12 ms·

This looks great, and I would have loved to see this when I was in the lab. When the software industry says to you: "We will nearly triple your salary, you don

This looks great, and I would have loved to see this when I was in the lab. When the software industry says to you: "We will nearly triple your salary, you don't have to work weekends, and you also don't have to feed the mice on a Sunday night." You will 100% take this deal. I was a 10yr+ academic tool maker in biochemistry, built cutting edge microscopes, hardware, and image analysis software. My lab was successful in our field. I got some papers out of the deal. I also saw things that no human had seen before in a microscope. I worked with very interesting people from around the world. The work in academia is great. You're moving the needle, new data, new failures. These are the perks. It is also highly possible that you have complete creative control of your project. I did, and it was amazing. Custom designed UIs to streamline our experiments, derived from watching students use the system to do their work. A decathalon of software design. Some reality: Your PI and organization will never compensate you the way the software industry will. In pay, expectations, and benefits. When you're over 30, and you don't technically have a real 401k, you are still paying your student loans that you needed to get into this field, and you're still in the same shitty apartment, something has to give. Comparison is the thief of joy, and when you see your cohort of computer science graduates your joy will be stolen :). It's good, honest work. A short tour of duty would be useful, and can teach you the difference between splitting the atom and splitting the check. Academia, at least in bioscience, is still very much an ivory tower. You don't have enough letters after your name to matter, and you will likely be a pet instead of a peer. Don't stay underwater for too long. Life is short. :D

