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Comment by larsberg | Hacker News Reader

"One of the things they teach you in American college is that industry is to be looked down upon."

This statement is not at all true in engineering schools. At least when I went to school (Northwestern, '00), there were huge numbers of industry/academic partnerships and the innovation talked about in this article was pushed as the sort of thing it was expected for you to do after graduation, unless you had the misfortune to continue on for your Ph.D., which very few people did. Maybe that quote applies more to non-engineering schools?

Can other engineering-educated folks relate to his quote?

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I have a bunch of friends who are philosophy students and right now they are "on strike", occupying a building at Middlesex University.

The irony that they gleefully proclaim that they aren't studying a lowly "vocational" or "technical" course, yet have purloined the language and ideology of, umm, actual workers seems to have entirely escaped them.

Then again, several of them genuinely believe that writing essays at university is morally equivalent to building tractors at a factory... Marxists, eh? They'll be in for a bit of a shock when they have to meet the real world.

Top tip for annoying an academic: refer to the "real world" in a way that implies that they don't belong to it.

The professor I used to work for used become incandescent with rage when someone did this. :-)

Well their message to taxpayers is "work harder for longer for less so we can go on sneering at you from our ivory tower", so they really don't belong to the real world. Yet, but they will soon...

They don't belong in the real world in the sense that people get paid in the real world. Meanwhile, most academics go into debt, earn very little, and work long hours trying to genuinely contribute something to society as a whole.

This is why so many phd students in computer science and related technical fields go into industry where they can get over double the salary from day one. Many academics do have a very negative view of none academics, precisely because of the sentiment that you so eloquently put into words.

The irony is that society is eager as ever to consume the technologies and knowledge that comes from academic research, yet somehow expect all that for free, and even get angry when their results don't come fast enough.

The me generation indeed.

My experience is in the the UK, but when I worked in academia (from '89 to '95) I was paid roughly the same amount as my friends in the private sector.

Looking at academic salaries these days they don't look too bad when you compare working conditions, perks (access sports centers etc.), long holidays and the rather generous final salary pension scheme.

Yeah, I can imagine PhD students have a hard time everywhere - but I really don't have much sympathy for salaried staff in academia (or most of the UK public sector) complaining about wages and conditions.

Admittedly, it seems prima facie ridiculous.

The thing is, socialism, Marxism, worker's rights, and etc., started in the university and spread from there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1968_in_France , for example.

So it's not so much that the philosophy students have purloined the language and ideology of "actual workers", but rather that their intellectual ancestors created the social context in which these "actual workers" were able to strike, form unions, and etc.

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/1/55760-what-should-we-te...

CS professor (about a student): "He accepted a job in industry."

Another CS professor: "Sad; he showed so much promise."

I don't know if the quote is true or untrue, but it would seem there are people in engineering who share the author's point of view.

When I was wrapping up my Master's and various professors were trying to convince me to stay for a PhD (CS), I definitely sensed them having this point of view.

I don't necessarily think that profs will see someone going to industry as a failure, but it is a loss. If someone a prof supervises goes on to a tenure track position, they become a long-term colleague and demonstrates the influence they have on Academia. A portfolio of grad students who went on to be captains of industry isn't as academically sexy as ones who all have long publication lists.

Absolutely wrong, if you are talking about apply for grant money. If there is one thing that the government loves when giving out grants, it's strong industry support and/or clear impact on society.

The view you saw more likely comes from the fact that the knowledge those people generate in industry will be locked up behind IP walls for generations, and thus it's a loss to the academic pool of information.

I'm in the process of switching from academia to industry. I'd say that all but one of my mentors take this point of view.

This was a pretty typical viewpoint of CS professors in the mid and early 90s. The job market was dismal and the jobs available were boring. Academia was more stable, arguably more interesting, and depending on the situation, possibly paid about the same as industry.

For tech, this is almost certainly not a universal thing. Back when I was in college doing a BSCS, we almost universally respected the industry and it's ability to execute and research.

Sure, there were jokes about making money instead of quality research or software. There were jokes (very valid ones) about the pain of dealing with the uninitiated; we all feared and obsessed over life under a PHB. But the tech sector and even compsci and math didn't carry any derision towards I could detect in my interactions with people from diverse schools across the US. Perhaps because there was so much money to be made, even post-bubble.

When I got my Masters in maths a few years ago, it was generally acknowledged (and only part in jest) that future income was inversely proportional to ability. People who weren't smart enough to study 'real' maths, took the much easier statistics and financial mathematics courses and went on to get high paying jobs.

I can't speak to your math department's prejudices. I was just making a point that I don't think the derision is universal. And in the slinky more practical CS, CSE, and CE. Programs we had a healthy respect for the industry.

A lot of very good work has been funded by private initiatives in the last 5 years.

I wouldn't call it prejudice as much as observation. The stats and financial mathematics people did go on to earn the big money, and those courses where, on the whole, filled with people (like me) who couldn't cut it in the harder PhD level pure math courses. That is simply how it was.

I never argued that private initiatives didn't fund a lot of (or even most) cutting edge research.

Industry\Business brings money and wealthy alumini. When I was at Northwestern (post-Enron) I always found Anderson Hall humorously named...

Agreed (Northwestern, 2012). Not only do professors not look down on industry, many either come from or participate actively. I'm not sure if you're CS or remember Larry Birnbaum, but you can't take a class with him without hearing something about his new startup ;)

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