It took me about 5 years to really transition into industry. It will, of course, vary greatly by industry specifics (mine ended up being tech, but my background is in Linguistics).
My best advice to anyone in this position is: stay in academic positions as long as you can (I lectured for nearly 10 years), but take on contract work concurrently until you find your foot in the door. A PhD is not really a “get a job out of academia” degree, and it really needs more work/networking to be respected in industry.
Edit: want to clarify this:
A PhD is not really a “get a job out of academia” degree
Remember that, typically, a Masters degree is where you go if you want to stand out in industry immediately, as it tends to be a more involved version of an undergraduate degree since it will have a more defined course structure and direction vs a PhD. Universities know this, which is why so many Masters programs are unfunded (many PhD programs are also unfunded, but friendly advice: never, ever do a PhD program that costs you money).
At the same time, it tends to be easy to get a Masters on the way to a PhD – usually just some paperwork. In that sense, you may have a leg up just only reporting your Masters to certain companies. And of course, if you are in a PhD program, ask if you can sign off for the extra Masters on your way.
The PhD is unique in that it is specifically designed to require new research. Many companies do not see the value in paying more for that, though if you have a chance to show them the difference between you and another candidate, you’ll win 99/100 times.
Edit 2: this is specifically PhD programs in the US, which are markedly different than other parts of the world.
Edit 3: and of course, the adage “publish or perish” does apply in academia. But academia, in my opinion, is not the meritocracy it used to be, at least in the US. Of my entire cohort of about 25 people, 2 became tenured professors – and both of them have parents who are professors. Nepotism is rampant and probably means more than publishing in certain fields.
For industry, publishing means very little.
Not trying to be defeatist or change anyone’s views here. Just giving my 2 cents since I have been in a relatively unique situation before.
This all sounds so weird coming from germany since here you do you bachelors degree, then your masters degree and then optionally your PhD. While the usefullness of the PhD and its duration vary between subjects (in IT it takes 3-5 years and is not really worth it money-wise if you go in the industry afterwards, while in medicine it can be done in a year or even less and is basically necessary). Also while you do your PhD you are usually employed by the government (since universities are public institutions) and paid well. A PhD earns you social prestige and prestige in the industry since - besides in medicine - nearly no one has one.
I spent most of a decade in industry doing what is generally thought of as a PhD’s job. In order to fill in some gaps, I took a ton of graduate classes on the companies dime and looked at doing a fully funded PhD. I didn’t end up doing it.
Why?
The industry paid better than academia. So the brain drain was real. The informal training I had from PhD’s in the company was vastly superior to the graduate level training at the university. Anyone who was any good at the applied side was not in academia. The ones left in academia were a very odd group with zero applied knowledge.
Most PhD hires failed miserably in the field. 9 out of 10 of them could not make the transition to the practical application of knowledge.
I saw a trend where smaller companies where hiring mostly industry experienced people for the positions (like I was).
So for me the time and investment was not worth it.
One of my friends made it halfway through his PhD. He then got sick of the politics and drama and noped out.
Interesting observations. Intent here is not to offer disagreements but just comparisons to my experience:
Yes, industry pays much better. The wage gap in academia is a huge deal and one which will not get attention until the general issue with low wages in the US is handled. That said, I make about twice as much in industry as I would have as a tenured professor in my field had I started at the same time.
This resonates with me in that I have heard it a lot. I think every person is different, but academia has a habit of supporting a kind of pretentiousness that is not conducive to pragmatic work. I would suggest this is highly field dependent, though.
Industry experience trumps academic, 100% of the time.
I came at it from a different path than you. I wanted to be a professor, through and through. The tenured professorship is generally unattainable, since the number of positions is nothing compared to minted PhDs. For that reason, I explored switching to industry. I ended up in a good space, but I am not at all suggesting that someone should get a PhD to go into industry.
Edit: there’s also an epistemological argument to be made about #2 (the readiness of academics for industry). A lot of industry is about very specific solutioning and methods which may even be company dependent. In that sense, it is a skill you can only get from industry.
First paragraph had me laughing. Somebody has spent a lot of time in private industry and has gotten burned a few times.
As for #2 it depends on the age of the industry. Here is the life cycle of research driven industries as I see it.
Historically in research driven industries the foundations have been started in academia. Private companies start up relying on the universities research.
Money flows into the university systems from private companies and they start producing a lot PhD’s in the field.
Next the private companies decide they can make more money doing the research in-house. They offer large sums of money to the established professors and get fresh grads at bargain prices.
