4 ms·

> It's hard to pass up making my 2x or more in industry. Austin's salary is public data, and I have a really good sample of what people like him make in indust

> It's hard to pass up making my 2x or more in industry. Austin's salary is public data, and I have a really good sample of what people like him make in industry. Try 5x. Before RSU appreciation. Maybe 3x. But 3x would imply a VERY chill industry position. "Name your interest space and we'll let you work on that" type of gig. Probably way more chill than academia. > The freedom and unstructured time to explore fuzzy problems is unmatched. Industry also provides this. Actually, I find much more freedom in industry than in academia. And, if we're honest, my industry position is probably at least as secure as a faculty position at a public university in a red state. > I don't know any other job that gives you 6-figure salary and lets you basically do whatever you want for 42% of the year. In industry research, you can't do whatever you want. But you can usually do what you want. In fact, the caveat of "prove your worth" is a huge tell. In industry, you REALLY CAN do what you want! Real freedom; just be useful. In academia you have "freedom". By which we mean "raise money". But even if not... look at it like this: an industry position that pays 5x allows you to work for a year and then take the next 4 off. 2/5 is bigger than 1/5. And that is time you can actually take off. To do whatever. Not "off" in the "better be writing grant proposals!" sense. Actually off. > Is a 2x salary increase worth giving up that kind of time? Probably not. But if you can land an R1 CS position in SE, you should be making closer to 5x.

