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by jhp123
976 days ago
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Yeah $25k a year for five years or more would be very hard to justify, that's leaving at least half a million dollars on the table in terms of lost earning potential. I think I do have a unique perspective and a pretty respectable level of knowledge and ability for CS research, obviously I wouldn't know for sure until I tried to enter the field. For example I've written a typed UI system based on monadic coroutines, with typed embedding of invariants around focus behavior, scrolling, and responsive display ... I've seen papers and theses on typed UI programming in Haskell which seemed pretty similar in terms of scope and sophistication. I was kind of hoping there would be more paths between industry and academia in CS, because the industry is so large compared with other research fields like math or physics. |
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Somewhat more problematically, "a pretty respectable level of knowledge and ability for CS research" is table stakes for just about every grad student in a CS program. This is especially true at better programs. You might be sadly surprised just how little your industry programming experience is valued in academic CS research - in my grad program, being highly skilled in multiple programming languages was assumed.
By better program, I mean programs like an R1 university CS research program - I am specifically excluding terminal, MS-only CS programs in that statement. Many of those terminal, MS-only programs are actually credential programs for career changers (people who want to upgrade to a SW engineer job and had unrelated undergrad majors).
You might want to look at how the papers and theses you have been enjoying were produced. I strongly suspect that the writers were mostly grad students working under a current professor who had grants to support grad students to do that work. There probably isn't much (any?) demand to hire programmers to do research programming work - that is what research assistantships pay students for.
Maybe a good analogy here would be think about someone who has a physics undergrad, has worked in applied engineering in the energy industry for 16 years, and is now interested in being hired into a university role that allows that person to do more of their day-to-day work directly in particle physics research. What physics department is going to hire that person? Why? Keep in mind there is a verifiable surplus of physics PhD postdocs looking for that gig . . .
All this isn't meant to be overly discouraging, just my thoughts. Honestly, just keep a list of universities you wouldn't mind working at and once a week or so, browse all their job listings to see if something fits your interests and apply if it does!