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Comment by bartwr | Hacker News Reader

If someone believed they will earn 2-5x better than in academia, with full freedom to work on whatever interests them, and no need to deliver value to the employer... Well, let's say "ok", we have all been young and naive, but if their advisors have not adjusted their expectations, they are at fault, maybe even fraudulent.

Even being in elite research groups at the most prestigious companies you are evaluated on product and company Impact, which has nothing to do with how groundbreaking your research is, how many awards it gets, or how many cite it. I had colleagues at Google Research bitter that I was getting promoted (doing research addressing product needs - and later publishing it, "systems" papers that are frowned upon by "true" researchers), while with their highly cited theoretical papers they would get a "meet expectations" type of perf eval and never a promotion.

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Yet your Google Research colleagues still earned way more than in academia, even without the promo.

Plus, there were quite a few places where a good publication stream did earn a promotion, without any company/business impact. FAIR, Google Brain, DM. Just not Google Research.

DeepMind didn't have any product impact for God knows how many years, but I bet they did have promos happening:)

You don't understand the Silicon Valley grind mindset :) I personally agree with you - I am happy working on interesting stuff, getting a good salary, and don't need a promo. Most times I switched jobs it was a temporary lowering of my total comp and often the level. But most Googlers are obsessed with levels/promotion, talk about it, and the frustration is real. They are hyper ambitious and see level as their validation.

And if you join as a PhD fresh grad (RS or SWE), L4 salary is ok, but not amazing compared to costs of living there. From L6 on it starts to be really really good.

I assure you, before the LLM race, those research shops (DM, FAIR) had many directors that didn't contribute to any product whatsoever.

> I am happy working on interesting stuff, getting a good salary, and don't need a promo

People who don't contribute to the bottom line are the first to get a PIP or to be laid off. Effectively the better performers are subsidizing their salary, until the company sooner or later decides to cut dead wood.

> with full freedom to work on whatever interests them, and no need to deliver value to the employer

You know that in academia you constantly have to beg for money by trying to convince government agencies that you’re bringing them value right?

> full freedom to work on whatever interests them, and no need to deliver > value to the employer...

That was an exaggeration. No employee has full freedom, and I am sure it was expected that you do something which within some period of time, even if not immediately, has prospects for productization; or that when something becomes productizable, you would then divert some of your efforts towards that.

It wasn't an exaggeration! :) The shock of many of my colleagues (often not even junior... sometimes professors who decided to join the industry) "wait, I need to talk to product teams and ask them about their needs, requirements, trade-offs, and performance budgets and cannot just show them my 'amazing' new toy experiment I wrote a paper about that costs 1000x their whole budget and works 50% of time, and they won't jump to putting it into production?" was real. :) They don't want to think about products and talk to product teams (but get evaluated based on research that gets into products and makes a difference there), just do Ivory tower own research.

One of many reasons why Google invented Transformers and many components of GPT pre-trainint, but ChatGPT caught them "by surprise" many years later.

Well there are a few. The Distinguished Scientists at Microsoft Research probably get to work on whatever interests them. But that is a completely different situation from a new Ph.D. joining a typical private company.

I believe the above post was highlighting that as a misconception young people may have, not saying it is the case.

Someone correct me if this is wrong, but wasn't that pretty much the premise of Institute for Advanced Study? Minus very high-paying salaries. Just total intellectual freedom, with zero other commitments and distractions.

I know Feynman was somewhat critical to IAS, and stated that the lack of accountability and commitment could set up researchers to just follow their dreams forever, and eventually end up with some writers block that could take years to resolve.

> Minus very high-paying salaries.

They very high salaries are central to the situation.

If you remove high salary then you have a lot more freedom. The tradeoff is the entire point of discussion.

Come be a professor in the Netherlands! You can even run a company on the side. Freedom is real. You don’t get paid well for it.

> you are evaluated on product and company Impact, which has nothing to do with how groundbreaking your research is,

I wonder... There are some academics who are really big names in their fields, who publish like crazy in some FAANG. I assume that the company benefits from just having the company's name on their papers at top conferences.

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