I often get asked how I landed a job in industry after my postdoc. After my PhD at McGill, I started a postdoc at UCLA in July 2014. After about 6 months, like many a postdoc I started to got worried about my financial security and academic job prospects. So I started exploring jobs outside of academia.
I dusted off my CV and arranged it in a way that I thought would highlight what the market wanted. In early 2015 that would have meant deep learning, machine learning, data science and big data. I honestly didn't really know what each of these things actually meant in the real world but I thought it would help me get a job so I put it in there. I uploaded it on LinkedIn and pretty soon I was getting emails from recruiters in finance and tech.
This part of the process (why you get calls or not and from whom) is completely opaque to me. I think that when you're often on LinkedIn and update your CV some ML pipeline picks it up and marks you as actively looking for a job and give you a higher ranking in searches. I also presume that some recruiters have lists of hot universities where they look for candidates - UCLA is a hotspot for math research (Terrance Tao is there). This is why, I assume, I got contacted by a lot of finance recruiters.
Something else that might have tipped the balance is that I used to do development professionally before grad school, and ran an open source project. It probably also helped that I'd been working in Python on and off since 2006. So I was also getting contacted by tech recruiters.
Rant: no one in industry is using Matlab, and as a PI if you force your grad students to use Matlab you're really hurting their future job prospects outside of academia (99% of grad students end up not in academia).
Recruiters get paid a substantial commission when a candidate gets hired. They also have to sift through a see a people who are just looking, are a poor fit, or who will ultimately bomb the interview. So you will get a lot of emails about things which are seemingly unrelated to your skills (hey do you want to develop a Java server pages app for transportation logistics? was a memorable one).
OTOH if you have good rapport with a recruiter they can be real buds and advocate for you when finding a job. They will prep you for interviews and give you a lot of context you need in these scary times. They're also generally nice people since they have to deal with people a lot. So, be nice to recruiters.
I was getting cold-called about a lot of different jobs with adult-sounding titles and I didn't quite know what they meant at the time.
They included things like:
- Research scientist: the closest thing to postdoc in industry. Develop your own research agenda. Sweet gig.
- Research engineer: someone who can code research ideas. If working on ML, that might mean being real good with CUDA.
- Software engineer: in a tech company, a jack-of-all-trades position that can run the gamut from doing kernel stuff to writing JS for a front-end app to doing pipelines of exabyte datasets. In a finance company, someone who writes C++.
- Data scientist: a statistician with working knowledge of SQL.
- Data engineer: someone who does the piping on exabyte datasets.
Of course, there are many other jobs out there for a person with a PhD, like teacher, science communicator, or dog photographer to the stars - these just happen to be the jobs that I was getting calls about.
One thing you need to be aware of is that even within one company there can be multiple pipelines for hiring, especially for research. If you interview for a general software engineering job at Google you're unlikely to get matched to Google Brain; Brain has its own posted job offers which generally have research-something-or-other in their title. Something people will try is to get in through the front door (in tech companies, software engineer) and get transfered to a research job within a couple of years. I know a lot of very smart people who went through this route, it is definitely possible. However, if you just want to be considered for research job you can also make it clear to your recruiter; just know that those jobs are a lot harder to get.
Generally you'll get a prep call with a recruiter, and then a phone screen. In a phone screen, they'll ask you technical questions that are sufficiently straightforward that they can be answered in a shared google doc or over the phone. These questions may be about:
- Algorithms and data structures (for a software engineering role)
- System design (software)
- Basic stats (data science)
- Basic finance math (finance)
- ML (research position)
- Are you a good person or someone who will make work miserable? (behavioural questions)
Your recruiter will help you prep for the phone screen, however the book everybody recommends is Cracking the Coding Interview. This gives you prep questions about algorithms and about behaviour.
