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【陈怀临注：这不是徐志摩的资产阶级小情调，在康桥腻腻歪歪。这是这几天发生的，哈佛大学计算机系教授Matt Welsn的辞职宣言。。。http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/ 。这个哥们把多少人梦寐以求的终身教授给quit了，要去Google上班。。。Matt的背景简要如下：I have been on the faculty in Computer Science at Harvard since 2003. I received my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UC Berkeley (1999 and 2002). Following my Ph.D. work I spent one year as a visiting researcher at Intel Research Berkeley. I received my undergraduate degree from Cornell University (1996). 这个哥们写了一篇”我为什么要离开哈佛“。现在估计是传的漫天飞了。其大概意思是：学术界，如果做系统方向的话，没啥意思了。只有在Google这样的环境中，才能接触喜欢的东东。。。他最近几年做的是Wireles Sensor这方面。当然，同学们千万不要盲目一头热。Google给他的RSU估计是N个million。哈佛大学计算机系的正教授的这个帖子，比许多广告都来劲。Google每个夏天就去美国Top高校，不管37=21，把所谓最优秀的年轻人都收编。。。这个确实比较狠。我大宋是，每年夏天，美国大使馆对我大宋人才集体收编，并且深深感谢我大宋的前期（据说现在是从胎儿抓起。。。）培训和无私的共产主义精神。。。另外，Google现在似乎是一个吸引人才的大黑洞。大家再看看： http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/。 这都是计算机界的王牌飞行员。。。现在都在Google当差。如果看看Google的管理团队，都是明星阵容。有一次去Google的campus混饭吃，遇见几个来自祖国宝岛的家伙。。。其中有一个神经兮兮的。。。后来被告知，其是台大的一个王牌教授。。。现在辞职在Google做事。。。】

Why I’m leaving Harvard
The word is out that I have decided to resign my tenured faculty job at Harvard to remain at Google. Obviously this will be a big change in my career, and one that I have spent a tremendous amount of time mulling over the last few months.

Rather than let rumors spread about the reasons for my move, I think I should be pretty direct in explaining my thinking here.

I should say first of all that I’m not leaving because of any problems with Harvard. On the contrary, I love Harvard, and will miss it a lot. The computer science faculty are absolutely top-notch, and the students are the best a professor could ever hope to work with. It is a fantastic environment, very supportive, and full of great people. They were crazy enough to give me tenure, and I feel no small pang of guilt for leaving now. I joined Harvard because it offered the opportunity to make a big impact on a great department at an important school, and I have no regrets about my decision to go there eight years ago. But my own priorities in life have changed, and I feel that it’s time to move on.

There is one simple reason that I’m leaving academia: I simply love work I’m doing at Google. I get to hack all day, working on problems that are orders of magnitude larger and more interesting than I can work on at any university. That is really hard to beat, and is worth more to me than having “Prof.” in front of my name, or a big office, or even permanent employment. In many ways, working at Google is realizing the dream I’ve had of building big systems my entire career.

As I’ve blogged about before, being a professor is not the job I thought it would be. There’s a lot of overhead involved, and (at least for me) getting funding is a lot harder than it should be. Also, it’s increasingly hard to do “big systems” work in an academic setting. Arguably the problems in industry are so much larger than what most academics can tackle. It would be nice if that would change, but you know the saying — if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

The cynical view is that as an academic systems researcher, the very best possible outcome for your research is that someone at Google or Microsoft or Facebook reads one of your papers, gets inspired by it, and implements something like it internally. Chances are they will have to change your idea drastically to get it to actually work, and you’ll never hear about it. And of course the amount of overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.) you have to do apart from the interesting technical work severely limits your ability to actually get to that point. At Google, I have a much more direct route from idea to execution to impact. I can just sit down and write the code and deploy the system, on more machines than I will ever have access to at a university. I personally find this far more satisfying than the elaborate academic process.

Of course, academic research is incredibly important, and forms the basis for much of what happens in industry. The question for me is simply which side of the innovation pipeline I want to work on. Academics have a lot of freedom, but this comes at the cost of high overhead and a longer path from idea to application. I really admire the academics who have had major impact outside of the ivory tower, like David Patterson at Berkeley. I also admire the professors who flourish in an academic setting, writing books, giving talks, mentoring students, sitting on government advisory boards, all that. I never found most of those things very satisfying, and all of that extra work only takes away from time spent building systems, which is what I really want to be doing.

We’ll be moving to Seattle in the spring, where Google has a sizable office. (Why Seattle and not California? Mainly my wife also has a great job lined up there, but Seattle’s also a lot more affordable, and we can live in the city without a long commute to work.) I’m really excited about the move and the new opportunities. At the same time I’m sad about leaving my colleagues and family at Harvard. I owe them so much for their support and encouragement over the years. Hopefully they can understand my reasons for leaving and that this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.

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