Pretty soon most of the best and brightest are drained to private industry. The funding from private industry slows to a trickle and all that is left in academia is those with more social connections than ability.
For the next 30 years, private industry has great talent. Then the first first wave of PhD’s retire. The new PhD’s grads are trained by the social connections crowd.
That’s when you start to see fun job descriptions posted like:
PhD + 2 years of experience, Masters + 5 years experience, Bachelor’s + 8 years experience.
The paragraph is an overly polite way of writing to avoid any semblance of disparaging the other person. As mine was clearly written as a personal anecdote there is no need to qualify your remarks as non-derogatory.
Generally I see people develop those types of phrasing habits when they have negative experiences with misunderstanding in the past. Very common with many PhD’s communicating with MBA’s, sales or production teams. A little overly verbose but carefullly respectful to avoid conflict. It’s a very good habit to have professionally but quite funny when out of context.
Yes. Kinda? There are microwave guns designed for crowd control. I don’t know how commonly they’re used if they are even out of an experimental stage though. They’re not gonna kill you, but they will make you uncomfortable.
Alright, absolute noob here, I’m not particularly interested in computer science or an OS I have to obsessively research. First, how is gaming on Linux nowadays? I play a lot of games, most of which are not triple-A, so I wonder how accessible this is. Second, what distributions are accessible and still customizable? I have all kinds of peripherals I’d like to be able to use, speaker systems, midi controllers, etc.
Fellow Linux noob, just started using it earlier this year so if someone with more experience wants to weigh in, please do.
That said, gaming on Linux is pretty good. Steam’s proton makes most games playable out of the box, although it’s still a good idea to check Proton DB to see if any particular game you want to play is playable.
As for your other question, I’m not totally sure what you mean by accessible and customizable, but I don’t think any of your peripherals are going to be distro locked. The Arch Wiki is a pretty good resource for, well, everything, but most relevant to you for your peripherals (it also usually gives good information for any distro, not just arch)
Q1: Pretty good! Use ProtonDB to check what games work, and if you need to apply any fixes.
Q2: Linux Mint is the most popular choice for beginners, and it’s extremely easy to use. Other people choose Pop!_OS because it’s apparently better for gaming (I haven’t tried it). However, I think the best distro for gaming, while still being extremely stable, is Nobara (a distro based on Fedora Linux).
Also, practically all Linux distros are customizable, don’t worry about which one’s the best.
P.S: You can browse through the most popular distros here: DistroWatch
(Background: I’ve been obsessively using Linux for four years.)
About gaming, from my personal experience, it’s overall pretty straight forward. When issues happen, you just got to have patience to read through logs and search up on Google or similar any suspicious parts of the log. Worst part is usually DRM/anticheat, but from what I can gather, usually pretty isolated cases are problematic due to compatibility, usually requiring the devs to go out of their ways to make the DRM incompatible.
As for the distros question, perhaps Linux Mint? It trades off bleeding edge updates for the sake of stability. Just avoid the Debian-based variant of Mint for now as it’s still in beta.
As a lifelong Baal voter I am now voting for Moloch. How can anyone with a conscience still vote for Baal after he was convicted of sacrificing adults?
It is so sad that it works too - no room for nuance, responsibility, even long-term stability (even for the entire human species, + all other mammals on Earth & many others too that we seem ready to take down with us on our way to extinction).
I try to do a search on Chrome and Gemini pops up and start spewing its BS. I go into messages and I try to send a message and gemini pops up and asks me if it wants to send a message for me. No I know how to write my own stupid messages. It’s all integrated into Windows 11, Is integrated into the Bing app. It’s like swatting flies trying to get rid of it.
The idea is that it can replace a lot of customer facing positions that are manpower intensive.
Beyond that, an AI can also act as an intern in assisting in low complexity tasks the same way that a lot of Microsoft Office programs have replaced secretaries and junior human calculators.
I’ve always figured part of it Is that businesses don’t like to pay labor and they’re hoping that they can use artificial intelligence to get rid of the rest of us so they don’t have to pay us.
Ignoring AI as he is like ignoring Spreadsheets as hype. “I can do everything with a pocket calculator! I don’t need stupid auto fill!”
AI doesn’t replace people. It can automate and reduce your workload leaving you more time to solve problems.
I’ve used it for one off scripts. I have friends who have done the same and another friend who used it to create the boilerplate for a government contact bid that he won (millions in revenue for his company of which he got tens of thousands in bonus as engineering sales support).
kbin.life
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