I am a master's student, I think many times about academia vs industry for "research". Academia has a great advantage over industry: freedom, never dismiss it.
Care to share some concrete examples of how academia is more free and how you expect that to make your daily life better overall? The author touched on that point a bit, especially when he described that tenure wasn’t as freeing as he expected. From his writing, he didn’t seem especially free to me.
I commented because I think academics may underestimate how much freedom there can be in industry. My experience has been that after establishing a baseline of trust (by delivering on goals, making good technical decisions, behaving honestly and ethically, etc.), my company and manager are happy to give me a lot of latitude to choose what I work on.
Being one of our founding engineers, I have several times identified a need and implemented a solution without "seeking permission" first. When I do want more formal company backing to pursue a project, a conversation with my manager or an email or a one-page Google Doc all sound easier than writing and submitting a grant proposal.
As our company has grown, I have seen my role change, and I have collaborated with my manager to determine a new direction and title for myself. Notably, I tried management for a while, and I ultimately decided to return to an individual contributor role (no direct reports). It didn't sound like Dr. Fratantonio had the option to stop mentoring other PhD candidates.
Freedom is not exclusive to founding engineers. Our company has a prioritized list of features available for development, and devs have a big role in choosing the next feature they work on, even when it's not a current area of expertise. Established engineers and new hires alike have a lot of latitude to pick technologies, architect a solution to a problem, implement a novel algorithm, etc. One relatively junior new hire is embarking on a project to rewrite much of our frontend code, with support from all of us.
Again, that's why I commented. Depending on what type of freedom you're seeking, industry may offer it and pay better and have better working conditions to boot.
I didn’t explain my opinion as strong as I could have. In academia, your biggest problem to do great research is "publish or perish", but in industry, as an employee, your biggest problem is your company's short goals. "They buy your freedom". You can't focus on a hard problem for ten years or do research on interesting theoretical problems in industry.
>You can't focus on a hard problem for ten years or do research on interesting theoretical problems in industry.
Sure you can. You simply spend a bit of time on farming out practical applications to other teams or filling patents or writing publications. Comes out to less overhead than in academia with grants, managing students, writing papers, etc. Sure, 99.99% of industry is applied however 0.01% of a massive thing is still very large so there's plenty of non-applied work being done.
Industry is massive and painting every little piece of it with the same brush is a very unjust way of looking at it. I'd recommend you actually learn about things and talk to people before making broad generalizations about them.
There are numerous counterexamples. AI/ML is huge in industry right now, but that’s just the most visible field. Hardware manufacturers certainly have employees pushing forward the state of the art. Google regularly publishes cited research papers. Microsoft and Oracle fund a lot of academic research—I have to assume they also employ internal researchers. Industry is on the forefront of the software engineering specialization of CS (my grad school focus). I’m sure you can find plenty more examples.
10 years of focus on the same problem is definitely possible in industry, and your salary will scale with your expertise. It sounds like you’re expected to produce results along the way even in academia, so there’s not a notable difference in that regard.
One other thing worth comparing is the administrative burden. Good engineering teams have a variety of support systems in place to keep high-value engineers as productive as possible (people managers, engineering coordinators, project managers, etc.). It sounds to me like profs end up personally doing a lot of legwork.
From my reading on the subject industry seems a lot more free in practice than academia. Which is a sad state of affairs in my view. No overbearing need to worry about keeping grant committees happy or paper review boards or tenured advisors or well connected members of the community. If you don't play by the rules in academia then you won't get another position and future grants much less tenure. Large companies will pay for people to do research that is only tangentially relevant to their business. And if your research does make them money then they'll put up with a lot.
You can actually do much of the exact same research at industry labs as at a university. You can even compete for the same government grants. In many fields the highest-cited authors with the most publications actually work in industry.
You will have managers in industry of course, where in academia you just have a dept chair and dean who only have a vague sense of what you're up to. On the other hand, in industry you can actually devote most of your time to doing the research yourself. Often they break the labor up into those that write grants and the team that does the work. Whereas in academia the incentives really drive you to spend all your time dealing with funding sources and students. When you do have free time, you then have a backlog of writing you want to get done.
This is certainly the case when you're a masters student. It can change as you climb the greasy pole. You will have a lot of freedom if you are extremely successful in your chosen field. Otherwise, it's not such a rosey picture. In academia only the crème de la crème can shop around for a good deal in terms of pay, location and equipment. If you are merely successful then you'll have little choice over where you live and little negotiating power when it comes to pay.
My impression is that it is, in most industries, easier to switch employers than it is in academia, and that gives a certain freedom as well. The knowledge that, if treated poorly, you could just leave, is a powerful motivator to your employer. Also, if things become overly political or just poorly run, you have a ready solution: go somewhere better. At least some in jobs in academia do not feel they are able to do that (as easily, anyway).
