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well you could go work at google, amazon, facebook, or microsoft if you felt like writing an unending stream of javascript to better serve people ads. there are
by munin 12y ago
well you could go work at google, amazon, facebook, or microsoft if you felt like writing an unending stream of javascript to better serve people ads. there are researchy parts of those companies but getting a job there is a lot like getting any other academic job in terms of competition and number of applicants, so it's effectively academia.
what wondrous land do you propose that will support researchers and their desire for a few months out of the year to think about stuff? at most companies, you won't get a few minutes out of the day to do anything other than pack numbers tightly into excel or go to your next standup.
- tdat13 12y agoI'm just curious, but your comment suggests to me that it is easy to switch from an academic program to working at google, amazon, facebook, or microsoft. Those jobs require training and experience that academia does not provide. Writing javascript and researching, as an example, topology are very different things. I also have a hard time believing that research at a corporation is effectively academia just because they share a competitive environment. Could you explain further?
- munin 12y agowell, if you're in a good PhD program for computer science, you probably have a really good BS in CS from somewhere with a high GPA and demonstrated work experience in the form of research, which was probably programming. your research probably involves developing some kind of software, if yours doesn't you as a student probably do programming for some other system that is someone else's research. you also work with other people and have deadlines and so on, so a lot of CS "research" is basically a job writing code for money. my impression of research at facebook/google/microsoft is that they generally hire phds and they generally take phd students as interns, so if you drop out of a phd program, you're not working there (in a research role at least). so you have to finish your phd, then compete with everyone else for those jobs, just like postdocs and professor positions. once there, you have to justify your existence / funding the same way that you do as a professor (go ask people at MSR how this is going for them lately).
- quonn 12y agoI've worked at a few companies. My work rarely involved Javascript and never ads; I've not packed anything into excel and I had plenty of time to think about stuff. So please don't paint things black and white.
- michaelochurch 12y agoIt's still harder to get a good academic job than a decent job in industry. I left a PhD program when I realized just how bad academia is, in comparison. Sure, you have to be good at politics to get a great corporate AI job, but you need political skill to get through academia as well. Politics is just a necessary evil; so just learn it so you can get things done and get back to more interesting stuff. It's not hard compared to category theory. In the corporate world, the failure mode is a crappy job that still pays as well as the AI gig; it's just not as sexy. Then you can slack, learn the skills for your next gig (it's not like you need to be in academe to read papers) and get something better. In academia, the failure mode is being dumped with no money and no reputation in some godforsaken No Country for Old Men reach, being 35 and trying to get an entry-level gig in something.
- angersock 12y agoI'll second this--again, it's not like every second of your 9-5 is micromanaged: in fact, any shop like that is probably run by people that are easy to game with just a little application of intellect. I wholeheartedly support the concept of slackademia...using idle cycles at work to learn about new, exciting things.
- munin 12y agothere's a big difference between "if I clock out an hour early, I can read some wikipedia pages before I commute home" and "take the next three weeks and read these 20 papers"