People give preparing for technical interviews a bad reputation. It's a lot like GREs - you can either use it as an opportunity to brush up on your knowledge, and love it, or it can feel like a miserable slog. I personally loved it. Being self-taught in programming, I had never done anything theoretical data structures and algorithms, so I was really happy to go through Algorithms and Data Structures with Tim Roughgarden. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it was life changing - a revelation. All of a sudden the range of problems that I could tackle with code blew up.
I also followed an edX curriculum on data science, which I didn't like as much - I felt like I already knew most of the theoretical things that were thought and the rest sounded just okay (using Spark). With hindsight, it introduced me to out-of-core computation, pandas and ggplot which obviously wasn't a waste of time.
I went to a data science meetup in LA and met somebody (now a friend) who wanted to work on a Kaggle problem together. I learned a lot from that (it's probably the first time I used sklearn!). We finished in the top 5% so I also had something to put on my CV about my supposed knowledge of machine learning.
I also picked up a book on portfolio theory for finance interviews. Give yourself a solid 4-8 weeks to prep for your interviews, and do a little bit of prep everyday, with a sprint on the weekends.
I have a friend who is trying to date better so as guy-who-has-dated (I'm married now) I recommended that she go on a different date every night for a whole week. The idea is you to push yourself out of the scarcity mentality (there's no one out there for me) and move towards an abundance mentality (there's too many people out there for me! I better be selective!). What I failed to warn her about is that if you do that you will also inevitably have a lot of failed awkward dates, which is part of the often arbitrary, fickle process.
I had a lot of failed, awkward interviews. I flew to London for a two day interview with a finance company (one of their researchers had been a PhD student with David Mackay! I love London!). I did ok on the technical questions but completely bombed my interview once I inquired about their policy for publishing research (most finance places don't allow you to publish, with some notable exceptions).
I had an interview in Chicago with another finance company (I stayed in the fancy Trump Hotel! I wore a suit and tie! Pre-2016 were different times!). I did ok on the technical and they just had one more interview loop - a 4 hour behavioural interview with a psychologist in a hotel next to LAX! I started crying around the one hour mark when he started asking about my relationship with my dad (he passed away in 2008 and I never really got over it). I never really recovered after that. But then I got a free therapy session so there's that.
There was an interview with a secretive Bay Area ML stealth-mode startup, where I showed some monkey physiology research to a confused crowd during lunchtime. I can still remember the smell of the lemon salmon in that room.
There was that one time I brushed off the CTO of an LA startup when he asked about whether I had cross-validated my results. I was like - would I show results if they weren't cross-validated? Apparently a lot of candidates did! And of course there was that one time I spent 2 hours out of of a three hour technical test debugging some weird corner issue in pandas that was causing my ipython kernel to crash.
In general, I would say:
- Don't be an asshole - sometimes people ask seemingly dumb questions because a lot of people in their applicant pool can't answer these questions. If you answer as though a question is beneath you, that's a huge red flag.
- Keep talking and you'll be fine. The number one mistake people do in whiteboard interviews is they freeze when they don't know the answer. One thing that saved me in one interview is starting to talk about an almost completely unrelated problem where I found that you could solve it in O(sqrt(N)) memory because of a scheme I had thought was pretty clever. The interviewer seemed to agree that it was and helped me make that scheme work for the problem on the whiteboard.
- Keep the tears on the inside. This only happened once during that weird behavioural battery test - it was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. It was sort of like someone asking me the 36 questions and I was not in it for that. I could have just walked out and saved myself another two hours.
- You don't have to keep going when you're in an interview where you know the person you're talking to is trying to sell you magic beans. Silicon Valley hype is real and your BS detector must be finely attuned if you don't want to end up at "Uber, but for dogs" (actual phone pitch).
- Don't be an asshole - seriously, people won't want to work with you if you're a jerk.
- Practice makes perfect. One rejection is sad. 10 rejections is much less than 10X as sad. Some rejections might even make you feel happy. Get back on the horse.
I think the most humiliating part for me is that I was broke and I had to ask for reimbursement after rejections sometimes. I had lost my passport for a couple of months so I had to take the bus from LA to SF for some Bay Area interviews, so you can imagine my sad sad emails asking for reimbursing 50$ for a bus ticket.
