why I am leaving academia
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@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ date: 2023-11-30T09:30:00+01:00
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categories:
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- programming
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tags:
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- job ads
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- jobs
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---
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As I once again find myself staring at local software dev job ads, I can't help but wonder: _what are the current trends in local software dev ads?_ In other words, can we identify patterns by data mining job ads? The answer is, of course, yes, but the results are disappointingly comparable with the last time I was flipping through ads, in 2014---nine years ago! Java programming jobs are still the most popular ones, followed by the .NET stack, and HR still thinks recurring buzzwords such as _agile_ and _teamwork_ should be heavily sprinkled throughout the ad descriptions. Let's take a closer look.
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---
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title: Why I Am Leaving Academia (For Now)
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date: 2024-01-17T09:52:00+01:00
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categories:
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- education
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tags:
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- academia
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- phd
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- jobs
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---
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First, I really wanted to leave. Afterwards, I didn't want to. Then, I was paralyzed and didn't know which route to take. Now, I'm just glad a decision has finally been made, and I can move on. After five and a half years, I am leaving academia. In this post, I scramble to gather my thoughts as to why. Brace yourself for an incoming wall of text.
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## I tried to get a foot in the door
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The last six months I've been going back and forth waking up thinking "I should stay" just when I was about to accept the central thought of the day before "I should leave". It has been exhausting.
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I like a lot of things in academia, such as the freedom and flexibility and the actual job contents (teaching/researching/writing) that suits my personality---sometimes like a glove, sometimes like a misshapen ragged jacket. I've managed to publish 13 articles in 5 years and received multiple praises from peer reviewers, colleagues, and students, so I must be doing _something_ right.
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Should I be interested in getting tenured in academia, the logical thing to do after receiving a PhD is to try and get hold of a postdoc position. I asked around/applied for five different vacancies, and none of them bore any fruit:
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- One postdoc position was in distributed software engineering. I've been a software engineer for 11 years and my PhD is in software engineering education, but I'm not an expert in distributed computing. They said "thanks, but no thanks". Fair enough.
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- Another one was in education research, but in a department of medical science, and after inquiring, they required a certain amount of domain knowledge, even though that of course wasn't listed in the job ad. Fair enough.
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- Another one required a few years of postdoc experience and completely ignored my more than a decade work experience. Fair enough? I'm not so sure anymore.
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- One professorship vacancy was in education research in a neighboring university that's not as strict as my current institution when it comes to requiring postdoc experience. The trouble was... My PhD is in Engineering Technology. They required one in Engineering Science, meaning my official appliance wouldn't even make it to the first round. The work contents perfectly matched my prior experience, but I couldn't tick their box.
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- Then I changed tactics and started emailing acquaintances in my work field to see if I could score something through my contacts. Several people recommended the same person to contact, so thing were looking up. Until that person never replied to my inquiries.
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If you ever want to see a true example of dogmatism and inflexibility, try applying for a job in academia. If you can't perfectly match their requirements, you're toast---at least that's my experience. I guess that's partially the result of my own doing since I chose my own research topic and didn't fit in an existing research cell. I am especially baffled at the inability to render my previous experience relevant at all, even though when I speak to professors, they all say it's great to have someone teaching software engineering who knows what he's talking about.
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I tried to get a foot in the door...
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## But I didn't try hard enough.
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I admit, if I really _really_ wanted to stay, I probably could have stayed. There were a few opportunities that I eventually turned down myself:
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- I did get a job offer from a human-computer interaction research center, but after thinking about it, I remembered how I felt when I did my internship there 17 years ago. Also, I don't think I would have fit in well, and I have no ambition to become a research expert as I also love teaching.
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- My co-supervisor offered me a half-time teaching (only) position, but I loved the combination of teaching and research, and judging from experience wrestling with course schedules, it would be a very hard sell to combine it with a job in industry.
