[pamelafox]

(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.

[truly]

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.

[pamelafox]

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!