After failing many times I ended up in a SWE interview at Google, kept my composure and said good enough words in approximately the right order. It took 5 months from "I need a job" to "I have a job offer".
For a postdoc it might be easier to go to a giant tech company than a highly specialized startup. I didn't have a lot of marketable real world skills at this point. I distinctly remember being completely lost during Noogler training when they taught us about their source control and having to ask the guy next to me what a source control was. His answer: it's like git. Next question: what's a git? etc.
Big tech companies will take a chance on someone who's smart and willing to be trained. Startups generally want someone who is productive on day one (spoiler: I was not productive on day one). Then you learn a bunch of stuff and you put giant tech company on your resume. People who you cold call about jobs or research suddenly reply to your emails.
There's a lot of internal mobility and it's in everyone's interest to land in a place where you can eventually be productive and do something interesting. After about three months at Google it was pretty clear that I was no Jeff Dean but I was a pretty sharp data scientist and I knew a thing or two about visual perception so I ended up doing a mishmash of both.
Of course once you've got that first job it's easy enough to get a job elsewhere, and people recommend switching jobs every 18 to 24 months to maximize your compensation.
If you're a postdoc right now, you might be 1) broke or 2) scraping by or 3) slightly better than scraping by. When I came to LA as a postdoc I thought I was going to make bank. Postdocs in the UC system are unionized via the Auto Workers of America and are better treated than most. I had dental and might even have had health insurance (although I never used it for lack of need and also because I couldn't quite figure it out).
At 45k US$ per year, when I signed up for a postdoc I thought I could live a cushy life. Housing costs are way higher in LA than in Montreal, and you need a car to do anything, which I failed to take into account. I ended up sharing a house with 10 other grad students and postdoc in Westwood without a car (in LA! I definitely did LA wrong). I spent most of what would have been my meager savings in the first year of my postdoc getting my teeth fixed (6 years of grad school, smoking and poor oral hygiene and I had to get double-digit numbers of teeth filled in). After one year I has saved up maybe 1000$ (but my teeth are now pristine).
With hindsight though, I wasn't broke so much as I was unhappy - unhappy that I didn't make any friends in LA and that my dating prospects were abysmal and that I was alone in the lab. So I ascribed my unhappiness to the fact that I (thought I) was broke, which got externally reinforced since everybody around me (this being LA) said that having money is good and not having money is sad.
By the time I landed a job at Google, I had started meditating and I was reading ethics books which slapped me out of that state - I started thinking that I shouldn't spend my newfound fortune less I fall victim to the hedonic treadmill (Dario warned me about this and he was absolutely right). So I got paid like a Bay Area software engineer (at the time of my hire, about 200k$ total compensation) but was still living substantially like a postdoc. I had roommates and didn't have a car; the only big buy I made was getting LASIK which I immediately regretted because now my eyes get pretty itchy.
In due time I switched from Google to Facebook, and because this was a more specialized position (BCI engineer) I got much more aggressive comp (417k$). I was definitely happier than in my lowest days in LA in both the Google and Facebook jobs. It's easy to think "well that just means you had more money, ergo life was better". However, I was still living mostly a postdoc lifestyle. I had a handful of expensive adventures (swimming with rays in Hawaii, petting domesticated foxes in San Diego). I have many friends who like good food, so I did end up in a lot of Michelin star restaurants which I wouldn't have been able to afford otherwise. But mostly I saved up money and avoided expensive hobbies.
Don't get me wrong, the money definitely helped. I religiously applied the research in the If money doesn't make you happy paper. Mostly I think I didn't have to worry about being broke anymore and that relieved me.
Much more important to my well-being was that I also happened to have a much stronger network of friends in SF and a loving girlfriend (then wife). I felt connected to my community. I also had this new concept, the weekend! It's crazy how when you're a postdoc you forget that weekends exist, because you're always doing research. People don't prepare you for how much it sucks to go do a postdoc in a new city and how isolated you are. Getting a job that wasn't a postdoc definitely helped.
