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In my experience professors are very good candidates for top tech companies - many have management experience, many have taught algorithms at one point or are g

In my experience professors are very good candidates for top tech companies - many have management experience, many have taught algorithms at one point or are good at them already. I doubt this professor didn’t have a choice.

khazhoux 3y ago
Yikes, I’ve had the opposite experience, uniformly. Professors join to great acclaim, and everyone then slowly learns (again for the Nth time) that “managing” students, writing grant proposals, and running research projects, has very little carryover to managing a team of engineers inside a large complex project.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  Ok, but that doesn’t change the fact that they get offers and thus have many choices.
shermantanktop 3y ago
My experience (at a BigCo) has been the opposite. The below applies to about 60% of them; the other 40% are good or great. Our academic gets tired of terrible wages and thinks “I’ll do a tour of duty at a tech company and pay off my mortgage.” They arrive and freak out because the incentives are totally different. They spend their days trying to replicate the vibe of graduate seminars or R&D projects (e.g. “hey everyone, let’s explore type systems!”), but the working developers around them are not buying it. They rant and rave about how they can’t get approval to publish this or that IP. Oh, and it turns out their coding skills are below that of the incoming junior engineers who they used to teach. Ultimately they fail to make any impact, so their project is cancelled — an indignity which they would never experience at uni. So they leave, but during that 1-2 year adventure they have been paid 10x they would have made at a university. And now they can return to academia having paid off some debts and with a shiny entry on their resume that says they have Real World experience at a BigCo. Again, that’s not everyone, and I sort of rolled all the bad problems into one scenario. But I have seen it many times - just last month I watched a team of academics get torn down due to this type of square-peg-round-hole mismatch.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  This sounds like a Google experience - not something that happens at Amazon. Which is perhaps why OPs professor joined Amazon again after complaining.
  - shermantanktop 3y ago
    I worked at Amazon too, and this scenario has happened there as well.
- analognoise 3y ago
  > e.g. “hey everyone, let’s explore type systems!” Oh my God, I laughed way too hard.

khazhoux 3y ago

Yikes, I’ve had the opposite experience, uniformly. Professors join to great acclaim, and everyone then slowly learns (again for the Nth time) that “managing” students, writing grant proposals, and running research projects, has very little carryover to managing a team of engineers inside a large complex project.

laidoffamazon 3y ago
Ok, but that doesn’t change the fact that they get offers and thus have many choices.

shermantanktop 3y ago

My experience (at a BigCo) has been the opposite. The below applies to about 60% of them; the other 40% are good or great. Our academic gets tired of terrible wages and thinks “I’ll do a tour of duty at a tech company and pay off my mortgage.” They arrive and freak out because the incentives are totally different. They spend their days trying to replicate the vibe of graduate seminars or R&D projects (e.g. “hey everyone, let’s explore type systems!”), but the working developers around them are not buying it. They rant and rave about how they can’t get approval to publish this or that IP. Oh, and it turns out their coding skills are below that of the incoming junior engineers who they used to teach. Ultimately they fail to make any impact, so their project is cancelled — an indignity which they would never experience at uni. So they leave, but during that 1-2 year adventure they have been paid 10x they would have made at a university. And now they can return to academia having paid off some debts and with a shiny entry on their resume that says they have Real World experience at a BigCo. Again, that’s not everyone, and I sort of rolled all the bad problems into one scenario. But I have seen it many times - just last month I watched a team of academics get torn down due to this type of square-peg-round-hole mismatch.

laidoffamazon 3y ago
This sounds like a Google experience - not something that happens at Amazon. Which is perhaps why OPs professor joined Amazon again after complaining.
- shermantanktop 3y ago
  I worked at Amazon too, and this scenario has happened there as well.
analognoise 3y ago
> e.g. “hey everyone, let’s explore type systems!” Oh my God, I laughed way too hard.