Top all-time · #919
Matt Welsh
Personal blog · matt-welsh.blogspot.comprogrammingcareersystems
Matt Welsh writes Volatile and Decentralized, a personal blog at matt-welsh.blogspot.com about programming, career and systems. Since 2009, 74 different Hacker News readers have linked it 99 times, most often “Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)”. The last post was in 2019, but the archive is still widely read.
Most-linked posts?
- Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2010-11-15
- Things I did wrong as a professor (2016)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-03-03
- The Fame Trap3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-08-05
- How I almost killed Facebook3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-02-26
- A Retrospective on SEDA3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-07-27
- The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-05-24
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-05-06
- Reading/Annotating PDFs on an iPad (comments on multiple apps)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-04-22
- Computing at scale, or, how Google has warped my brain2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-10-21
- Startup vs. Big Company: What's "Freedom"?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-11-13
What Hacker News says?
OP here. Lots of people at Google have PhDs. Most do not. My role is actually a Tech Lead Manager, which is far more technical than a typical manager position, and indeed I am on the Software Engineer ladder. I would say about 80% of my time is spent on technical things (writing code, design docs, evaluating designs, etc.) and only about 20% on "manager" activities like doing performance reviews, hiring, and the lik…
Comment linking /2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html
on “Day in the Life of a Google Manager”Submitted Rewriting a large production system in Go as a story · 238 points
HN discussionCompetitive, yes, certainly. But is it competitive in the same way? I’m other words, do “cracking the coding interview” style questions play as big a role? EDIT: I figured, why not do a quick web search. I found this link: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2014/01/getting-job-at-google... Just one POV, but it does confirm that PhD graduates do have to go through the same kind of coding exercises (at google) as anyone e…
Comment linking /2014/01/getting-job-at-google-for-phd-students.html
on “Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class”Submitted Day in the Life of a Google Manager as a story · 179 points
HN discussionIt's reasonable to assume that a PhD has lowered themselves to work in industry because they couldn't get a post-doc. Let's conduct a poll. Other than you, did anyone here who's been involved with PhD holders or grad-school and academia themselves actually think this? How many of us actual academicy types actually think it's "lowering oneself" to work in industry? I don't. I do think that both academia and industry…
Comment linking /2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html
on “The Ph.D.-Industry Gap”Submitted The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like) as a story · 168 points
HN discussionIt would, but people pull it off. Here's one example, also from Harvard. http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar... I think it's much easier in Computer Science than other fields - say the humanities, or biology or chemistry.
Comment linking /2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html
on “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life”Submitted How I almost killed Facebook as a story · 157 points
HN discussionIt certainly appears to be. Here's a former Harvard prof who wrote a pretty interesting blog post: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar...
Comment linking /2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html
on “Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google”Submitted Running a software team at Google as a story · 149 points
HN discussionFor something like an opposite perspective, there's "Why I'm leaving [my job as a CS professor at] Harvard [to join Google]": http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar... Shorter version of both posts: "Working at (university/big tech co.) frees me from all the distractions of working at (big tech co./university) so I can spend all my time hacking on the problems I find most interesting."
Comment linking /2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html
on “Why I'm Getting a PhD”Submitted Academics, we need to talk as a story · 141 points
HN discussionFirst time I've heard of SEDA, though I've been aware of the concerns/concepts it addresses, in various forms, for some time. Any thoughts on Welsh's Retrospective on SEDA ? http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/07/retrospective-on-seda...
Comment linking /2010/07/retrospective-on-seda.html
on “Show HN: uThreads – Concurrent User Threads in C and C++”Submitted Things I did wrong as a professor (2016) as a story · 128 points
HN discussionA previous hint of the pull of Google for Welch was: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/10/computing-at-scale-or...
Comment linking /2010/10/computing-at-scale-or-how-google-has.html
on “Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)”Submitted The Google career path, Part 3: Performance reviews and promotions as a story · 127 points
HN discussionA notable one that's made the rounds on HN before: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar... I see the "I quit" genre more from CS/engineering professors, but that's probably because I'm on HN a lot. It would be somewhat interesting to compare the humanities subgenre and the STEM subgenre. Also yesterday I had a long conversation with my neighbor at work (former math professor) about everything…
Comment linking /2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html
on ““I Quit Academia,” an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays”Submitted Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google) as a story · 127 points
HN discussionI'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 rationali…
Comment linking /
on “The N=1 Guide to Grad School: Advice for Aspiring PhDs”Submitted The other side of "academic freedom" as a story · 124 points
HN discussionFWIW, I sat in on some of his lectures on distributed sensor networks and thought he was great. Even if he wasn't, he gave up his tenured faculty position to hack full time at Google (IIRC, less than a year after getting tenure). See http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar... for some background.
Comment linking /2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html
on “Day in the life of a Googler (Matt Welsh)”Submitted Day in the life of a Googler (Matt Welsh) as a story · 121 points
HN discussionMatt Welch has written extensively about switching from tenured Professor at Harvard to Software Engineer at Google: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/ , with the initial post http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar... Matt's blog is great because (a) he writes it, (b) he's still connected to academia via program committees and (c) you can see how his thinking has evolved over the last 8 years. And…
Comment linking /2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html
on “Ask HN: Academics who switched to industry, what's your experience been like?”Submitted How I almost killed Facebook as a story · 119 points
HN discussionHere's a smattering of articles I've collected, YMMV: http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-professor http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/work-hard/ http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/05/secret-lives-of-profe... http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-life.htm http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo... http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html http://www.ams.org/notices/199701/comm-rota.p…
Comment linking /2010/05/secret-lives-of-professors.html
on “Why Academic Papers Are A Terrible Discussion Forum”Submitted Computing at scale, or, how Google has warped my brain as a story · 119 points
HN discussionThe Social Network paid particular attention to this, to the point that they tracked down[0] the actual slides[1] Zuckerberg would have seen in his Harvard OS class for the scene in the classroom. [0] http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/10/in-defense-of-mark-zu... [1] http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/course/cs161/notes/vm.pdf
Comment linking /2010/10/in-defense-of-mark-zuckerberg.html
on “The Hacker Who Cracked the Code in Iron Man and The Social Network”Submitted Making universities obsolete as a story · 106 points
HN discussionI recommend the anonymous comment starting: It's unfair to characterize a UK PhD as "a good US Master's thesis"... http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/09/so-you-want-to-go-to-... — it's pretty fair and accurate.
Comment linking /2010/09/so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school.html?showComment=1284106457670
on “PhD or Not PhD: that is the question”Submitted What I wish systems researchers would work on as a story · 93 points
HN discussion
