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

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.