial programmers and entrepreneurs as unduly biased against academia, so upon the request to write an "irregular" anecdote bemoaning having strayed beyond the university walls, I tried to impart the same level of bias.
So:
* Take the above comment as pessimistic by design.
* Think a little harder about how you talk about academia, and how you feel when I talk that way about industry.
And for those thinking of leaving academia for industry:
* Think about what will really make you happy. Academia and industry aren't just different sets of problems during your workday (although they definitely are that!), they're different lifestyles. Don't think you're going to do the same work or live the same way "on the other side". Instead, look at what you can do "over there", and ask what you really want to do.
* Consider if you're just burned-out. If you are, you'll still be burned-out in industry.
I agree with your take on industry's disdain and ignorance for academic research -- those are some of the most painful, agonizing conversations to endure in a professional context.
They hold this opinion out of fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of what they do not understand. Fear that a new research paper could make their jobs obsolete. But most of all, their fear that because they do not understand academic research, they are less intelligent and less capable.
So just think about it from their point of view. They are defending their own jobs and decisions in life, albeit subconsciously.
That's fairly silly. I'd be a very rich man if I had $100 for every research result or open-source program that has never been turned into a successful, profitable product, despite its obvious potential, just because it never got quite faddy enough for BigCo's and VC's to throw money at it.
And if I don't have that money, it's still someone else's to make.
Wow, I haven't realized that libertarianism and Austrian economics are now such an integral part of the Left Coast ideology! things must have been changing fast there lately.
Interesting perspective, otherwise. I do suspect you may not find academia entirely to your liking either, but good luck.
For something that was not mentioned, one thing which is often rather unsettling for people who move to industry is discovering a system that is not actually focused on maximizing your individual productivity/output/value added/job satisfaction/etc, although of course circumstances vary.
Of course everything you say about the software industry is true, right down to the "libertarianism and Austrian economics" (I take it you prefer critical race theory and postcolonial studies). Otherwise, your critics would have said something rather than just downvoting you.
Your problem seems to be that you haven't considered the possibility that academia is even worse. Academia is even worse. (I dropped out of the Berkeley PhD program in 1992 - specialty, OS and languages. From what I can tell, academia has only gotten worse since then.)
I could produce a parallel list of bullet points, but I'll just say three things. The only reason to go to grad school is because you want to be a professor. The only reason to be a professor is because you want to be a bureaucrat. Do you want to be a bureaucrat?
Even if you want to be a bureaucrat, there's no guarantee that you'll be good at it. Good bureaucrats don't write posts like the one you just wrote. They don't antagonize anyone, ever, in any way. They would rather lie - and they do. Are you good at that?
One of the things you'll discover in academia, for instance, is that the most appalling faux pas you can commit is to say anything bad about your colleagues' research. "Colleagues" meaning, of course, only whatever little log-rolling grant mafia you've wound up joining. You're perfectly free to criticize its enemies - though not the endeavor as a whole. Oh, you didn't want to join a mafia? You think someone is going to fund you just because you're smart and have cool ideas? Strange ideas you have there, kid.
I understand what you want CS research to be. CS research isn't what you want it to be. CS research is a gigantic government bureaucracy. Nor is it unique. Science itself is a gigantic government bureaucracy. Do you think it's not deceptive? Systematic deception is its very lifeblood.
Can science of the sort you're looking for exist? Of course it can exist. You can find it very easily. All you need is a time machine. Set the controls for at least 40 years ago.
Otherwise, the simplest way to do the kind of research you want to do is to decide quite consciously to give yourself over to the salt-mining industry in the most mercenary possible way, spend a decade making as much money as you possibly can (and spending as little as you can), and (if you succeed) found your own little university of one. It's not Victorian science, either, but I'll tell you it's a lot closer than Berkeley.
>Of course everything you say about the software industry is true, right down to the "libertarianism and Austrian economics" (I take it you prefer critical race theory and postcolonial studies).
Why would I prefer that bunch of idiot hippies? My preference is for Karl Marx and Henry George (with the former being better at seeing what capitalism really is, and the latter being the better economist).
>Your problem seems to be that you haven't considered the possibility that academia is even worse. Academia is even worse. (I dropped out of the Berkeley PhD program in 1992 - specialty, OS and languages. From what I can tell, academia has only gotten worse since then.)
This is precisely what I was considering at the end of undergrad. Hell, I'm in basically the same specialty as you were.
>Even if you want to be a bureaucrat, there's no guarantee that you'll be good at it. Good bureaucrats don't write posts like the one you just wrote. They don't antagonize anyone, ever, in any way. They would rather lie - and they do. Are you good at that?
Cool story, bro. Do you think I didn't consider the office-political implications of what I wrote?
* Most academics don't read Hacker News.
* Most academics would perceive this as on their side.
* I openly admit that I wrote the post not even with mere bias but with an active bent towards an overly-negative portrayal of reality.
* Most start-up folks here on Hacker News don't necessarily agree in whole, but agree in part. I've seen Steve Yegge's speech referenced a disturbing number of times on Reddit and HN.
