I personally was on my way to start a Ph.D. Got a job at the university, talked to professors about possible topics but ultimately decided to get a job in the

I personally was on my way to start a Ph.D. Got a job at the university, talked to professors about possible topics but ultimately decided to get a job in the industry. While teaching classes was fun and the job gave me plenty of free time to read things. What was really annoying me is the fact that for every little thing you want to do (e.g. buy another smartphone for the study, go to a conference, ...) you have to run through a horribly inefficient process of filling out a dozen forms and getting signatures from all sorts of people. I also felt bad about not really "creating" something. In my master's thesis, I created an asynchronous web-crawler, evaluated lots of NoSQL backends, hacked for about 8 hours a day and had a nice project in the end. At the university, I created slides, did lectures but never really did something "cool". There are already dozens of lectures on all sorts of topics and I pretty much only transformed text into pretty slides. Starting next month, I'll be working at a small company (9 people) and really look forward to hack on something with likeminded people :) Hope it was the right choice