| The sociology of science is so interesting. (Not the field, but the subject.) Here are some of my favorites quotes/thoughts: This one is a direct contrast to your advice (which speaks volumes about what's wrong with academia): "A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble."[0] This was written about physics at Caltech, but applies more broadly. It explains why the ability to 'manage up' is so critical for early-career success. "[...] departments are run, for better and worse, by the professors who often lack managerial experience. Worse, they are generally unaware of this shortcoming, assuming incorrectly that management is trivially easy compared to their topics of study and merits minimal effort. We have now seen the consequences of this lack of attention." [1] Academic politics is a great reason not to stay in academia: "Look for environments where competitors see themselves as playing a game, rather than fighting for survival — this prevents rankings within the hierarchy from becoming an existential problem." [2] This book has a great chapter of career advice, here's a gem: "Don't build a pyramid. Everyone seems to build one pyramid per career. A pyramid is an ambitious system that one person really cares about and that winds up working well, but then just sits in the desert because nobody else cares the same way. This happens usually just after leaving graduate school." [3] "In general, status-conscious places are miserable for everyone, and the more, the worse." [3, next page] Gatekeeping is predictable from the incentive structure: "For all the high-level talk about how we need to plug the leaks in our STEM education pipeline, not only are we not plugging the holes, we're proud of how fast the pipeline is leaking." [4] "So why am I not an academic? There are many factors, and starting Tarsnap is certainly one; but most of them can be summarized as 'academia is a lousy place to do novel research'." [5] "...whereas Newton could say, 'If I have seen a little farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants,' I am forced to say, 'Today we stand on each other's feet.'" [6] [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html [1] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/08/09/caltech-astrop... [2] https://www.briantimar.com/notes/mimetic/mimetic/ [3] Phillip Hobbs, "Building Electrooptical systems: making it all work" 2nd Ed, p392 [4] https://danluu.com/teach-debugging/ [5] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2020-09-20-On-the-use-of-a-l... [6] Richard Hamming 1968 Turing Award lecture, Journal of the ACM 16 (1), January 1969, p. 3–12 |
It is several repeated and very costly attempts that I made to do just that which leads me to give the advice I did.
The pyramid quote is an interesting one. Obviously there is a tension between being passionate about an idea/goal/cause but not being overly siloed. It seems the best-case scenario is: pick your passion, find some people who're thinking in the same general direction, and compromise the vision among yourselves.
Let's just say that the thought of solving some of the problems I'm interested in from outside academia has occurred to me. But I'm sure it's not all sunshine and rainbows on the outside, either, and moving from academia whose primary motivator is risk aversion to something like a startup is an extreme culture shock, the more so because my objective would be building something real, rather than bilking gullible VCs into an acquihire.
Really good thoughts there.