frozenport 4y ago
What's Nico Stuurman up to these days? https://valelab.ucsf.edu/nico_stuurman/ https://valelab.ucsf.edu/nico_stuurman/
- throwmamatrain 4y ago
  Ah, the uManager guys! Great software, sits on top of ImageJ (open source image analysis). Our software was a custom C+Win32 app that was ported from CodeWarrior on MacOS 7/8. Windows timers were so crap that I ended up using Ryan Geiss' timer from Milkdrop: http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/FAQS/timing.html http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/FAQS/timing.html Yes, that Ryan Geiss, the Winamp one. He now works for Nvidia I think. Our machines were bristling with serial ports, driving high speed filter wheels, lasers of every color we could get our hands on, special shutters coated with teflon, fast expensive cameras, and more! Their work is very much in my old field, I was in bioenergetics, specifically mitochondria and their dysfunction. Thanks for the link down memory lane!
leemailll 4y ago
I heard nih might be a decent place for possible permanent position other than PI in bio fields
jxramos 4y ago
totally this. I had a boss once who took me aside in her office to probe interests and direction. Somewhere she quipped about work in academia being paid peanuts. It was a pretty shocking statement and attitude to hear it so bluntly, especially being so close in time to my own graduation and years at the university and admiration for that world. But in all honesty I never heard it challenged much. Later as I started to hear more about how economies function and how revenues really build up and stem from consumers in volume I came to realize that things that ultimately benefit a lot of people generate a lot of money. I saw an intermediary of this working at Apple and seeing how much funds they had to spend vs biomedical companies that were more conservative with their funds. Consumer electronics and consumer products in general have a lot of customers, benefit a lot of people, and ultimately earn a lot of money. Academia is much more limited in its scope and immediate benefit. That delay in benefit shapes the money involved in all sorts of surprising ways that aren't immediately apparent while still under the wings of the academic world and the "currencies" they operate with be it notoriety, prizes, grants, etc etc. Ultimately the results and products of academia are suspect and risky since they're often in the prototype unvetted phase of birthing into existence. Those thoughts Elon Musk shares while touring Starbase about design vs manufacturing in the gauntlet of tests against reality where the two forms get vetted side by side come to mind here. His statement of "design is overrated" probably has a close analogue in academia. Products of the mind are essentially untested and may not stand up to reality along whatever dimensions one needs to evaluate them against, or as is probably more often the case simple don't scale to the degree needed to impact a large number of people in a short time frame to translate to paying customers.
altacc 4y ago
As a counterpoint, I know someone who went back to academia after getting disillusioned with tech (academia > tech > academia). The key difference may be that they live in Europe, have no student loans and the pay disparity between a developer in bioscience and in tech is not as large as I imagine it is in the US. They are paid significantly more than the scientists they work alongside but not much less than they were paid in a good tech job. For them the bioscience work is much more interesting than anything they did in tech (they have a maths-based PhD, so were working on quite complex problems but in a relatively boring field). Software development is important to more and more industries and the pay disparity caused by insanely large funding and little requirement to produce profits means that other sectors are being priced out of in-house development, especially niche use cases. The ongoing rise of no-code development will be increasingly useful across all sectors but will fail to deliver a lot of these niche applications.
- icelancer 4y ago
  I did this as well, but started my own company. The key for a lot of people making the switch is to make the money in your first endeavor - in tech - then transition into a lower-paying but more pleasing industry, with the money buffer you built up making it possible. I've seen it a few times lately.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- busterarm 4y ago
  Salaries in Europe are catching up...
  - myst1 4y ago
    A lot of the smarter people I know have been recruited into Europe. People say "the salaries are so much lower lol", but the reality is, you often have employment laws that remove terrible occurrences as possibilities that are commonplace in America, you have access to healthcare, being a home owner is actually possible and if you don't want that renting is better overall. European culture is usually way less cut throat, and managers typically know their stuff, rather then failing upwards to half a million dollar salary's where using the word "digital" and being a brute is the main requirement. Salary isn't everything. European engineering is a pretty different culture. The way the us tries to prevent this is by crippling their people with student debt.
alaricus 4y ago
This is pretty much my story as well. I work less and get paid much more after leaving academia. Idealism can last so long before one gives in.
sbt 4y ago
> You don't have enough letters after your name to matter, and you will likely be a pet instead of a peer. This is an underrated point. This is the case for programmers in finance as well, and requires a hefty salary premium to put up with.
- konschubert 4y ago