ModernMech 5y ago
Do you know anyone who made $500k for a year and then took 4 years off to work on their research? I'd like to see what they managed to do with their time.
- lapsedacademic 5y ago
  To be fair, no. (People do switch between "low key pure-R" jobs and "higher stress r&D" jobs. Perhaps similar.) But... perhaps this is because after you've made $industry_money for 10 years and hit your late 30s, you realize you'd rather spend all of your time training your biological AGI agents and don't really give a shit about the kinda unpleasant industry rat race, much less the totally brutal higher ed rat race. Or skiing. Lots of multi-millionaire ski bums in my grad cohort. No idea what they do in the summers. Not my cup of tea, but probably better than writing papers no one will read. In early retirement, there's time for research. And time to share that research. Just... no incentive to do the rat race thing that's necessary to convince an academic you're "accomplished something". But who cares? You finished the race. You don't have to get paper awards or NSF grants. You just have to do work that matters. Or ski. Or change diapers. So, I guess, to be even more fair: yes. CS PhDs work through their 30s and then retire. Totally. All the time.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  A friend of mine did! He's been pretty productive, both in terms of academic things and living a good life. CS is nice in that you don't (initially) need access to a lot of resources. I think this would be much harder to do in a wet-lab field, which is one of the reasons I'm still here.
- raphlinus 5y ago
  That's not too different than what I did. I left Google fall 2018, at the time thinking I'd write a video game. That morphed into doing research on 2D rendering, because building the infrastructure for that was more interesting and exciting than the actual game. For a while (not the whole time) it was pure unstructured time, no outside responsibilities. I rejoined Google a year ago with a research software engineer title, mostly because it was a better place to pursue this research than just continuing on my own. Partly I'm posting this to support 'lapsedacademic's assertion, you can do good research in industry. It takes a certain element of luck to land a spot, but it also helps to be very passionate about the research itself. I'm now writing a paper on an exciting GPU algorithm, but it's pure love, funding doesn't depend on it, it just makes a nice point on my list of accomplishments during perf time.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    I'm curious, what are your options for starting a company based on the research you're doing at Google? What kind of ownership do they get (I assume it's not nothing)?
    - raphlinus 5y ago
      I thought about starting a company, but that's not where my energy is, it's doing the science. Everything I do is permissively licensed open source (though if I had a chance to work on awesome rendering in a proprietary product I would not turn it down). I'll also add, I looked into academia and talked to some people about steps in that direction, for example seriously considering taking on teaching a class at UC Berkeley. But I decided that the daily grind of academia was not for me. I think I get to spend a larger fraction of my time actually working on my problems at Google than I would at a university.
  - archagon 5y ago
    What genre of game did you want to build, out of curiosity?
    - raphlinus 5y ago
tubby12345 5y ago
>you REALLY CAN do what you want! Real freedom; just be useful. exactly. high-level ICs at FAANG set their own schedules/roadmaps and salaries as long as they pushing expanding the forefront of an area that brings value. the truth is academia is a shelter for a lot of people who can't do useful things.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > the truth is academia is a shelter for a lot of people who can't do useful things. And that's a good thing, because often times it's not obvious immediately how a particular thing is useful or brings value. Sometimes a particular area of inquiry doesn't appear promising until a subsequent invention many years later. For example, driverless cars were incubated in academia. Now corporations are using those same techniques. A lot of researchers crashed a lot of cars before a winning combo was discovered. You don't get positive results without a ton of failures and not-useful ideas. It's worth noting that industry was not the one footing the bill here to get all of these negative results. There were no high-level ICs at Google doing this research when it was being done at CMU. Google only started doing it only once the the techniques were proven at the DARPA grand challenges.
  - tubby12345 5y ago
    >Sometimes a particular area of inquiry doesn't appear promising until a subsequent invention many years later. this could be the tagline of every single application to NSF. i'm not sure if you're in academia but there are hordes of projects that are funded that are clearly useless. >For example, driverless cars were incubated in academia. are you really claiming that driverless cars weren't immediately obvious as valuable? just because CMU got to it first doesn't mean industry wouldn't have gotten to it.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      > hordes of projects that are funded that are clearly useless I don't understand what your point is. It's not like industry is immune to funding ideas that are clearly useless (Juicero) or even fraudulent (Theranos). If you have a way to fund only good ideas, I think that would be quite a breakthrough. I mean, look around you: this community is set up around a good-idea selection engine that itself struggles to consistently identify good ideas. Bad ideas are a part of getting to good ideas. If you really had a 100% fool-proof way if identifying bad/good ideas at the pre-funding stage you wouldn't be here talking about it -- you'd be using it to make a ton of money. Also, I would challenge you to point to a NSF funded idea that is 100% clearly, objectively useless. Something so clearly has no plausible utility whatsoever. I think this would be very hard to do. > are you really claiming that driverless cars weren't immediately obvious as valuable? It's true that industry could have but they didn't, and that's the point. It only became attractive to industry after the public sector dumped a massive amount of R&D into it and basically proved how to do it to industry, and that's not a coincidence. Before the the DARPA grand challenges it was absolutely a question as to how viable the idea of driverless cars were. This story is not an uncommon thing.

ModernMech 5y ago

Do you know anyone who made $500k for a year and then took 4 years off to work on their research? I'd like to see what they managed to do with their time.

