I attach below an edited transcription of a Q&A session titled Academic Careers vs.

Industry Careers given by Greg Duncan and Guy Lebanon to summer interns at Amazon in
the summer of 2014. Some of the content is specifically aimed at the fields of machine
learning, statistics, and economics. The content does not reflect the official perspective of
Amazon in any way.
It was also published at Medium (Academic Careers vs. Industry Careers)
Q: What are your backgrounds?
Greg: I am the Chief Economist and Statistician in GIP. I do a variety of things and
depending on what day you are talking to me Im one of an economist, a statistician, a
machine learner or a data scientist. I have a PhD in economics, an MS in statistics, and a BA
in economics and English. I work on a variety of statistical and forecasting issues in our
Global Inventory Planning process, and I do data science consulting generally within
Amazon. I am responsible for the algorithm that powers the buy box on Amazons web site.
I have 40 years of experience in data science, economics, and statistics. I was a full professor
in both economics and statistics and had faculty appointments at Northwestern (6 years),
UC Berkeley (12 years), WSU (9 years), Cal Tech (2 years), and USC (3 years). Currently, I
have a part time appointment at UWs economics department in addition to my full time
position at Amazon. Ive had joint positions between industry and academia for most of my
career. Ive supervised more than 20 PhD dissertations and 18 of them are full professors,
some of them in good places: CMU, Maryland, UCSD, and the University of Wisconsin. I
have an early 1980 paper that lays out map reduce and mini-batch SGD (though using other
names).
I quit publishing in 1989 since I was at Verizon and GTE labs and they didnt allow
publishing. I was the chief scientist at GTE lab and I led the team that designed the
spectrum auction algorithm for the Verizon wireless network. I also designed and fielded
hundreds of consumer preference surveys. I then transitioned to consulting and worked at
National Economics Research Associates (NERA; a Marsh McLennan firm) as senior VP and
management committee member. Later I was Managing Director at the consulting firms
Huron and Deloitte, and a Principal at the Brattle consulting group. I then retired, but about
two years ago I came out of retirement to join Amazon.
Guy: I grew up and went to college in Israel. I came to the US in 2000 for a PhD at Carnegie
Mellon University. I graduated in 2005 with a thesis in the area of machine learning. It was
clear to me since my sophomore year in college (1997) that I wanted to be a professor. Ive
worked towards that goal in a very focused way from 1997 to my PhD graduation in 2005. I
was lucky to get a faculty job right after graduation and I joined Purdue as an assistant
professor in 2005. Due to a two-body situation and geographical constraints I decided to
move in 2008 and I ended up at at Georgia Tech. I got tenure and promotion to associate

professor at 2012 and then went on a one year sabbatical at Google. At the end of my
sabbatical my wife and I decided to stay on the west coast and I decided to stay in industry,
but move to Amazon rather than stay at Google.
Q: What are your main messages about careers in industry vs. careers in
academia?
Greg: Here are my main points:
(a) There is a lot more freedom in academia than in industry, but the problems are not as
interesting.
(b) The stuff you do in industry ends up actually being used.
(c) Industry jobs pay well, while academic jobs do not.
Guy: First, I would like to point out that there is no objective right choice here. There are
pros and cons and the right answer depends on the person, and possibly even the specific
time in a persons life. For example, for me the right choice in 2005 was to join academia,
but in 2013 it was to move to industry.
The main pros of academic jobs are:
(a) Freedom. Despite what some recent blogs say about professors not being completely free
due to their need to publish and get grants, there is much more freedom in academia than in
industry. This is true for young faculty members, but it is especially true for senior faculty
members. They do not report to a manager in the same sense that they would in industry. As
long as they remain somewhat active in publishing and grants, they can work on whatever
they want.
(b) Theory. Academic jobs are much more suited than industry jobs for people who want to
work on theory. This is true for pure mathematicians and for CS theorists, but it is also true
for people who mix theory and algorithms.
(c) Teaching. Not everyone likes to teach, but if you do then this is a huge pro. I like
teaching and I felt a lot of satisfaction from teaching students of all levels.
(d) Stability (see below).
The main pros of industry jobs are:
(a) Big Impact. A few people can accomplish something truly big and important on their
own. Albert Einstein comes to mind. The other 99% need a lot of help, especially in
computer science. The help includes a team, proprietary data, and massive computing
resources that are all generally unavailable in academia. I want to clarify that Im talking
about really big accomplishments that revolutionize our world, for example, the Internet,
cloud computing, smart-phones, and e-commerce. These revolutions all required a lot of
people working together and a lot of financial support. In academia you can develop some
theory that will influence these revolutions to some degree but it is very rare to actually be
the main driver of these revolutions.
(b) Teamwork. Academic work is pretty solitary. Professors meet periodically with their