  Are you talking about the letters P, H and D? As in, if you don't have a PhD they don't see you as a peer?
  - exdsq 4y ago
    I've honestly yet to meet a research software engineer without a PhD because of the academic bias you will get in, well, academia.
    - gvurrdon 4y ago
      I work with two of them at the moment. One is planning to apply for a PhD studentship soon, but the other does not intend to do so.
    - ohlookabird 4y ago
      For many years I worked in a high profile research institute (neuroscience) as an RSE without a PhD. Still don't have one, and that's okay (for the path I'm on). Quite a few of the other RSEs in the institute don't have one either. In total I'd say maybe 50% didn't have a PhD.
    - xen0 4y ago
      Depending on the definition of RSE, I may or may not have been one. The company I worked for was a Synchrotron Light Source; I worked on software for data collection on X-Ray beamlines. I would say that only about half of those in the same role as me had a PhD. Moving away from data collection to analysis, the fraction of PhDs went up, but only reached 1.0 when considering the sub-group specialising in structural biology.
    - 4y ago
yiyus 4y ago
This. I have worked for almost 15 years in academic research, but in very close collaboration with the steel industry. The code we write can help steel companies to save millions when developing new products. This is quite complex software, which combines materials science, mechanical engineering and advanced mathematical concepts while requiring high performance and reliability. I found a nice position for a tenure track in France, in a top research centre. Besides designing and writing software, I would have to design and implement experimental plans, teach, deal with students and administration, keep an excellent publications record, and find funding for future projects. Remote work would not be a possibility (but I would work may unpaid extra hours at home). And the amount of published papers and recommendation letters required just to be considered for the job was overwhelming. My salary would be lower than $30k/year. They do not even know what is a RSE. I am searching a remote job in the software industry now.
- siva7 4y ago
  seriously? in what kind of alternative reality does academia live to offer 30k?
  - noobermin 4y ago
    European countries have lower salaries in general? Although their social safety nets are better. Also, assistant professors (or the equivalent there) generally make less but do probably make more once they get tenure. I'm assuming they meant the tenure-track position itself is ~30K USD, but making tenure usually does mean a pay increase.
    - evandijk70 4y ago
      In the Netherlands, 30k is the starting salary for a PhD student. 30k for a tenure track position sounds insane to me.
      - maccard 4y ago
        In Ireland PhD stipends are closer to 13-17k. It's not a perfect comparison because the PhD stipends are tax free, so your comparative salary would be in the 17-20k mark. That said, Postdoc research positions are much closer to 40k than 30k.
zozbot234 4y ago
As usual, xkcd is relevant: https://xkcd.com/664/ https://xkcd.com/664/
rob_c 4y ago
> at least in bioscience... BINGO! that field is notoriously horrible and interacts extremely badly with a 'when not discovered here, not important' syndrome. Biology is brutal toward bio-physicists, mathematicians as well as people who code who they are forced to work with rather than seek out to help them. I still hold up as an example nonsense discussions around p-values in bio vs actual work going on in statistics in maths departments. It shows how far detached they've become. Not to criticize too strongly, but given the above, combined with it's reproducabilty crisis, and existential problem of being in the back-pocket of big-pharma, I seriously doubt the professional integrity of a lot of people in the field. Move toward mathematics, physics and chemistry. There is (some) serious money and a good atmosphere around areas such as finite-element modelling, or wolphram like tools as an example. There is a lack of direct funding for decent posts but you get recognised and paid the equivalent as a peer, I know from working with some of these people. It's not to say it's 100% always without friction, but no job is I'd argue.
- willis936 4y ago
  The reproducabilty crisis in chemistry is just as bad, if not worse, than biology. Anyone with a pen can reproduce a math proof. If you work on a big project (physics experiment) where every paper has a dozen eyes on it you can't slip crap work by your peers because that's their livelihood on the line. In between you have bio/chem fields where each project is too expensive to trivially reproduce but still small enough to have only one career on the line for each project.
  - myst1 4y ago
    Most of the reproducibility issues in chemistry happen in biochem in my experience(meanwhile it gets the most funding). That said, synthetic chemistry is also a problem area. Usually in synthetic chemistry it's not that the work can't be entirely reproduced, but rather that yields are fudged. That's mostly because PIs say "you can't graduate until this reaction yields 99%.". So after someone has written four papers, taught classes at minimum wage for 7 years, they fudge a 95% to a 99%. It's not okay, but neither is the way academia is structured. Super glad my discipline was elsewhere, but I saw colleagues suffer from this stuff...
alimov 4y ago
Thank you for your comment, it was a joy to read and get a peek.
noobermin 4y ago
