Matt Welsh

Matt Welch has written extensively about switching from tenured Professor at Harvard to Software Engineer at Google: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/, with the initial post http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html Matt's blog is great because (a) he writes it, (b) he's still connected to academia via program committees and (c) you can see how his thinking has evolved over the last 8 years. And there are of course a number of other former faculty there too, but none that I know of who've blogged as much as Matt. In the systems space, off the top of my head: Amin Vahdat, Mike Dahlin, Steve Gribble, Craig Chambers, David Patterson, David Wetherall, Eric Brewer. Personally, I've had way more impact (and fun!) building Compute Engine and Kubernetes than I had in academia. If in doubt, try industry for a summer or a year -- nothing we write can replace personal experience.

I'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/

Oh neat, I really enjoyed reading his blog years ago: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/

Competitive, yes, certainly. But is it competitive in the same way? I’m other words, do “cracking the coding interview” style questions play as big a role? EDIT: I figured, why not do a quick web search. I found this link: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2014/01/getting-job-at-google-for-phd-s… Just one POV, but it does confirm that PhD graduates do have to go through the same kind of coding exercises (at google) as anyone else. It is worth noting that this is the case if you're applying for SWE positions, where a PhD might not really confer that much of an advantage. Again, I'm not sure if this would be the case if you were, say, getting hired as an AI researcher for a lab. So, this link sheds some light, thought I still don't know about research positions specifically.

>Are there people with similar backgrounds that have made the leap? I'm keen to hear from them. One that I know of is Matt Welsh: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.in/

It's reasonable to assume that a PhD has lowered themselves to work in industry because they couldn't get a post-doc. Let's conduct a poll. Other than you, did anyone here who's been involved with PhD holders or grad-school and academia themselves actually think this? How many of us actual academicy types actually think it's "lowering oneself" to work in industry? I don't. I do think that both academia and industry need to drop their utterly ridiculous notions of professional passion, because most people most of the time will never work on Their Life's Defining Passion when there are bills to pay, but industry can certainly come up with problems just as big, just as hard, and just as worthy as academia. http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html

> 'But the reality is talented people are able to sustain a high level of productivity at long hours.' This, in my opinion, is the flaw in the argument. I don't think it's true for writing code, unless what you're writing is boilerplate which requires no mental effort. > Some of the best engineers in the world work insane hours at Google, Apple and facebook and put out great products. Google doesn't have fixed working hours: http://www.quora.com/Does-Google-have-fixed-working-hours From what I've heard, you're expected to get things done but no one cares how you do it. Some people work crazy hours; that's fine for them. Some people probably work 10-4 and then a little bit in the evening. Matt Welsh seems to work 9-5: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/day-in-life-of-googler.html

Follow-up: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/07/retrospective-on-seda.html

FWIW, I sat in on some of his lectures on distributed sensor networks and thought he was great. Even if he wasn't, he gave up his tenured faculty position to hack full time at Google (IIRC, less than a year after getting tenure). See http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html for some background.

Matt Welsh (Harvard CS systems prof) has a great post on the topic: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/09/so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-schoo… "The only reason to do a PhD is because you love doing research. If you don't love research, don't bother -- it is not worth the time, money (in terms of opportunity cost vs. making a real salary in industry), or stress. Doing a PhD is stressful, if you are doing it right -- you are in constant competition with other academics to publish your results in the top venues, to make a name for yourself, to get recognized. If you harbor ideas of lazy days sitting in the coffee shop pondering the universe, you are dead wrong. (You can always approach a PhD this way, but you will probably not be very successful.)"

I recommend the anonymous comment starting: It's unfair to characterize a UK PhD as "a good US Master's thesis"... http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/09/so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-schoo… — it's pretty fair and accurate.

As you can tell by the date, it's about a month old. He has a follow up blog post titled "First week at Google": http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/07/first-week-at-google.html.

> "the latest wisecrack about Harvard" "Latest" in this case means "over 5 years old, but the author recently heard about it." Eg, the following 2010 comment at http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/05/secret-lives-of-professors.html uses the exact same phrase: "It is complicated, but one way to look at it is that Harvard is a very large hedge fund with a university attached to it (which gets a tiny fraction of the fund's payout each year)." And earlier 2007 piece titled "Goodbye, Princeton University" uses a similar construction, at http://www.nassauweekly.com/goodbye_princeton_university/ : "Princeton University has ceased being primarily an institution of higher learning and is, like Goldman, a huge hedge-fund with a university that it runs as a side project." We also see it in several previous HN threads (see https://hn.algolia.com/?query=harvard%20hedge%20fund&sort=byDate&a… ). The oldest is from 8 years ago, referencing a 2008 article titled "Is Harvard Just a Tax-Free Hedge Fund?" at http://theamericanscene.com/2008/05/12/is-harvard-just-a-tax-free-hedg… > Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.