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- A few of my co-authors suggested to look abroad, where indeed job ads in my field are more prominent, but contrary to your typical PhD graduates, I have a family and am simply not prepared to move for a job---especially if it's yet another fixed term contract with little hope of getting tenured (as everyone is eyeing on those ads and their CVs are most likely more appealing). I never understood why people are prepared to take that huge risk.
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- Someone from my examination committee offered me a temporary job in their team in preparation of applying for international funds. I genuinely thought I had a shot at this, but after meeting with the funding support team and seeing the success rates of previous years (10%), my faith plummeted. On top of that, the idea was gradually turning into something else, and the funding would only last for a couple of years (2 or 3, depending on the type), meaning the jumping-through-50-page-document-loops fun would soon restart.
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There are other ways to apply for postdoc fellowships, but chances are always slim. I can hear you thinking: _if you don't submit your proposal, you'll never get it_ and that's true! But my current energy levels and low tolerance for bureaucracy and politics combined with the reasons listed above made me conclude that for me, it's just not worth chasing after. If I didn't get the grant---which has a 90% chance---I would have to find another job within a few weeks, which, considering the current computing job market, only added pressure. And again, success doesn't even yield a permanent position.
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On top of that...
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## I am getting bored.
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_Bored_ might not be the right word, perhaps _weary_ is more fitting. Despite a doctoral title clearly signing you're dealing with a specialist, I'm a generalist at heart. I like doing many different things. To use [Emilie Wapnick's coined terms](https://puttylike.com/terminology/), I'm more of a serial-specialist, that's why I gravitated towards multidisciplinary research. But academia doesn't reward generalists: it rewards hyper-specialists.
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Additionally, teaching the same course again and again year in year out gets disheartening. Sometimes there's an exciting opportunity to bin everything and start from scratch. Sometimes courses get major overhauls. Most of the times, however, only minor adjustments are made, and after six years, I got over it. Sure, the student groups change, but the problems they struggle with and the course material they have to wade through remains the same. And yes, in industry, things often look alike as well, which is one of the reasons I turned to academia. The generalist in me is a part of the problem.
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I thrive on variety, and it has gradually dawned to me that variety isn't one of academia's strong suits. Speaking of which, the rate at which new concepts are implemented isn't either, generating frustration on more than one occasion.
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Besides the weariness, however, lies a bigger issue...
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## I am lonely.
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I wrote [about this](/post/2020/08/education-and-collaboration/) [many times](/tags/academia), and the reason isn't just COVID or the post-COVID work-from-home adaptation. The reason is the inherent nature of academia itself. Widely diverging teaching schedules and conferences make for very rare collegial water cooler chit-chat. Most academics are loners by nature: we teach alone, we write alone, we study alone. The meetings are just there to synchronize the otherwise asynchronous isolated work and to paste section two and three in Overleaf.
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I reckon many academics will start protesting when reading this, and I'll make things worse by saying in academia, you don't truly collaborate but merely cooperate. I come from a heavy pair programming background where software development teams are (striving to be) true _teams_. The term _team_ has little meaning in academia. Worse, there are plenty of selfish people here, and it's impossible to blame them: [the publication numbers game](/post/2022/08/the-toxic-culture-of-rejection-in-computing-academia/) pushes them to behave this way.
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That's not to say that people aren't prepared to help each other out. My point is that individualism is the norm, not the exception, and while I have proven that I can live with that, it wears me down mentally. Even worse, I fear that I'm also starting to exhibit that kind of behavior, because...
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## I am losing touch with practice.
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Even though I think that's not completely true, evidently, recruiters do, as this even cost me a job offer, where afterwards I heard that in the last few years, I "_haven't touched Java, or development in general, that, given the difficult market, is detrimental to immediate employability_". What a way to politely try to say that I'm too expensive.
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That transparent bullshit might have a faint ring of truth to it, though. While I kept myself up-to-date---even more so than during my job as a software engineer, to be honest---of course I haven't touched huge enterprise software projects, and of course I'm not up-to-date when it comes to the latest front-ent JS framework pizzazz. But give me a week and my code spewing engine will be up and humming in full gear.