Since this thread is turning into a yet another complaints about academia thread: One of the serious downsides of working in academia is you are basically doing the industry's work for them for less pay and they will one day turn around, pat you on the back, then sell your work for millions of dollars. It gets worse honestly the closer you are to applied fields. There, you already straddle the line between what your more "pure" (and less well paid) peers think is "science" and actually making things that will in fact make people's lives better, so you have less room to be idealistic about why you are doing what you're doing, that is, whether it is for "moving the needle" or "adding to the corpus of humanity's knowledge" or whether you really are just doing someone else's work for them they aren't willing to fund given the risks. And given that the latter is basically closer to what you're doing and your closer to the place where you'll see your work enable someone else's riches, it's hard not to want to jump ship and just become one of those people on the other side but make money hands over fist. It's an upsetting situation honestly.
- javajosh 4y ago
  The next thought should be: why doesn't neo-liberal capitalism fix this problem? And: is my characterization of the problem correct? Why not start a new firm that better compensates researchers (and tool makers) for their valuable work? It seems like big tech (especially Google, and perhaps Microsoft) comes in from the commercial side and invests in R&D at reasonable rates for just this purpose! But surely if workers are systematically undercompensated, there is room for a disruptive firm to come in and take the best talent and still make a profit. Perhaps the characterization is wrong and the EV (expected value) of this work is far lower than you think (this seems likely), and/or there are externalities like regulation, or the leverage of prestige that traditional orgs (e.g. universities and publishers) wield, that warp the profit incentive. Or (and this is my cynical view) pure science was always best left to the hobbyists. Historically the most important discoveries have come only rarely and to those who loved doing science in their free time or, more rarely, when a talented individual found a patron. Building a science factory and hiring science factory workers not only sounds distasteful, but it doesn't seem to work very well. (The exceptions being those very capital intensive projects like the LHC which require a large pool of professional scientists and engineers to do the experiment.)
ArtWomb 4y ago
The converse is something akin to Tableau, which came out of the graphics department of Stanford and Pat Hanrahan's lab. Tableau was acquired by Salesforce for around $15B. No doubt, proximity to SV was key to their growth. But the original research from 20+ years ago on DataCubes visualization was a product of academia. It just so happened to coincide with our era of "democratizing data science" ;) Multiscale Visualization Using Data Cubes https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/pan_zoom/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/pan_zoom/
Archelaos 4y ago
Having worked in academia before the age of 40 (though not in computer science), I can agree with this view. To enjoy the benefits of status, compensation and, to a certain extent, flexibility, one has to reach the level of professor. After failing to reach this level at 40, I switched to software development, without ever regretting it. A while ago I saw a position for image recognition in astronomy advertised by the university of my town. It sounded all very exciting for someone who enjoys figuring out solutions for a complex task -- until I looked up the pay grade: Less than half of my current hourly rate, without the flexibility I have (working from everywhere I want, even pre-Covid). Well, the problem seems to be that a competitive salary for a software engineer would probably have to be higher than for the professor leading the group. As an aside, I recently had a discussion with a friend in my country's military about the cyber defence forces wanting to recruit software engineers. There is a similar problem here: if they do not use contractors (whom they can pay what they ask for), they have difficulty finding an appropriate pay grade, since a well-qualified software engineer would have to be paid better than a general.
sokoloff 4y ago
I have some similar feelings about working for a game company (that was fairly successful and on the “better half” of the distribution of game companies). Loved the creative control and influence I could have (even as a mid-20s tech lead on a title), loved my colleagues, loved the work, and even enjoyed the satisfaction from shipping a golden master after a multi-week crunch period. Ultimately, a hedge fund was willing to pay me a multiple of what I was making in games and I decided I’d rather have a house than work on games.
ManBlanket 4y ago
I dropped graduate research into adversarial algorithms and generative adversarial networks when I realized instead of being paid beans to do something genuinely interesting I could get paid 6 figures to make business software and do whatever I want with my free time. Like so many other potential promising academic software engineers, I had a family to raise and a life to live. No kidding science needs more research software engineers, but that isn't going to change until science can pay software engineers at least a basic minimal income. When that changes I'll considering picking up where I left off.
the_only_law 4y ago
Tbh the more I hear about the academia the worse it sounds. Look I’m willing to take a massive paycut, I was starting to come around to the time cost, and hell, I’ll even work in Matlab. But: > you don't have to work weekends, and you also don't have to feed the mice on a Sunday night This is just wild, and if anything reminds me of low skilled near minimum wages jobs.

