9 ms·

> If you really like the atmosphere at universities, that is cool. Put a backpack on and you can walk into any building at any university in the United States

by m0th87 15y ago

> If you really like the atmosphere at universities, that is cool. Put a backpack on and you can walk into any building at any university in the United States any time you want. Backpacks are a lot cheaper than working in academia. You can lead the life of the mind in industry, too — and enjoy less politics and better pay. You can even get published in journals, if that floats your boat. (After you’ve escaped the mind-warping miasma of academia, you might rightfully question whether Published In A Journal is really personally or societally significant as opposed to close approximations like Wrote A Blog Post And Showed It To Smart People.) The degree of arrogance in this article is astounding. I've worked at Google, Microsoft, and IBM, and the work I've found most satisfying is in grad school. To each his own. If you let something like this guide your life decisions, you have much bigger issues to deal with than finding a so-called "README.txt for your career as a young engineer".

mattmiller 15y ago
You missed the point of the article. You can do cool thing even at large companies iff you put yourself out there and look for opportunities that interest you. You can also get paid for it if you are smart.
- kamaal 15y ago
  I think you have put it very well. This is something that I have always wondered. Leave alone some bad places, lets take the example of a good place. Consider a large corporation which is a pretty good place. But you also have a your usual large organisation crowd-control policies. If a person can't make use of good opportunities, experiment and learn in such a place, I doubt whether the same guy will do any good at a reputed place(like big web shops today) or even a start up. Or more appropriately, only people who are capable of doing good in large corporates can do well in a start up. Or vice versa. If you can't do well in big company without any thing stopping you, you are not likely to do well in a start up either. Start up's are not some magical places of congregation which will give you edge over your career without any considerable effort. Wherever you are, you've got take personal interest and steps to learn, work and make your mark.
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  It's actually pretty hard to get on to the most interesting projects in large companies. Your first project is a roll of the dice, and you usually have to do well on that first one to get an upgrade on your second. Yes, there's cutting-edge work going on at Fortune 500 tech companies. It's about 5% of the workload, and it's competitive to get onto these projects. You're competing against PhDs who have been with the company for 10+ years, have major internal accomplishments to their name, and are objectively more qualified than most of us are. This doesn't mean you shouldn't try. There are other benefits to working at these large companies (high salaries, good benefits, and work that, even if unglamorous, is a part of something successful people care about). I do think, however, that the idea that a 25-year-old can walk into Intel and Oracle and expect to be allocated to cutting-edge work because of raw talent, is patently absurd. Most large software companies have 6 de facto tiers which may not correspond to job titles: Freshman, Junior, Senior, Lead, Senior Lead, and Fellow. The type of work you get depends largely on this tier: Freshman: low-impact but "fun" projects, "bait" work designed to ease you into the company. This is what people get straight out of school. Junior: mid-priority but grungy projects, maintenance of others' architectures. Keep in mind adverse selection: the good architects generally want to assist in the maintenance load for their creations, while the bad ones tend to run like hell. Senior: mid-priority but more interesting and autonomous projects. Opportunities for junior-level IC (individual contribution) on high-priority projects. This is where most people are expected to plateau. Lead: leadership roles on low- and mid-priority projects, plus encouragement toward IC on high-priority work. Good point from which to move into middle management if one hits a technical plateau. Senior Lead: leadership roles on mid- and high-priority projects, plus expectation of IC on