lapsedacademic 5y ago
To be fair, no. (People do switch between "low key pure-R" jobs and "higher stress r&D" jobs. Perhaps similar.) But... perhaps this is because after you've made $industry_money for 10 years and hit your late 30s, you realize you'd rather spend all of your time training your biological AGI agents and don't really give a shit about the kinda unpleasant industry rat race, much less the totally brutal higher ed rat race. Or skiing. Lots of multi-millionaire ski bums in my grad cohort. No idea what they do in the summers. Not my cup of tea, but probably better than writing papers no one will read. In early retirement, there's time for research. And time to share that research. Just... no incentive to do the rat race thing that's necessary to convince an academic you're "accomplished something". But who cares? You finished the race. You don't have to get paper awards or NSF grants. You just have to do work that matters. Or ski. Or change diapers. So, I guess, to be even more fair: yes. CS PhDs work through their 30s and then retire. Totally. All the time.
mattkrause 5y ago
A friend of mine did! He's been pretty productive, both in terms of academic things and living a good life. CS is nice in that you don't (initially) need access to a lot of resources. I think this would be much harder to do in a wet-lab field, which is one of the reasons I'm still here.
raphlinus 5y ago
That's not too different than what I did. I left Google fall 2018, at the time thinking I'd write a video game. That morphed into doing research on 2D rendering, because building the infrastructure for that was more interesting and exciting than the actual game. For a while (not the whole time) it was pure unstructured time, no outside responsibilities. I rejoined Google a year ago with a research software engineer title, mostly because it was a better place to pursue this research than just continuing on my own. Partly I'm posting this to support 'lapsedacademic's assertion, you can do good research in industry. It takes a certain element of luck to land a spot, but it also helps to be very passionate about the research itself. I'm now writing a paper on an exciting GPU algorithm, but it's pure love, funding doesn't depend on it, it just makes a nice point on my list of accomplishments during perf time.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  I'm curious, what are your options for starting a company based on the research you're doing at Google? What kind of ownership do they get (I assume it's not nothing)?
  - raphlinus 5y ago
    I thought about starting a company, but that's not where my energy is, it's doing the science. Everything I do is permissively licensed open source (though if I had a chance to work on awesome rendering in a proprietary product I would not turn it down). I'll also add, I looked into academia and talked to some people about steps in that direction, for example seriously considering taking on teaching a class at UC Berkeley. But I decided that the daily grind of academia was not for me. I think I get to spend a larger fraction of my time actually working on my problems at Google than I would at a university.
- archagon 5y ago
  What genre of game did you want to build, out of curiosity?
  - raphlinus 5y ago

tubby12345 5y ago

>you REALLY CAN do what you want! Real freedom; just be useful. exactly. high-level ICs at FAANG set their own schedules/roadmaps and salaries as long as they pushing expanding the forefront of an area that brings value. the truth is academia is a shelter for a lot of people who can't do useful things.

ModernMech 5y ago
> the truth is academia is a shelter for a lot of people who can't do useful things. And that's a good thing, because often times it's not obvious immediately how a particular thing is useful or brings value. Sometimes a particular area of inquiry doesn't appear promising until a subsequent invention many years later. For example, driverless cars were incubated in academia. Now corporations are using those same techniques. A lot of researchers crashed a lot of cars before a winning combo was discovered. You don't get positive results without a ton of failures and not-useful ideas. It's worth noting that industry was not the one footing the bill here to get all of these negative results. There were no high-level ICs at Google doing this research when it was being done at CMU. Google only started doing it only once the the techniques were proven at the DARPA grand challenges.
- tubby12345 5y ago
  >Sometimes a particular area of inquiry doesn't appear promising until a subsequent invention many years later. this could be the tagline of every single application to NSF. i'm not sure if you're in academia but there are hordes of projects that are funded that are clearly useless. >For example, driverless cars were incubated in academia. are you really claiming that driverless cars weren't immediately obvious as valuable? just because CMU got to it first doesn't mean industry wouldn't have gotten to it.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    > hordes of projects that are funded that are clearly useless I don't understand what your point is. It's not like industry is immune to funding ideas that are clearly useless (Juicero) or even fraudulent (Theranos). If you have a way to fund only good ideas, I think that would be quite a breakthrough. I mean, look around you: this community is set up around a good-idea selection engine that itself struggles to consistently identify good ideas. Bad ideas are a part of getting to good ideas. If you really had a 100% fool-proof way if identifying bad/good ideas at the pre-funding stage you wouldn't be here talking about it -- you'd be using it to make a ton of money. Also, I would challenge you to point to a NSF funded idea that is 100% clearly, objectively useless. Something so clearly has no plausible utility whatsoever. I think this would be very hard to do. > are you really claiming that driverless cars weren't immediately obvious as valuable? It's true that industry could have but they didn't, and that's the point. It only became attractive to industry after the public sector dumped a massive amount of R&D into it and basically proved how to do it to industry, and that's not a coincidence. Before the the DARPA grand challenges it was absolutely a question as to how viable the idea of driverless cars were. This story is not an uncommon thing.