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I'm curious what led you to leave industry for a postdoc. AMPLab is a great place with lots of smart people, but I'm guessing you've taken a > 4x pay cut with

I'm curious what led you to leave industry for a postdoc. AMPLab is a great place with lots of smart people, but I'm guessing you've taken a > 4x pay cut with dim chances for career development, unless you're shooting for a faculty position.

stochastician 11y ago
Things I love about academia: 1. incredible freedom to work on whatever I want 2. a real focus on prototypes and curiosity, with less pressure to "ship working artifacts" 3. explicit recognition that "learning new skills" is part of the job. When I was in industry, if I needed an antenna designed, I would just go hire an RF engineering firm. Now I can spend time hacking on it myself, which I really enjoy 4. Absence of corporate bullshit, which has traditionally included tremendous IT freedom, no centralized control of messaging / official PR line, etc. 5. Generally no IP bullshit unless you want it -- everyone loves open-source, etc. AMP is a real leader here. Things that are a challenge: 1. project management is often lacking -- it can be hard to focus, and the freedom to explore is a double-edged sword of "it's been 18 months, what papers have we actually finished?" 2. The pay isn't great -- CS postdocs make $60-70k/year. Fortunately I can consult on the side to pad this out. 3. A lot of your inputs are 23-year-old graduate students, who are smarter than you, enthusiastic, and inexperienced. This can be a fantastic source of new creative ideas, but sometimes they also decide to switch from julia to rust 80% of the way through a project. Sometimes you wish you could just hire that RF engineer and get shit done (see above above) tl;dr : I get to build the coolest shit with the most amazing people helping me and learn a ton of new things, in an environment which generally shares my values.
- hodgesrm 11y ago
  The AMPLab is great. Glad to hear you are working there and wish you the best of luck pushing the boundaries of computer science.

stochastician 11y ago

Things I love about academia: 1. incredible freedom to work on whatever I want 2. a real focus on prototypes and curiosity, with less pressure to "ship working artifacts" 3. explicit recognition that "learning new skills" is part of the job. When I was in industry, if I needed an antenna designed, I would just go hire an RF engineering firm. Now I can spend time hacking on it myself, which I really enjoy 4. Absence of corporate bullshit, which has traditionally included tremendous IT freedom, no centralized control of messaging / official PR line, etc. 5. Generally no IP bullshit unless you want it -- everyone loves open-source, etc. AMP is a real leader here. Things that are a challenge: 1. project management is often lacking -- it can be hard to focus, and the freedom to explore is a double-edged sword of "it's been 18 months, what papers have we actually finished?" 2. The pay isn't great -- CS postdocs make $60-70k/year. Fortunately I can consult on the side to pad this out. 3. A lot of your inputs are 23-year-old graduate students, who are smarter than you, enthusiastic, and inexperienced. This can be a fantastic source of new creative ideas, but sometimes they also decide to switch from julia to rust 80% of the way through a project. Sometimes you wish you could just hire that RF engineer and get shit done (see above above) tl;dr : I get to build the coolest shit with the most amazing people helping me and learn a ton of new things, in an environment which generally shares my values.

hodgesrm 11y ago
The AMPLab is great. Glad to hear you are working there and wish you the best of luck pushing the boundaries of computer science.