Ask HN: How valuable is a position as Academic Research Fellow?

[yulaow]

I try to keep this long story very short. Note: I am right now living in Middle Europe and I am in my late 20s.

Basically I was gonna change job in these months and as soon as I wrote on Linkedin that I closed my position with my previous employer, the university Professor with which I made my dissertation for my bachelor degree some years ago informed me they want to offer me a position as Research Fellow.

It is well paid (not industry level "well paid" but it's good enough and it's 3 days a week remote work + flexible hours and I get _A_LOT_ of tax deductions that I usually would not get... basically I should not pay a single euro of taxes. Also they promise to improve it year over year) and they offered me to "sponsorize" my master degree + eventually a phd because they have a lot of research projects right now (especially related to blockchains projects + virtual reality + augmented reality) and not enough researchers.

Note that since some weeks ago I was working as web/mobile developer, so this is a very different skillset.

Now, I don't really know if I am interested in a phd, but the master degree seems a good opportunity.

What I don't know, at all, is: how well is seen in the eyes of the industry and HR-people a position as researcher in academy? I mean, do I risk to go back in a sw dev position in the next years and see my salary/perceived_value/expected_skill downgraded? Do you have any experience, stories, knowledge about this?

Thank you a lot.

[landon32]

If you're working on a really hot research topic, you can come back to industry with a much better resumé + probably pay check. I know for ML research if you want to ever 'make it big' you basically need to do a phd at a top university.

I would look into the specific field you're doing a research project and then see if that field looks promising ~3-5 years out. For instance, if Coinbase and Ethereum are huge in 3 years, I'd imagine they'd love to talk if you've done important foundational work on blockchain related tech. AWS also released their quantum ledger DB suggesting they're interested in blockchain-related ideas.

It probably wouldn't make the most sense to just go back to being a web developer at randomTechcorp after this, but you could have potentially even more interesting opportunities.

[keiferski]

That honestly sounds like an incredible deal. If you have any entrepreneurial aspirations, try building them on your two days off. Just make sure the university doesn’t automatically own them.