19 ms·

Leaving Academia (2013)

98 points by msvan 12y ago

noobermin 12y ago
I'm curious what this fellow's experience after leaving was.
- zo1 12y ago
  We'll just have to wait and see. Perhaps he'll write about just that in his blog at some point.
- jakobegger 12y ago
  I'm now an independent software developer. I already had a side project that was doing pretty well (Mac App), and I started to work on a second Mac app that I released last summer. I wrote a bit about it on https://eggerapps.at/blog/ https://eggerapps.at/blog/ Another reason for leaving that I didn't mention in the text was the birth of my first son. I saw how colleagues had little time to spend with their newborns. Now that I'm on my own I can choose myself how much time to spend with my kids.
  - NotOscarWilde 12y ago
    > I'm now an independent software developer. I already had a side project that was doing pretty well Is it bringing enough money for you to pay half of your family's bills? Forgive me for being so direct, but "independent software developer" is a very broad label, and it contains both the successful and the struggling programmers. Not that being dependent on a family is a bad thing; the only downside is that it is not something that everyone can do.
    - WhitneyLand 12y ago
      Why did you move so far away from your research?
      - jakobegger 12y ago
        My research involved a lot of programming, and I enjoyed making pretty GUIs for the code I wrote. So I already knew how to make Mac Apps. I made database apps because I saw an opportunity. I had been thinking about doing something more related to my area of study (physics & computer graphics). However, all I came up with were some vague ideas for games, and games seemed too risky for me. I do miss some parts of my research (especially maths), but for the most part I'm happy with what I do now.
    - jakobegger 12y ago
      We did move in with my parents for a year after I quit grad school, which lowered our cost of living significantly. But we no longer rely on family now. I'll share numbers too: My revenue this year is around 50000€. (mostly sofware sales + some consulting) My take-home salary (after expenses, social security, taxes) will probably be around 30000€, which is significantly above the median income in Austria. It's also more than what I'd make as a junior software developer.
miochat 12y ago
Sadly, most of the people I care about also care about degrees, so I'm still struggling for a PhD title..
- carl-j 12y ago
  May I ask what your relation to these people is? Is it friends and family or prospective employers?
Hermel 12y ago
PhDs in IT do not pay off, at least salary-wise. The time is takes to complete them is much better invested in a regular job, gaining practical experience.
- eob 12y ago
  The repayment with respect to industry work is in credentialed autonomy, not money. And for many, that's worth it.
  - beambot 12y ago
    Amazingly succinct way to describe the benefits. For the OPs field (physics), this is doubly-important for any industrial research positions.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    Indeed. I moved academia -> short industry adventure -> academia. I like both. Industry is more pleasing because you work on products that are directly used and you are judged (at least in a small company) on tangible results. The downside is that work is mostly driven by the most urgent needs or cash flow, so there is far less time to explore certain things deeper. In academia on the other times, you are judged on getting grants (which is definitely process that is to a large extend out of your hands, and tends to favor people who were already successful in getting grants). On the other hand, you have far more time to explore, try, fail, and try again (as long as you are not a professor). One should also realize that graduate studies highly differ per country. E.g. I did my PhD in The Netherlands, and there are no tests, or anything alike. I basically got funding for four years to do research, a small amount of teaching and to write my thesis. There was only one serious sanity check after the first year to filter out PhD candidates who were very unlikely to complete a thesis in four years.
    - thirdtruck 12y ago
      > I did my PhD in The Netherlands ... I think this is a point that deserves more emphasis. It's easy to forget the degree to which US education is uncommonly expensive, among other things that skew its ROI. Makes me wonder if I could afford a CS education abroad (being self-taught), without taking loans.
noelwelsh 12y ago
What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience? Substitute "writing a paper" with "building a product" and you're well on your way to being an entrepreneur.
- noobermin 12y ago
  One (might) pay off and benefit the world, or it may flop and you have to move onto your next one. One (might) be influential, or it may be relegated to the annals of some obscure journal, never to read or cared about. Still, there might be a pay off for one (monetary). The other buys your "academia points". The pay-off is a little more suspect on the academic's side, I think.
sktrdie 12y ago
I find myself in the exact opposite situation. Been working for industry since I was 18 and am 28 now. Never got a degree. I'm tired of working in a consumer setting where everything has to be faster, better, more pleasing for the client. I've now moved to academia because I want to work on things that are foundation for other work and not always things that are immediately useful to people. However I see how he had enough of that always being examined environment, but in Industry you'll also get examined, this time by a cranky costumer that wants a button a little more to the left, and who doesn't have the professional skills to examine your work.
- noname123 12y ago
  I think it's because OP never had the xp of working in industry and think grass is greener on the other side. I also made the switch from consumer web to academia. However I understand from his perspective which is from someone who wants stay on research, go from PhD to post-doc to to fellow to principal investigator to whatever. Competition is intense and everyone along the way is selected for people who are so interested in their work that they might be very unbalanced in other area's. It's all about trade-off's. I personally would rather trade for working on things that I find interesting and technical than A/B testing. But I can understand someone who is tired of academia and wants to live in the "real world" for a change. I can also understand people who are very happy doing things that they think are very engaging/fun/important in consumer web and respect that.
  - hessenwolf 12y ago
    So interested in their work? Nah, it is luck and politics. Sadly, most of the selections are not for hard-core research chops. The whole grant and annual weighing scales approach nowadays strongly dis-incentivizes risk-taking. Without risk-taking with great big brass genitalia, research results are pretty pedestrian.
