All in All

Why I'm leaving Harvard

The word is out that I have decided to resign my tenured faculty job at Harvard to remain at Google. Obviously this will be a big change in my career, and one that I have spent a tremendous amount of time mulling over the last few months.

Rather than let rumors spread about the reasons for my move, I think I should be pretty direct in explaining my thinking here.

I should say first of all that I'm not leaving because of any problems with Harvard. On the contrary, I love Harvard, and will miss it a lot. The computer science faculty are absolutely top-notch, and the students are the best a professor could ever hope to work with. It is a fantastic environment, very supportive, and full of great people. They were crazy enough to give me tenure, and I feel no small pang of guilt for leaving now. I joined Harvard because it offered the opportunity to make a big impact on a great department at an important school, and I have no regrets about my decision to go there eight years ago. But my own priorities in life have changed, and I feel that it's time to move on.

There is one simple reason that I'm leaving academia: I simply love work I'm doing at Google. I get to hack all day, working on problems that are orders of magnitude larger and more interesting than I can work on at any university. That is really hard to beat, and is worth more to me than having "Prof." in front of my name, or a big office, or even permanent employment. In many ways, working at Google is realizing the dream I've had of building big systems my entire career.

As I've blogged about before, being a professor is not the job I thought it would be. There's a lot of overhead involved, and (at least for me) getting funding is a lot harder than it should be. Also, it's increasingly hard to do "big systems" work in an academic setting. Arguably the problems in industry are so much larger than what most academics can tackle. It would be nice if that would change, but you know the saying – if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

The cynical view is that as an academic systems researcher, the very best possible outcome for your research is that someone at Google or Microsoft or Facebook reads one of your papers, gets inspired by it, and implements something like it internally. Chances are they will have to change your idea drastically to get it to actually work, and you'll never hear about it. And of course the amount of overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.) you have to do apart from the interesting technical work severely limits your ability to actually get to that point. At Google, I have a much more direct route from idea to execution to impact. I can just sit down and write the code and deploy the system, on more machines than I will ever have access to at a university. I personally find this far more satisfying than the elaborate academic process.

Of course, academic research is incredibly important, and forms the basis for much of what happens in industry. The question for me is simply which side of the innovation pipeline I want to work on. Academics have a lot of freedom, but this comes at the cost of high overhead and a longer path from idea to application. I really admire the academics who have had major impact outside of the ivory tower, like David Patterson at Berkeley. I also admire the professors who flourish in an academic setting, writing books, giving talks, mentoring students, sitting on government advisory boards, all that. I never found most of those things very satisfying, and all of that extra work only takes away from time spent building systems, which is what I really want to be doing.

We'll be moving to Seattle in the spring, where Google has a sizable office. (Why Seattle and not California? Mainly my wife also has a great job lined up there, but Seattle's also a lot more affordable, and we can live in the city without a long commute to work.) I'm really excited about the move and the new opportunities. At the same time I'm sad about leaving my colleagues and family at Harvard. I owe them so much for their support and encouragement over the years. Hopefully they can understand my reasons for leaving and that this is the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

Guest Post: Why I'm staying at Harvard (by Michael Mitzenmacher) [Michael Mitzenmacher is a professor of Computer Science and the Area Dean for Computer Science at Harvard. He is a dear friend and colleague and has been one of the role models for my own career. Michael wanted to respond to my earlier blog post on leaving Harvard with his own reasons for staying; I am only too happy to oblige. (I swear I did not ghost write this.) You can read more of Michael's own blog here, though he's not posting much these days. –MDW]

To begin, I'd like to say how sorry we are at Harvard that Matt's not returning. Matt's been a great colleague, continually pushing to make CS at Harvard better. His enthusiasm and tenaciousness have made us tangibly better in numerous ways. I, personally, will miss him a lot. Matt pushes hard for what he believes in, but in my experience he's always done so with open ears and an open mind. We're losing a leader, and Google is lucky to have him. I have no doubt he'll do great things for the company, and maybe even earn them another billion or two.

While Matt's decision has been a blow to CS at Harvard, I'm optimistic that our plan for growth will, eventually, make up for that loss. My job as Area Dean is to try to make that happen as soon as possible. I don't want to suggest that replacing Matt will be easy, but rest assured we'll be on the case.

I'd also like to say that I think I understand Matt's reasons for leaving. I'm glad to have him write "I love Harvard, and will miss it a lot." And how could I disagree with statements like "The computer science faculty are absolutely top-notch, and the students are the best a professor could ever hope to work with. It is a fantastic environment, very supportive, and full of great people." But I know from previous talks with him that he hasn't always loved being a professor. And that's what I'll try to write about the rest of the post.

I think there's a sense in academia that people get PhD's so that they can become professors. Most graduate students have that point of view going in – their experience with research professionals at that point is essentially entirely with faculty. And most professors encourage students to have that goal. Some of that, I think, is that most professors like their job (unsurprisingly), and some may not have other experiences to suggest to their students. And some of it may be more calculated. One measure of a faculty member's success is how many faculty offspring they've produced.