* Most of the votes have been upvotes, indicating a perception that the discussion is worth having rather than storming off in a huff and blacklisting the offending poster.
>You think someone is going to fund you just because you're smart and have cool ideas?
No, I thought someone was going to fund me because my adviser is well-known and prestigious within the field. There's no point breeding inferior academic DNA into myself, is there?
>Otherwise, the simplest way to do the kind of research you want to do is to decide quite consciously to give yourself over to the salt-mining industry in the most mercenary possible way, spend a decade making as much money as you possibly can (and spending as little as you can), and (if you succeed) found your own little university of one. It's not Victorian science, either, but I'll tell you it's a lot closer than Berkeley.
For my field I never even saw any point in applying to Berkeley, but how do you propose to go about this? Even the successful industrial programmers I know, unless they became millionaires off a start-up, did not actually make enough money to "settle down" out of working and "found your own little university of one."
Provided you had the cash, it does sound like a fine idea.
Why would I prefer that bunch of idiot hippies? My preference is for Karl Marx and Henry George (with the former being better at seeing what capitalism really is, and the latter being the better economist).
Come on, you don't think you can shock people with Karl Marx, do you? In 2012? Try some Maistre, Carlyle, Froude. Maybe even George Fitzhugh or R.L. Dabney. Here, this'll get you started: http://books.google.com/books?id=an2LWYTh2ewC
No, I thought someone was going to fund me because my adviser is well-known and prestigious within the field.
Maybe you're not such a bad bureaucrat after all! But I meant not while you're in grad school, but after. Of course, if you stick with your mafia, and it's a good mafia, you can keep the party going. Perhaps. Definitely make sure you don't alienate your betters.
Even the successful industrial programmers I know, unless they became millionaires off a start-up, did not actually make enough money to "settle down" out of working and "found your own little university of one."
Yeah, that's what I mean. Dedicate yourself completely and unreservedly to the foul, foul art of money-grubbing, and/or money-saving. Or possibly money-stealing. Anything is better than either conning investors, or conning the government. Have you considered growing pot?
(I won't say this worked perfectly for me, but it did give me time to write my purely functional operating system. Unfortunately this took longer than expected and I'm now kinda broke. And I really can't turn my daughter's closet into a grow-room. So, we'll see if anyone thinks they need a purely functional operating system... Kickstarter, here I come.)
Come on, you don't think you can shock people with Karl Marx, do you?
The point isn't to shock. The actual point was that you're not supposed to talk politics in the workplace. I wasn't preaching Marx to coworkers, so why were they railing on about Hayek?
Yeah, that's what I mean. Dedicate yourself completely and unreservedly to the foul, foul art of money-grubbing, and/or money-saving. Or possibly money-stealing. Anything is better than either conning investors, or conning the government. Have you considered growing pot?
You've got to be kidding. You would rob people before "conning investors" (ie: making an actual go at a business) or "conning the government" (ie: making an actual go at research)?
Just link me to your "pure functional operating system" already, or I'm calling troll-post.
Scroll down to the RSA implementation around line 2500. You won't learn anything. And why does a self-compiling compiler need an RSA implementation, anyway?
Neighbor, please. It's hard enough trying to reinvent the wheel by myself. With any help it'd be downright impossible.
There's a great anecdote about Jessica Mitford from the '50s. Mitford had spent years writing an autobiography and, during this process, had constantly been passing drafts around to all her commie-princess friends. Of whom as you'd imagine there was a great number. Finally she got an agent, whose name I forget but I'm sure was a big New York queen of some kind, who shut her down and forced her to finish the book instead. "It's like parading around all day," the agent told her, "in your underwear."
The system has only been self-hosting for 7 or 8 months. Until November the parser was still de facto impure. The packet decoder has never been tested and isn't even in the kernel. String syntax is nonexistent, the prettyprinter prints pure dog crap, Nock 6 was an aesthetic disaster so Nock 5 is actually Nock 7 but with the calling convention reversed, persistence is nonexistent, stack overflow recovery is nonexistent, profiling has succumbed again to bit rot, HTTP is completely untested, etc, etc. I could explain all these things to you, or I could finish putting my clothes on.
Obviously it's on a public repository and all the code is PD. Crap you can even build the thing if you like. You can even fork your own kernel and try to compete with me! Don't expect any documentation, however. If I don't answer my email I don't have to accept patches. If I don't read my email I don't have to answer it.
Conning investors is quite different from making an actual go at a business.
What is the difference? The difference is that when you invite investors to invest in your new location-based social network for morticians and coroners (or whatever the fsck), you are making an actual go at a business. Whereas when you invite investors to invest in your new programming language, you are conning investors.
Conning the government means making flagrantly bogus and absurd claims in your grant applications. Please bear in mind that all your competitors will be doing this. If you don't intend to play by the same rules, you need some other way of stabbing your competitors in the back before the finish line. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
I am descended from a long line of Beltway bandits. I recognize the patterns and practices of the tribe at once. Indeed I recognized it in my first week at Berkeley, when they sat us down and gave us the basic lecture on what it means to have a career in "science" today.
