Tips on moving from grad school to industry

February 24, 2014

After finishing my PhD and teaching for a semester, I joined Swype as a Software Engineer. My focus was on researching and developing language modeling improvements; it wasn’t just coding away.

But there were loads of things I didn’t understand at first. There are still aspects of industry that surprise me.

Biggest things first:

• Financial stability
• Time off. I suspect because of grad school, I still don’t remember when holidays are.
• A schedule. You’re working with people, so you align to their schedule. In my grad school days, my schedule didn’t matter except for rare meetings.

Random links:

• Paul Graham’s essays
• Notes from Peter Thiel’s startup class
• Google IO talks by Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman
  • Open Source Projects and Poisonous People (2008)
  • The Myth of the Genius Programmer (2009)
  • Do You Believe in the Users? (2009)
  • The joys of engineering leadership (2010)
  • Programming Well with Others: Social Skills for Geeks (2011)
  • The Art of Organizational Manipulation (2012)
• Excerpts from StackExchange on ArsTechnica: There are some gems in there, like enforced coding style, operator overloading, or one of them pointed me to The Way of Testivus, which inspired me in unit testing.