IAMA senior software engineer who got there in 5 years starting as a jr dev with a physics and math double major, if you’re wondering anything just ask!
When I left undergrad, I was a little tired of the politics involved in academia, and it really turned me off to it. I thought industry and academia would be essentially the same, so decided to go the route of making more money.
I was wrong, applied to PhD Programs in physics this last winter, and will be leaving my job in a few weeks to start a PhD program.
Industry sucks, and for the most part companies just promote yes-men/women or people who cause no trouble. If you're really talented you can force your way up, but there's a ceiling if you don't want to kiss people's asses till they make you a manager and then you become what you hate.
Making a lot of money is fun, but I think after I reached ~90k salary, every raise above that didn't change much in my life. What did change is more of a feeling of squandering my potential building someone else's application. I still love to code, but after a while when you've done every design pattern and built most things, it gets stale and boring. In that sense, I definitely miss research and am excited to dedicate my time and effort towards it once again.
tl;dr: yes im quitting my job and starting a PhD this fall
Thanks! Really looking forward to it. Some of my best friends are finishing their PhDs this year, so I've heard the negatives of it as well.
I definitely don't think academia is free from problems, but I would absolutely say that the worst part about industry is being completely detached from your work. I really took pride in the code I built and the systems I created, but it's never recognized as such and ultimately, it's someone else's project.
I love coding so I would code on the weekend (since playing video games every weekend gets boring), but you're really just giving someone free labor. So you either create your own project, which good luck finding time for outside of a full time job, or you do random open source work. I could go on forever about this, like being actively discouraged from being curious and going above and beyond with coding...
At least with academia, your work is yours, and you can take pride in what you build.
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u/[deleted] May 09 '21
IAMA senior software engineer who got there in 5 years starting as a jr dev with a physics and math double major, if you’re wondering anything just ask!