students and colleagues, but it doesnt come close to the teamwork that you find in industry.
Some people prefer to work alone, and that is fine (notice my point above though that real
impact requires teamwork). But for people that enjoy being a part of a team or leading a
team this aspect of industry can be a big pro.
(c) Two Body Careers and Geography. In the high-tech industry it is fairly easy to find a
good job in many regions. For example, you can find many good opportunities in the US at
San Francisco, the bay area, Seattle, New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago.
Some of these locations have more opportunities than others, but a good candidate can find
good options in any of the above locations, and many other locations as well. In academia, a
typical applicant sends 1050 applications all over the country, and if they are lucky they get
one or two offerslikely in places that are not their top choices. This is a problem for the
professor, but it is an even bigger problem for the professors spouse, who is likely to have a
separate geographic preferences.
(d) Compensation. Compensation is much better in industry than academia. The
compensation gap is minimal right after PhD graduation, but it widens significantly with
time. It depends on many factors, but is quite possible for the pay gap to grow to more than
100% after 10 years (possibly significantly more than 100%). Many young PhD graduates
dont consider this a priority right away, but this becomes a bigger priority later on when the
graduates plan on having kids, buying a house, etc.
(e) Opportunities (see next paragraph).
Workplace and role stability is much higher at academia and it can be both a pro and a con.
It is a pro since it is nice to not worry about what happens next and being able to make long
term plans. It is a con since stability is negatively correlated with new opportunities. In
industry people frequently leave and roles change and this can often lead to exciting new
opportunities. For example, my immediate manager at Amazon left a few months after I
started. This caused some unexpected issues for me, but things turned out very well at the
endI got an opportunity to interact directly with Amazons leadership team. Industry is
full of opportunities, but one has to be ready for some amount of instability.
There are two stories that I want to mention next that are relevant for this discussion.
Story 1: As a professor and graduate student, I noticed that professors often brainwash
graduate students that academic jobs are the best path forward for the best students, and
that industry jobs should only be entertained if a faculty search is unsuccessful (or is
unlikely to be successful). Professors convey this message to their students since they
believe it to be true (after all they ended up being professors because that is what they
believe). But there is an added incentive for professors to do that: placing your graduate
students as faculty in top departments increases your reputation and your departments
reputation and ranking. Indeed, the placement of graduate students as professors in good
schools is a key component in how professors and departments are evaluated (both formally
and informally). I personally witnessed department chairs and deans urging professors to
push their top students to faculty jobs rather than industry.
While at school, graduate students receive this message from their thesis advisors and other

