[pmorici]

Kind of an interesting full circle. I remember reading his "why I'm leaving Harvard for Google" post a while back and If memory serves it was because he was doing to many managerial type things that he wasn't thrilled about yet he finds himself in a similar position again a few years later. It would be interesting to hear what he thinks of his current responsibilities compared to the teaching job he left.

[foobarian]

It's probably the case that he could've stuck with being an individual contributor. I don't know about Google but the tech shop I work for has paths explicitly for the introverted engineer types who don't care for the drudgery of managing people. This is invariably a lot harder in academia, as getting to tenure pretty much requires one to act as a startup founder-- do all the business dealing, run a team, get funding, etc.

Given that Matt did get tenure he clearly is really good at such managerial roles, and probably couldn't help but step up. I bet Google leadership try very hard to get people to do management--it's not easy, on the contrary engineers don't like it and it's a fight to get the good ones to step up. I would bet too that the managerial type things at Google are a lot more fun than the academic ones.

[mdwelsh]

That's a fair point. It's true my job has shifted much more towards being like a professor than being an individual contributor SWE. Still, lots of differences with academic life: Far lower overhead, far less administrative work, much greater assurance of success (not being subject to peer review for everything), etc. So overall more satisfying although the day-to-day schedule might look roughly the same.

[induscreep]

I don't think it was a teaching job...really low teaching loads at Harvard. More of a research job.