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If I chose to stay in academia to pursue a postdoc, however, these recruitment persuasions would become increasingly difficult. Imagine I manage to score a postdoc of 3 years, or even 6, but meet a dead end after that and miss that tenure track by a hair. That'll mean it would have been nine+ years since I "_haven't touched development in general_". What then?
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Additionally, I've always said to myself and my supervisors that I believe in teachers with a strong theoretical _and_ practical background. Software engineering is a practical discipline. Software engineering is not trying to prove and solve mathematical equations. Software engineering evolves rapidly. Software engineering solves practical problems.
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As a teacher, I want to have that experience under my belt in order to radiate confidence and convey these practices with enthusiasm. My students have said numerous times that they especially appreciate my background. If I chose to stay, I would gradually lose that advantage and slowly but surely become yet another professor that's disconnected with the real world. No wonder that [teaching software engineering is still done wrong](/post/2022/05/teaching-software-engineering-is-still-done-wrong/). Software engineering research is not software engineering.
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## So what now?
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I don't want to just teach. I don't want to just research. I don't want to just code. _Brain Baking_ is what I want to do, and as a _Brain Baker_, I get to combine, to mix, knead, ferment, and bake all of these things: writing, teaching, studying, coding. But as an employee, it'll probably be next to impossible to find a single job that perfectly matches that or to find multiple jobs that are properly adjusted to each other.
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So I'm going independent. Next month, I'll be an independent _Brain Baker_ and I'll have the freedom to pursue whatever interests me, as long as it generates paid invoices. I wanted to keep at least a part of the freedom and flexibility from academia without leaning in too much on the uncertainty. Depending on the clients and the contracts, freelancing is probably just as uncertain---or perhaps even more---than that postdoc, but at least I'll be reaping the benefits of building my own little company without having to move.
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By taking up the role of software architect for four days a week, I bought myself one day filled with contemplation and writing. Or teaching as a guest lecturer, should its opportunity cross my path. Or organizing longer bread baking workshops (the next one is scheduled mid-February, be there or be square!). Or spending more time with my family.
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My hands are aching. As Regi Fils-Aimé would say: _My body is ready_.
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---
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Does that mean I have shut the door permanently? Not really, but by not (immediately) choosing to continue pursuing a career in academia, I am slimming my chances to be offered one in the near future: the numbers game continues, and I'm out. Still, if a tenure track comes up that piques my interest, I might give it a shot, you never know, although I'm realistic enough to know that, given the ridiculously long-winded and archaic application procedures, the odds will be against me. That's another silly thing in academia: everyone---including stiff competition from abroad---is eyeing on getting tenured and there are little captivating positions in-between.
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Make no mistake, I have zero regrets. I loved researching creativity, I loved having an ethically sound job that contributes to society---and I will be very critical to future prospects in that regard---and I loved the freedom to compile and teach my own courses. I've always wanted to become a doctor and I am so glad I didn't pursue the degree after finishing my Master's. In my view, the stereotypical saying that PhDs are next to worthless in industry is false: both the invaluable personal growth and the dissemination of my work will surely come in handy in the coming years.
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Right now, it's time to tip the scales back in favor of coding. But as that scale inevitably gets out of balance somewhere in the future, it might be time to reconsider.
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---
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This isn't the first _Why I Left Academia_ post. The following similar blog posts by others mentioned different but equally valid reasons to leave that struck a chord:
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- [Natalia Bielczyk](https://nataliabielczyk.com/why-did-i-really-leave-academia-top-16-reasons/) mentions lack of sense of humor (that's true!), false impact, and the feudal system.
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- [Chris Cornthwaite](https://roostervane.com/why-i-left-academia/) calls out the tenure-track rat-race and even wrote a book about it.
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- [Allison Harbin](https://allisonharbin.com/post-phd/why-i-left-academia-part-1) despises the sometimes very dirty numbers game.
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- [Austin Henley](https://austinhenley.com/blog/leavingacademia.html) quit academia because he was unhappy, even though he was on a tenure track.
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