    - kefka 12y ago
      Not really. There's tons of low-hanging fruit that could be worthy of some serious papers / prestige if the work was done for them. 1. Biology : Repetitive Strain Injury calculations via Neural Load 2. Computational Photography : Low Cost, Quick Photogrammetry Calculations via GPS/9DoF metadata 3. Biometric Security : MS Kinect Biometric Security via RGBD and 3D Sound
ins0m 12y ago
A conclusion I am starting to see at the horizon for myself. Especially as a CS major the academic reality hits you hard - realizing this is probably not the direction you should bet your best years on. Taking the risk can be more fulfilling. I would by quit interested in your next steps and way down the road.
nicklaf 12y ago
Footnote: this story is oddly similar to the top story on the first archive.org snapshot of SN: https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...
tspiteri 12y ago
The title "Leaving Academia" made me expect the author to have been in academia for some time, and not as a student, and to have decided to move on to something else. The article is not about leaving academia, but about not joining academia.
- dalke 12y ago
  I think your perception is miscalibrated. The writer did join academia, just not for very long. If I were to get a job at Google, work there for a week, and quit, I think it would just fine to write an essay about "Leaving Google". How long do you think you need to be working at X before you can write that you are leaving X? Or rather, when do you think you actually join academia? Is a 6th year graduate student, pre-defense, still not yet part of academia?
  - rdc12 12y ago
    And if you left Google after a week and wrote about it, most people would probably dismiss it
    - dalke 12y ago
      I agree with you, and I see that you agree with me in that it's inappropriate to conclude that "Leaving X" implies that a person was at X 'for some time.'
- jakobegger 12y ago
  This attitude is exactly what made me leave. I've spent more than seven years at university, three of them paid to do research, and then I get told 'you're not really part of the club yet, you're just a student'.
  - tspiteri 12y ago
    I had not read your article properly, and I got the impression that you were still considering whether to join the PhD programme. Now I have reread it and you said you had already started the programme, so you are right, apologies. But then why do you imply, in the conclusion, that leaving academia is like stopping educating yourself? If what you were doing was mainly educating yourself (which was not the case), then you would have been exactly "just a student".
gradstudent 12y ago
I remember this article the first time it was posted here. I remember I was not impressed. My opinion in in the interim has not improved. For a start, this should really be titled "Why I dropped out" as you cannot leave an institution to which you do not yet belong. Moreover, the article, then as now, seems as vapid as the comments it inspires; i.e. tall poppy bullshit. Bah humbug.
- dalke 12y ago
  Many people, and I am one, regard grad school as a professional position. Nominally you are there to do your own research and make your own decisions, under advisement of a professor. (I can see some exceptions for a new graduate student who is still doing coursework, but in this case the student had passed the qualifying examination.) As such, grad students don't really "drop out", just like employees don't really "drop out" of a job when they quit, nor unpaid elected officials don't "drop out" of office when they resign, nor volunteers drop out when they stop doing volunteer work. Personally I think there was a mistake in the logic. Success as an academic may by related to the number of citations one gets, but it's not a factor which affects one's graduate career. Only the handful of people in your graduation committee needs to be convinced about the work, and once you have the PhD there's no continue on that topic, or stay in academia.
navait 12y ago
>Maybe a handful, I said. And then I realized that there was no way I could work on that problem. Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives. What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience? I wanted to say at first that if he was in it for the sake of being a successful, high-impact researcher, he was in science for the wrong reasons. But really, unless you are one of those high-impact people, you aren't getting tenure. I don't feel like tenure is asking for much if you're a hard worker who's produced some novel results. I get that science is supposed to be about passion, but you can't support a family on passion alone. > A career in academia would just require even more proving my worthiness...I'd constantly be evaluated. That's not what I was looking for. He's in for a rude awakening. You're only as good as your last envelope.
- noobermin 12y ago
  A much more accurate statement is you might not get tenure if you're not high-impact, but you certainly won't if you aren't. Also, of course you are evaluated in anything in life, from the desk to the friendly get-together. The issue with academia has always been its ROI. You invest a lot into the academic life, your time, your youth, your energy, your mental state, all to graduate close to 30 make a salary some of the people you tutor make fresh out of college? All while working 50-60 hour weeks...it isn't quite the life. Perhaps being in a start-up requires such dedication too, but that can be seen a risk that can yield a great reward. For academe, there is no reward, save the "academic points." This [1] says it well. At least if you work hard and stress and have no life in the "real world", you'd have the chance of monetary compensation. Really, in academia, unless you are lucky enough to become a tenure prof, all you have is your pride that you understand something no else cares to. That, and the occasional free pizza and beer. [1] http://100rsns.blogspot.com/2010/10/25-academe-is-built-on-pride.html http://100rsns.blogspot.com/2010/10/25-academe-is-built-on-p...
  - NotOscarWilde 12y ago
    > For academe, there is no reward, save the "academic points." I disagree. First of all, there is a rather high place in the societal ladder. A university professor is still somebody who induces awe, plus the job has this "uncorrupted by money" vibe which you cannot get as a manager/entrepreneur. Furthermore, you have an extremely high position in the local society, i.e. at the university. But I think the real reward is not vain or materialistic -- the reward is doing something you adore, and something you find a lot of meaning in. Both teaching and research are extremely fulfilling for me (as a PhD student). Personally, I can think of other jobs in compsci/programming that would be fulfilling, but they are likely as unavailable as the university position.
