Furthermore, my employment contract with the university has expired (in the Netherlands PhD students are typically employed a university). Since this month, I have started my new job at an industrial company. So essentially, I left academia.
On leaving academia
I think that some people that know me and haven't seen me in a while may be surprised (or perhaps shocked :-) ) by this announcement, so I think it would be a good idea to give an explanation why I have decided not to pursue a research career.
First, I'd like to stress out that the last four years were great, although there were a few periods that could have been better. I have no regrets becoming a PhD student (as opposed to working for an industrial company) -- I did many interesting things, I have been at many interesting places around the world, presented my research and software at a number of international software engineering conferences, learned interesting/useful stuff and I have met quite a number of interesting people. I'm really thankful for that to my supervisors, who gave me this opportunity.
Apart from research, one of the other things I'm really proud of is the practical impact of the work I'm involved with. For example, I gave a presentation at FOSDEM about NixOS -- a non-academic event -- which was quite successful. Apart from FOSDEM, I also gave a number of talks and demonstrations at industrial companies that were very well received. Finally, I'm also happy about the impact of my blog.
After listing all these positive traits, it almost sounds a bit odd that I'm not continuing the same path, which I often hear from outsiders. I have the following reasons for this:
- My working style does not completely map to the job description of a researcher. Apart from doing the work to get things published, I have also invested a significant amount of time and effort in the tools and their practical usage.
As I have also presented frequently to people outside the academic community, I typically use a lot of practical examples and I often have a number of demos showing good practical usage. These aspects are nice, but are (in principle) not part of my job description. Quite often, outsiders become happy after seeing these aspects and think that my research is about doing that kind of stuff, which is not true.
- It's about publishing. As I have explained earlier in a number of blog posts, researchers have to publish and often it's used as the primary means to measure their productivity.
I know some people that have left academia because they hate writing papers and the pressure that it sometimes gives. I don't really hate writing papers, although I've had my frustrating moments sometimes -- actually, if I have a good idea I'm very eager to write them down.
What bothers me is that my research subject -- software deployment -- is not a very popular topic in the software engineering research world. If I would continue my career in research, I have to produce more publications, preferably at highly ranked conferences and journals.
It's difficult to achieve this goal with my current research topic and working style. As a consequence, I'm more or less forced to pick subjects that are better publishable, which basically forces me to check the interests of the program committee members and do stuff that I'm not always interested in. I'm not somebody who likes to work that way.
Some research topics are hyper-specialized, which is not always a good thing. I have noticed that even for my research (that already looks quite practical to most people in the research community) is difficult to sell conceptually to non-academic people, unless I do it the right way. For a number of presentations that I have seen at conferences, I'm pretty sure that people for industry would lose their interest in a matter of minutes and have no clue what the speaker is talking about.
For many of these papers, the "real world" does not care about and as a consequence they tend to become forgotten knowledge. I'm not somebody who likes to do stuff that nobody cares about and do not bring any value to the software engineering community as a whole.
Furthermore, if I would spend my time to publish more, there is less time to do engineering work and to produce/improve tools that can actually do something.
I've picked my current research project, because I like solving problems that I really believe that they are relevant and I want to add value. However, the "deliverables" of my style unfortunately don't always map to publishable units at academic events.
- I want to add more practical value. I have always been a person that likes to build stuff. If I have a nice idea in mind, I'm always very eager to try it out and to make piece of software that does something, although it is not always very relevant. For the last 6 months, I had no time for doing stuff like this. Nearly all my time was consumed by finishing publications, writing my thesis and preparing/visiting a conference.
Looking for a new job
As my time was completely consumed by finishing publications and writing my thesis the last 6 months, I didn't really have the time to think about a new career perspective. At the end of August, I have decided to put my CV online and I have used the entire month of September to visit and talk to companies.
I was approached by many companies and I have visited all of them in a circle of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Utrecht. So I have traveled quite a lot :-).
In the beginning, I felt a bit worried, because it's been a long time ago that I officially applied for a job and I knew that there are a number of prejudices that industry people have on academics like me. This a bit funny, because when I was still a bachelor's student I was not worried about application procedures or getting a job at all :-)
First it looked like my view on industry turned out to be true -- some potential employers did not care about my research career, just asked me: "can you program in Java?" and offered me a salary, which was way lower that my current salary. Some of them also did not know what a PhD is and treated me the same as an undergrad student.
