

Ask HN: Should I leave academia and jump to Silicon Valley? - sakyamuni

I'm a long-time academic who has tenure at a major university. However, I feel that academic life is not as satisfying as I'd like it to be. There is a lot of overhead and I hardly get to spend any time hacking. Being in the ivory tower also feels pretty isolating. Recently I've been offered a position at a major Silicon Valley tech company that you have all heard of. It is an exciting opportunity but it is a one-way street: returning to a tenured faculty job after leaving for industry is going to be almost impossible. So it's a pretty serious decision.<p>Have other ex-academics here on HN made a similar switch, and what has your experience been like?
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pedoh
I made the switch. My first job out of college was teaching at a private high
school. I certainly felt that I was making more or less a permanent decision
when I decided to go; now, I'm less convinced, but I certainly agree that
going back to a tenured faculty position would be difficult.

What makes you think that this new position is going to be the bee's knees and
satisfy your itch? How do you know that you won't be trading one type of pain
and suffering for another? Is there any chance you could use a sabbatical to
do work for this company, to "test the waters"? I'm guessing you couldn't
actually become an employee, but perhaps you could work some deal that would
further your academic research while seeing if joining the non-academic tech
industry would suit you.

To me, "major Silicon Valley tech company" smells like Google, Yahoo!,
Microsoft, et cetera. Keep in mind that while all of these types of large
companies have different approaches to being large companies, they all have to
deal with human scale, and with that can come a load of bureaucracy and
overhead that may in time frustrate you as much as it does in academia. Some
of those companies do a better job at that than others.

One last thought. When I saw the light bulbs go on in my students, and when I
saw them teach other students what I had taught them, so I knew they truly
"got it", that was very special and very rewarding. Moving to the tech
industry has had it's own rewards and intellectual challenges, but for me,
teaching others was very rewarding, and I find often that the times I spend
teaching my colleagues something are some of the best. Don't forget the good
parts of your current job, too!

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anigbrowl
Not really on-point, but there's frequent discussion about the the direction
and value of higher education on HN, including questions of tenure. It would
be interesting to hear more from someone who actually has academic tenure
about the overhead you describe and how it has affected teaching and research,
compared to your expectations when you began teaching.

Good luck with making your decision. One-way choices like that are quite
intimidating. A sanity check might be to consider what you would do if either
you hated working at the company, or they hated having you work there - it
happens. So suppose you were unemployed a year from now, and forever banned
from setting foot on an academic campus - what would you do with yourself?

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luu
Can you take a leave of absence or jump over during a sabbatical year? I don't
know many tenured academics who have made the jump, but the few that I do know
have done of those two things when trying out a research lab or trying their
hand at a startup.

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qq66
You should talk to Hal Varian.