panjaro 12y ago
How can I vote down this link?
berbc 12y ago
> A career in academia would just require even more proving my worthiness. I do not think the industry will accept you without you regularly proving your worthiness. Of course, a PhD is something special so I understand anybody would not want that, but not for the reasons given in the article. Same for crazy ideas and being educated. I believe someone could have given roughly the same reasons for "Leaving X" because she's tired of doing the things that X requires. At least we learn about what doing a PhD entitles you to do, but as others have pointed out, this is quite a rude awakening.
- fluxquanta 12y ago
  >I do not think the industry will accept you without you regularly proving your worthiness. Exactly. I left a physics PhD program after my first year because I couldn't stand the environment anymore, and went into software development for an established company. I'm still given "homework" and "exams", still judged on merit of my work, still proving my worthiness of my paycheck everyday. Luckily I had to work throughout undergrad and grad school to afford it, so I already had that knowledge going into my career, but it really sounds like the author of this article did not.
tensor 12y ago
The value in academia is not in the political benefits that it gives in getting a job or being recognized. If you are in it for fame and fortune, you are a fool. I was in academia. Not just a grad student, but achieved the phd and did a post doc. I don't regret any of it. It taught me many invaluable lessons, all of which have been useful in industry starting a company. My impression of industry so far: they don't get progress. They don't get innovation. They have problems, but they they don't understand them and are unable to commit resources to the procedures that are needed to solve them. Only the very biggest of tech companies like Google, Palintir, Apple, Facebook, are able to tackle the really hard problem. These are the problems that you can not make an estimate for in terms of completion. The majority of industry will not even entertain this class of problem. Academia, too, has a lot of problems. I left because of the publish or perish mentality. I liked to work on hard problems, and had some successes, but overall it is the numbers that matter not the difficulty. There are an equal number of politics in academia as in industry, though they are different in academia. In industry, politics often involves a lot of incompetent people in high places following paper work procedures that do not support their supposed cause, while in academia it is more a lot of infighting over government grants and insultingly simple metrics like the number of papers published. In short, the author of this post is full of ignorance, and I am only slightly less full of ignorance in that I haven't achieved tenure in academia, and only have several years in industry helping to run a company. None the less, what I learned in academia in terms of the science of computing, it was invaluable.
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- jostmey 12y ago
  > If you are in it for fame and fortune, you are a fool. I think that sums up why so many people hate being in academia. They go into it for the wrong reasons. I've seen many people make this mistake.
dgmdoug 12y ago
Isn't part of the problem that we place this artificial wall between academia and industry? I often found myself confused in this respect. I attained my PhD a number of years ago, and found this an invaluable experience, which has no doubt helped me to excel in industry, however I still meet people (developers and senior level executives especially) who think academia is about locking yourself in a room and writing stuff without building anything useful. Ironically, these are the same people who build products and code without surveying the field, understanding what is already out there and building on top of existing solutions. Their naivity and ignorance is such that they believe they are building something truly unique, and will get it right first time, every time. It seems to me that we should stop standing on each side of the fence and looking down on each other, and start working together. We might actually achieve something great it if we do that. Regards the OP, if it was the right time for him/her to leave, that's great. Nobody should continue on a path that they do not find fulfilling. It says nothing about academia, or industry though. It only reveals the feelings of the author. The true travesty here, is that he/she will find it extremely difficult to pick up that work again and find a place in a university if they change their mind in the future. Our system in the UK is broken, since you only get a single shot at academia -- unless of course you are independently wealthy. Perhaps this is the cause of the divide. You are either in, or you are out -- and once you make your choice there is no going back.
jcfrei 12y ago
Doing PhD has crossed my mind as well. From reading quite a slew of articles (most of them talking about abandoning academia, few of them happen to be positive), I would cynically summarize: Do a PhD if you are either a) doing it for the prestigious degree or b) because the subject really interests you. Don't do a PhD if a) you are hoping for a tenure or b) expect to earn more. I don't think there's anything inherently "noble" in doing a PhD, so I think the outcome of the decision should entirely depend on how realistic your expectations are.
- martincmartin 12y ago
  This is decent advice for many endeavours. To summarize: when choosing what to spend most of your waking hours on, don't just do it for the money, make sure it's something that interests you. Or, at least, that you can get in to.
- WhitneyLand 12y ago
  There is nobility in it. It still may not be the right tradeoff for people but expanding the sum of human knowledge is a great contribution.
cs702 12y ago
This is terrible in my view: "As a PhD student you get to choose some interesting problem and work on that, right? That's what I naively imagined before I started at the institute. Some day at lunch I told my supervisor about this idea I had. We could take his fluid simulation method from computer graphics and apply it to a problem related to molten polymers. There was this experiment by a group of applied physicists that would fit nicely. He asked me how many people would be interested in the problem. Maybe a handful, I said. And then I realized that there was no way I could work on that problem. Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives. What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience? To be successful you need to target a large audience, and not just pursue whatever obscure problem takes your fancy." As a society, don't we want our young academics to be able to pursue their intellectual passions, no matter how obscure? A lot of original research is produced in areas that others have overlooked or considered unimportant. Do we really want a "citation market" to determine whether researchers can pursue their passions?
