
Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google) - leibniz
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html
======
moultano
He's describing something that was the biggest factor for me not deciding to
go back to school. I came to Google and started working on search engine spam.
I also periodically read papers on "Adversarial Information Retrieval" as it
is called in the literature. Only a handful of the papers I read had useful
ideas, and I don't think there's anything that can really be done to improve
the situation. There are certain things you can't really research without
access to the real thing. Information Retrieval is one of them, and I'd be
equally skeptical of parallel computing research unless the university has a
1000 node cluster to work with.

This sucks for the world, because the research in these things that Google
does doesn't really escape to advance the state of the art elsewhere.

~~~
Lewisham
Sadly, most academics realize that they're data-starved, but industry isn't
able to/doesn't want to work with academia to help gain access to that data.
Even if you do get access, you're NDA'd so hard that publishing useful papers
is a challenge.

It's a shame, because universities are essentially free labor, just on much
longer timeframes and lower probability of immediate success. I understand
_why_ things are the way they are, but I'd love to find some way of
reconciling this issue. It's already killed a research project of mine before
it started.

~~~
moultano
Google realizes this too, and there are a lot of people here that would like
to help. There are a few huge issues that always come up.

1\. Paranoia about giving competitors the edge they need.

2\. Paranoia about giving spammers the edge they need.

3\. Privacy. It's nigh impossible to anonymize user data enough to release and
still have it in a useful form. The AOL logs debacle hurt everyone.

One of my friends had a really interesting take on this. His belief
essentially was that the industry advances when people switch companies and
(legal or not) take their institutional knowledge with them. Unfortunately,
academia is hard to transfer into.

~~~
price
<quote>His belief essentially was that the industry advances when people
switch companies and (legal or not) take their institutional knowledge with
them.</quote>

This is why it's so important that in California the law protects employees
leaving companies to work for other companies -- this _is_ legal there. You
can't take code, data, hardware designs, or other concrete intellectual
property -- that's forbidden by the agreements every tech company requires
employees to sign. But if you couldn't take institutional knowledge with you,
you couldn't work at a new company at all. (How could an ex-Googler unlearn
how web-scale systems are built of many disposable pieces?) And if an
agreement purports to restrict you from switching jobs, then California law
repudiates that restriction.

Unfortunately some other states have no such law, and cheerfully enforce non-
competes against engineers trying to switch companies. And guess what? The
industry doesn't move as fast in Massachusetts as in California.

~~~
kevinpet
If I could point to one thing other states could do to improve their economy,
it would be adopt the exact language of California's anti-non-compete and the
"you own your own ideas, unless developed as part of your work" law.

Not that this is going to single handedly grow a silicon valley in Montana
overnight, but it has so little downside. The reason for the exact language is
because if they use the exact language consciously, they effectively import
the case law surrounding those laws.

------
anrope
"...overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work,
etc.)..."

I feel like a professor shouldn't consider teaching "overhead". If you're
teaching classes, you should be putting at least as much effort into research
as teaching. Prof != post-doc.

If your passion is in research, then a move to industry (or post-doc) sounds
like a good choice.

~~~
Smerity
He may be complaining about all the overhead that goes _with_ teaching rather
than the teaching itself. I'm tutoring this semester for a Data Structures
course and a painfully large portion of the time is spent dealing with things
that really aren't teaching.

Trying to deal with plagiarism (which even goes as far as assignments posted
on RentACoder), using ancient marking systems (WebCT is well and truly evil),
handling students who obviously don't care at all but feel entitled and so on.

~~~
robryan
You would be stupid to post an assignment on something as well known as
rentacoder. I've ad professors who have mentioned finding their assignments on
there so they are well aware.

~~~
hga
But there are people that stupid and the need to check such sites is just one
more bit of overhead.

Hmmm, I suppose it's unfortunate that a final exam does not lend itself to
requiring the use of a computer to demonstrate that you truly can program your
way out of a paper bag.

------
mbyrne
Short version: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google) is because I want to be an
engineer and not an academic.

~~~
jlees
s/engineer/researcher/

------
teichman
Matt: what will happen to your graduate students?

~~~
seiji
My name is Matt, so I feel qualified to reply.

My first joke thought was: "I bet Google will be happy to hire them too."

A moment later I realized it's probably true.

~~~
Estragon
You probably would have gotten positive points for this if you'd left off the
extra "My name is Matt" joke.

------
jacobolus
Big loss for Harvard. Matt Welsh is a fantastic teacher.

~~~
snowmaker
Agreed, I had him as well and he was a big inspiration. Perhaps the beginning
of a broader shift in industry vs. academia?

~~~
Lewisham
I think the pull is that Google is a very academic place (based on visits and
talking to people who work there), and if Google's interests align with yours,
you're basically doing the research you would have already done PLUS you get
paid better PLUS you don't have to fight for funding on an almost daily basis
PLUS you actually have data. Google is a fabulous, exciting, wonderland place
for lots of software engineering professors/students.

The question is whether Google is a career. Places like Google, Microsoft
Research (and, perhaps Facebook) allow for the freedom that academics crave,
but that's only three places. If research-style engineering goes out of
fashion in favor of enterprise middle-management hell, you're going to be left
high and dry if you don't have a publishing record to fall back on when you
try going back to the Ivory Tower.

Fortunately, those places have enough cachet that you can say "I worked at
Google" and no publishing record for those years are forgiven, but if you
don't have one (say, you went half way through your PhD), coming back is going
to be hard. That's why the decision is so difficult: you're taking a bet on
whether the benefits taken for granted in academia are going to continue in
industry. A broader shift would have to show more companies than those three,
in order to provide (for want of a better word) "safety" that your worklife
goals aren't in jeopardy.

~~~
kingkilr
They're not new though, just the next generation. The previous one had places
like IBM and AT&T employing researchers in this manner.

------
gojomo
A previous hint of the pull of Google for Welch was:

[http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/10/computing-at-scale-or...](http://matt-
welsh.blogspot.com/2010/10/computing-at-scale-or-how-google-has.html)

------
svrocks
Matt made assembly language and multithreading entertaining to learn and
accessible for undergrads, which was no small feat. So those of you bashing
his teaching need to step off

------
klochner
Someone has to say it:

    
    
       So he can leave google for facebook