However, I got the added stresses of working at a big Bay Area tech company:
- The commute down to the big tech campuses is brutal. Commute length is one of the biggest predictors of quality-of-life. Mid-peninsula and South Bay are super boring places to live (in my opinion), so SF was the place to be, and that meant 60-90 minutes on the bus each way.
- SF is filled with young-ish tech people, which is great at first (I found my crowd!) but then eventually really sucks (everybody has the same demographics, the same ideas, the same kind of jobs, etc.). You don't see children on the street or old people. Homeless people shit on your front porch and shoot heroin on the street but you don't feel like you can help them because there's so many destitute people that it's overwhelming.
- You start to hate yourself for the ills that giant tech and social networking are bringing to the world. I met a grad student once that refused to shake my hand because I worked for Facebook. I brushed it off saying "I'm only like 10% evil. Here's a picture of my kitten", but I still felt awful after. FB and Google are filled with some of the nicest, most liberal, do-gooder people you have ever met. I sincerely believe that the vast majority of people who work there are individually aligned with altruistic values and also happen to be super smart. Search (spreading knowledge!) and a social network (combat loneliness!) are incredibly valuable things to have out there. But you could have (and people have) written entire books about the unintended consequences of creating those valuable things, for example rigging elections, information bubbles, increasing concentration of wealth, the Bay Area homelessness crisis, people wearing diapers at Amazon fulfilment centers. So I have decidedly mixed feelings. When people ask me about quitting my last job, I always joke that I have a lot more free time on my hands, now that I don't spend a half-hour hating myself in front of the mirror before getting to work. I'm like 70% joking when I say that.
- You start to have nothing interesting to talk about. I felt like my personality was melting. When you're working on research in academia, you will yack anybody's ear off about your research. You can't do that when you're at a profit-making business, so you have to have hobbies and read other stuff unrelated to your job to stay an interesting, well-balanced person.
For these reasons expect your happiness curve to look like inputting a step function into an RC circuit: pretty soon that capacitor will get discharged and you get back to baseline.
For a lot of people, SF is a great place to be in your thirties for a few years, but you have to get out eventually. I met a lot of people in the first months I was in SF -- a few years later, they were all gone. I even had a system to make new friends periodically when people moved out - sign up for an improv class. 18 hours later - you have one new friend and a bunch of new acquaintances. Rinse and repeat. It sounds cynical, but when I shared this with other Bay Area people, I got a lot of nods and approvals.
It took me 4 years to get out of SF and back to Montreal. Montreal is a special place. When I first moved to the US I said to people I was from Canada. I got a few shrugs, so I switched to saying that I'm from Montreal. Oh man - I love Montreal, they would say, I had such a blast partying/going to McGill/etc.
But Montreal is so much more than that. It's the cultural capital of my people (quebecois). It's a place where being broke is fun - you can walk and take the metro and go to the festivals and wine and dine in the park in the sun for a pittance. It's one of the only places in North America that hasn't fully succumbed to the brutal logic of capitalism - productivity + growth = profit.
You still find a lot of people that are doing things because it's their passion - artists that aren't awking their wares on Instagram etc. Also people don't find it particularly weird if you tell them you're unemployed, on sabbatical or retired.
At first I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I figured I would do the Tim Ferriss thing and take 6 months off to "explore the world". After talking to a financial advisor I realized that I could extend my sabbatical essentially forever, as long as I was careful.
When I quit my last job, and moved back to Montreal, within a month I felt like a veil was lifted. I could have thoughts which were my own and I was suddenly an interesting person to talk to. I could read books for fun and have rambling conversations with people outside of the productive-professional class (e.g. seniors and high school kids playing pick-up ping pong in the park). I was having smart ideas™ again. I don't think I was depressed before, but I definitely had ennui.
