I've wrestled with this in the past. As a CS PhD student, I will be working full time as a web developer when I graduate.

For me it came down to either (sweeping generalisations):

1) Continuing research on interesting problems, or perhaps working for interesting companies like the Bearau of Meteorology or the CSIRO (the Australian governments industry research organisation). The problems would be intriguing, and you would feel very satisfied with what you have done most days at work. However when you get home, I imagine you would be pretty mentally exhausted, and may not find much time or energy to work on your own projects.

or

2) Working for a web dev company, where the problems are (not always, but often) relatively straight forward, and don't take too much mental energy to solve. Sure, building business apps is not the most satisfying job for everybody, but the people are great, the company is great, you get looked after well, etc. The best bit is that when you get home, there is probably more mental energy to work on your own side projects that interest you.

I like contributing to Open Source projects, and I also find that after a difficult day at work or uni, I don't have the energy to punch out an hour of coding when I get home. So for me, I'm currently leaning towards option 2.

There are more than those 2 options.

Oh of course. I didn't mention:

3) One day I'd like to own a caravan park.

And indeed, they were complete and utter generalisations. I'm sure there are people in interesting jobs, who come home and are able to work on interesting side projects. Either because their jobs are interesting but not brain-draining, or because they are particularly driven, or any number of reasons.

I have just found that at this point in my life, those are the two prospects that I am weighing up.

Such as?

3) Use your R&D skills to create a useful technology or service in an area that interests you and either license it or found your own company around it. Quite a common route for academic types.

I'm familiar with a few people who have done this, and they really enjoy what they do. I wish anyone doing this all the best.

However it suffers the same problem as 1). That is, you may not have the energy for other projects. I understand the sentiment of your suggestion, which is: "My side project is also my work", but then you are committed to that project for X amount of time. Whereas with a typical side project that I might play with on the weekend, or with open source contributions, I am free to dabble with whatever interests me on that particular day. It is this freedom and flexibility that I am seeking in my life (partially because I have the attention span of a newt :)

I work at Locu over here - I was going to tell Adam his writeup made the front page so he could respond (I don't think he was expecting this), but I think he's asleep on the East Coast, so I'll post this before this falls off the front page. Hacker News is not the target audience of our merchant-facing product, but it is certainly the target audience of our technology, such as our local business API at dev.locu.com :)

Adam is our Director of Data over at Locu. Our operation is powered by a very unique data structuring system, crucial to which is a heavy crowd computing component. Adam's research was in crowd-powered databases at MIT, and Locu seems to follow from his research nicely. (I briefly worked in his advisor's lab when doing my masters at MIT as well.) As best as I can tell, he is not bored yet. If he is, he is hiding it well.

Here's a blog article he's written for us about our crowd computing process: http://blog.locu.com/post/25389032496/the-locu-workflow-a-cr...

And here's a more general article about our technology: http://blog.locu.com/post/36602971835/7-reasons-to-nominate-...

I'll see if I can't get him on this thread if it's still alive tomorrow morning.

"infinite time to read"

Depending on what you do (and where you do it), the private sector can actually be quite liberating. I find academia stifling.

I've run into people with great private-sector positions, but they seem to almost all be ex-academics who first established themselves in academia, and then jumped to something high-level and researchy, like a position at Microsoft Research, or a senior position at Google with considerable freedom [1].

For a junior person, academia does have a lot of downsides, not least because of the massive move towards rationalization, metrics-counting, and a focus on how much grant money you bring in. But the junior people I know in the private sector have even less freedom regarding what they spend their day doing, and much less freedom when it comes to formal working conditions, such as choosing to work from home or a coffee shop a few days a week.

Is there a way to find positions with research freedom in the private sector without first becoming established in academia?

[1] Matt Welsh is a good example of someone who did the senior-academic-to-industry transition. He went into academia, got tenure, got promoted up the ranks through to Full Professor at Harvard, and then left for a senior position at Google with considerable freedom: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/

"Is there a way to find positions with research freedom in the private sector without first becoming established in academia?"

Define "established"?

Most relevant to the hypotheticals here, one question is whether you can get a position with research freedom in the private sector without going into academia at all. If you choose industry rather than academia, is it possible? Or do you need to first get that "professor" line on your resume to be able to land those kinds of industry positions?

I work for IBM Research. While I do not have complete freedom, I feel that my research and development mandate is quite broad within my project. I came straight from grad school. Most people that are hired into IBM Research were not professors, but are coming from grad school or post-docs.

Anyone with a Masters degree (working as a researcher)?

Kinda. There are so e people who have Masters degrees who work in Research, but they don't typically have what I think of as a "research mandate". They have more development responsibilities. But, there are some people with PhDs who are the same.

Most people, though, have PhDs.

Didn't they just shutdown Hawthorne, move everyone in software to Yorktown, and lose a lot of people to Google New York in the process? What's left?

We moved, yes, but I'm not aware of anyone who left because of the move. I'm actually happier up in Yorktown - it's a better building than Hawthorne.

I strongly believe the "professor" title is not a point of strength on one's resume vs solid industry experience. In general, if one is taking the time and effort required to become a tenured professor, he/she should stick with it. Sure, there are anecdotal cases (Harvard profs going to Goog...), but those are anecdotes and not the mean.

Could you elaborate? I mean I agree about academia being stifling, but I have trouble imagining it easy to find a research/reading sort of job in CS today.