professors they look up to. I want to offer here a different perspective and hopefully help
people understand the relative pros and cons so they can make the best decision for
themselves.
Story 2: A couple of years ago after getting tenure at Georgia Tech, I had a minor midlife
crisis. I could choose to proceed in many different paths as a tenured professor, but I didnt
know what to choose. I could focus on teaching or writing a book; I could keep writing
research papers in my current area, or switch to a different research area. I started writing a
book. I studied for some time new research fields (computational finance and renewable
energy)thinking that I may want to change my research direction. I eventually understood
that the main question I need to answer is: what do I want to do for the rest of my
life? This question is highly related to the question looking back from retirement, what
accomplishments will I consider to have been successful?
The key insight for me was: publishing papers, having others cite my work, and getting
awards is simply not good enough when the alternative is improving the world. In the
future, when my kids ask me what I did during my long work days I want to point to more
than a stack of papers, decent pay, and a length CV. I want to say that I played a big role in
helping society and changing the world for the better. The chance of doing that in industry is
much bigger than in academia. We are living in a unique age of increasingly fast revolutions:
computers, Internet, e-commerce, smartphones, social networks, e-books. These recent
revolutions were all driven by companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and
Microsoft. Well see many more revolutions in our lifetime including wearable devices, selfdriving cars, online education, revolutions in medicine, and more. I do not mean to say that
I can change the world by myself in a couple of years, but with the help of colleagues and
over the period of several years it is possible.
Greg: I found most of my research topics in the nexus of computer science, economics,
statistics, applied math, and psychology. At Amazon these areas are like tectonic plates
hitting one another. Economists can do some things, statisticians can do other things, and
data scientists can do other things. If you are in academia, it is not easy to work in that
nexus. Many colleagues in the statistics department would say that is nice work but it is not
really statistics stuff. The same thing would happen in computer science and economics
departments. I find working in that nexus to be very exciting. It isnt clear what to do, but
you realize that there is a problem and no one knows how to work on it. Another related
issue is that in industry you need to solve a specific business problem, not a related problem
as is often done in academia. Its a kind of freedom, but it is also a restriction. Its like
writing a sonnetyou can do anything you want as long as you maintain its form.
I really like working at Amazon. Another place I had a lot of fun was Verizon where I had a
lot of impact. When I see people buying stuff from Amazon I can point and say I helped
make this work well. Similarity, when I see people using Verizon phones I can say I helped
develop that technology.
In my area of economics and statistics you probably want to go to academia first, have your

midlife crisis, and then move to industry. My mid life crisis, by the way, was having three
kids preparing to go to college and realizing that even a senior tenured professor at a good
university cant send them to college and cant buy a house. Perhaps an industry postdoc
position would work well, in that people dont go straight to a faculty job but would have
some industry experience first. Unfortunately, that does not happen frequently in
economics or statistics.
Q: What limitation does an industry job places on future jobs. What if you
choose industry first and then have a mid life crisis and want to move to
academia?
Greg: In economics or statistics that would be a killer. However, I think in a growing field
like data science perhaps you can switch to academia after industry. I think it is important
to keep a connection with universities even when you are in industry. I have done that for
much of my career. In fact, I recently taught a course on data science and I put the syllabus
on the web. I got many requests from academics asking me to come and teach for their
departments since they are trying to start an ML group.
Guy: This would not be a big deal if you are going to industry for a short amount of time (1
3 years) and then apply for faculty jobs. If you are in industry longer and want to keep the
option of moving to academia you need to find a place that allows and even encourages
publishing. You dont have to publish like crazy but you need to keep publishing. I also think
that sometimes the most interesting papers come from industry since they work at a scale
that academics dont have access to. Such papers are worth more than typical academic
papers experimenting on standard public datasets and will be very valuable if you later
apply for faculty jobs.
In machine learning, cutting edge is increasingly done in industry since academics dont
have access to the really interesting data, evaluation methods, and computational resources.
It is already impossible for academics to reproduce large-scale ML experiments described in
industry papers and build upon them and this will become more common in the future.
Once this happens more frequently, algorithmic and applied ML innovation will occur
primarily in industry.
Greg: I want to amplify that. I get a lot of requests from former colleagues of mine that ask
me to give them interesting Amazon data so they can work on it. The answer is usually no
and not just at AmazonGoogle and other companies would usually say the same thing. In
industry you have access to datasets that academics can only dream of. You will be picking
up stuff that is quite relevant and the market values that human capital significantly.
Sometime universities hire industry veteransfor example USC does that. These veterans
may not have PhD degrees even, but they have experience that is extremely valuable and
generally unavailable in academia.

