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by truly 1485 days ago
It is unfortunate when a talented teacher, as the OP seems to be, turn to industry for (significantly) more money, but this seems to be the way the market works pretty much everywhere around the world.

There are however some advantages to an academic job: somewhat more flexible schedule (not when you're teaching), relative freedom to engage in whatever research you wish, no need to sit in front of a computer screen all day, job security.
2 comments
pamelafox 1485 days ago
(Author here) The aspect of flexibility is really interesting. On the one hand, the lecturer role is way more flexible in that I can get my prep work done whenever I want, and if I did find myself all done with prep, I could garden all day instead with no guilt. (That happened once in my 1.5 years!)

On the other hand, there's a lot that's more inflexible than in a SWE job: lecture times, university-dictated exam times (at night! I had to sleeptrain my toddler to make them), staff meeting times (hard to find a time that works for a staff of 50-100).

So yeah- more flexible in some ways, less flexible in others, it depends what sort of flexibility you're looking for.

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truly 1485 days ago
As a (tenured) academic myself, I fully understand the flexibility (and the lack thereof). A staff of 50-100 sounds like a true nightmare. I've experienced classes of ~500 students myself, but 2000 seems quite excessive.

Congratulations for trying out lecturing and for the eloquent writeup.

P.S. Btw, I've stumbled upon your website https://www.recursionvisualizer.com/, which even works with memoized functions (in what seems to be a left-to-right call-by-value order), so I will be using this the next time I'm teaching dynamic programming or backtracking, in order to save time on drawing calls by hand on the board.

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pamelafox 1485 days ago
Oo, nice! I was actually thinking of adding specific support for a @memoize decorator that would visualize what gets added to the memo, like the visualization I made more manually for this article (scroll down): https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/algor... Don't know when I'll ever get around to it, pull requests welcome!
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cycomachead 1485 days ago
Yeah, the thing is, as someone in the same position as the OP, I feel stupid for always sticking around.

Pamela already addressed the inflexibility part. And I'll just echo that I find it worse than how she described. But I've probably over-committed myself, too. Engaging in research-like stuff is very fun, but it is often unpaid for someone who is a lecturer.

As for job security: Non-Tenured folks (like the OP) get relatively short term contracts. And it's easy for the University to not renew them, especially when there are budget constraints. Sure, I never had a contract like this as SWE and I could have been fired before my 1-2 years were up, but my job there felt much more secure. I knew my manager and how the company was doing. In contrast, while I'm friends with everyone - I don't yet have security that I'll be returning in the Fall, even though my name is on the schedule.

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