But being a faculty member is not for everyone. As Matt has described in this blog, and I in the past have described in my blog, being a professor is probably not exactly what most people expect. Besides teaching and research, your time gets taken up with administration, managing (graduate) students, fundraising, and service to your scientific community. It's perhaps absurd to expect that everyone who starts out in a PhD program be interested in all these various aspects of the job. And, fortunately, in computer science, there are still many other compelling options available.

As Matt says, at Google, "I get to hack all day." That's just not true as a faculty member – time for actual hacking is usually pretty small, and more of your time is spend managing others to hack for you. (This is a complaint I've heard from many faculty members.) I can understand why Google would be a very appealing place for someone who wants to write code. I'm sure Matt will come to miss some of the other aspects of being a professor at some point, and I'd imagine Google will to some extent let him entertain some of those aspects.

One of the comments suggested money must be a motivation. For some people who have to make this choice, maybe it is. (See Matt's comments on the post below for his take on that.) So what? Again, it's good that in our field there are good options that pay well. That's a big plus for our field, especially if we accept the fact that not everyone can be or wants to be a professor. But as Matt says, professors at Harvard (and top 20 institutions in general) are doing just fine, and money probably isn't the main issue for those who choose a different path.

I suppose the question that's left is why I'm staying at Harvard – that is, why I still like being a professor. (And thank you to those of you who think the obvious answer is, "Who else would hire you?") I enjoy the freedom of working on whatever I find interesting; being unrestricted in who I choose to talk to about research problems and ideas; having the opportunity to work with a whole variety of interesting and smart people, from undergraduates to graduate students to CS colleagues all over the globe to math and biology professors a few buildings down; the ample opportunity to do consulting work that both pays well and challenges me in different ways; the schedule that lets me walk my kids to school most every day and be home for dinner most every night; and the security that, as long as I keep enjoying it, I can keep doing this job for the next 30+ years.

The job is never boring. On any given day, I might be teaching, planning a class, working with students, thinking, writing a paper, writing some code, reading, listening to a talk, planning or giving a talk, organizing an event, consulting in some form, or any other manner of things. In the old days, I wrote a blog. These days, I'm administrating, making sure our classes work smoothly, our faculty are satisfied and enabled to do the great things they do, and we're able to continue to expand and get even better. Once I wrote a book, and someday I hope to do that again. Perhaps the biggest possible complaint is that there's always something to do, so you have to learn to manage your time, say no, and make good decisions about what to do every day. As someone who hates being bored, this is generally a good feature of the job for me.

And Harvard, I find, is an especially great place to work. We attract some of the most amazing students. Our still small-ish CS faculty really works together well; we all know who each other are, we keep aware of what we're all doing research-wise, we collaborate frequently, and we compromise and reach consensus on key issues. Outside of the CS faculty, there's all sorts of interesting people and opportunities on campus and nearby. Boston is a great city (albeit too cold and snowy in the winter).

Other profs have made similar comments in Matt's post – there's a lot to like about the job, and at the same time, it's not the best choice for everyone. Of course I don't like everything about the job. Getting funding is a painful exercise, having papers rejected is frustrating and unpleasant, and not every student is a wondrous joy to work with. I sometimes struggle to put work away and enjoy the rest of my life – not because of external pressure (especially post-tenure), but because lots of my work is engaging and fun. Of course that's the point – there's good and bad in all of it, and people's preferences are, naturally, vastly different. I don't think anyone should read too much into Matt's going to Google about the global state of Computer Science, or Professordom, or Harvard, or Google. One guy found a job he likes better than the one he had. It happens all the time, even in academia. It's happened before and will happen again.

But I'm happy with my job right now. In fact, I'm pretty sure my worst day on the job this year was the day Matt told me he wasn't coming back. We'll miss you, Matt, and best of luck in all your endeavors.

Day in the Life of a Googler

I was thinking recently about how different my workdays are now that I'm at Google, compared to the faculty job at Harvard. The biggest difference is that I spent nearly 90% (or more) of my time writing code, compared to Harvard where I was lucky if I got half an hour a week to do any programming. I also spend a lot less time at Google procrastinating and reading a zillion stupid websites – mostly because I'm enjoying the work a lot more.

Here's a short rundown of my typical day at Google:

6:30am - Wake up, get son up, shower, breakfast, take dog to the park.
8:30am - Leave for work (I take the subway most days).
9:00am - Arrive at work. Type passwords into half a dozen different windows to get my work environment back to a sane state. Check email. Check on status of my several jobs running in various datacenters. Page in work from day before.
9:30am-10:15am - Work on code to add requested feature to the system I'm working on. Debug it until it's working, write a unit test or two. Fire off code changelist for review. Grab third free Diet Coke of the day.
10:15-11:00 - Switch git branches to another project. Take a look at code review comments from a colleague. Go through the code and address the comments. Build new version, re-run tests, re-run lint on the code to make sure it's working and looks pretty. Submit revised changelist and responses to comments.
11:00-11:30 - Switch git branches again. Rebuild code to be safe, then fire off a three-hour MapReduce job to crunch log data to analyze network latencies.
11:30 - 12:00 - Quick videoconference meeting with team members in Mountain View.
12:00-12:35 - Lunch of free yummy food in cafeteria. Regale coworkers with stories of Apple IIgs hacking when I was in middle school.
12:35-2:00 - Back at desk. Check email. Check status of MapReduce job - about halfway done. Respond to last set of comments from code review done in the morning and submit the code. Merge and clean up the git branch. Take a look at task list to decide what to work on next.
2:00-3:00 - Project meeting with teams in Cambridge, Mountain View, and elsewhere by videoconference. This is my only hour-long meeting of the whole week. It is mildly amusing and I mostly spend the time doing some light hacking on my laptop and hitting reload on the MapReduce status page to see if it's done yet. Check Buzz and post a snarky comment or two.
3:00-4:00 - Red Bull infusion to keep energy going for the rest of the day. MapReduce is finally done. Generate graphs of the resulting data and stare at them for a while. Think about why the results are different than expected and write next version of code to generate another set of statistics. Try to get the code to the point where I can fire off another MapReduce before leaving for the day.
4:00-5:00 - Whiskey Thursday! Round up a group of colleagues to drink scotch and play Guitar Hero. (I have a nice collection of scotch under my desk. Somehow I have been designated as the guardian of the alcohol supply, which suits me fine.)
5:00 - Pack up laptop and head home.
5:30-8:00 - Dinner and family time until son goes to bed.
8:00 until bedtime - More hacking, if there's stuff I want to get done tonight, or make a few nice cocktails if not.

Contrast this to my typical work day at Harvard:

6:30am - Wake up, get son up, shower, breakfast, take dog to the park
8:30am - Leave for work (a 20-minute walk from home to the office, and I bring the dog with me).
9:00am - Arrive at office. Check email. Groan at the amount of work I have to do before the onslaught of meetings in the afternoon.
9:15am - Start working on outline for a grant proposal. About three minutes later, decide I don't know what I want to write about so spend next 45 minutes reading Engadget, Hacker News, and Facebook instead.
10:00am - Try to snap out of the Web-induced stupor and try to make headway on a pile of recommendation letters that I have to write. Fortunately these are easy and many of them are cut-and-paste jobs from other recommendation letters I have written for other people before.
11:00am - Check calendar, realize I have only an hour left to get any real work done. Respond to some emails that have been sitting in my inbox for weeks. Email my assistant to set up three more meetings for the following week.
11:30am - Try to make some token headway on the grant proposal by drafting up a budget and sending off the three emails to various support staff to get the paperwork going. Make up a title and a total budget for the proposal that sound reasonable. Still undecided on what the project should be about.
12:00pm - Take dog out for a 20-minute walk around campus. Sometimes spend longer if we run into other dogs to play with.
12:30pm - Run over to Law School cafeteria to grab overpriced and not-very-appetizing lunch, which I eat sullen and alone in my office, while reading Engadget and Hacker News.
1:00pm - First meeting of the day with random person visiting from a random company in Taiwan who will never give me any money but wants me to spend half an hour explaining my research projects to them in extraordinary detail.
1:30pm - Second meeting of the day with second-semester senior who has suddenly decided after four aimless years in college that he wants to do a PhD at Berkeley or MIT. Explain that this will not be possible given zero research track record, but somehow end up promising to write a recommendation letter anyway. Mentally note which other recommendation letters I will cut and paste from later.
2:00pm - Realize that I have to give lecture in half an hour. Pull up lecture notes from last year. Change "2009" to "2010" on the title slide. Skim over them and remember that this lecture was a total disaster but that I don't have time to fix it now. 
2:30pm - 4:00pm - Give lecture on cache algorithms to 70 or so somewhat perplexed and bored undergrads. Try to make the lecture more exciting using extensive PowerPoint animations and wild gesticulations with the laser pointer. Answer a bunch of questions that remind me why the lecture was a disaster last year and vow to fix it before delivering again next year.
4:00-4:10pm - Hide in office with door closed trying to calm down after adrenaline rush of lecturing. Gulp large amounts of Diet Coke to re-energize and re-hydrate.
4:10-4:20pm - Check email. Check Engadget. Check Facebook.
4:30-5:00pm - Last meeting of the day with two grad students working on a paper due in less than a week. They have no outline and no results yet but are very optimistic that they will make it in time. Spend half an hour sketching ideas and possible graphs on the whiteboard while they scribble furiously in their notebooks. Make vague promises about reviewing a draft if I see one later in the week.
5:00pm - Walk home with my dog. This is the best part of my day.
5:30pm - Get home, immediately sit down to check enormous pile of email that accumulated while I was in lecture and meetings. Forward five new meeting requests to my assistant for scheduling next week.
5:45pm - 8:00pm - Family time, dinner.
8:00pm - Pretend to "work" by reading email and tinkering with PowerPoint slides for a talk I have to give the next week. Too exhausted to do anything useful, make a drink and read Engadget again. 

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