Guy: I want to mention a related issue. In academia the mindset is usually you join a
department and you stay there until retirement. Perhaps you move from one university to
another once in the middle of your career. In high-tech industry the mentality is very
different these days. Many people join a company and then move after a few years, and then
move again. Transitioning form one company to another is especially easy if you live in a
high-tech hub like the bay area, Seattle, or New York City, but it happens in other places as
well. As a result, young graduates should not feel that choosing between different industry
options is a huge decision that will design their entire career without a possibility to
backtrack from it.
Greg: That is a good point. In academia I cant tell you the number of times someone made
me an offer and I said no Im not interested, and then something changed and I called back
after two years expressing interest and they said sorrywe cant reissue that offer at this
point. That absolutely doesnt happen in industry. Its almost like fishingwe didnt get you
this year but well try again next year. Maybe you will be upset for some reason and well be
able to get later. The key thing is we are in a growing and expanding industry and as a
consequence experienced people are in high demand.
Q: If you knew you were going to industry anyway would you still get a PhD and
would you do anything different?
Guy: That is a very good question and if you look at the web there are a lot of blog posts
discussing whether a PhD is worth it if you end up in industry. Its a parallel discussion to
the discussion of academic vs. industry careers in that there are pros and cons and no right
or wrong answer. It depends on the person, and the specific mindset they have at that point
in their life.
In my case, I definitely do not regret doing the PhD. Doing a PhD means losing considerable
money (often in terms of opportunity cost), but the way I see it one should optimize for their
long-term career rather than for a 510 years horizon. If you do a PhD and move to
industry, in some sense you lose 5 years, but there will be enough time in your future 3040
years to make up for that financially and otherwise. The PhD experience will likely be the
only time in your life where you can look at a problem and study it and become a real expert
at it without distractions. In industry you have distractions like needing to launch a product
or fixing an urgent problem, and you may not be able to learn fundamental skills that take
years to develop. For example, a deep understanding of machine learning requires deep
knowledge of statistics, probability, real analysis, linear algebra, etc. If you are working on
an ML product in industry you just dont have the time and peace of mind to dive deep and
properly learn all these areas. I also think it is an enjoyable experience and it shapes your
personality in some way. There is plenty of time afterwards to worry about product launches
and changing the world.

Greg: I have a different perspective. In economics you really need a PhD and in statistics it
is getting to the point where you really need a PhD to do scientific work. The reason is that
we have a mature discipline now. In the 1950s a very smart creative MS or even BS could
become a professor. These days I can pretty much tell who has a PhD and who doesnt based
on the way they think. In my area, when you get to the MS level you feel like know
everything, and everyone at that level knows everything. If you do a PhD, your thesis advisor
says tell me something we have never heard of. You have to demonstrate your creativity and
you have to learn how to be creative and solve problems that are ambiguous and arent well
defined. The best theses are in areas where people may not even know that there are
problems and as a consequence people are doing things incorrectly. Such significant
creativity does not usually come from people that didnt get a PhD since they didnt develop
that mindset. And so not having a PhD stands out much more than 60 years ago.
Guy: I agree with Greg, but I dont think it is quite as pronounced in computer science. You
do normally need a PhD to be a scientist, but there are a lot of exciting innovations that can
be accomplished without a PhD experience. I also want to say that being a scientist is not
the only way to do exciting things and make a significant impact. You can be an engineer, a
product manager, a people manager, UX designer and you can do amazing things that
change the world.
Greg: I agree. I was referring to a research scientist working in areas of statistics or
economics. Also, if you want to go the business route a PhD is not very relevantyou should
get an MBA instead.
Q: What about publication policy at Amazon and at other companies?
Greg: If you are doing something that is very relevant to Amazon the last thing you want is
to publish it and have a competitor get it. At Verizon and GTE lab we had a no or minimal
publication policy. We thought Bell labs messed up and gave their stuff away. On the other
hand, people who are starting their careers do need to publish, and I am sympathetic to
balancing the need for having people know about you and your work. Early in your career it
is important to publish, which is why I think it makes sense to have an academic job first.
Guy: I think companies should publish to some extent, assuming their business interests
are maintained. Many companies including Amazon have a publication policy where people
submit a request to publish a paper and someone goes over the request and decides whether
to let you publish, ask you to change the paper, or just prohibit it altogether at this point in
time.
Q: What about choosing between a researcher career and a software engineer