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y ago
  Influence matters. And academia attributes influence to merit. But the shape of influence is different from field to field and specialization to specialization. Moreover, it’s difficult to pinpoint a field and specialization where citation impact isn’t limited to “a handful of people.”
- noelwelsh 12y ago
  For a number of reasons, no, we don't want PhD students to research whatever random topics pop into their head. For a start, PhD students don't know how to do research. That's one reason one does a PhD: to learn how to do research. That means listening to your supervisor and working on problems they suggest, at least in the early part of your PhD. I have seen many PhD students, including myself, arrive with half-baked ideas that go nowhere. Learning to formulate a useful research problem is a part of what you are taught. The second reason is that resources are finite. You don't get to piss around with other people's money anymore than other adults do.
  - 12y ago
keredson 12y ago
I also left my PhD program shortly after passing quals. I think it's a great time to bail. There are too many great classes you'll have to pass on if you're only long enough to get a masters, and you haven't yet burned a ton of dissertation hours. (Assuming you do it right - I remember my advisor being quite miffed that I wouldn't stop signing up for a full load each semester.) Grad classes really are the best learning bang for the buck/hour I've ever experienced. Just make sure you fill out the paperwork so you do get that MS along the way...
jmcmahon443 12y ago
You are an expert in computer graphics and you think that the entertainment industry is the only one for you? Go work for Autodesk, SolidWorks, Flux.io, PlanGrid, or one of the other companies making CAD software. WE NEED YOU GUYS.
- WhitneyLand 12y ago
  Autodesk is a massive part of entertainment industry software depending on the products. The deadlines and stress aren't much different either. However if you are into CG there is a lot of opportunity implementing cutting edge research and some room for publishing still in the right role.
sgnelson 12y ago
I'm currently in graduate school. I'm constantly asking myself why I'm there. It's certainly not for my future job prospects (though in my particular field, they do get better with a Master's degree), and it's not because I want to go into academia (Academia, at least for the social sciences, is slowly dying in my view). But I do know why I'm there. I'm there to continue to learn new things, to interact with others who are like minded, and to work on problems that I may not get to explore in a paid position for a private company who seeks profits above all. I could probably write an entire book on what is wrong with academia (the short answer: a lot). But at the same time, I have a freedom to explore that I wouldn't have at even the most liberal companies (unless it was as a pure researcher, which quite frankly are rare positions, especially for a non-PhD). All this being said, it seems obvious to me that the author made the right decision in his case, however, I think he misunderstood the reasons for going into academia. That might sound naive from my point of view (and to some degree, it absolutely is, but I won't get into that now.), but I also think that it was naive in the author's case to think that the only reason to go into academia is to further his career prospects. Jumping through all the hoops of academia sucks. I was supposed to graduate in two weeks. Let's just say I won't be. It was quite the punch to the gut when I finally came to realize that I was going to miss the deadline to turn in my thesis. I made the comment to my advisor just two days ago: "I hate this system, as if officially turning in what we've talked about for the past two years means that I will have learned any more than I already do, but if I don't do it, I don't have a piece of paper that certifies me as somewhat knowledgeable in a specific field." Which is pretty normal for almost anyone to note about this academic system. But I know that for many jobs, I need that piece of paper. So it goes. But I didn't go back to school for a job, I went for an education, which I have received. Academia isn't for everyone of course, but if you go into it just for a better career, I feel many people will be sorely disappointed. If you go into it trying to see how much you can learn and realize that you get out of it, what you put in, you'll still have a lot to complain about, but hopefully it won't be a waste of time.
arca_vorago 12y ago
"Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives." Which is why the quality of papers (among other reasons) has gone downhill. I knew a particularly brilliant scientist who would do basic work at a reduced rate in a corporate setting as long as the people actually writing the paper included him in the author list. He shows up on over 1000 papers, many of which are of dubious scientific merit, but because of those kinds of numbers, more and more people flock to him for similar work, without realizing it.
nilkn 12y ago
This is probably a very naive question, but could somebody explain how education is becoming so expensive in the United States and yet there seem to be so few tenure-track positions available? I understand that the number of Ph.D.s has grown quite significantly in the last few decades, but so has the cost of attendance of almost all colleges. The number of tenure-track positions, meanwhile, hasn't caught up at all. I'm still amazed to consider that the college I attended, had I not received scholarships, would have cost me $50,000/year to attend in total. Yet I can't actually think of a single faculty member in the department I majored in who attained tenure while I was there. I do remember somebody joining with a Ph.D. from Harvard, having studied under a renowned mentor, for a non-tenure-track and low-paying "lecturer" post. This greatly talented person, naturally, is now gone, presumably at some other transient and low-paying post elsewhere. I just looked up one of my professors, who was a brilliant topologist and knot theorist doing a postdoc, and was surprised to find she's abandoned academia and is working as an analyst in oil & gas now.
serve_yay 12y ago
You will never stop qualifying yourself to other humans for as long as you live, never. It's true that you can choose whether to seek certain of those qualifications, as is shown here. But it never really stops.