frozenport 4y ago

What's Nico Stuurman up to these days? https://valelab.ucsf.edu/nico_stuurman/ https://valelab.ucsf.edu/nico_stuurman/

throwmamatrain 4y ago
Ah, the uManager guys! Great software, sits on top of ImageJ (open source image analysis). Our software was a custom C+Win32 app that was ported from CodeWarrior on MacOS 7/8. Windows timers were so crap that I ended up using Ryan Geiss' timer from Milkdrop: http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/FAQS/timing.html http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/FAQS/timing.html Yes, that Ryan Geiss, the Winamp one. He now works for Nvidia I think. Our machines were bristling with serial ports, driving high speed filter wheels, lasers of every color we could get our hands on, special shutters coated with teflon, fast expensive cameras, and more! Their work is very much in my old field, I was in bioenergetics, specifically mitochondria and their dysfunction. Thanks for the link down memory lane!

leemailll 4y ago

I heard nih might be a decent place for possible permanent position other than PI in bio fields

jxramos 4y ago

totally this. I had a boss once who took me aside in her office to probe interests and direction. Somewhere she quipped about work in academia being paid peanuts. It was a pretty shocking statement and attitude to hear it so bluntly, especially being so close in time to my own graduation and years at the university and admiration for that world. But in all honesty I never heard it challenged much. Later as I started to hear more about how economies function and how revenues really build up and stem from consumers in volume I came to realize that things that ultimately benefit a lot of people generate a lot of money. I saw an intermediary of this working at Apple and seeing how much funds they had to spend vs biomedical companies that were more conservative with their funds. Consumer electronics and consumer products in general have a lot of customers, benefit a lot of people, and ultimately earn a lot of money. Academia is much more limited in its scope and immediate benefit. That delay in benefit shapes the money involved in all sorts of surprising ways that aren't immediately apparent while still under the wings of the academic world and the "currencies" they operate with be it notoriety, prizes, grants, etc etc. Ultimately the results and products of academia are suspect and risky since they're often in the prototype unvetted phase of birthing into existence. Those thoughts Elon Musk shares while touring Starbase about design vs manufacturing in the gauntlet of tests against reality where the two forms get vetted side by side come to mind here. His statement of "design is overrated" probably has a close analogue in academia. Products of the mind are essentially untested and may not stand up to reality along whatever dimensions one needs to evaluate them against, or as is probably more often the case simple don't scale to the degree needed to impact a large number of people in a short time frame to translate to paying customers.

altacc 4y ago

As a counterpoint, I know someone who went back to academia after getting disillusioned with tech (academia > tech > academia). The key difference may be that they live in Europe, have no student loans and the pay disparity between a developer in bioscience and in tech is not as large as I imagine it is in the US. They are paid significantly more than the scientists they work alongside but not much less than they were paid in a good tech job. For them the bioscience work is much more interesting than anything they did in tech (they have a maths-based PhD, so were working on quite complex problems but in a relatively boring field). Software development is important to more and more industries and the pay disparity caused by insanely large funding and little requirement to produce profits means that other sectors are being priced out of in-house development, especially niche use cases. The ongoing rise of no-code development will be increasingly useful across all sectors but will fail to deliver a lot of these niche applications.

icelancer 4y ago
I did this as well, but started my own company. The key for a lot of people making the switch is to make the money in your first endeavor - in tech - then transition into a lower-paying but more pleasing industry, with the money buffer you built up making it possible. I've seen it a few times lately.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
busterarm 4y ago
Salaries in Europe are catching up...
- myst1 4y ago
  A lot of the smarter people I know have been recruited into Europe. People say "the salaries are so much lower lol", but the reality is, you often have employment laws that remove terrible occurrences as possibilities that are commonplace in America, you have access to healthcare, being a home owner is actually possible and if you don't want that renting is better overall. European culture is usually way less cut throat, and managers typically know their stuff, rather then failing upwards to half a million dollar salary's where using the word "digital" and being a brute is the main requirement. Salary isn't everything. European engineering is a pretty different culture. The way the us tries to prevent this is by crippling their people with student debt.

alaricus 4y ago

This is pretty much my story as well. I work less and get paid much more after leaving academia. Idealism can last so long before one gives in.

sbt 4y ago

> You don't have enough letters after your name to matter, and you will likely be a pet instead of a peer. This is an underrated point. This is the case for programmers in finance as well, and requires a hefty salary premium to put up with.

konschubert 4y ago
Are you talking about the letters P, H and D? As in, if you don't have a PhD they don't see you as a peer?
- exdsq 4y ago
  I've honestly yet to meet a research software engineer without a PhD because of the academic bias you will get in, well, academia.
  - gvurrdon 4y ago
    I work with two of them at the moment. One is planning to apply for a PhD studentship soon, but the other does not intend to do so.
  - ohlookabird 4y ago
    For many years I worked in a high profile research institute (neuroscience) as an RSE without a PhD. Still don't have one, and that's okay (for the path I'm on). Quite a few of the other RSEs in the institute don't have one either. In total I'd say maybe 50% didn't have a PhD.
  - xen0 4y ago
    Depending on the definition of RSE, I may or may not have been one. The company I worked for was a Synchrotron Light Source; I worked on software for data collection on X-Ray beamlines. I would say that only about half of those in the same role as me had a PhD. Moving away from data collection to analysis, the fraction of PhDs went up, but only reached 1.0 when considering the sub-group specialising in structural biology.
  - 4y ago