career?
Guy: I want again to clarify a misconception that researchers in industry are better or more
senior than engineers. That is simply not the case. For example my manager is a business
person and doesnt have a PhD, but I have a lot of respect for him, his experience and what
he accomplished. I have no problem taking directions from a manager, regardless of
whether he is a scientist, an engineer, or a business person. Similarly, I have a lot of respect
to my colleagues in different job ladders. Unless you are at a place that focuses on pure
research (like MSR, though that may be changing there as well), the goal of both scientists
and engineers are the same: develop a great product and help the company and its
customers. People in different job ladders would have different strengths but everyone
works as a team to get things done. A software engineer would have really strong skill set in
one area and a scientist would have a really strong skill set in another area.
Q: How did you feel your impact change when you moved from academia to
Google and when you moved from Google to Amazon?
Guy: When I was in academia I felt that I had an impactpeople cited my work and told
me that they liked my paper and that it inspired them. I got invited to give talks and
received a few awards. I felt good about myself and my impact. But when I moved to
industry and saw how industry is rapidly changing the world, it put the academic impact in
perspective. What I previously thought of as big impact all of a sudden became minor and
elusive. It was hard to point at concrete long-lasting ripple effects that my work had on the
real world (except the influence I had on my students).
When I was at Google, I was officially on sabbatical and I kept the option of going back to
academia open. This resulted in some lack of focus and so my impact at Google was mostly
scientific. At Amazon I officially resigned from Georgia Tech and jumped with both feet into
an industry career. That changed in mindset and resulted in having a more profound
product impact.
Greg: I, too, went on sabbatical to GTE Labs and I intended to come back, but afterwards
decided to stay in industry. I had a good publication record and citations, but it wasnt the
kind of impact that I had at Verizon or that I have here at Amazon. The impact you can have
in industry is real and immediate. Its like baking bread in that you work hard and the loaf
comes out and you eat itinstant gratification. In academia you submit your article, and
then you wait a while and the reviews come back with revise-and-resubmit decision. Then
you wait a bit and you go back and do some work, and then resubmit. Perhaps at the end it
gets into the journal but by the time people read and ask me about it, Im working on
something else and sometimes I even hardly remember that paper. I remember that
somebody asked me about a paper recently and I had to look it upI forgot I even wrote it.
The point is that impact in industry is real and palpable and people note it. Also, about

politics: many businesses are political, but what Ive seen is that they are less political than
any economics or statistics department Ive been in. Perhaps Guy can comment on politics
in CS.
Guy: At Purdues ECE department there was quite a bit of politics that actually shocked me
as a new assistant professor. The other departments I have been at were not very political.
Q: How do you compare work life balance between industry and academia?
Greg: I think work life balance is a lot better in industry. In academia for the first 10 years
people are very focused on getting tenure and then getting to full professor. If you are not
working on weekendsyou are not going to get promoted. Its as simple as that. At Amazon
and at GTE Lab and Verizon you can organize your time so that you have more time for your
family. On the other hand, we are all professionals and most of us would do the work for
free. Im the luckiest person in the world since they pay me for doing something that I love
doing.
Guy: I had a different experience in that I dont think work life balance at academia has to
be much worse. There are about 3 years where I was working particularly hard and Ive seen
my colleagues work particularly hard (years 24 of tenure track). In general, I was at work
from 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon with occasional extra work later at night if
needed. I do the same thing right now in industry. I do think it depends on each person and
in both industry and academia there are workaholics or people who are influenced by
workaholics to work very long hours.
One nice thing about academia is that work is more flexible and you can work from home
(or other places) more. Also, it is really nice to have the academic flexibility during the
summer semester.
Written Jun 21, 2015 View Upvotes
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