98 points by msvan 12y ago

noobermin 12y ago

I'm curious what this fellow's experience after leaving was.

zo1 12y ago
We'll just have to wait and see. Perhaps he'll write about just that in his blog at some point.
jakobegger 12y ago
I'm now an independent software developer. I already had a side project that was doing pretty well (Mac App), and I started to work on a second Mac app that I released last summer. I wrote a bit about it on https://eggerapps.at/blog/ https://eggerapps.at/blog/ Another reason for leaving that I didn't mention in the text was the birth of my first son. I saw how colleagues had little time to spend with their newborns. Now that I'm on my own I can choose myself how much time to spend with my kids.
- NotOscarWilde 12y ago
  > I'm now an independent software developer. I already had a side project that was doing pretty well Is it bringing enough money for you to pay half of your family's bills? Forgive me for being so direct, but "independent software developer" is a very broad label, and it contains both the successful and the struggling programmers. Not that being dependent on a family is a bad thing; the only downside is that it is not something that everyone can do.
  - WhitneyLand 12y ago
    Why did you move so far away from your research?
    - jakobegger 12y ago
      My research involved a lot of programming, and I enjoyed making pretty GUIs for the code I wrote. So I already knew how to make Mac Apps. I made database apps because I saw an opportunity. I had been thinking about doing something more related to my area of study (physics & computer graphics). However, all I came up with were some vague ideas for games, and games seemed too risky for me. I do miss some parts of my research (especially maths), but for the most part I'm happy with what I do now.
  - jakobegger 12y ago
    We did move in with my parents for a year after I quit grad school, which lowered our cost of living significantly. But we no longer rely on family now. I'll share numbers too: My revenue this year is around 50000€. (mostly sofware sales + some consulting) My take-home salary (after expenses, social security, taxes) will probably be around 30000€, which is significantly above the median income in Austria. It's also more than what I'd make as a junior software developer.

miochat 12y ago

Sadly, most of the people I care about also care about degrees, so I'm still struggling for a PhD title..

carl-j 12y ago
May I ask what your relation to these people is? Is it friends and family or prospective employers?

Hermel 12y ago

PhDs in IT do not pay off, at least salary-wise. The time is takes to complete them is much better invested in a regular job, gaining practical experience.

eob 12y ago
The repayment with respect to industry work is in credentialed autonomy, not money. And for many, that's worth it.
- beambot 12y ago
  Amazingly succinct way to describe the benefits. For the OPs field (physics), this is doubly-important for any industrial research positions.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Indeed. I moved academia -> short industry adventure -> academia. I like both. Industry is more pleasing because you work on products that are directly used and you are judged (at least in a small company) on tangible results. The downside is that work is mostly driven by the most urgent needs or cash flow, so there is far less time to explore certain things deeper. In academia on the other times, you are judged on getting grants (which is definitely process that is to a large extend out of your hands, and tends to favor people who were already successful in getting grants). On the other hand, you have far more time to explore, try, fail, and try again (as long as you are not a professor). One should also realize that graduate studies highly differ per country. E.g. I did my PhD in The Netherlands, and there are no tests, or anything alike. I basically got funding for four years to do research, a small amount of teaching and to write my thesis. There was only one serious sanity check after the first year to filter out PhD candidates who were very unlikely to complete a thesis in four years.
  - thirdtruck 12y ago
    > I did my PhD in The Netherlands ... I think this is a point that deserves more emphasis. It's easy to forget the degree to which US education is uncommonly expensive, among other things that skew its ROI. Makes me wonder if I could afford a CS education abroad (being self-taught), without taking loans.

noelwelsh 12y ago

What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience? Substitute "writing a paper" with "building a product" and you're well on your way to being an entrepreneur.

noobermin 12y ago
One (might) pay off and benefit the world, or it may flop and you have to move onto your next one. One (might) be influential, or it may be relegated to the annals of some obscure journal, never to read or cared about. Still, there might be a pay off for one (monetary). The other buys your "academia points". The pay-off is a little more suspect on the academic's side, I think.

sktrdie 12y ago

I find myself in the exact opposite situation. Been working for industry since I was 18 and am 28 now. Never got a degree. I'm tired of working in a consumer setting where everything has to be faster, better, more pleasing for the client. I've now moved to academia because I want to work on things that are foundation for other work and not always things that are immediately useful to people. However I see how he had enough of that always being examined environment, but in Industry you'll also get examined, this time by a cranky costumer that wants a button a little more to the left, and who doesn't have the professional skills to examine your work.

