The View From 40 Years in the Research Trenches - From Academia to Industry and Back Again
I began my career in computing as a newly graduated math major, My first post-college job was as a programmer although I’d never programmed or even seen a computer. I spent the first 3 weeks in the trenches reading a manual and learning to program and then I was unleashed on the world. After 9 months programming, I started graduate school in an Electrical Engineering Master’s program, focusing on Computer Science, having never taken either an Engineering or a Computer Science course. What was I thinking? Armed with my Master’s degree, the next rung on my ladder was another industrial position, this time as a System Engineer. That lasted a year before I accepted a position in a teaching college as the sole professor of Computer Science within a general Engineering program. During my 6 years there I taught everything from Switching Theory to Mathematical Logic, beginning programming, Compilers, Operating Systems, Operations Research, and perhaps a dozen other courses. At this point it was time to go back to graduate school, get a PhD in Computer Science, and climb up a few more rungs at a research university. I spent the next 16 years as a professor at NYU doing research in software testing, reliability, metrics and other areas of Software Engineering, although my dissertation and training were largely theoretical. While I was quite successful, publishing many papers, receiving lots of research grants and some awards, and loved teaching, I also did a fair amount of industrial consulting since I was always interested in how my ideas might impact the real world. While I had had a number of unsolicited offers to move to industry, I always thought of myself first and foremost as an academic until someone at Bell Labs convinced me to try it during a sabbatical leave. Although I got much closer to industrial practice there, I still was viewed as an outsider who gave advice, rather than an integral part of the team. After returning to NYU, I was eventually convinced to take an unpaid leave and try working for the Labs full-time as a regular member of the Technical Staff in Research. I wound up spending the next 19 years at AT&T Bell Labs and then AT&T Labs - Research as a full-time researcher who generally partnered with development projects. In 2012, AT&T was shutting down Research and I left and resumed a non-conventional academic career. In this talk I will discuss how my different types of positions: working in industrial computing, at a teaching college, at a research university and in industrial research have informed my ideas about good Software Engineering research, and proper Software Engineering education.