yiyus 4y ago

This. I have worked for almost 15 years in academic research, but in very close collaboration with the steel industry. The code we write can help steel companies to save millions when developing new products. This is quite complex software, which combines materials science, mechanical engineering and advanced mathematical concepts while requiring high performance and reliability. I found a nice position for a tenure track in France, in a top research centre. Besides designing and writing software, I would have to design and implement experimental plans, teach, deal with students and administration, keep an excellent publications record, and find funding for future projects. Remote work would not be a possibility (but I would work may unpaid extra hours at home). And the amount of published papers and recommendation letters required just to be considered for the job was overwhelming. My salary would be lower than $30k/year. They do not even know what is a RSE. I am searching a remote job in the software industry now.

siva7 4y ago
seriously? in what kind of alternative reality does academia live to offer 30k?
- noobermin 4y ago
  European countries have lower salaries in general? Although their social safety nets are better. Also, assistant professors (or the equivalent there) generally make less but do probably make more once they get tenure. I'm assuming they meant the tenure-track position itself is ~30K USD, but making tenure usually does mean a pay increase.
  - evandijk70 4y ago
    In the Netherlands, 30k is the starting salary for a PhD student. 30k for a tenure track position sounds insane to me.
    - maccard 4y ago
      In Ireland PhD stipends are closer to 13-17k. It's not a perfect comparison because the PhD stipends are tax free, so your comparative salary would be in the 17-20k mark. That said, Postdoc research positions are much closer to 40k than 30k.

zozbot234 4y ago

As usual, xkcd is relevant: https://xkcd.com/664/ https://xkcd.com/664/

rob_c 4y ago

> at least in bioscience... BINGO! that field is notoriously horrible and interacts extremely badly with a 'when not discovered here, not important' syndrome. Biology is brutal toward bio-physicists, mathematicians as well as people who code who they are forced to work with rather than seek out to help them. I still hold up as an example nonsense discussions around p-values in bio vs actual work going on in statistics in maths departments. It shows how far detached they've become. Not to criticize too strongly, but given the above, combined with it's reproducabilty crisis, and existential problem of being in the back-pocket of big-pharma, I seriously doubt the professional integrity of a lot of people in the field. Move toward mathematics, physics and chemistry. There is (some) serious money and a good atmosphere around areas such as finite-element modelling, or wolphram like tools as an example. There is a lack of direct funding for decent posts but you get recognised and paid the equivalent as a peer, I know from working with some of these people. It's not to say it's 100% always without friction, but no job is I'd argue.

willis936 4y ago
The reproducabilty crisis in chemistry is just as bad, if not worse, than biology. Anyone with a pen can reproduce a math proof. If you work on a big project (physics experiment) where every paper has a dozen eyes on it you can't slip crap work by your peers because that's their livelihood on the line. In between you have bio/chem fields where each project is too expensive to trivially reproduce but still small enough to have only one career on the line for each project.
- myst1 4y ago
  Most of the reproducibility issues in chemistry happen in biochem in my experience(meanwhile it gets the most funding). That said, synthetic chemistry is also a problem area. Usually in synthetic chemistry it's not that the work can't be entirely reproduced, but rather that yields are fudged. That's mostly because PIs say "you can't graduate until this reaction yields 99%.". So after someone has written four papers, taught classes at minimum wage for 7 years, they fudge a 95% to a 99%. It's not okay, but neither is the way academia is structured. Super glad my discipline was elsewhere, but I saw colleagues suffer from this stuff...

alimov 4y ago

Thank you for your comment, it was a joy to read and get a peek.

noobermin 4y ago

Since this thread is turning into a yet another complaints about academia thread: One of the serious downsides of working in academia is you are basically doing the industry's work for them for less pay and they will one day turn around, pat you on the back, then sell your work for millions of dollars. It gets worse honestly the closer you are to applied fields. There, you already straddle the line between what your more "pure" (and less well paid) peers think is "science" and actually making things that will in fact make people's lives better, so you have less room to be idealistic about why you are doing what you're doing, that is, whether it is for "moving the needle" or "adding to the corpus of humanity's knowledge" or whether you really are just doing someone else's work for them they aren't willing to fund given the risks. And given that the latter is basically closer to what you're doing and your closer to the place where you'll see your work enable someone else's riches, it's hard not to want to jump ship and just become one of those people on the other side but make money hands over fist. It's an upsetting situation honestly.

