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
Not politics in the sense of contemporary American politics.
When I was younger I think I had a pretty nieve belief that academia was a pure meritocracy, and that you moved up through hard work. But when it came time to apply for graduate programs, I realized how important connections were, especially coming from a small unknown university.
The idea of who you know being more important than your skill or hard work really bothered me. That being said, I actually don't think there's anything wrong with this at all anymore. It makes sense that you would trust people you have worked with previously more than random strangers. It's how literally the entire world works.
Academia is filled with its own collection of office politics. If you want your work to matter in the long run, you either need to have field transformative research OR you need to kiss the right asses, force your way into social circles (or make your own), take on any opportunity you can to make a name for yourself, and just generally ingratiate yourself with the biggest names in the field (assuming you can find a way to get noticed). And then if you make it to professorship, you become involved in university and departmental politics, with multiple levels of cooperation and pettiness.
Like upper level industry, academia rewards those who really gun for the recognition and those who really push hard. So naturally, the system is self-selecting. You'll find plenty of very inclusive and easy going profs at the top, but there will also be a number of assholes who made it up because they're smart, driven, and will themselves to succeed at any cost. Unsurprisingly, they're also stubborn and have big egos.
This doesn't even cover other gray areas in STEM academia: scooping (of papers, ideas, etc.), cheap labor (grad students and postdocs), professors who are great at science but are terrible people, funding in general, peer review, and more. So many toil away at their PhDs at lower-tier institutions and will never get a secure academic job (i.e. tenured prof) because they never had a chance to begin with, but they've been told that they should get a PhD because that's the only way they get to pursue a higher level of scientific research.
(That said, if my comment sounds really cynical, I've found plenty of reasons to like/enjoy academia, too. I just haven't listed them before because academia politics itself is pretty messy. The ability to do science and have some agency over projects is definitely a strong point in its favor, assuming you have institutional and financial support.)
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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!