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"infinite time to read" Depending on what you do (and where you do it), the private sector can actually be quite liberating. I find academia stifling.
by fixxer 13y ago
"infinite time to read"
Depending on what you do (and where you do it), the private sector can actually be quite liberating. I find academia stifling.
- batgaijin 13y agoCould you elaborate? I mean I agree about academia being stifling, but I have trouble imagining it easy to find a research/reading sort of job in CS today.
- fixxer 13y agoSure... here is an example (there are others): Finance is in the crapper, but I still know people getting research gigs with hedge funds. In those jobs, you get to do all that chalk talk/intellectual masturbation, but you also get to test ideas in real-time... very cool when they work out.
- _delirium 13y agoI've run into people with great private-sector positions, but they seem to almost all be ex-academics who first established themselves in academia, and then jumped to something high-level and researchy, like a position at Microsoft Research, or a senior position at Google with considerable freedom [1]. For a junior person, academia does have a lot of downsides, not least because of the massive move towards rationalization, metrics-counting, and a focus on how much grant money you bring in. But the junior people I know in the private sector have even less freedom regarding what they spend their day doing, and much less freedom when it comes to formal working conditions, such as choosing to work from home or a coffee shop a few days a week. Is there a way to find positions with research freedom in the private sector without first becoming established in academia? [1] Matt Welsh is a good example of someone who did the senior-academic-to-industry transition. He went into academia, got tenure, got promoted up the ranks through to Full Professor at Harvard, and then left for a senior position at Google with considerable freedom: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/ http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/
- fixxer 13y ago"Is there a way to find positions with research freedom in the private sector without first becoming established in academia?" Define "established"?
- _delirium 13y agoMost relevant to the hypotheticals here, one question is whether you can get a position with research freedom in the private sector without going into academia at all. If you choose industry rather than academia, is it possible? Or do you need to first get that "professor" line on your resume to be able to land those kinds of industry positions?
- scott_s 13y agoI work for IBM Research. While I do not have complete freedom, I feel that my research and development mandate is quite broad within my project. I came straight from grad school. Most people that are hired into IBM Research were not professors, but are coming from grad school or post-docs.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoDidn't they just shutdown Hawthorne, move everyone in software to Yorktown, and lose a lot of people to Google New York in the process? What's left?
- scott_s 13y agoWe moved, yes, but I'm not aware of anyone who left because of the move. I'm actually happier up in Yorktown - it's a better building than Hawthorne.
- zura 13y agoAnyone with a Masters degree (working as a researcher)?