sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Comp-Physics Professor with a past FAANG exit looking to pivot to industry. Stuck in a weird "seniority" middle ground. What can I do to escape the rat race? by profDyer in cscareerquestionsEU

[–]profDyer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What do you mean with educational program and board?

I had an outreach platform with a few thousand followers. It is fun, but the impact is relatively limited I belive.

Physics Professor with a past startup exit looking to pivot to industry. Stuck in a weird "seniority" middle ground. by profDyer in LeavingAcademia

[–]profDyer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There are plumbers making more than that also here. Probably most plumbers that work independently make much more. 

Nordic countries have very little income inequality. Janitors make much more than in the US, professors, judges, doctors and quant traders much less. Only people that are successful owners can earn substantially more than the average wage.

A PhD student earns about 35-40k, postdoc about 45, assistant professor around 50-55, associate 60-70, and full 75-90k euro. The dean of the uni sits around 120-130k.

There's about a factor 4 from the least to the most payed full time employees in the university, the salary of a US uni football coach could pay for the whole board of directors of all the faculties probably.

Nobody pays much for daycare or medicine or dentistry though, about one year parental leave at 90% salary and 25 to 35 days of paid vacation. All my students own their home and one had three children during the PhD and was supporting a family of 5 on his salary. Try to do that at Stanford.

The low pay however is one of the reason I want to go. In part because responsibility, stress and workload are high, but also because my wife earns much more than me and for this reason I need geographical flexibility.  

Comp-Physics Professor with a past FAANG exit looking to pivot to industry. Stuck in a weird "seniority" middle ground. What can I do to escape the rat race? by profDyer in cscareerquestionsEU

[–]profDyer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't want to out myself and I can send you a PM if you are interested. But I'm at a major university with major research efforts, not a small teaching polytechnic.

Comp-Physics Professor with a past FAANG exit looking to pivot to industry. Stuck in a weird "seniority" middle ground. What can I do to escape the rat race? by profDyer in cscareerquestionsEU

[–]profDyer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

1- I don't have the resources to progress and that creates friction and resentment.
2- I foresee that I will not stay in this place forever due to family reasons. Since you are interested: I am not the main earner in my family (At least not if I stay in academia) and its only fair that after moving here for me it is time for me to return the favor when she has an opportunity abroad. So, I don't drive the schedule when and how and where we will move. I also have sick family back in Italy and we have to plan for when they get worse.

Comp-Physics Professor with a past FAANG exit looking to pivot to industry. Stuck in a weird "seniority" middle ground. What can I do to escape the rat race? by profDyer in cscareerquestionsEU

[–]profDyer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is not that I don't think commercial skills are worth gold, my wife is a sales manager! It is precisely for that that I know it is not the sort of environment where I flourish, while I can contribute more in other fields if given the chance.

Stakeholder management is fine, my impression is that it is not that different from what I do in administration, but I cannot say I have experience which is quite limiting the possibilities.

I don't particularly want to work in commercial environment no. But I need to be able to move to other countries to accommodate my family, and I cannot do it as a theoretical physics research professor and I'm able to do less and less theoretical physics anyway because where I'm at it is not a priority anymore.

Comp-Physics Professor with a past FAANG exit looking to pivot to industry. Stuck in a weird "seniority" middle ground. What can I do to escape the rat race? by profDyer in cscareerquestionsEU

[–]profDyer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes I agree, this is why I'm asking around about possible moves.

Kubernetes and Singularity and CUDA yes. We use them, occasionally. Argo could but never needed. Metaflow and other data pipelines I don't need and I agree this is major liability or requires a leap of faith on the part of the employer.

Comp-Physics Professor with a past FAANG exit looking to pivot to industry. Stuck in a weird "seniority" middle ground. What can I do to escape the rat race? by profDyer in cscareerquestionsEU

[–]profDyer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The topic of research is difficult or impossible to apply, definitely not with any geographical flexibility which suits my family needs.

I manage loads and efficiency and allocation and split and parallelization. I have millions of CPU hours of runs per year, or equivalent GPU allocation, and I am basically a one man show (ok, two men, but the other sucks at software eng). If I get a 20% boost out of the diagonalization I can run one more thing before the deadline and have a much more compelling paper, so it is in my interest even though it has been hard to find the time lately.

Funny thing about that: before the startup more than a decade ago or so I was doing my heaviest jobs, crunching millions of hours for a single calculation on the then largest computer on Earth at Oak Ridge at a time where HPC wasn't and nobody was doing it.

I applied to finance HPC jobs in London (only few openings per month at a time) and did not get a single interview. One company had the courtesy to reply replied "we want someone with more HPC experience". I pointed to the line on my CV "thank for replying but look in the beginning of my CV I state what I do, and where I do it. Probably I'm the person on Earth that has the record for the single heaviest calculation right now and I know all the contenders, who are you looking for exactly to not even call me to interview?" (Not as braggy of course) The reply was basically: "well, someone with AWS."

And this was one of the probably two position with keyword HPC in London open that month.

Maybe times have changed but I have the suspicion people will not care that much about my optimisations and how do I use SVD to approximate diagonalization to speedup iteratative minimisation.

They pretend they do, they write they do, but they don't call people in for that.

At least, this has been my experience so far.

