Living In Academia

I spent about two years working as a research assistant at Griffith University and quite enjoyed my time there. I spent time working with both pure mathematics lecturers as well as software engineering oriented lecturers, so I’ve got a fairly good grasp and appreciation for the academic point of view and the processes and logic they tend to use. One of the things you notice if you spend time in an academic environment as well as a commercial environment is that the abstract nature of academic thought and reasoning fits very poorly into a commercial context. This is why so many very good ideas that come out of universities so often struggle to be commercialized (and why there are dedicated departments to help inject commercial sense into an academic idea and bring it to market). It’s not that academics are a bunch of nut-jobs with no idea about reality, it’s simply that the values and expectations in an academic environment are very different to those in a commercial environment. For instance, if a mathematics professor is developing software, his prime concern is that it is “correct” and usually wants it to be provably so. A software engineering lecturer’s primary concern will be that the software meets the requirements precisely. In most cases however, a commercial developer’s primary concern is that the software does what the user wants. With contract style work the commercial interests match up much better with a software engineering lecturer’s viewpoint, but with commercial off the shelf software development the requirements are largely unimportant – making users happy and thus buy the product is important. The biggest difference though is not between “commercial developers” and software engineering academics, but rather between mathematicians (or possibly referred to as computer scientists which tend to be mathematicians who specialized in computers) and “commercial developers”. A mathematician always wants everything to be correct (aka perfect) and provably so. A commercial developer just wants it to work, remain working and be maintainable. Sometimes of course, commercial developers are far too slack and could use an injection of the mathematician’s viewpoint, however I’ve generally found the reverse to be true more often. Academics tend to be overly pedantic to the point where it would in fact damage a commercial project. So am I saying that academics are useless or that commercial developers are somehow better? Heck no. Both viewpoints are extremely useful and allow for different types of innovation. Both are required. Just if you ever find you’re in an argument (as opposed to an informative discussion) with someone from “the other camp” give up and walk away – that argument will never be resolved.