4 ms·

To start with, I never thought I would be so pro-industry. It is very surprising to me, I always saw my pathway as staying in academia. However, that has change

To start with, I never thought I would be so pro-industry. It is very surprising to me, I always saw my pathway as staying in academia. However, that has changed. I work in industry and can echo this. Industry is HAPPENING for research. I am TRUSTED to do research in my company and drive research directions. My time as a research scientist is RESPECTED and I am not asked to do things that would WASTE my time. When I am interacting with my colleagues everyone is INTERESTED in the topic and not their EGOS. It is incredibly rewarding to show up at work and everyone is interested and engaged. Projects are funded either through customers or internally but we all feel like a team. In addition to this industry work, I have a grant through a university that hasn't started yet (!) and I have spent approximately 4 weeks of full-time work doing paperwork related to the grant. This doesn't include any of the effort to write the grant. This full-time work includes: sitting in meetings with the university budget people not understanding their own spreadsheets, writing prestigious letters for prestigious people to sign welcoming me to their own prestigious institutions, defining the specific dates I will take a month long travel to visit a colleague 3 years from now, a back and forth email exchange that took all day to identify the correct date format to be used in a web form (it was unclear the date format was the issue until the end), vainly explaining to university administration that project A and project B are not the same project nor funded the same way despite that I work on both. Also I live in a country that decided to blow up their funding agency because a new party took over the government and that postponed my grant by 1.5 years. Like the author, I loved being a PhD student. I loved doing a postdoc. I love being a scientist. I love the idea of sitting around and thinking about things and building models to test out ideas and creating new knowledge. But working in academia is a no-go because of the amount of nonsense you put up with. This is compounded when you are actively interacting with university administrators who have permanent jobs (funded by the overhead from your grants) while you do not. And likely they have higher salaries then you and your phd students and postdocs. Meanwhile there is little to any support in most places for workers (thankfully, I have a union in the country I work in). I strongly recommend anyone pursuing a phd or postdoc to do whatever they want, but don't buy into the egoist bullshit of academia. Industry is where its at. Sure it has it's problems, not every industry job is like mine. But it is better. And it's not about the pay (even though that is nice). It's about how much I love to show up to work every day compared to the bullshit of academia. Note: I don't know why i was capitalizing words, I suppose I just feel strongly about things.

ModernMech 4y ago
Great comment. A couple questions I have, because you seem like you like your work: 1. Can you start your own project? 2. If so, how do you get funding and build a team for it? 3. If you start a project and move to another company, can you take your funding and project and team with you? 4. If you leave your job, are you able to take a position at a company that competes with your old company? 5. Do you decide your work schedule? How many days a week do you work? 6. Do you own what you create on company time? Does your company own what you create on your time? The answers to these questions were my biggest concern in making the choice. The most important one is the last one, where I found clauses in my industry employment contracts purporting to own all of my thoughts. Such terms were set in stone; either sign or the offer would be rescinded. I’m wondering if similar contracts are found in your country.
- mnky9800n 4y ago
  Hi! Yes I can answer. To tell you more about the company, it started as a software consultancy by an informatics professor and a senior research scientist (computer science). They have been pushing more and more into R&D consulting and internal research. 1. Yes. When I started at the company I proposed a project and the company decided to fund it internally. There are other people in the company with internal projects (like there is a nuclear medicine group) as well but I guess most people work for customers. But this is definitely possible. Since we are a consulting group, internal projects don't often pay as well as customer projects, but people are motivated for different reasons. 2. The CEO and CSO (chief science officer) met and decided on a budget for me. That budget includes money for buying my hours for the project and travel, visiting colleagues, and conferences. Since it funds me, basically, and I am working on a team with people outside of the company, I didn't need to build a team for it. However, building teams internally like this would be expected in the future based on conversations with the CSO. Also I really am looking forward to building internal teams in the future so I hope it will happen. 3. I cannot take internally funded projects and the team with me unless the new company decided that they were going to buy the hours of the team I guess. That being said see the comment about FOSS in answer 6. 4. I didn't sign a non-compete anything, so I would assume there is no issue here. 5. Yes, my work schedule is completely decided by me except for team meetings, etc. I work 5 days a week but I don't always work 5 days a week. The company encourages this and we have ski and climbing slack channels for people to plan stuff like that before, during, or after normal working hours. 6. I think it depends on what I am creating. Our company believes in FOSS, so everyone who is building software internally does so with that in mind. Not all customers believe that though. If I am producing research, I am allowed and expected to publish it in journals which means, essentially, I own the research in the sense that it would matter to an academic. If I produce a result so profound that we could develop a product around it and bring it to market to all become rather wealthy, then we would do so and perhaps embargo results in a paper until the product is released. I'm not sure that would really matter that much in my case. I think the company does own some of what I do and think about. It's only fair that if I come up with an idea under company time they get first dibs. Even Woz had to ask Hewlett-Packard if they wanted the Apple ii before he could sell it himself. Happy to answer more questions if you have them.

ModernMech 4y ago

Great comment. A couple questions I have, because you seem like you like your work: 1. Can you start your own project? 2. If so, how do you get funding and build a team for it? 3. If you start a project and move to another company, can you take your funding and project and team with you? 4. If you leave your job, are you able to take a position at a company that competes with your old company? 5. Do you decide your work schedule? How many days a week do you work? 6. Do you own what you create on company time? Does your company own what you create on your time? The answers to these questions were my biggest concern in making the choice. The most important one is the last one, where I found clauses in my industry employment contracts purporting to own all of my thoughts. Such terms were set in stone; either sign or the offer would be rescinded. I’m wondering if similar contracts are found in your country.

mnky9800n 4y ago
Hi! Yes I can answer. To tell you more about the company, it started as a software consultancy by an informatics professor and a senior research scientist (computer science). They have been pushing more and more into R&D consulting and internal research. 1. Yes. When I started at the company I proposed a project and the company decided to fund it internally. There are other people in the company with internal projects (like there is a nuclear medicine group) as well but I guess most people work for customers. But this is definitely possible. Since we are a consulting group, internal projects don't often pay as well as customer projects, but people are motivated for different reasons. 2. The CEO and CSO (chief science officer) met and decided on a budget for me. That budget includes money for buying my hours for the project and travel, visiting colleagues, and conferences. Since it funds me, basically, and I am working on a team with people outside of the company, I didn't need to build a team for it. However, building teams internally like this would be expected in the future based on conversations with the CSO. Also I really am looking forward to building internal teams in the future so I hope it will happen. 3. I cannot take internally funded projects and the team with me unless the new company decided that they were going to buy the hours of the team I guess. That being said see the comment about FOSS in answer 6. 4. I didn't sign a non-compete anything, so I would assume there is no issue here. 5. Yes, my work schedule is completely decided by me except for team meetings, etc. I work 5 days a week but I don't always work 5 days a week. The company encourages this and we have ski and climbing slack channels for people to plan stuff like that before, during, or after normal working hours. 6. I think it depends on what I am creating. Our company believes in FOSS, so everyone who is building software internally does so with that in mind. Not all customers believe that though. If I am producing research, I am allowed and expected to publish it in journals which means, essentially, I own the research in the sense that it would matter to an academic. If I produce a result so profound that we could develop a product around it and bring it to market to all become rather wealthy, then we would do so and perhaps embargo results in a paper until the product is released. I'm not sure that would really matter that much in my case. I think the company does own some of what I do and think about. It's only fair that if I come up with an idea under company time they get first dibs. Even Woz had to ask Hewlett-Packard if they wanted the Apple ii before he could sell it himself. Happy to answer more questions if you have them.