I believe the numbers given were that half of us first-year grad students would finish, half of those would find teaching jobs, and those who found teaching jobs would be dividing their time three ways: 1/3 teaching, 1/3 research, 1/3 grantwriting. I found this broadly credible and still do.
So, that's only 1/3 of your day spent as a professional liar (and/or backstabber). You might as well try to spend only 1/3 of your day as a professional crackhead, whore, etc. But hey, it's worth a try.
As for trolling - absolutely! Laugh while you can, monkey-boy...
What is the difference? The difference is that when you invite investors to invest in your new location-based social network for morticians and coroners (or whatever the fsck), you are making an actual go at a business. Whereas when you invite investors to invest in your new programming language, you are conning investors.
I see little difference. Neither of those is ever going to make money.
Neither Hayek nor Marx is "politics." Politics is Olbermann and/or Glenn Beck.
Hayek and Marx are history and literature. If you're not supposed to talk history and literature at the workplace, you may be in the wrong workplace.
Hayek is a second-rate figure both as writer and thinker. The only Austrians worth reading are Hoppe, Rothbard and Mises. I would read all of Rothbard before I read any of Hoppe, and all of Mises before I read any of Rothbard. I would not read Hayek at all.
What's cool about Dabney and Fitzhugh is that you could be expelled from any university in the country if someone found them in your dorm room. I wouldn't want them on the shelf at work either. Even Carlyle is pushing it in both contexts.
You certainly can't say that for Mises and Rothbard, even - not to mention Henry George and Karl Marx. About the only thing more innocuous than Henry George and Karl Marx would be a pile of old National Geographics, if screened for tits.
At least this makes you ineligible for my most important piece of advice. But others may care so I'll say it anyway: never go to grad school, especially in Computer Science, before both (a) you're old enough to drink, (b) you have actually had a drink. (It's completely ok to be a virgin, however.)
I left academia after undergrad, despite applying and getting into graduate school. My degree is in Computer Science, my specialty track was Programming Languages and Compilers, and my senior thesis was in Systems Programming Languages.
I had job offers and eventually took one. What I found was that industry is smug, deceptive, fad-driven, cares nothing for fundamental problem-solving until you pay them for it, and (of course) near-fatally infected with live-to-work-ism and the Californian Ideology.
* Smug: despite many of them having MSc degrees or being PhD drop-outs, most of the professional programmers I've met deride research itself as essentially pointless. Someone once asked me point-blank at lunch why I wanted to publish an invention/discovery of mine in a research paper, why I didn't just go found a start-up based on it. My discovery is in type theory: not exactly the most amenable field for using Ruby on Rails to pump out a "minimum viable product". Further: type-theory results are mathematical rather than empirical, the proofs have to be checked. Peer review has its just place in the world, and thus so does Research Science.
* Deceptive: many of the people I met did not know or care whether their software served its intended purpose well, or whether that purpose was a good purpose, or whether (provided it was a good purpose, which I shall note that, say, investment banking isn't) it can be served well. The hiring binge I saw was completely uncorrelated to having an actual workload for the people they wanted to hire. The idea seems to have been to hire everyone's Hackathon friends.
* Fad-driven: look at the ads for hiring "rock-stars" and "ninjas", and then realize that most of these people earning six-figure salaries just build web-sites or silly mobile applications. Who thought Groupon was a good idea (I'll note that I never did)? Why should everything be an ad-based web application to the point that things other than ad-based web applications simply don't get built that often anymore?
* Cares nothing for fundamental problem-solving: Industry is infected with marketer-thinking (trying to please a perceived primary market of investors and secondary market of customers) rather than fundamental business-thinking (building cars instead of faster horses). The industrial programmers who can possess substantial skill in fundamental Computer Science, or who solve problems in Computer Science, are a vocal but still small minority. Think of Steve Yegge and his "cat-picture problems," and remember that Steve Yegge is talking about major companies like Google and Facebook spending their energy on cat-picture problems.
* Live-to-workism and California Ideology: I was astounded and offended to find myself hearing hour-long talks between otherwise intelligent, humane and respectful coworkers on libertarianism and Austrian economics. Further, the software industry is powered by "passion" (a component of the Californian Ideology), which has mostly just become an excuse for long, unbroken workdays, fanboyish loyalty to employers/companies, and programming-centered social events outside work. The programming profession expects you to love your job, no matter what it is. Not enjoy, not like, not perform competently, love. The assumption is that if you didn't love what you were doing, you would leave. Never mind real life, where the state of one's bank account is more than just a way of keeping score, programming jobs are clustered in some of the world's most expensive metro-areas, people have families, and they may have moved to enter their programming job.
I'm not quite back in academia yet (only admitted to one graduate school so far, with non-guaranteed funding, two other applications still pending), but I'll be damned happier when I get back there. And of course, unbias this anecdote by accounting for its kvetchiness and negativity, because you asked for a negative opinion about industry.