Furthermore, at one company I had to perform a number of capacity tests to check whether I was smart enough. I had to do tests, such as verbal analogies, number sequences, and abstract reasoning. Fortunately, I did the test well enough. There were a few applicants that immediately had to leave because their score was too low and the company was not even interested talking to them. I have made it to the last round and they gave me a job offer, but I refused it. :-)
Fortunately, I did not unlearn my application skills (nearly all of them went quite successfully) and not all companies that I talked to were disappointing -- in the last 2 weeks of September I had "collected" 4 interesting job offers, with good salaries and interesting job aspects. I have met a number of interesting people at these companies and it was very hard for me to turn 3 of them down. A few of them were very disappointed that I rejected them. :-)
In total, I received 6 job offers, one application turned out to be a mismatch of interests from both sides, and 1 rejection after the second round. Apparently, that company was looking for somebody that just wants to write code and not somebody who's critical like me :-).
My new job: Software Architect @ Conference Compass
Currently, I have joined Conference Compass, a Delft-based startup company developing applications (mostly Apps for mobile devices) to improve the experience of conference participants.
I will fulfill the role of Software Architect -- I'm involved with many technical aspects, ranging from design, implementation, documentation and (interestingly enough) deployment.
The main reason of joining this company is that the company is small, there is a lot of interesting challenges that I can work on, a lot of room in things that I can do/improve, and the atmosphere -- 3 employees are PhDs (once I graduate they have 4 of them) and are -- apart from technical aspects -- very much interested in applying new concepts.
Even more interesting is that there is room in which I can use my experience from my research background and that they are very much interested in participation in free and open-source software projects.
Another interesting aspect is that they are located in the YES!Delft incubation centre, which is supported by various external parties including Delft University of Technology. In fact, I'm not that far away from my previous working spot (only 100 meters or so). I can see my former employer's building from the window here. :-)
In my past career, I have worked for medium sized companies as well as big ones. Joining a small group is a new experience to me.
The future of Disnix and other components of the Nix project
After reading this, you may possibly wonder what the future is of the software that I wrote during my PhD career, in particular Disnix and other components part of the Nix project.
As I may have already partially revealed on this blog, my new employer is also interested in the deployment technologies of my previous job. One of their biggest interests is having this technology supported in the mobile space and in the cloud.
Furthermore, my former employer is still using our Nix-based Hydra buildfarm and my two former colleagues (who are now also employed elsewhere) still maintain it and use the Nix technology at their company as well.
So in short: The Nix project is far from dead and is still actively being used. Now that we're not required to publish papers anymore, we even have more time to improve the tools and to make it even better applicable.
Also, my homepage and this blog will remain to exist. It will still be tech-related, cover deployment and other technical aspects that I may run into in the near future. My new job is not only about software deployment, so I will also be working on other aspects.
The future of research in software deployment
As the Mancoosi project has come to an end and because me and my former colleagues working on Nix (including the Nix author) have left the university, deployment research is pretty much dead now, which is a shame, because I think it's very important in practice.
However, I have agreed with my supervisors (and still have the intention!) to publish one journal paper that contains some unpublished stuff from my PhD thesis, in my spare time. Maybe (you'll never know) I have more stuff published when I can find the time and space for it, but I can't give you any time window. :-)
It's not that since I have switched to industry that I'm not interested in research anymore and that I don't want to read or write a paper. I'd still like to be involved in a healthy/doable way, but it's no longer my primary task.
In fact, if academia and industry invest some effort, it can result in fruitful collaborations that give both parties benefits. I wrote a very large blog post about this some time ago, titled 'Software engineering fractions, collaborations and "The System"' that I'd like to encourage both academic and industry people to read.
So to all my academic friends: I'd like to say that if you have a new idea, let me know and make sure that you show that it's relevant to read or even better -- something that I can actually use/try.
Concluding remarks
In this blog post, I have announced that I have moved from academia to industry. The title contains "leaving academia" which sounds very dramatic and a bit like a farewell message. Although I'm no longer employed by the university, I'm actually still located quite close to it, and I have visited my former colleagues twice this week. Furthermore, the technology that we have "invented" is still actively being used and maintained.
I also have the intention to retain the relationship with people from the research world, although I still have to see how I can properly integrate that into my new job description.
Finally, I still have to defend my PhD thesis. Once I have more details about this, I'll announce it here and at several other places of course :-).