noname123 12y ago
I think it's because OP never had the xp of working in industry and think grass is greener on the other side. I also made the switch from consumer web to academia. However I understand from his perspective which is from someone who wants stay on research, go from PhD to post-doc to to fellow to principal investigator to whatever. Competition is intense and everyone along the way is selected for people who are so interested in their work that they might be very unbalanced in other area's. It's all about trade-off's. I personally would rather trade for working on things that I find interesting and technical than A/B testing. But I can understand someone who is tired of academia and wants to live in the "real world" for a change. I can also understand people who are very happy doing things that they think are very engaging/fun/important in consumer web and respect that.
- hessenwolf 12y ago
  So interested in their work? Nah, it is luck and politics. Sadly, most of the selections are not for hard-core research chops. The whole grant and annual weighing scales approach nowadays strongly dis-incentivizes risk-taking. Without risk-taking with great big brass genitalia, research results are pretty pedestrian.
  - kefka 12y ago
    Not really. There's tons of low-hanging fruit that could be worthy of some serious papers / prestige if the work was done for them. 1. Biology : Repetitive Strain Injury calculations via Neural Load 2. Computational Photography : Low Cost, Quick Photogrammetry Calculations via GPS/9DoF metadata 3. Biometric Security : MS Kinect Biometric Security via RGBD and 3D Sound

ins0m 12y ago

A conclusion I am starting to see at the horizon for myself. Especially as a CS major the academic reality hits you hard - realizing this is probably not the direction you should bet your best years on. Taking the risk can be more fulfilling. I would by quit interested in your next steps and way down the road.

nicklaf 12y ago

Footnote: this story is oddly similar to the top story on the first archive.org snapshot of SN: https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombinator.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...

tspiteri 12y ago

The title "Leaving Academia" made me expect the author to have been in academia for some time, and not as a student, and to have decided to move on to something else. The article is not about leaving academia, but about not joining academia.

dalke 12y ago
I think your perception is miscalibrated. The writer did join academia, just not for very long. If I were to get a job at Google, work there for a week, and quit, I think it would just fine to write an essay about "Leaving Google". How long do you think you need to be working at X before you can write that you are leaving X? Or rather, when do you think you actually join academia? Is a 6th year graduate student, pre-defense, still not yet part of academia?
- rdc12 12y ago
  And if you left Google after a week and wrote about it, most people would probably dismiss it
  - dalke 12y ago
    I agree with you, and I see that you agree with me in that it's inappropriate to conclude that "Leaving X" implies that a person was at X 'for some time.'
jakobegger 12y ago
This attitude is exactly what made me leave. I've spent more than seven years at university, three of them paid to do research, and then I get told 'you're not really part of the club yet, you're just a student'.
- tspiteri 12y ago
  I had not read your article properly, and I got the impression that you were still considering whether to join the PhD programme. Now I have reread it and you said you had already started the programme, so you are right, apologies. But then why do you imply, in the conclusion, that leaving academia is like stopping educating yourself? If what you were doing was mainly educating yourself (which was not the case), then you would have been exactly "just a student".

gradstudent 12y ago

I remember this article the first time it was posted here. I remember I was not impressed. My opinion in in the interim has not improved. For a start, this should really be titled "Why I dropped out" as you cannot leave an institution to which you do not yet belong. Moreover, the article, then as now, seems as vapid as the comments it inspires; i.e. tall poppy bullshit. Bah humbug.

dalke 12y ago
Many people, and I am one, regard grad school as a professional position. Nominally you are there to do your own research and make your own decisions, under advisement of a professor. (I can see some exceptions for a new graduate student who is still doing coursework, but in this case the student had passed the qualifying examination.) As such, grad students don't really "drop out", just like employees don't really "drop out" of a job when they quit, nor unpaid elected officials don't "drop out" of office when they resign, nor volunteers drop out when they stop doing volunteer work. Personally I think there was a mistake in the logic. Success as an academic may by related to the number of citations one gets, but it's not a factor which affects one's graduate career. Only the handful of people in your graduation committee needs to be convinced about the work, and once you have the PhD there's no continue on that topic, or stay in academia.

navait 12y ago

>Maybe a handful, I said. And then I realized that there was no way I could work on that problem. Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives. What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience? I wanted to say at first that if he was in it for the sake of being a successful, high-impact researcher, he was in science for the wrong reasons. But really, unless you are one of those high-impact people, you aren't getting tenure. I don't feel like tenure is asking for much if you're a hard worker who's produced some novel results. I get that science is supposed to be about passion, but you can't support a family on passion alone. > A career in academia would just require even more proving my worthiness...I'd constantly be evaluated. That's not what I was looking for. He's in for a rude awakening. You're only as good as your last envelope.

noobermin 12y ago
A much more accurate statement is you might not get tenure if you're not high-impact, but you certainly won't if you aren't. Also, of course you are evaluated in anything in life, from the desk to the friendly get-together. The issue with academia has always been its ROI. You invest a lot into the academic life, your time, your youth, your energy, your mental state, all to graduate close to 30 make a salary some of the people you tutor make fresh out of college? All while working 50-60 hour weeks...it isn't quite the life. Perhaps being in a start-up requires such dedication too, but that can be seen a risk that can yield a great reward. For academe, there is no reward, save the "academic points." This [1] says it well. At least if you work hard and stress and have no life in the "real world", you'd have the chance of monetary compensation. Really, in academia, unless you are lucky enough to become a tenure prof, all you have is your pride that you understand something no else cares to. That, and the occasional free pizza and beer. [1] http://100rsns.blogspot.com/2010/10/25-academe-is-built-on-pride.html http://100rsns.blogspot.com/2010/10/25-academe-is-built-on-p...
- NotOscarWilde 12y ago
  > For academe, there is no reward, save the "academic points." I disagree. First of all, there is a rather high place in the societal ladder. A university professor is still somebody who induces awe, plus the job has this "uncorrupted by money" vibe which you cannot get as a manager/entrepreneur. Furthermore, you have an extremely high position in the local society, i.e. at the university. But I think the real reward is not vain or materialistic -- the reward is doing something you adore, and something you find a lot of meaning in. Both teaching and research are extremely fulfilling for me (as a PhD student). Personally, I can think of other jobs in compsci/programming that would be fulfilling, but they are likely as unavailable as the university position.

