From time to time, I’m asked why I left the industry and returned to academia. Interestingly, my answer sometimes varies. On some occasions, I feel I explain it clearly; on others, I’m not sure I do. Even after a thoughtful explanation, some people remain puzzled.
One day, I was asked this same question twice within two hours, in the small town of Houghton, Michigan. That experience motivated me to write this reflection.
I spent a few years in industry before moving back to academia as a postdoc and now as a faculty member. From 2017 to 2023, I was a software engineer at Snap Inc. Then I left the industry. Starting in 2024, I was a postdoc at UBC, and in Fall 2025, I began a new job as a faculty member at Michigan Tech.
I need to first go back and describe my experience in the industry.
In my early years in industry, I was genuinely satisfied. The user impact was real and tangible — features I built end-to-end reached millions of users. I once walked into a store and saw a stranger using something I had built from end to end. That feeling was deeply rewarding. I also learned a lot career-wise, and at Snap Inc., I had the fortune to learn from and work with the smartest and hardest-working engineers I’ve met in my life.
But after several years, my thinking began to shift. Two things drove the change:
First, I wanted to work on fundamental ideas. After years of shipping code and projects, I came to realize that the impact of code, although real, is temporary: as time goes on, my code will be gradually refactored, replaced, and removed. I had experienced the cycle of shipping projects to create impact many times. What I hadn’t done was pursue something more foundational: an (technical) idea that, through its dissemination, could have a longer-lasting and farther-reaching influence. That kind of work is hard, but it’s what I was drawn to.
Second, I needed more intellectual freedom and space. Years of constant production and business pressure in the industry made it very difficult for me to focus wholeheartedly on the first point. As a result, much of my daily energy went toward meeting delivery and performance expectations. If the first point is truly important, one naturally wants to dedicate most of their time to it and align it with their career trajectory. I began to wonder what might be possible if I had more intellectual space to think deeply.
Some people ask: Why not just switch teams within the company? As a former colleague put it, on a product team, the patterns on a technical track are remarkably similar across teams. Even if you switch to a different team, you’re still running the same playbook. What I needed wasn’t a different team; it was a fundamentally different mode of work — more intellectual freedom and more room to explore ideas I find genuinely interesting, without production or business burden. I once heard someone say that a university research lab is the ultimate incubator, which is something I’d like to pursue exactly.
In retrospect, leaving industry and returning to academia as a postdoc, and now as a faculty member, feels like stepping away from other work to train seriously for a competitive basketball tournament — I would regret not trying it at least once in my lifetime. Some may not fully relate to this choice, and that is understandable. I hope this helps clarify it. Finally, my years of experience as a developer have changed the way I approach research, and I believe it is beneficial for both developers and researchers to understand more about the other side.