[HN Gopher] Advice for Academic Refugees
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Advice for Academic Refugees
Author : barry-cotter
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-06-23 20:28 UTC (2 hours ago)
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| peter_l_downs wrote:
| This is great advice for anyone working at a startup,
| particularly the part about not waiting for an assignment.
| "Literally just do things, as long as they're not the wrong
| things" is the hardest thing to teach or learn.
| jltsiren wrote:
| There were a few places where the text sounded weird.
|
| > He had a plum position, and he was years away from tenure
| review. It's hard to walk away from a place like that after a
| lifetime of striving.
|
| The nominal academic career is ~45 years, as successful academics
| rarely retire early. In most fields, getting a tenure-track
| faculty job signals the transition from early to mid-career. But
| this seems to be about CS in the US, where it's common to get a
| faculty job with minimal postdoctoral experience. Getting tenure
| is then the true starting point for mid-career, and this was more
| likely about an early-career researcher choosing to leave the
| academia.
|
| > Academics for their part tend to lean into this by playing the
| "let's see how quickly I can destroy this entire presentation"
| game.
|
| There are some toxic fields of research, but I don't think this
| attitude is particularly common in the academia. There are many
| fields with a true sense of community. People generally realize
| that it's better to be nice to your colleagues, even if you are
| competing against them, because you will be stuck with them for
| decades.
|
| > Academia is characterized by well-trodden problems, hashed over
| for decades, and negligible novel data for resolving them.
|
| Here my experience is the opposite. The academia is characterized
| by world's top experts in a narrow niche investigating
| speculative problems few people have any idea of. More often than
| not, that research turns out to be a dead end, "wasting" years of
| work.
| the_watcher wrote:
| It seemed like this was about someone transitioning to industry
| data science, not CS. From the people I have worked with that
| came to DS by way of academia, the post sounds extremely
| accurate. It may be that you can get a faculty job in CS
| without much postdoc experience, but it's not true for
| psychology, political science, cognitive science, urban
| planning, economics, etc (all backgrounds of PhDs I have worked
| with in big tech data science).
| draw_down wrote:
| cs137 wrote:
| There are a lot of problems with academia, but this post shows
| such a rosy-eyed view of industry, I have a hard time taking it
| or its conclusions seriously.
|
| An industry job is fine if you're protected from the politics and
| valued for your knowledge and intelligence, but that's rare, and
| it usually doesn't last. The people making major decisions don't
| value intelligence or curiosity and, worse yet, they often have
| malevolent intentions. Getting "screwed" in academia means
| getting a B because of a tricky question on a final, or having to
| publish in a less prestigious journal than you think you deserve.
| Getting screwed in industry means you lose your right to an
| income and might never get it back.
|
| The thing is, people in industry (meaning for-profit businesses
| that expect every member to work on some line-of-business
| concern... I'm not talking about research labs) have better
| social skills than academics are used to, so a lot of ex-
| academics jump into it thinking they're getting into a non-toxic
| environment, because the corrosive behaviors are not immediately
| visible. It takes a few years before people realize they haven't
| just entered "industry"--they've gone into literal corporate
| America.
| timkam wrote:
| The obviously realistic assessment is: it depends. Sure, there
| are politics in industry, but most large corporations have
| large R&D organizations were politics are manageable and
| predictable, at least for individual contributors and team
| leads, simply because this is a crucial environmental factor
| and critical for retaining talent and getting products shipped.
| Politics primarily happen on higher levels and in particularly
| competitive parts of the organization (like Sales).
|
| In academia (in contrast), the governance structures that are
| in place essentially ensure that with the exception of the
| particularly lucky (or: 'genius') few, one always has to watch
| one's back to ensure the fight for employment, funding,
| research time, top-venue acceptance, tenure, etc. is
| successful.