panjaro 12y ago

How can I vote down this link?

berbc 12y ago

> A career in academia would just require even more proving my worthiness. I do not think the industry will accept you without you regularly proving your worthiness. Of course, a PhD is something special so I understand anybody would not want that, but not for the reasons given in the article. Same for crazy ideas and being educated. I believe someone could have given roughly the same reasons for "Leaving X" because she's tired of doing the things that X requires. At least we learn about what doing a PhD entitles you to do, but as others have pointed out, this is quite a rude awakening.

fluxquanta 12y ago
>I do not think the industry will accept you without you regularly proving your worthiness. Exactly. I left a physics PhD program after my first year because I couldn't stand the environment anymore, and went into software development for an established company. I'm still given "homework" and "exams", still judged on merit of my work, still proving my worthiness of my paycheck everyday. Luckily I had to work throughout undergrad and grad school to afford it, so I already had that knowledge going into my career, but it really sounds like the author of this article did not.

tensor 12y ago

The value in academia is not in the political benefits that it gives in getting a job or being recognized. If you are in it for fame and fortune, you are a fool. I was in academia. Not just a grad student, but achieved the phd and did a post doc. I don't regret any of it. It taught me many invaluable lessons, all of which have been useful in industry starting a company. My impression of industry so far: they don't get progress. They don't get innovation. They have problems, but they they don't understand them and are unable to commit resources to the procedures that are needed to solve them. Only the very biggest of tech companies like Google, Palintir, Apple, Facebook, are able to tackle the really hard problem. These are the problems that you can not make an estimate for in terms of completion. The majority of industry will not even entertain this class of problem. Academia, too, has a lot of problems. I left because of the publish or perish mentality. I liked to work on hard problems, and had some successes, but overall it is the numbers that matter not the difficulty. There are an equal number of politics in academia as in industry, though they are different in academia. In industry, politics often involves a lot of incompetent people in high places following paper work procedures that do not support their supposed cause, while in academia it is more a lot of infighting over government grants and insultingly simple metrics like the number of papers published. In short, the author of this post is full of ignorance, and I am only slightly less full of ignorance in that I haven't achieved tenure in academia, and only have several years in industry helping to run a company. None the less, what I learned in academia in terms of the science of computing, it was invaluable.

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jostmey 12y ago
> If you are in it for fame and fortune, you are a fool. I think that sums up why so many people hate being in academia. They go into it for the wrong reasons. I've seen many people make this mistake.

dgmdoug 12y ago

Isn't part of the problem that we place this artificial wall between academia and industry? I often found myself confused in this respect. I attained my PhD a number of years ago, and found this an invaluable experience, which has no doubt helped me to excel in industry, however I still meet people (developers and senior level executives especially) who think academia is about locking yourself in a room and writing stuff without building anything useful. Ironically, these are the same people who build products and code without surveying the field, understanding what is already out there and building on top of existing solutions. Their naivity and ignorance is such that they believe they are building something truly unique, and will get it right first time, every time. It seems to me that we should stop standing on each side of the fence and looking down on each other, and start working together. We might actually achieve something great it if we do that. Regards the OP, if it was the right time for him/her to leave, that's great. Nobody should continue on a path that they do not find fulfilling. It says nothing about academia, or industry though. It only reveals the feelings of the author. The true travesty here, is that he/she will find it extremely difficult to pick up that work again and find a place in a university if they change their mind in the future. Our system in the UK is broken, since you only get a single shot at academia -- unless of course you are independently wealthy. Perhaps this is the cause of the divide. You are either in, or you are out -- and once you make your choice there is no going back.

jcfrei 12y ago

Doing PhD has crossed my mind as well. From reading quite a slew of articles (most of them talking about abandoning academia, few of them happen to be positive), I would cynically summarize: Do a PhD if you are either a) doing it for the prestigious degree or b) because the subject really interests you. Don't do a PhD if a) you are hoping for a tenure or b) expect to earn more. I don't think there's anything inherently "noble" in doing a PhD, so I think the outcome of the decision should entirely depend on how realistic your expectations are.

martincmartin 12y ago
This is decent advice for many endeavours. To summarize: when choosing what to spend most of your waking hours on, don't just do it for the money, make sure it's something that interests you. Or, at least, that you can get in to.
WhitneyLand 12y ago
There is nobility in it. It still may not be the right tradeoff for people but expanding the sum of human knowledge is a great contribution.

cs702 12y ago

This is terrible in my view: "As a PhD student you get to choose some interesting problem and work on that, right? That's what I naively imagined before I started at the institute. Some day at lunch I told my supervisor about this idea I had. We could take his fluid simulation method from computer graphics and apply it to a problem related to molten polymers. There was this experiment by a group of applied physicists that would fit nicely. He asked me how many people would be interested in the problem. Maybe a handful, I said. And then I realized that there was no way I could work on that problem. Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives. What point is there in writing a paper that is only interesting to such a small audience? To be successful you need to target a large audience, and not just pursue whatever obscure problem takes your fancy." As a society, don't we want our young academics to be able to pursue their intellectual passions, no matter how obscure? A lot of original research is produced in areas that others have overlooked or considered unimportant. Do we really want a "citation market" to determine whether researchers can pursue their passions?

