Comment by jonathanstrange
9 years ago
Academia is similar to many other fields in that you roughly get what you pay for. That doesn't mean you can't save some money here or there or that money is not wasted here or there, but as a rule of thumb this generally holds.
My biggest quirk about the universities and institutes I've worked for so far is not the way they deal with grad students or postdocs, it's about seemingly 'unimportant' issues. Things like large, noisy, shared offices, lack of whiteboards, unnecessary bureaucracy, and lack of paid linguistic editing. At universities money tends to be saved at the wrong end, private businesses are much better at creating productive environments. Especially the constant lack of office space is hampering productivity. The priorities tend to be wrong (outside of a few centers of excellence), focused on getting as many researchers as possible. Instead they should spend a bit less on human resources and a bit more on a good work environment.
At least that's my personal experience and opinion.
Moving from a top research group to a fortune 500 company just last year, I couldn't agree with you more.
I had great resources in some places (access to the finest minds in my field, for example) and was completely hamstrung in others (a hard salary cap as an assistant researcher, extreme difficulty getting a new whiteboard installed in my office, etc)
Industry isn't perfect either but seems to be better at recognizing that researchers are best used in the role they were trained for and not doing ancillary work.
How is the money?
Significantly better than academia, of course. I get RSUs, annual bonus, etc. I actually got a fair amount of non-recurring money from patenting activity last year, as well.
I suspect I could make more money as a 'pure' software developer, but it would not be a factor of 2. And I'm doing what I love and largely choosing my own research direction. It needs to have an ultimate business application, but finding that alignment is not particularly difficult.
As with many scientists, having the resources I need to accomplish my research is often the stickier point. I have money for a few coops to do more speculative research, and annual equipment (I need clusters to do what I do). I don't have trouble getting funding for 2-3 conferences each year, which is all I need (more is a distraction, IMO). I'm hoping to start building out my group in a few years.
And I can do largely autonomous research work, very much like what I did as a researcher in academia. Arguably I am even more autonomous here, as I do not have a research adviser/boss.
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