| cs137 wrote:
| With academics, I think the problem is to some degree self-
| created. In the Boomer days, they copped the attitude that
| their research was the only thing that mattered and that
| teaching was unimportant grunt work to be delegated as much
| as possible. This resulted in under-educated, condescended-to
| politicians reducing their funding, and this combined with
| administrative bloat (another Boomer trick) to create a truly
| awful job market.
|
| Government research labs tend to have decent cultures, but it
| seems like the replacement of old, decent _noblesse oblige_
| companies by new-style psychotic McKinsey-esque startup-
| culture ones is complete. What I 've heard is that places
| like Google X are ultra-political (which isn't surprising,
| because all FAANGs are nasty places run by nasty people).
| I've had decent R&D jobs; the problem is that they're
| unstable. You are a resource to be pulled into someone else's
| war.
| analog31 wrote:
| A lot depends on your field. The academic fields that are
| moderately OK are the ones where there's a lively job market in
| industry competing for talent. I know professors in CS and
| Medicine, who are quite happy.
|
| In other fields, there's no continuity of work beyond someone's
| job. A professor studying X can be replaced by another
| professor studying Y. There's no reason to keep you, if someone
| else can be more productive. And beyond the undergrad level,
| you depend on the cooperation and goodwill of people who can
| deliberately or inadvertently make your career vanish in a
| nanosecond. And then unless you're a superstar, you get start
| from scratch and hope for a second lucky break amidst a
| multiple of brilliant competitors.
|
| I got out right after grad school, so I don't even qualify as
| an academic refugee. My parents had both been industrial
| scientists, so that career path wasn't foreign to me, and I
| planned for it while working on my degree.
|
| When I got "screwed" in industry, I was quickly back on my
| feet. Turning things around, a company making X can hire
| someone away from a company making Y.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| As someone who left academia for industry, and then made the
| somewhat crazy decision to return to academia, I agree with a lot
| of this. Especially in terms of academia, you are often expected
| to be independent and able to figure things out yourself, which
| can sometimes lead to you avoiding asking for help when you
| should. One thing that really shook me out of this in my first
| company was when they switched to an Agile process and I was
| literally forced to talk to people everyday.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > Recently I met a new coworker, a now-former professor who left
| academia. Like many, he seemed wounded by the experience. This is
| his first private-sector job.
|
| > I have to give him respect: he left willingly. He had a plum
| position, and he was years away from tenure review. It's hard to
| walk away from a place like that after a lifetime of striving.
| But he was unhappy, and he'd grown disenchanted with his research
| agenda, and didn't enjoy the labor itself anymore, and it was
| degrading his ability to enjoy his private life; so he quit. Not
| everyone is brave enough to do that.
|
| > When I was talking to him about onboarding and getting
| acquainted, I realized I was speaking to a more-accomplished
| version of my past self. There are certain pernicious behavioral
| patterns and outlooks that are instilled in a graduate student.
| Over the coming weeks I'll do my best to shepherd my coworker
| into the private sector and help him overcome what's been done to
| him; but today I had only a half hour, and was constrained by
| professional norms, and could only touch on the surface
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _No One Cares That You Are Smart_
|
| When I was a young lawyer, I worked with a group of four
| attorneys, three of whom had PhDs in other fields. The most
| senior lawyer, who had no PhD, commented on the challenge of
| leading such a group: "each man thought he was the smartest guy
| in the room".
|
| Humility is underrated!
| dekhn wrote:
| One of the few bits of useful advice I've received from a
| manager was "stop acting like you're the smartest person in the
| room, even when you are".
|
| I started acting like the dumbest person in the room (which is
| probably true in most cases) and it completely changed how
| people interacted with me.
| analog31 wrote:
| That's politics 101.
|
| But at the same time, if you humble yourself too much, people
| will walk all over you, and your work might have less impact
| than it should have. For instance if they assume that the
| things you say are ignore-able when they are actually correct
| and important.
| jrumbut wrote:
| I wonder how many refugees could have saved themselves a lot of
| pain if they tried some of this advice before burning out and
| leaving.
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