Academia vs. industry: Harvard CS vs. Google edition

Matt Welsh, a professor in the Harvard CS department, has decided to leave Harvard to continue his post-tenure leave working at Google. Welsh is obviously leaving a sweet job. In fact, it was not long ago that he was writing about how difficult it is to get tenure at Harvard.

So why is he leaving? Well, CS folks doing research in large distributed systems are in a tricky place, since the really big systems are all in industry. And instead of legions of experienced engineers to help build and study these systems, they have a bunch of lazy grad students! One might think, then, that this kind of (tenured) professor to industry move is limited to people creating and studying large deployments of computer systems.

There is a broader pull, I think. For researchers studying many central topics in the social sciences (e.g., social influence), there is a big draw to industry, since it is corporations that are collecting broad and deep data sets describing human behavior. To some extent, this is also a case of industry being appealing for people studying deployment of large deployments of computer systems — but it applies even to those who don’t care much about the “computer” part. In further parallels to the case with CS systems researchers, in industry they have talented database and machine learning experts ready to help, rather than social science grad students who are (like the faculty) too often afraid of math.