Why I chose OpenAI over academia
To start with, I never thought I would be so pro-industry. It is very surprising to me, I always saw my pathway as staying in academia. However, that has changed.<p>I work in industry and can echo this. Industry is HAPPENING for research. I am TRUSTED to do research in my company and drive research directions. My time as a research scientist is RESPECTED and I am not asked to do things that would WASTE my time. When I am interacting with my colleagues everyone is INTERESTED in the topic and not their EGOS. It is incredibly rewarding to show up at work and everyone is interested and engaged. Projects are funded either through customers or internally but we all feel like a team.<p>In addition to this industry work, I have a grant through a university that hasn&#x27;t started yet (!) and I have spent approximately 4 weeks of full-time work doing paperwork related to the grant. This doesn&#x27;t include any of the effort to write the grant. This full-time work includes: sitting in meetings with the university budget people not understanding their own spreadsheets, writing prestigious letters for prestigious people to sign welcoming me to their own prestigious institutions, defining the specific dates I will take a month long travel to visit a colleague 3 years from now, a back and forth email exchange that took all day to identify the correct date format to be used in a web form (it was unclear the date format was the issue until the end), vainly explaining to university administration that project A and project B are not the same project nor funded the same way despite that I work on both. Also I live in a country that decided to blow up their funding agency because a new party took over the government and that postponed my grant by 1.5 years.<p>Like the author, I loved being a PhD student. I loved doing a postdoc. I love being a scientist. I love the idea of sitting around and thinking about things and building models to test out ideas and creating new knowledge. But working in academia is a no-go because of the amount of nonsense you put up with. This is compounded when you are actively interacting with university administrators who have permanent jobs (funded by the overhead from your grants) while you do not. And likely they have higher salaries then you and your phd students and postdocs. Meanwhile there is little to any support in most places for workers (thankfully, I have a union in the country I work in).<p>I strongly recommend anyone pursuing a phd or postdoc to do whatever they want, but don&#x27;t buy into the egoist bullshit of academia. Industry is where its at. Sure it has it&#x27;s problems, not every industry job is like mine. But it is better. And it&#x27;s not about the pay (even though that is nice). It&#x27;s about how much I love to show up to work every day compared to the bullshit of academia.<p>Note: I don&#x27;t know why i was capitalizing words, I suppose I just feel strongly about things.