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Being an assistant professor at Stanford is orders more prestigious than whatever title he has at Google. For example, Dr. Fei-Fei Li is a professor at Stanfor

Being an assistant professor at Stanford is orders more prestigious than whatever title he has at Google. For example, Dr. Fei-Fei Li is a professor at Stanford and the Chief Scientist at Google. The professorship is orders of magnitude more prestigious than the Google thing.

nostrademons 8y ago
Depends on which group you hang out with. Being an assistant professor, or any part of academia, holds little appeal for many people who just want to make money in industry. For that matter, I didn't think working for Google was all that prestigious when I joined - I wanted to be a startup founder, like the guys who founded Flickr or Del.icio.us or ViaWeb, and Google was my consolation prize when that didn't work out. It was a bit of a mindfuck to see all the kids coming out of college and asking "How do I get a job at Google? It's been my dream since like forever!", and a further mindfuck when I met my wife, was like "Yeah, I was in line behind Larry Page at the cafeteria today", and she was like "Who's Larry Page?" Ultimately convinced me that chasing prestige was pointless, because it turns out everyone has a different definition of it. You would be surprised how much peoples' values differ, or how some people can be completely indifferent to other peoples' heroes. I mean, this person clearly preferred living a life true to his values than whatever prestige comes from working for Google. Anyway, I mentioned it because in my experience, former assistant profs at top universities were usually slotted into L5 (Senior SWE/Research Scientist/Data Scientist/etc.) at Google, while full profs were usually slotted into L7 (Senior Staff whatever). So there is a rough correspondence in that those are the corresponding levels that the same person who happens to have done both jobs ends up occupying. You could argue about which is more prestigious and you'd be right, by definition, because prestige is in the eye of the beholder.
- eanzenberg 8y ago
  Getting a professorship at Stanford is way harder than an L5 at Google, hands down, no questions.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    Don't care, have no interest in getting a professorship at Stanford. Getting a spot on Stanford's gymnastics team is way harder than getting a professorship at Stanford. After all, there are 39 spots for the former, and 2219 spots for the latter. The denominators are of roughly the same size, 4.8 million kids who do gymnastics vs. roughly 5M Ph.Ds. I have no interest in being a Stanford gymnast either (and in any case that ship sailed 20 years ago), but I'm making a point about prestige. The numbers would be even more stark if I'd picked another sport like basketball.
rifung 8y ago
> For example, Dr. Fei-Fei Li is a professor at Stanford and the Chief Scientist at Google. The professorship is orders of magnitude more prestigious than the Google thing. By what measure? She was the chief scientist of which there is only one but there are many professors at Stanford. She's not just any professor though: she's also the director of the AI lab which you could argue is more prestigious but I don't see why you would consider a "regular" professor title to be more prestigious than a chief scientist who managed a large number of researchers.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Possibly interesting/relevant, Fei-Fei Li is returning to her job at Stanford, primarily, and someone else is taking over as the head of Google Cloud AI: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/google-cloud-ai-andrew-moore-joining-google-cloud-fei-fei-li-becoming-advisor https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/goo...

nostrademons 8y ago

Depends on which group you hang out with. Being an assistant professor, or any part of academia, holds little appeal for many people who just want to make money in industry. For that matter, I didn't think working for Google was all that prestigious when I joined - I wanted to be a startup founder, like the guys who founded Flickr or Del.icio.us or ViaWeb, and Google was my consolation prize when that didn't work out. It was a bit of a mindfuck to see all the kids coming out of college and asking "How do I get a job at Google? It's been my dream since like forever!", and a further mindfuck when I met my wife, was like "Yeah, I was in line behind Larry Page at the cafeteria today", and she was like "Who's Larry Page?" Ultimately convinced me that chasing prestige was pointless, because it turns out everyone has a different definition of it. You would be surprised how much peoples' values differ, or how some people can be completely indifferent to other peoples' heroes. I mean, this person clearly preferred living a life true to his values than whatever prestige comes from working for Google. Anyway, I mentioned it because in my experience, former assistant profs at top universities were usually slotted into L5 (Senior SWE/Research Scientist/Data Scientist/etc.) at Google, while full profs were usually slotted into L7 (Senior Staff whatever). So there is a rough correspondence in that those are the corresponding levels that the same person who happens to have done both jobs ends up occupying. You could argue about which is more prestigious and you'd be right, by definition, because prestige is in the eye of the beholder.

eanzenberg 8y ago
Getting a professorship at Stanford is way harder than an L5 at Google, hands down, no questions.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  Don't care, have no interest in getting a professorship at Stanford. Getting a spot on Stanford's gymnastics team is way harder than getting a professorship at Stanford. After all, there are 39 spots for the former, and 2219 spots for the latter. The denominators are of roughly the same size, 4.8 million kids who do gymnastics vs. roughly 5M Ph.Ds. I have no interest in being a Stanford gymnast either (and in any case that ship sailed 20 years ago), but I'm making a point about prestige. The numbers would be even more stark if I'd picked another sport like basketball.

rifung 8y ago

> For example, Dr. Fei-Fei Li is a professor at Stanford and the Chief Scientist at Google. The professorship is orders of magnitude more prestigious than the Google thing. By what measure? She was the chief scientist of which there is only one but there are many professors at Stanford. She's not just any professor though: she's also the director of the AI lab which you could argue is more prestigious but I don't see why you would consider a "regular" professor title to be more prestigious than a chief scientist who managed a large number of researchers.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

Possibly interesting/relevant, Fei-Fei Li is returning to her job at Stanford, primarily, and someone else is taking over as the head of Google Cloud AI: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/google-cloud-ai-andrew-moore-joining-google-cloud-fei-fei-li-becoming-advisor https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/goo...