javajosh 4y ago
The next thought should be: why doesn't neo-liberal capitalism fix this problem? And: is my characterization of the problem correct? Why not start a new firm that better compensates researchers (and tool makers) for their valuable work? It seems like big tech (especially Google, and perhaps Microsoft) comes in from the commercial side and invests in R&D at reasonable rates for just this purpose! But surely if workers are systematically undercompensated, there is room for a disruptive firm to come in and take the best talent and still make a profit. Perhaps the characterization is wrong and the EV (expected value) of this work is far lower than you think (this seems likely), and/or there are externalities like regulation, or the leverage of prestige that traditional orgs (e.g. universities and publishers) wield, that warp the profit incentive. Or (and this is my cynical view) pure science was always best left to the hobbyists. Historically the most important discoveries have come only rarely and to those who loved doing science in their free time or, more rarely, when a talented individual found a patron. Building a science factory and hiring science factory workers not only sounds distasteful, but it doesn't seem to work very well. (The exceptions being those very capital intensive projects like the LHC which require a large pool of professional scientists and engineers to do the experiment.)

ArtWomb 4y ago

The converse is something akin to Tableau, which came out of the graphics department of Stanford and Pat Hanrahan's lab. Tableau was acquired by Salesforce for around $15B. No doubt, proximity to SV was key to their growth. But the original research from 20+ years ago on DataCubes visualization was a product of academia. It just so happened to coincide with our era of "democratizing data science" ;) Multiscale Visualization Using Data Cubes https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/pan_zoom/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/pan_zoom/

Archelaos 4y ago

Having worked in academia before the age of 40 (though not in computer science), I can agree with this view. To enjoy the benefits of status, compensation and, to a certain extent, flexibility, one has to reach the level of professor. After failing to reach this level at 40, I switched to software development, without ever regretting it. A while ago I saw a position for image recognition in astronomy advertised by the university of my town. It sounded all very exciting for someone who enjoys figuring out solutions for a complex task -- until I looked up the pay grade: Less than half of my current hourly rate, without the flexibility I have (working from everywhere I want, even pre-Covid). Well, the problem seems to be that a competitive salary for a software engineer would probably have to be higher than for the professor leading the group. As an aside, I recently had a discussion with a friend in my country's military about the cyber defence forces wanting to recruit software engineers. There is a similar problem here: if they do not use contractors (whom they can pay what they ask for), they have difficulty finding an appropriate pay grade, since a well-qualified software engineer would have to be paid better than a general.

sokoloff 4y ago

I have some similar feelings about working for a game company (that was fairly successful and on the “better half” of the distribution of game companies). Loved the creative control and influence I could have (even as a mid-20s tech lead on a title), loved my colleagues, loved the work, and even enjoyed the satisfaction from shipping a golden master after a multi-week crunch period. Ultimately, a hedge fund was willing to pay me a multiple of what I was making in games and I decided I’d rather have a house than work on games.

ManBlanket 4y ago

I dropped graduate research into adversarial algorithms and generative adversarial networks when I realized instead of being paid beans to do something genuinely interesting I could get paid 6 figures to make business software and do whatever I want with my free time. Like so many other potential promising academic software engineers, I had a family to raise and a life to live. No kidding science needs more research software engineers, but that isn't going to change until science can pay software engineers at least a basic minimal income. When that changes I'll considering picking up where I left off.

the_only_law 4y ago

Tbh the more I hear about the academia the worse it sounds. Look I’m willing to take a massive paycut, I was starting to come around to the time cost, and hell, I’ll even work in Matlab. But: > you don't have to work weekends, and you also don't have to feed the mice on a Sunday night This is just wild, and if anything reminds me of low skilled near minimum wages jobs.