
How to re-enter industry after a decade in academia? - leavingacademia
I&#x27;m considering leaving academia and returning to industry. I have a side project that is coming along, but most likely I&#x27;ll need at least a part-time job for another year and maybe indefinitely. I&#x27;d really like some advice on how best to make the transition, if it&#x27;s even possible at this point.<p>I&#x27;m still undecided about leaving, so your advice may help me make up my mind. The main drivers for leaving are the ones you hear so much about in academia - politics, job insecurity, cynicism, lack of impact, etc.<p>Thing is, I&#x27;ve been in Computer Science research for nearly ten years since my PhD. I&#x27;d say I&#x27;m an 8&#x2F;10 coder and am fluent in Python, JS+Vue.js, and Java. I&#x27;ve dabbled in half a dozen other languages. My sideproject is using Vue and it&#x27;d be advantageous for that project to learn more about front end dev. My CSS is mediocre and I&#x27;ve yet to master JS build tools. OTOH I&#x27;ve administered plenty of VPS installs and an SGE cluster. I&#x27;ve written a few REST APIs in Python.<p>What I&#x27;m really going to be rusty on is working in a dev team - using git properly rather than as a mostly solo dev, CI and testing frameworks, code reviews, agile working, and probably things I&#x27;m as yet unaware of. A bit like a junior dev in that sense, but then my programming skills are probably relatively strong.<p>I&#x27;m fairly settled geographically and live in a small city, with a larger one within an hour commute. Moving beyond the nearest big city isn&#x27;t an option. Working remote is fine.<p>How best to get back into the industry? I&#x27;d prefer a startup over a big corp. I don&#x27;t really want to be a junior dev as I&#x27;m a good hacker, but I don&#x27;t have open source projects etc. that I can use to demonstrate my competence. A part-time role would enable me to push the side-project forward, but I&#x27;m also worried about income - I&#x27;m in the UK and local dev roles seem to be around £30K, which would make part-time difficult to afford.<p>Any thoughts on how best to proceed, please?
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mister_hn
You have a PhD. Basically makes you flexible mentally and ready to adapt to
every situation.

You should try to apply also to some R&D positions, if any and if remote is
possible.

About getting the rust off, why don't you profit from the #hacktoberfest on
GitHub to get your hands dirty on projects that might spark your interest and
get used to a normal routine?

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leavingacademia
Thanks! I hadn't heard of #hacktoberfest:
[https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com](https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com)

