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Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

Is it really that easy to get tenure all over again, after a failed project/startup?

Many, many schools would hire him with tenure if he decided to go back to academia. Or he could choose to go to industry and make plenty of money.

Plenty of lucrative and fulfilling options.

Can you elaborate? Is this field-dependent? This is completely against my (very, very limited) experience:

I got my PhD ~20 years ago and saw a few tenured professors (math and physics) leave academia. While I have no first hand experience I did hear through a grapevine that some explored options for coming back, but could not. This is a sensitive topic with little data and so my info is certainly suspect.

I'm coming from a CS perspective.

If they are successful at a top university and leave to try other things (usually startups), then they will have no problems going back to academia. Sometimes it is even viewed positively.

For example, right now Carnegie Mellon has been seeing a flock of their faculty leave to go to tech companies or to do their own startups. Other universities would fight over a successful ex-CMU (or UW!) prof to come to their institution.

Depending on their level of success, they may not get back to a top 5 university, but some other R1 university would gladly take them!

I suspect CS is very different, but I don't know. When the dotcom boom started, many CS departments and universities seemed to start falling all over themselves, to get pieces of the action. (Whether for technology transfer or impact, or simply money.) I don't know whether Mathematics departments have had that kind of cultural upheaval.

I bet he could get tenure in a CS department if he tried.

(author of blog) If I were to attempt to return to academia, I would consider departments other than pure mathematics. E.g., the last place I interviewed at (about 10 years ago) was Emory University's department of Mathematics and Computer Science, and I remember being excited by computer science being part of the same department. I just checked, and see that it's now split into two departments: http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/site/home/

I would likely have a lot of trouble re-entering academia due to lack of recent academic publications; I've been on many hiring committees over the years in pure math, and we never considered hiring anybody who wasn't already in academia.

Could you say more about how noted professor marketability would work in this case, in your field?

My reasons for asking... I've heard mathematics academia has its own version of ageism. (In dotcoms, at least, it's easy to go from being a star who everyone wants to hire, to most people not caring.) Plus I wonder how it would be perceived: a history of seeming to want to do a startup rather than be a professor. And a university that wanted to be the new home of a prestige research&eduction open source software project would have to see whether the prior university's involvement would complicate things.

> Many, many schools would hire him with tenure if he decided to go back to academia.

Pretty sure this is false.

I'd say this is true. It wouldn't be UW nor at the same salary he currently has but, idk, Texas Tech, North Dakota State or some such place would think he would be a high profile catch at least in the next two or three years.

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