This post reminds me of a favorite passage from Lord of the Rings, when Frodo is debating whether he should wait for Gandalf in the Shire, or press on: “… The choice is yours: to go or wait.” [Gildor said.] “And it is also said,” answered Frodo, “Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.” “Is it indeed?” laughed Gildor. “Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill. But what would you? You have not told me all concerning yourself; how should I choose better than you? But if you demand advice, I will for friendship's sake give it.” The problem is, most of your advisers probably didn't know and, more importantly, couldn't know if the IBM sale would pan out. If they said stop, and you did, and failed anyway, what if they felt bad at whether the IBM sale might've worked? The world is big and unpredictable and replete with stories of people advising others that something can't be done or shouldn't be done that way, only to have the advisees ignore the advisers and do great things. Hell, see this post: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-i-almost-killed-facebook.ht… for an example of well-meaning advice that, if taken would've been wrong.

The first two paragraphs fits in the most stereotypes of any article I've read. A better one is Matt Walsh's, http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html

First time I've heard of SEDA, though I've been aware of the concerns/concepts it addresses, in various forms, for some time. Any thoughts on Welsh's Retrospective on SEDA? http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/07/retrospective-on-seda.html

Compare that to virtually zero notable stories of C++ projects switching to Go. A lot of projects at Google have switched from C++ to Go, and the people I know who work on them are pretty excited about working in Go. Here's a blog post by a coworker who leads the Chrome Data Compression Proxy project: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/rewriting-large-production-sy…

"The feature is currently launched for Chrome on Android, iOS, and desktop (including ChromeOS)." thx Matt, reading for background: 'Making the mobile web fast' ~ http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/what-im-working-on-at-google…

The Social Network paid particular attention to this, to the point that they tracked down[0] the actual slides[1] Zuckerberg would have seen in his Harvard OS class for the scene in the classroom. [0] http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/10/in-defense-of-mark-zuckerberg.h… [1] http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/course/cs161/notes/vm.pdf

A notable one that's made the rounds on HN before: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html I see the "I quit" genre more from CS/engineering professors, but that's probably because I'm on HN a lot. It would be somewhat interesting to compare the humanities subgenre and the STEM subgenre. Also yesterday I had a long conversation with my neighbor at work (former math professor) about everything that's wrong with academia. He mentioned the phrase "loan farming".

For something like an opposite perspective, there's "Why I'm leaving [my job as a CS professor at] Harvard [to join Google]": http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html Shorter version of both posts: "Working at (university/big tech co.) frees me from all the distractions of working at (big tech co./university) so I can spend all my time hacking on the problems I find most interesting."

Haha maybe my previous comment is off-topic, but it's because I want to read stories more like http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html

It would, but people pull it off. Here's one example, also from Harvard. http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html I think it's much easier in Computer Science than other fields - say the humanities, or biology or chemistry.

try this url: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss it works. same feed url pattern will work for google blog too http://googleblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

I've got an IOException while trying to summarize http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2013/04/running-software-team-at-google… And a different one for http://googleblog.blogspot.com I guess you should put more effort in your html parser. Try Apache Tika, perhaps.

It certainly appears to be. Here's a former Harvard prof who wrote a pretty interesting blog post: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html

When I heard the first couple of videos of Rich, I also asked myself this question. Here's Matt Welsh's take on "Do you need a PhD"?: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.co.at/2012/03/do-you-need-phd.html

How about this attempt to be nicely critical and help the guy out: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/how-i-almost-killed-facebook.…

Here's a smattering of articles I've collected, YMMV: http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-professor http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/ http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/05/secret-lives-of-professors.html http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-life.htm http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio… http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html http://www.ams.org/notices/199701/comm-rota.pdf http://matt.might.net/articles/books-papers-materials-for-graduate-stu… And the classic: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html Good luck.

He stated in his first post about working for Google that he is exactly that: my job title is simply "software engineer." (http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/06/working-for-google.html)