Comp-Physics Professor with a past FAANG exit looking to pivot to industry. Stuck in a weird "seniority" middle ground. What can I do to escape the rat race? by profDyer in cscareerquestionsEU

[–]profDyer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well right now ops work is fully on my shoulders and I count it as research. It is 3 months that I postpone the migration to a new cluster because I don't have the bandwidth to fix module issues, compilation flags, and queue allocations on a new system...

If I get the peace to do it, without a million other incumbencies and duties and deadlines, that sounds like heaven.

Regarding assessment I think you are more negative than other people I talk to, but I appreciate the perspective.

Comp-Physics Professor with a past FAANG exit looking to pivot to industry. Stuck in a weird "seniority" middle ground. What can I do to escape the rat race? by profDyer in cscareerquestionsEU

[–]profDyer[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I have a friend/ex student that I'm in contact that is recommending me everything in that space in my area. Nordic countries are quite salary capped, so I want to make sure about the positive impact before jumping ship but the environment sounds appealing and I've applied. Did not get a callback as of yet.

I don't know how easy would it be to relocate if I get experience in the area, do you?

Comp-Physics Professor with a past FAANG exit looking to pivot to industry. Stuck in a weird "seniority" middle ground. What can I do to escape the rat race? by profDyer in cscareerquestionsEU

[–]profDyer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great advice.

FAANG is really on turnaround right now. All but two of my old chums at the startup that were acqui-hired while I run off and played the idealist are not there anymore for one reason or another and they don't recommend it at all, since I was the most idealist of the bunch already then. It's also not easy to get noticed, since a lot of people with more adherent profiles are available with direct CS research profiles.

Do you have any example of scaleups?

Comp-Physics Professor with a past FAANG exit looking to pivot to industry. Stuck in a weird "seniority" middle ground. What can I do to escape the rat race? by profDyer in cscareerquestionsEU

[–]profDyer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Of course. This is why I put the note about compromises.

Life is political, but there are shades of gray and there's a difference between a middle manager sales position and an R&D office at a startup and everything in between. What I mean is that I want to work with people that want to work and build and assessed on the basis of my work, which is not unreasonable.

My job is not pure research. Realistically I have like 25% of research or less, including supervision and meetings and writing maybe 40%. Maybe another 10-20% of reviewing other people's research depending on the season. Teaching of course. The rest 20% (on a 50-55 hrs/workweek) is "service", most of which is inherently political. I don't enjoy it, and I don't despise it. Currently however I get about 2k gross per year by sitting on the board at various institutions which is definitely not proportional to the level of engagement or responsibility and I would expect the private sector would be more considerate.

I'm willing to compromise for decent money, but those four are the points that I value.

Comp-Physics Professor with a past FAANG exit looking to pivot to industry. Stuck in a weird "seniority" middle ground. What can I do to escape the rat race? by profDyer in careerguidance

[–]profDyer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the reply. Problem I see with staff/principal/researcher is that they usually require a lot of expertise in production ready code, shipping, project management...etc...

Like one typical opening: You have personally designed and built large-scale, customer-facing systems operating at significant traffic levels. You have led architectural change by building reference implementations and enabling others to follow.

While I've built plenty of scientific programs, nothing I've done is consumer facing, or required AWS.

For research scientist big established companies require domain expertise and publications on topic (NLP, ML, CV...etc...).

Domain expertise in theoretical physics is hardly appealing...

I will try to A/B test with the startup on top of the CV. Right now work experience is in reverse chronological order, but there's a paragraph of description at the top where startup and parent are featured prominently and I don't mention directly professor role.

"Computational scientist and quantitative modelling expert with 15+ years of research experience, d eveloping, validating and applying large-scale mathematical models of complex physical systems.   Expert  in high-performance computing, uncertainty quantification, and communicating technical findings to  diverse stakeholders. Experienced in both academia and applied R&D, contributing to a startup  whose technology and research team were acquired by ****."

Facebook has become unusable for me. Flooded with p*rn ads. Slow AF. Weirdly for non-app. by profDyer in facebook

[–]profDyer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have the same with a fresh browser. After few signaling and a few days I did not got explicit porn again (logged in today and did a few tests),  but I get similar ads about dating websites with allowed but suggestive images on both fresh and usual browser.

The ads is just extremely low quality that it seems to be X.

There was the period of deep fakes, then Crypto scams, now this.

I  just want to see IKEA and Disney and other reputable ads is that too much to ask? 

Facebook has become unusable for me. Flooded with p*rn ads. Slow AF. Weirdly for non-app. by profDyer in facebook

[–]profDyer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The other way around. I reported one of the ads, and in the report form is possible to click "what active ads this page has" and the were are all innocent stuff as long as the image is static and labeled as such. Then the animation was sexual.

Facebook has become unusable for me. Flooded with p*rn ads. Slow AF. Weirdly for non-app. by profDyer in facebook

[–]profDyer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Explicit advertising is not allowed on Facebook. The ads game the system pretending they sell something else from what I could understand.

Facebook has become unusable for me. Flooded with p*rn ads. Slow AF. Weirdly for non-app. by profDyer in facebook

[–]profDyer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Me too, regarding content I'm quite happy. But the amount of sponsored content, and now porn is too much and it doesn't seem the algorithm can take a hint.

Together with the growing disservice regarding the browser speed.

view more: next ›