high-priority work. Fun but low-priority work is generally not accepted (it won't get you fired, but you'll stop advancing and your peers will think you're wasting your time.) Most SL are trying to get into lower-upper management (yes, large companies have a de facto lower-upper, mid-upper, and upper-upper management) because so few people make it to the next technical tier. Fellow: complete autonomy, high degree of influence, implicit trust. Ability to flit between high-priority and low-priority projects based on what one wants to do. To get interesting technical work and enough income to raise children in NYC or SF without an awful commute, you generally need to make it into the Fellow tier, which is much harder than moving into management. At Lead, you have enough autonomy and status to take on whatever project you want, but having real influence (or high income) requires going higher, and going higher requires spending a substantial portion of your time (40+ hpw) on grungy work because that's what Senior Leads do. The bitchiest tiers are Junior and Senior Lead. Juniors have something to lose (3-4 years' career investment) and are skilled enough to take the worst of the work (middling priority maintenance, both unglamorous and underappreciated). Senior Leads are the one you see on-call at 11:30pm despite having two kids. And if you think working on a mid-priority, grungy project is bad, imagine what it's like to manage that project and have to deal with people quitting, transferring, or getting fired at a rate of 2-3/year.
mechanical_fish 15y ago
How long have you been out of grad school? If you are still in grad school... Write us back in ten years and tell us how academia is coming along. Meanwhile, carpe diem. If you're out of grad school, tell us how much more awesome your career is than those of your relatively-untrained peers. More money? More respect? More challenges? What? I went to grad school, and then I did a postdoc, and these things were indeed very fun hobbies [1], though very very expensive in lost income and opportunity cost. But now I support a large number of PHP apps, make significantly more money than I did as a researcher, have significantly more impact on human lives than as a researcher, work less hard than a researcher... And am, gosh, approximately ten years behind my peers career-wise. Oh, those expensive hobbies! Still, nothing wrong with having hobbies. Just do be sure to know the difference between hobby and career. It can be similar to the difference between the transient and the steady-state. And if you're out of grad school and have managed to secure an awesome steady-state career as an academic researcher with job security and good pay and time to spend with your family, your other hobbies, and your community, please do write back and tell us again how arrogant we are. --- [1] In much the same way, I imagine, that the triathlon is fun.
- _delirium 15y ago
  The main arrogance, I think, is his claim that journals are just blog posts with more elitism, combined with a strange sort of anger towards academia (which doesn't seem to be based on knowledge of how academia works; it's not much of an ivory-tower fairy land, but really quite industry-like, with professors as managers in charge of running moderate-sized organizations, which they need to do PR, mentorship, and management for, along with generating revenue streams to keep the lab provisioned and grad students / postdocs paid). As for journals, I like blogging, and hope to see academic publishing move towards a more online, networked open model, but I simply don't think we're anywhere near that. A typical blog post and a typical journal article are miles apart, today, and very few novel scientific results are produced in blog posts. So if your goal is to advance science, you're probably going to be part of academic culture in one way or another, and probably going to publish your results in conferences or journals. That's also possible to do outside academia or an industrial research lab, but relatively few people outside those kinds of settings actually manage to get the time to do so, since their local incentives don't reward it. In some cases they actively hinder it; I've been working with some game-industry people who hope to publish some of their AI techniques in venues like (http://www.aiide.org/aiide11/ http://www.aiide.org/aiide11/), but publishing is often vetoed by their management.

