A surprising reason to leave academia for industry
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010131
Ten years ago I edited a feature article entitled “Physics for profit and fun ” (Physics Today, February 2001, page 38). John Waymouth, a retired director of R&D at GTE, wrote the article, which has stuck in my mind thanks to its attention-grabbing first paragraph:
I spent my entire working life using physics to grub for paydirt in an industrial setting. By this I do not mean the central research laboratory of a multibillion-dollar technological conglomerate able to support “pure” curiosity-driven study. I mean the product development laboratory of a nose-to-the-grindstone division engaged in a battle for market share in a rather prosaic industry that nevertheless depended on mastery of some complex and challenging technology. In such a setting, any project that yielded only meeting presentations or publications in refereed journals had to be considered essentially a failure.
Waymouth goes on to recount his career in industry, comparing it—favorably—with the one he might have had in academia. He was glad that he never had to apply for hard-to-get government grants and proud that his research begat two new and profitable product lines: very high output fluorescent lamps and metal-halide high-intensity high-pressure discharge lamps.
I detected an echo of Waymouth’s article yesterday in an oral history interview with Jonathan Sachs, the inventor of Lotus 1-2-3 , a popular spreadsheet program that made its debut in 1983.
Lotus 1-2-3 wasn’t the first spreadsheet program. That distinction belongs to VisiCalc . But whereas VisiCalc was developed for the Apple II computer, Lotus 1-2-3 was developed for the IBM PC, which, along with its clones, proved to be the more popular computing platform. Indeed, Lotus 1-2-3 was the PC’s “killer app": People would buy a PC just to get the spreadsheet program.
I learned something of the history of Lotus 1-2-3 when I was a postdoc at Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in the late 1980s. One of the four MIT grad students I met there told me that the program’s inventor used to work at MIT’s Center for Space Research.
My brain must work in mysterious ways, because I never thought to look further into the connection between space research and spreadsheets until yesterday. Having quickly found Sachs’s oral history interview, I was intrigued by this exchange between Sachs and his interviewer, Martin Campbell-Kelly:
CAMPBELL-KELLY: About 1978 you left MIT to go to Data General?
SACHS: Yes, the summer of 1977, I left MIT. I’d been working there for a long time and I’d written a lot of stuff that was kind of interesting, but the problem with working at MIT is—they get money for a grant; they do something and then they do something else. There’s never a wider audience for this stuff. So I began envying people working in industry who wrote the tools that I used—and where they would write something a lot of other people would use. And what I also got out of my system later on was the notion that I wanted to get more into management and run larger projects. That was also something I never really had the opportunity to do at MIT.
Sachs’s answer was a double surprise for me—first, because I didn’t expect such a rich and thoughtful rationale; and second, because I was surprised at all. I know that high-tech industry offers challenging and rewarding careers, but evidently I still need reminding. Maybe you do, too.
