September 5, 2016 - Tagged as: en.
After two years as a PhD student at Indiana University, I finally decided to move to the industry, and I’m currently available for job offers.
For the most part I really enjoyed my time here at Indiana University. I still think that IU is the ideal place for someone like me to pursue a PhD. We have a great programming languages group, and the group I work more closely (with my advisor) is doing lots of hacking, on GHC (we have two core GHC developers in our group!), various Haskell libraries like lvish, and runtime binary instrumentation tools, which I really enjoy.
But publications are still a big part of the life as a PhD student, and I really, really disliked everything about publishing a paper. I’ve never wanted to have great publications, I’m more interested in learning about programming languages, compilers, and related tools, and contributing to projects that I believe are contributing to the community (which is one of my motivations when contributing to GHC). I want to have a deep understanding of fundamentals of programming languages and compilers, but I also want to develop as a programmer and software engineer.
Graduate school just didn’t let me do these as much as I’d like, and instead forced me to write papers. After about a year it started to become clear to me that academia is not the right place for me because I will probably never enjoy writing papers or grant proposals. So I realized that the long road to PhD in the US (about 6 years usually, followed by more years as postdoc) will be mostly a waste of time, and I won’t be as successful as I want because I don’t enjoy publishing papers.
Sure, I can be a PL researcher/developer in the industry after a PhD. But I believe if I can find a somewhat related job right now, in a few years I can be a PL researcher/developer, without wasting my 3-4 years suffering while trying to publish papers. If I can’t find such a job, well, I think I’ll still be happier because at least I’ll be programming and be much more productive.
So I decided that it’s best for me to do the switch as soon as possible.
If you’re interested, send me an email and let’s have a chat.