After 6 months of putzing around figuring out what to do with the rest of my life, I have successfully replaced ennui with existential angst. Hey, it's an upgrade! I talked to a friend of mine (guy in his seventies, been working in tech since out of grad school) and he told me this: I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do when I grow up. The lesson I got from him is: it never ends. You're always going to chase after professional satisfaction and you might never reach it and that's totally okay.
My wife is an ophthalmologist, so she spends a lot of time with elders. She often asks them what their biggest regrets are in life, and career stuff almost never comes up. You might think it's just the population of people she dealt with. In SF, she often met with retired professionals, career-oriented people. Career has very little influence on your happiness over your lifetime. As academics we are often taught that the best way to advance our careers is to move far away from home, which is a great way of breaking up meaningful friendships and putting strain in relationships.
When I came, most of the people I knew from Montreal were still there. Some of them were doing great. A lot of them didn't. It seemed like it was mostly orthogonal to whatever career trajectory they had. Some ended up in grad school, graduated, found a job in tech, then fell by the wayside somehow. I met one guy who I did my undergrad with who was getting trashed at a New Year's Eve party - had stayed in Waterloo too long after he graduated, startup this, startup that, was isolated, girlfriend (now ex-girlfriend) was a little unstable, etc. Family problems, undiagnosed mental illness maybe.
I know it's hard to feel bad about privileged straight white guys in their 30's with graduate degrees, but seriously, a lot of people don't thrive after their PhD. I think it's because the system is set up to convince them that the only way they'll ever be happy is if they do this one thing that's really hard to do, which is make it academia. Then if they decide to do something else and that doesn't work either they feel like failures. Meanwhile their life goes to shit because the fundamentals - health, nutrition, frienships, love - aren't taken care of. That leads to a spiral of depression and I've definitely seen it happen - don't let it happen to you.
I realize this is now more of a rant than a guide to getting an industry job but when people (postdocs) ask me if they should get an industry job it's a long conversation, so if I just have 5 minutes with someone I'll say "sure - they have free food and massage chairs". The reality is that it's a bit of a mixed bag:
- You'll make a lot of money that you can choose to either 1) not spend and retain your freedom or 2) spend and be locked in to a certain expensive lifestyle because of the hedonic treadmill. If you then lose your position and had chosen lifestyle 2) you will end up worse off than when you started.
- You'll have shiny, important looking positions and companies on your CV. This will open doors for you. You may feel bad about working for said companies.
- You might have to move far away from where you are. This will make you happy and sad and stressed and exhilarated. It will wreck havoc on your current friendships and may create new lifelong ones.
- You will learn a thing. That's great! You'll meet a lot of people who are a lot smarter than you are. The voice inside your head that is constantly telling you you're inadequate will start becoming louder and louder. That'll make you feel sad!
- You might be super busy, which will prevent you from thinking about important things (climate change, growing inequality, superintelligence, etc.). This is good! No more worrying! This is bad! No more worrying!
I got out of my postdoc and took a job in industry. With hindsight I think I did that because I was sad (although that wasn't the reason I was giving back then) and it definitely helped but for entirely different reasons you would think. I've also met my fair share of absolutely miserable software engineers during my time at Facebook and Google. And what about new profs? Are they not miserable writing all those grant applications and preparing classes and barely sleeping?
I guess my point is, we suck at figuring out what makes us happy. I spent four years in SF at tech companies and I loved it at first, but by the end I hated it. I met my wife there and made life-long friendships. When I came back to Montreal I had a big nest egg to retire or at least be a forever postdoc (which is what I always wanted TBH). I am in good shape, I have basically no stress in my life, and am almost assuredly better off than I would have been had I continued my postdoc (I probably wouldn't have met my wife in this counterfactual scenario! I might never have found a network of friends in LA!). People return my emails. Life is pretty sweet. Almost none of this was planned. I emphasize this because people like straightforward teleological stories but reality is far more interesting.
So, should you get a job in industry? 🤷