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y ago
Influence matters. And academia attributes influence to merit. But the shape of influence is different from field to field and specialization to specialization. Moreover, it’s difficult to pinpoint a field and specialization where citation impact isn’t limited to “a handful of people.”
noelwelsh 12y ago
For a number of reasons, no, we don't want PhD students to research whatever random topics pop into their head. For a start, PhD students don't know how to do research. That's one reason one does a PhD: to learn how to do research. That means listening to your supervisor and working on problems they suggest, at least in the early part of your PhD. I have seen many PhD students, including myself, arrive with half-baked ideas that go nowhere. Learning to formulate a useful research problem is a part of what you are taught. The second reason is that resources are finite. You don't get to piss around with other people's money anymore than other adults do.
- 12y ago

keredson 12y ago

I also left my PhD program shortly after passing quals. I think it's a great time to bail. There are too many great classes you'll have to pass on if you're only long enough to get a masters, and you haven't yet burned a ton of dissertation hours. (Assuming you do it right - I remember my advisor being quite miffed that I wouldn't stop signing up for a full load each semester.) Grad classes really are the best learning bang for the buck/hour I've ever experienced. Just make sure you fill out the paperwork so you do get that MS along the way...

jmcmahon443 12y ago

You are an expert in computer graphics and you think that the entertainment industry is the only one for you? Go work for Autodesk, SolidWorks, Flux.io, PlanGrid, or one of the other companies making CAD software. WE NEED YOU GUYS.

WhitneyLand 12y ago
Autodesk is a massive part of entertainment industry software depending on the products. The deadlines and stress aren't much different either. However if you are into CG there is a lot of opportunity implementing cutting edge research and some room for publishing still in the right role.

sgnelson 12y ago

I'm currently in graduate school. I'm constantly asking myself why I'm there. It's certainly not for my future job prospects (though in my particular field, they do get better with a Master's degree), and it's not because I want to go into academia (Academia, at least for the social sciences, is slowly dying in my view). But I do know why I'm there. I'm there to continue to learn new things, to interact with others who are like minded, and to work on problems that I may not get to explore in a paid position for a private company who seeks profits above all. I could probably write an entire book on what is wrong with academia (the short answer: a lot). But at the same time, I have a freedom to explore that I wouldn't have at even the most liberal companies (unless it was as a pure researcher, which quite frankly are rare positions, especially for a non-PhD). All this being said, it seems obvious to me that the author made the right decision in his case, however, I think he misunderstood the reasons for going into academia. That might sound naive from my point of view (and to some degree, it absolutely is, but I won't get into that now.), but I also think that it was naive in the author's case to think that the only reason to go into academia is to further his career prospects. Jumping through all the hoops of academia sucks. I was supposed to graduate in two weeks. Let's just say I won't be. It was quite the punch to the gut when I finally came to realize that I was going to miss the deadline to turn in my thesis. I made the comment to my advisor just two days ago: "I hate this system, as if officially turning in what we've talked about for the past two years means that I will have learned any more than I already do, but if I don't do it, I don't have a piece of paper that certifies me as somewhat knowledgeable in a specific field." Which is pretty normal for almost anyone to note about this academic system. But I know that for many jobs, I need that piece of paper. So it goes. But I didn't go back to school for a job, I went for an education, which I have received. Academia isn't for everyone of course, but if you go into it just for a better career, I feel many people will be sorely disappointed. If you go into it trying to see how much you can learn and realize that you get out of it, what you put in, you'll still have a lot to complain about, but hopefully it won't be a waste of time.

arca_vorago 12y ago

"Success in academia is measured in the number of citations your paper receives." Which is why the quality of papers (among other reasons) has gone downhill. I knew a particularly brilliant scientist who would do basic work at a reduced rate in a corporate setting as long as the people actually writing the paper included him in the author list. He shows up on over 1000 papers, many of which are of dubious scientific merit, but because of those kinds of numbers, more and more people flock to him for similar work, without realizing it.

nilkn 12y ago

This is probably a very naive question, but could somebody explain how education is becoming so expensive in the United States and yet there seem to be so few tenure-track positions available? I understand that the number of Ph.D.s has grown quite significantly in the last few decades, but so has the cost of attendance of almost all colleges. The number of tenure-track positions, meanwhile, hasn't caught up at all. I'm still amazed to consider that the college I attended, had I not received scholarships, would have cost me $50,000/year to attend in total. Yet I can't actually think of a single faculty member in the department I majored in who attained tenure while I was there. I do remember somebody joining with a Ph.D. from Harvard, having studied under a renowned mentor, for a non-tenure-track and low-paying "lecturer" post. This greatly talented person, naturally, is now gone, presumably at some other transient and low-paying post elsewhere. I just looked up one of my professors, who was a brilliant topologist and knot theorist doing a postdoc, and was surprised to find she's abandoned academia and is working as an analyst in oil & gas now.

serve_yay 12y ago

You will never stop qualifying yourself to other humans for as long as you live, never. It's true that you can choose whether to seek certain of those qualifications, as is shown here. But it never really stops.