I’ve recently switched careers from academia to software engineering. Some reflections on the interview and job market in these two different fields.

Adversarial and Non-adversarial

In my experience, every step in the interview process in academia is adversarial. This both characterizes my own experience as an interviewee, and the interviews I gave as a faculty member of at the University of Chicago. The first step in each meeting is to get the interviewee to commit to something; the second step is to object to it. This patterns holds from group interviews, to job talks, to one-on-one meetings, and even to casual meals. Many one-on-one meetings begin with an upfront claim that it will not be a discussion of work; they almost inevitably evolve into a series of debates.

Although I recognize that there can always be exceptions, my experience in all my interviews in software engineering was non-adversarial. Interviews rested somewhere on a spectrum between the interviewee talking to a mostly silent interviewer, to an active and healthy collaboration between interviewer and interviewee. In no interview did it feel adversarial, or like the goal of the interviewer was to put the interviewee on their most tenuous possible ground. This was a welcome surprise given my previous experience in academia. I also do think that it was nonetheless helpful to prepare for each interview under the expectation that I might be put under maximal pressure.

Disclaimer: Some of this experience may be specific to the academic job market in philosophy.

Workplaces

In my opinion, most academic departments are basically the same. Cultures are very similar, work-life balance is very similar, and management structure is very similar. (Of course, the point here is that there is absolutely no management whatsoever!) How do you pick between jobs? Compensation, specialization of existing faculty members, and sometimes trying to avoid particular known “bad apples”.

It quickly became clear that there are huge differences between tech companies, and also within teams within the same company. These are differences in culture, management style, team structure, etc. The standard question “Do you have any questions for us?” is widely regarded as a joke in academic interviews; in a tech it seems absolutely essential—and there are so many questions to ask even after getting an offer.

I speculate that part of the difference here lies in the life-cycle of each company. Academic departments are like very mature companies. I was mostly interviewing at startups, which have a much greater diversity; things might have felt more homogeneous if I was interviewing at bigger tech firms.

Recruiters

I am still pretty much baffled by the role of the recruiter. This obviously has no equivalent in the academic interview process. My experience with recruiters was that a key part of their job is to give you x hints, where x is a function of something entirely obscure to me. Very helpful to me as a candidate, but still a very odd (and seemingly potentially very unfair) dynamic.

Next Steps

I am very excited to share that I’ll be taking the next step of my career as a software engineer at Clerk. I couldn’t have done this without the support of my family, friends, and peers at the Recurse Center.