> Single-tasking on important problems I think the author is right here. Being a professor is more like being a startup founder than being an employee. > Pres

> Single-tasking on important problems I think the author is right here. Being a professor is more like being a startup founder than being an employee. > Prestige and money I don’t think the author touches on some of the most important differences in this section. First, most academic faculty jobs are 9 months. This leaves a lot of time for other endeavors. Professors can make bank doing independent consulting work on the side, which is something frowned upon typically for employees. The other thing is, there’s a lot of agency as a professor. Your day-to-day are managed by you. If you want to cancel a class, that’s your prerogative. What you teach in the classroom is yours as well, and the content you create (lecture slides, teaching materials, assignments, exams) is owned by you, not the school. Admin sets your teaching schedule but otherwise your days are yours to manage. I work 3 days a week at home. One week I went to a conference in Greece and taught from the hotel. > Job security Its true that it’s harder to switch jobs than a tech worker in SF. But at the same time, that every city has an academic sector means you aren’t locked into living in a tech hub. Also, while most academic roles are hard to come by, CS positions are routinely open; many departments have been hiring continuously for years. > Freedom I think academia still comes ahead here. Beyond freedom, even more important is control. The administration can’t yank you off a project. If you change institutions, you can take your project and funding with you. That kind of control can’t be found in corporations. More worryingly, many tech companies include clauses in their contracts which try to claim intellectual ownership over all ideas generated by their employees, even in their spare time. I don’t know if OpenAI does, but that kind of contract language is toxic to me. In all, I don’t think the “industry employee”/“academic professor” dichotomy is valid. As I mentioned, the for-profit equivalent of a research lab would be a tech startup. If you don’t think you’d be happy as a startup founder, you won’t be happy as a PI of a research lab. The main allure of going the academic route is that it’s the proven way to work on an idea long term without having to worry about pesky things like profitability and product market fit. The better comparison is academic research scientist, which is more like a staff role. There, you don’t have the breadth of scope a professor does, but you still get to work on a cool project. You don’t have full control over it, but you also are insulated more from it going sideways.