by m0th87 15y ago

mattmiller 15y ago

You missed the point of the article. You can do cool thing even at large companies iff you put yourself out there and look for opportunities that interest you. You can also get paid for it if you are smart.

kamaal 15y ago
I think you have put it very well. This is something that I have always wondered. Leave alone some bad places, lets take the example of a good place. Consider a large corporation which is a pretty good place. But you also have a your usual large organisation crowd-control policies. If a person can't make use of good opportunities, experiment and learn in such a place, I doubt whether the same guy will do any good at a reputed place(like big web shops today) or even a start up. Or more appropriately, only people who are capable of doing good in large corporates can do well in a start up. Or vice versa. If you can't do well in big company without any thing stopping you, you are not likely to do well in a start up either. Start up's are not some magical places of congregation which will give you edge over your career without any considerable effort. Wherever you are, you've got take personal interest and steps to learn, work and make your mark.
michaelochurch 15y ago
It's actually pretty hard to get on to the most interesting projects in large companies. Your first project is a roll of the dice, and you usually have to do well on that first one to get an upgrade on your second. Yes, there's cutting-edge work going on at Fortune 500 tech companies. It's about 5% of the workload, and it's competitive to get onto these projects. You're competing against PhDs who have been with the company for 10+ years, have major internal accomplishments to their name, and are objectively more qualified than most of us are. This doesn't mean you shouldn't try. There are other benefits to working at these large companies (high salaries, good benefits, and work that, even if unglamorous, is a part of something successful people care about). I do think, however, that the idea that a 25-year-old can walk into Intel and Oracle and expect to be allocated to cutting-edge work because of raw talent, is patently absurd. Most large software companies have 6 de facto tiers which may not correspond to job titles: Freshman, Junior, Senior, Lead, Senior Lead, and Fellow. The type of work you get depends largely on this tier: Freshman: low-impact but "fun" projects, "bait" work designed to ease you into the company. This is what people get straight out of school. Junior: mid-priority but grungy projects, maintenance of others' architectures. Keep in mind adverse selection: the good architects generally want to assist in the maintenance load for their creations, while the bad ones tend to run like hell. Senior: mid-priority but more interesting and autonomous projects. Opportunities for junior-level IC (individual contribution) on high-priority projects. This is where most people are expected to plateau. Lead: leadership roles on low- and mid-priority projects, plus encouragement toward IC on high-priority work. Good point from which to move into middle management if one hits a technical plateau. Senior Lead: leadership roles on mid- and high-priority projects, plus expectation of IC on high-priority work. Fun but low-priority work is generally not accepted (it won't get you fired, but you'll stop advancing and your peers will think you're wasting your time.) Most SL are trying to get into lower-upper management (yes, large companies have a de facto lower-upper, mid-upper, and upper-upper management) because so few people make it to the next technical tier. Fellow: complete autonomy, high degree of influence, implicit trust. Ability to flit between high-priority and low-priority projects based on what one wants to do. To get interesting technical work and enough income to raise children in NYC or SF without an awful commute, you generally need to make it into the Fellow tier, which is much harder than moving into management. At Lead, you have enough autonomy and status to take on whatever project you want, but having real influence (or high income) requires going higher, and going higher requires spending a substantial portion of your time (40+ hpw) on grungy work because that's what Senior Leads do. The bitchiest tiers are Junior and Senior Lead. Juniors have something to lose (3-4 years' career investment) and are skilled enough to take the worst of the work (middling priority maintenance, both unglamorous and underappreciated). Senior Leads are the one you see on-call at 11:30pm despite having two kids. And if you think working on a mid-priority, grungy project is bad, imagine what it's like to manage that project and have to deal with people quitting, transferring, or getting fired at a rate of 2-3/year.

mechanical_fish 15y ago

How long have you been out of grad school? If you are still in grad school... Write us back in ten years and tell us how academia is coming along. Meanwhile, carpe diem. If you're out of grad school, tell us how much more awesome your career is than those of your relatively-untrained peers. More money? More respect? More challenges? What? I went to grad school, and then I did a postdoc, and these things were indeed very fun hobbies [1], though very very expensive in lost income and opportunity cost. But now I support a large number of PHP apps, make significantly more money than I did as a researcher, have significantly more impact on human lives than as a researcher, work less hard than a researcher... And am, gosh, approximately ten years behind my peers career-wise. Oh, those expensive hobbies! Still, nothing wrong with having hobbies. Just do be sure to know the difference between hobby and career. It can be similar to the difference between the transient and the steady-state. And if you're out of grad school and have managed to secure an awesome steady-state career as an academic researcher with job security and good pay and time to spend with your family, your other hobbies, and your community, please do write back and tell us again how arrogant we are. --- [1] In much the same way, I imagine, that the triathlon is fun.

_delirium 15y ago
The main arrogance, I think, is his claim that journals are just blog posts with more elitism, combined with a strange sort of anger towards academia (which doesn't seem to be based on knowledge of how academia works; it's not much of an ivory-tower fairy land, but really quite industry-like, with professors as managers in charge of running moderate-sized organizations, which they need to do PR, mentorship, and management for, along with generating revenue streams to keep the lab provisioned and grad students / postdocs paid). As for journals, I like blogging, and hope to see academic publishing move towards a more online, networked open model, but I simply don't think we're anywhere near that. A typical blog post and a typical journal article are miles apart, today, and very few novel scientific results are produced in blog posts. So if your goal is to advance science, you're probably going to be part of academic culture in one way or another, and probably going to publish your results in conferences or journals. That's also possible to do outside academia or an industrial research lab, but relatively few people outside those kinds of settings actually manage to get the time to do so, since their local incentives don't reward it. In some cases they actively hinder it; I've been working with some game-industry people who hope to publish some of their AI techniques in venues like (http://www.aiide.org/aiide11/ http://www.aiide.org/aiide11/), but publishing is often vetoed by their management.