The other side of "academic freedom"

I really wanted to get into academia because I had the perception that you got paid for thinking smart thoughts and occasionally writing about them, but when I actually tried academic research it seemed to be about 80% politics/grantwriting and 20% research delivery, so I went into private industry. If you have sufficient reputation to have a sinecure from Google, that's certainly an option for subsidizing research. Even if you don't, a lot of research in our field is not terribly expensive to do, and the materials/collaboration required to do it are within the grasp of e.g. anybody who runs a business which gives them sufficient scheduling flexibility. You can even get published in Real Academic Journals (TM), which surprised me.

As someone who relatively recently decided to go into industry instead of academia after finishing my PhD, my reasoning was almost identical. Industry seems like a better chance to work on interesting problems and have a bigger impact.<p>However, I'm really regretting it at the moment.<p>I thought I'd at least have a say in how I approach problems, even if I didn't get to choose the problems I work on. Instead, I've literally been told, "Your job is not to do science. Your job is not think. Your job is to click a mouse. Do exactly what you're told in exactly the way you're told to do it. Now, stop asking questions and stop trying to think for yourself."<p>I realize that the people I'm working with have a _lot_ more experience than I do, but I do think there's value in considering alternate approaches to solving problems. A lot of the fault lies with me, too. In the case above, I didn't clearly communicate the business impact of what I was suggesting to my mentor. Either way, it's frustrating.<p>Most of it is finding the right team to be on. I still think I chose the right company, I just need to find a way to be on an R&#38;D team. I'm under a 2 year contract, so I can't leave even if I did get frustrated enough to.<p>At any rate, know what you're getting yourself into. I did two internships on similar teams, but at different companies. Things are definitely done differently here.<p>There is certainly of lot of interesting work in industry, but it's very easy to wind up stuck doing menial repetitive tasks if you're not careful.

Amusingly, I think his dig at the programming language community actually underscores something that I really love about academia and that I think is virtually unique: you can focus on things that are not immediately practical just because they're elegant or beautiful. It's awesome. I couldn't imagine much room for it in industry (although it's not entirely impossible).<p>Unfortunately, it also seems surprisingly rare even in academic CS. Certainly nobody I know at Berkeley operates this way :(. Maybe it's better in the mathematics department. For me, that would be the main draw to academia: being able to not worry about short-term usefulness and not needing to worry about marketing my work to the average programmer.<p>Besides, those "esoteric abstractions"? They solve real problems. In surprisingly simple ways. Better than existing solutions. The only reason that "real software developers" don't benefit is that they aren't willing to learn them. And it is not--and should not be--the responsibility of the PL theory community to get the average programmer up to date. And, even so, some people are really trying. It brings to mind the usual saying about horses and water.<p>Also, if I may make an observation: it seems his thoughts on PL design broadly reflect the philosophy of Google in general. This is just reinforced by the designs of Golang and Dart, as well as the promotional material surrounding the languages (presentations and the like). I personally think that this almost borders on anti-intellectualism: they seem to imply that something created by ivory-tower academics with an understanding of math cannot possibly be useful in the real world; only real software engineers™ make practical tools.<p>And that is probably the main reason that I would choose a company like Jane Street over Google any day :P.<p>Yeah, I'm probably more annoyed by this than it's worth. It really helps to lay my thoughts down on paper, and I still haven't started that blog I keep on considering. So HN will have to be my confidant for now.

I realize it's in quotes, but very few academics hearing the phrase "academic freedom" would think of "the ability to work on anything you like." They would, rather, think of what Wikipedia aptly describes as:<p>". . . the belief that the freedom of inquiry by faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy as well as the principles of academia, and that scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts (including those that are inconvenient to external political groups or to authorities) without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment."<p>I've been in academia for (including graduate school) a little over twenty years, and I've been astounded at the ways in which freedom of inquiry is threatened from without and from within. And while few American and European academics face imprisonment for their views or objects of study, many academics in other parts of the world do. And U.S. and European academics certainly can face job loss or sanction for being interested in "inconvenient" things.<p>I would encourage the author to confine his use of this phrase to its traditional meaning, lest anyone forget the far more important problem to which it refers.

But this is all wrong. "Academic Freedom" means that you are free to publish your findings in an objective way without having to please your investors.<p>Of course you have to do things that are interesting and impactful and the funding is less now than it has been in the decade prior, but that is much different than saying that academic freedom means doing whatever you want. I can just imagine Michelangelo writing this blog during his agony of painting the Sistine Chapel.

Two separate points:<p>1. I'm surprised that Welsh argues that tenured CS profs still have to follow what publication venues want to see. Why not just say, "Fuck it?", publish on blogs / arvix.com/, and let the field catch up to them? Certainly that's not a route to immediate promotions or status within the field, but there may be strong long-term returns to individuals who go this way and are vindicated over time.<p>(This obviously doesn't apply to non-tenured faculty or grad students. I'll also note that this point is a related observation, not a criticism of his argument.)<p>2. This stands out to me:<p><i>The final (and arguably most important) aspect of being successful as a faculty member is being able to solve new problems better than anyone else in your area. It is not usually enough to simply do a better job solving the same problem as someone else -- you need to have a new idea, a new spin, a new approach -- or work on a different problem.</i><p>Genuinely new ideas are actually quite rare. Sometimes the difference between a "new" idea and someone else's discovery or implementation of that idea can be just a couple months difference! (See Steven Berlin Johnson's <i>Where Good Ideas Come From</i> for one popular description of this.) Yet one person or group gets 99% of the credit / tenure / etc.

&#62; My team at Google has a pretty broad mandate which gives us a fair bit of freedom.<p>The other points might be fair but this would have to be the exception rather than the rule in private industry and even Google I would image would never give enough leeway to someone to "monitor volcanoes with sensor networks"

I want to study astronomy. After first year I found it to be a dead end. So I went to private sector, got nice 9-5 job and hack astronomical software over evenings. More freedom, more money and my software is still used by thousands of astronomers.

I'm surprised that we don't see more in the way of "open source" computer science research, done by unpaid volunteer enthusiasts.

I had been thinking along similar lines in physics research as a post-doc, and wrote my experience and ideas up[0].<p>Then I got fired (unrelated to me writing that post:), and went in a job interview with another prof, who have read my post, and started off the discussion with that. In the end, he have seen the value, the ideals, and that the problems outlined were valid (he also worked in the Bell Labs which is one of my inspiration).<p>In the end I decided that instead of joining another lab, or as the OP working in the industry, I'll wing it and see if I can set up things the way I want. So now my "main job" is to do research and set up the lab I would want to work in, and get the people who are just as ambitious on board. "Tall order" doesn't even begin to describe it, let's see what happens.<p>[0] <a href="http://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2013/02/academia-is-failing-but-not-for-everyone/" rel="nofollow">http://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2013/02/academia-is-failing-bu...</a> "The Academia is Failing But Not For Everyone"

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

Interesting to hear the other side of this. I'm a PhD student in Computer Science right now, and a lot of the appeal of the job is the ability to get paid for working on projects that interest <i>me</i>. That said, I have a nice government fellowship for my PhD and a generous funding package from my university - if I was missing one or both, things would be harder.

I have a question for tenured profs, why one needs to apply for grants after getting tenured?<p>my guesses: to increase its own salary; to buy equipment; to support the group.<p>is it possible, to do research alone (maybe having one or two grad students) ?